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Sept. 19, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:59:38
The Robot Revolution - Freedomain Call In
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Jacob, you have made it to the top of the list.
How are you doing, my friend? Doing well.
How are you this evening or afternoon?
I'm well. I'm well, thank you.
So, I wasn't really sure what to talk about, but you were looking for people to come up, so I figured I'd raise my hand.
Now, you run a show, right?
I do. So what are you doing to me?
What are you doing? Do you jump in the queue with nothing to say?
Hey, I mean, I'm not desperate.
I've got stuff to talk about.
I just want to make sure I'm being polite.
If you don't have anything on your mind, that's no problem, but that's not waste time if you don't.
Well, I actually do have a question.
I was kind of curious what your thoughts were, specifically about libertarianism.
And so I guess, do you view libertarianism as a viable option to this two-party system that America is pretty much stuck with?
Is it something that could help or is it kind of a waste of time?
So it depends what you mean by viable.
I always want to make sure we're talking about the same thing.
So tell me what you mean by a viable option.
And I'm not skeptical that it is or isn't.
I just want to know what you mean by the word.
Is it an option for people to pursue to be an alternative to the two-party system?
Is that clear enough? Alternative, so are you saying, it's a question, can libertarian political action solve problems in politics?
Yes. And what would your definition of solving those problems in politics be?
What would that look like? How would you know if you had achieved it?
Increasing individual liberty.
When was the last time that individual liberty in America was increased?
Good question.
I'm not counting tax cuts because they crank up the tax 10%, they lower it 5% and everyone feels like they're in galt's galt.
I'm talking about when was freedom in America for individuals enhanced or expanded?
So, I guess it would kind of depend on exactly what we would be talking about.
Specifically, in my state, we now are constitutional carry as far as firearms go.
So, we do not have to have a state mandated identification that allows us to be able to carry a concealed carry weapon.
I would consider that A move towards more liberty versus less.
Yeah, I would certainly agree with that.
That, of course, was the original liberty, though.
It was taken away and then returned to you, right?
Exactly. Okay, so that's a recovering of liberty.
That's an expansion of liberty.
Yes, I agree.
So I guess that's more of my question is that if libertarian political action...
Is a useful tool to at least even gain back our liberties that we should have in the first place.
Well, I mean, I assume that this was a libertarian initiative, this idea of recovering the right to bear arms?
Yes, initially it was.
There were, of course, other groups that joined in, but I believe it was the Libertarian Party that put it forth and were really the driving force behind it.
I mean, that seems like some success in the recovery of Liberties.
Can you think of any others? I can only speak at least from my state.
So we have definitely put forth some campaigns to prevent like hate speech laws.
So I think that that's another one that would come directly to mind.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I know that in the US, the Supreme Court has decided that there isn't any such thing as hate speech.
And, of course, I mean, everyone hates some form of speech or another.
To me, communism is hate speech.
But what can you do?
I guess what you guys do is push back against those kinds of laws.
So I think that libertarianism can be very helpful in reversing some...
Stripping of liberties, and it also can be helpful in slowing things down, right?
It matters to me that we've not hit full communist dictatorship yet, and some of that has to do with activism on the part of the Libertarian Party, right?
I would agree so.
So I just recently became involved with the party officially.
Not the only solution I see, but it seems to still be a great tool, like you said, for activism.
And if there's anything I can do to help, I guess, keep the Red Menace at bay, definitely seems like an option I would like to take, especially if they are promoting peaceful solutions versus some of these far left or far right solutions.
You mean like the militias and stuff?
No. Specifically, as far as the far right, I would say like the Boogaloo Boys, which are kind of like accelerationist, trying to say, well, let's just collapse the system, much kind of like Antifa.
Right.
OK.
And and you, of course, would you want to keep keep the system as best you can, right?
That's actually something I've been trying to work out philosophically for myself and.
I wouldn't really consider myself a conservative because the current system, at least the way that I see it, is there's not much of it that I would like to conserve.
More of an American culture, I guess, is what I would want to conserve, the Western culture.
And what do you view as the primary elements of that culture?
I would have to say probably a lot of Christian philosophy.
Love thy neighbor, thou shalt not still...
I'm trying to come up with these off the top of my head.
I'm not particularly religious.
Well, individualism, reason, and maximum liberty, property rights, and freedom from coercion, and minimal or limited state.
It's that kind of stuff, right?
Free speech. Yeah, correct.
Correct. The things that make Western civilization the best.
Right. Okay. Okay.
Now, what's your ideal society?
An ideal society, I guess it would be, well, the ability to choose in which way to live your life without the threat of force or fraud.
Is that minichism or a truly voluntary society, like all the way to anarcho-capitalism?
I consider myself an anarcho-capitalist, so I would like to see no government.
I believe all government to be force and therefore immoral.
So I believe, I think it was Plato that said that good people don't need laws to tell them how to act responsible and bad people will find a way around them.
Right, right. Yeah, and it's because the last great moral advance was the end of slavery.
And, of course, the end of slavery was because a whole bunch of Christians and a lot of Quakers and Protestants and a whole bunch of Christians ended up using the power of the state to end slavery.
I mean, ending slavery within a country is pretty easy.
You just stop enforcing slave contracts, right?
And you're done. Pretty, pretty easy, right?
Just stop enforcing your slave contracts.
Because slavery was something that was subsidized by the state enforcement of the contracts.
You can't keep people locked up if they just want to break free and no one's going to go chase them down and bring them back for you.
But to end slavery, obviously they stopped enforcing slave contracts within America and within England.
But then, to end slavery around the world, they used the power of the state, right?
They used the power, particularly the British Navy and Army, to interfere with and end the slave carriers.
So, I mean, there's sort of two levels to getting free.
One is just stop enforcing bad contracts, like slavery, evil and immoral contracts.
And the other is use the power of the state to smash those contracts elsewhere.
I think we're all kind of keen on the one, to stop enforcing immoral contracts.
But of course... An anarcho-capitalist can't seize control of the state to end the state, right?
It's just one of these paradoxes.
You can't do it.
Now, how long would you say it's been since America has been relatively close to the state that you would consider ideal?
I'm honestly not sure if we have actually ever been there.
I believe there have definitely been times where there were less government coercion and force used against the citizens, but I'm not sure if we've actually ever been too close to that society in general, at least ideally.
Yeah, it's funny too, because we think of America as, you know, like a blob with a government, all the way from its beginning.
But of course, the reality is that for a significant majority of Americans, there was really no functional state for good chunks of American history.
I mean, they talk about the Wild West, like, that's just a big bunch of government propaganda.
The West was extraordinarily peaceful.
Of course, the criminals gravitate to the cities, not to the farms.
And so, for...
In terms of spontaneous self-organization and dealing with criminality and dealing with contract violations and so on, you had ostracism, you had even pirates.
There's actually a famous book by an economic historian on how pirates would deal because they can't enforce their contracts in a court of law because they're Criminals, right?
And how pirates would deal with the divvying up of goods and responsibility for work and the maintenance of contracts.
They're very complex systems for resolving contractual disputes that spontaneously arose in the absence of the state or, in this case, from the opposition to the state.
And so there were significant patches of the government that just didn't really apply.
to a lot of places in history.
And I would sort of argue that for all but very few, the average person has no practical access to the legal system.
I mean, this was many, many years ago.
A trader was over-trading on my account, just sort of like trading for his own benefit rather than for my benefit.
And I remember talking to a lawyer and he said, "Yeah, you can take the court It'll cost you probably, I guess, the modern equivalent of about $750,000 and it will probably take about 10 years.
Right. And, you know, you can never be sure of the outcome.
So that is, you know, no practical access to the legal system.
And there are very few people who can successfully use the legal system, except, of course, if you, you know, have a lot of money and you want to use it as a sort of club with which to intimidate people.
But the legal system is there.
In general, to maintain the profits of lawyers and serve the oligarchs in threatening average people, but it's not there.
In a way, we're sort of functioning in the worst of all worlds in that there's not really a parallel system of dispute resolution, but there's no practical access.
People say, oh, we need the state to resolve contracts.
It's like, have you ever tried to use the state to resolve a contract?
Have you ever seen? How that would happen?
I remember there was a guy, George Schultz's grandson, was one of the whistleblowers at Elizabeth's home scam fest called Theranos, right?
This, we can do a thousand tests on a drop of blood, like, complete.
You put that in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign and people were like, okay, man, I can accept ghost zombie dragons, but I can't accept this makes no sense at all.
But George Schultz's grandson was...
A whistleblower, and he was heavily threatened by Theranos, and he was dragged into court over and over again.
He actually was followed, he felt, by private investigators, and he slept with a knife by his bed.
He was so scared of what might happen, and he said he wanted to get a gun and sleep with a gun by his bed, but he was so depressed and anxious facing down the legal system.
When he woke up in the morning, he wasn't sure that The gun would be used to protect himself or to shoot himself.
I guess he got suicidal over the course of this.
And his father was actually on his knees begging him not to do this.
I guess maybe his father had some experience with the legal system.
And his parents had to spend about a half a million dollars on legal bills because they were going after him, I think, for disparaging the company or something like that.
Now, the fact that A lot of what, if not most of what he said, turned out to be true, or at least seems to be true, doesn't get him his money or his life back or anything like that.
So, yeah, it is a funny thing.
People say, well, gosh, without the state, how would we resolve these kinds of disputes?
It's like, you know, most people have no chance in the legal system and no real access to the legal system.
And it's...
It's pretty rough. But people sort of forget that.
Oh, but the government has a legal system, and we need that for society.
It's like, well, no. I mean, you're actually preventing spontaneous and effective dispute resolutions from coming into effect.
Sorry, that was a slight bit of a tangent, but it's just something to remember when you're debating these things with people that, oh, without the government, how would we resolve disputes?
It's like, well, I'll take my chances.
Thank you very much, because it really doesn't.
There was, I think, a defamation case up here in Canada.
It took like Over seven years to resolve.
And, of course, the lawyers made a fortune.
You can never get your reputation back in that way.
But, yeah, it's just pretty rough that way.
So, as far as political action, I think that libertarianism is a great philosophy.
And it is consistent all the way to anarcho-capitalism.
It is consistent with the non-aggression principle, which is wonderful.
I think it's a great way to meet like-minded people, but I think it's most value at the moment.
I mean, it's really sad.
Let me just speak from my heart for a moment.
It's really sad that the state keeps advancing.
And the best that can be done is to delay or slow down.
I mean, that seems to be... Ron Paul was like, I want to end the Fed, right?
And now he's like, well, we've got to push back against vaccine passports.
And, you know, let's say that they were to win against vaccine passports, and it seems the only way they'll be able to do that is the same way that other people push back against voter ID laws, which is just call them racist and see if that sticks.
But, you know, when you look at someone like Ron Paul, and no disrespect to Ron Paul, he's a great man, but...
It's like, you know, he wanted to end the Fed and audit the Fed and that was going to be...
And now they're just like, hey, I wonder if we can hold our vaccine passports for three months.
You know, that's sort of where it's at.
And so, yeah, I mean, it's great that you guys have the gun laws or the absence of gun laws, so to speak, that you have.
As far as, you know, I pulled the age card now.
That's all I've got left is the creaky age card at 55.
And one of the things that I would just say is that You know, we are a whole lot less free than when I was a kid.
We are a whole lot less free than when I was a kid.
And there have, of course, been, and I've been one of those people for like 40 years straight, pushing for more freedoms.
And I've put a lot of effort and work into it.
And, of course, there are many, many, many others, really countless others, much like yourself, who've put huge amounts of effort and energy into it.
And the result has been what?
I mean, we have the internet, but the internet is...
While we're able to have this conversation, that's great.
But, you know, we do have to zoom out and look at the big course of things.
And the last thing, of course...
I mean, a systemic collapse is the second worst thing, right?
A systemic collapse is the second worst thing.
The worst thing is straight up North Korean style dictatorship, right?
That's the worst thing. I mean, that's gulags and mass graves.
And it seems that...
And it doesn't really seem like we're too far off from that, honestly.
It does not seem... No, no, that's right.
It does not seem that we're too far off from that.
And the only...
I mean, I think the only...
What was it my daughter taught me?
The portal to the nether. You build a portal in Minecraft and you get to this place called the nether and she took me out there once with a bunch of listeners to fight the ender dragon.
And so I think that the only hope...
For those of us who love liberty, it's the stand and fight thing.
I don't know, man. The stand and fight thing has some real risks, and those risks are getting greater and greater every day.
But there's such an immensely powerful and talented and, I dare say, often wealthy group of people who are just desperate for freedom.
And that is the great crop Of humankind, the great golden tribe of the liberty lovers, right?
And some place in the world, I truly believe this, some place in the world is going to figure this out.
And just as America did the brain drain from Europe in the 19th century, some place is going to be like, come here and be free.
Come here and be free.
Now, we thought maybe that was Hong Kong for a while, but given China's growing power, that seems...
Unlikely, some people thought New Zealand for a while, but with the socialists in charge, that seems somewhat unlikely.
Some people thought Australia, but that, of course, is completely off the grid.
As far as that goes, maybe it'll be an Eastern European country, maybe it'll be an Eastern Asian country.
I know Thailand is offering some pretty long-term citizenship options, but...
The opportunity to compete for liberty has diminished with the global pandemic because what they're trying to do, of course, is eliminate the capacity for the livestock to break out and run.
They're looking to close the exit loops so that you can't go anywhere because liberty is locked down from a pandemic standpoint.
This, of course, is the great opportunity. Horrible gift of the pandemic to the ruling classes.
I remember back in the day, people came to Canada for freedom.
My wife's parents fled Greece when the communists were on the verge of taking over to get to Canada for freedom.
And corporations all flooded to Ireland in the 90s for that kind of freedom.
People have consistently come to America for that kind of freedom.
And so the problem is, of course, is this competition aspect of the elite's plan, right?
Remove the ability to compete.
I do still think some place is going to figure it out.
Some place in the world is going to figure out that if you offer a refuge to the people most desperate for freedom, you will become a very wealthy and happy and positive society.
And that, I think, is the big hope.
It may be a slim hope, but again, people are pretty smart.
The tax farmers are pretty smart.
And figuring out this approach, I think, would be the most ideal.
And then it's just a matter of waiting out what happens with the rest of the countries and see.
But, you know, it's a pretty desperate situation, as you know.
I mean, the world debt is absolutely monstrous.
And people think of debt as an abstract thing.
But debt is literally life.
Debt is literally life.
You know, when there's a big giant welfare state and money is being pumped into various sectors of society, people just, they have kids.
They don't need to get married.
They just have a bunch of kids and make their money from the welfare state.
And so the debt that goes into paying for the welfare state has literally created billions of lives.
Billions of lives are dependent upon The continuation of a debt which cannot be continued.
This is why debt is so cruel.
Debt is so brutal. And debt as a mechanism for buying votes is so appalling because it literally will create lives that can't possibly be sustained as the debt begins to collapse.
And, I mean, this is well known throughout history and, of course, throughout history what countries do when they have taken on financial obligations they can't possibly fulfill.
They just go to war. The debt is used to create life.
And then the wars are used to eliminate the life.
And how that sits in the world history at the moment, I think it's pretty obvious.
So, yeah, we are heading to a pretty rough pass.
And the main issue, I think, with libertarians is it's always trying to deal with the effects rather than the causes.
Because... Of the world's ills is government education.
The fact that you have a single pain point by which to inflict rancid ideologies upon all of the citizens.
I mean, with the exception of a couple of homeschooled kids and all that, but that is, I think, the major and main issue.
Now, America died in the 1860s, and the West as a whole.
You know, it's been a dead cat bounce ever since.
As soon as governments took over education, then there was no possibility that liberty could be sustained.
A single and central place or point at which you can control the thoughts of hundreds of millions of people, maybe a billion people at this point, that is so much power.
And no human being can productively handle that kind of power.
And so, once the government's gained control over the minds and thoughts of children, I mean, there's no way that that is not going to draw the most deranged and controlling freaks in society to take that over.
And that really is the major issue.
Of course, kids aren't taught how to think.
And you never hear it discussed.
It's really a remarkable thing.
You never hear it discussed.
I mean, have you ever read, and the mainstream media is really up in arms about the anti-vaxxers, right?
Have you ever once heard any one of the mainstream media say, well, wait a minute, close to half of Americans are really skeptical of the vaccine.
And according to the mainstream media, the vaccines are safe and effective and scientific, right?
So has any of them ever said, you know, when half of people reject clear and obvious science by their perspective, Man, do we ever have to look at the educational system.
We have got to figure out what has gone so catastrophically wrong with our educational system that half the population is anti-science.
They want the control and power to shape the thoughts of their citizens from the age of four or five onwards.
But then when anything goes wrong in society, they never ever trace it back to that educational system.
It's like they want the power to control your thinking.
But if half the population thinks badly, as they say, well, that's just the fault of the population.
They're just crazy.
They're just dumb.
They're just like, it's like, no, no, no.
You guys were able to educate these people for 12 years straight.
If there's anything wrong with the way that, I mean, logically, right?
If there's anything wrong with the way that people think in a mass way, you have to look at the educational system.
But of course, I mean, they'll never do that because to criticize the educational system is to criticize the very mechanism that gives them the most power.
And in higher education, it's even worse, because higher education is the gateway to the middle and upper middle class.
You don't have a degree, and this is still pretty true.
If you don't have a degree, it's pretty hard to get into the upper middle class, and that's where people want to be.
And once governments control higher education, as they do even in America, then you simply have to jump through all the hoops to get to the middle class.
And the hoops are...
Diversity, inclusion, equity, socialism, egalitarianism, collectivism.
You just have to mouth all the platitudes and the gatekeepers won't let you through if you don't.
I just managed to squeak through.
And even then, I ended up becoming an entrepreneur, which is where I found my real success early in life.
And of course, it's interesting...
To me that my first real success as a software entrepreneur was based upon stuff I never learned in school.
Computer programming. Or even the business.
I didn't take business. I didn't take computer programming.
I didn't take marketing. I didn't take sales.
Yet I did all of these things.
Didn't take any management classes.
Did all of these things just by reading and thinking things through and I think having some natural ability.
So you're forever going to be playing whack-a-mole with the effects of the educational system.
And of course... It seems to me functionally impossible that the government would ever give up control of the educational system.
It serves so many powerful purposes.
I mean, even down to the, you know, I've got these ducks, and my daughter has these ducks, right?
And they've bonded with us, so they'll follow us everywhere.
Watching that bonding mechanism is really interesting.
It's really interesting. It's actually, it's very easy to project that as, oh, they like us.
They're affectionate. They love us.
Of course, we're very nice to the ducks and my daughter will cuddle them and stroke them and feed them and so on.
I'm sure that there's some positive feelings.
It's not really love in the sort of abstract, virtuous sense.
But of course, for the government, when you put your kids in government schools, those kids bond like the ducks with us.
They bond with the government.
The government raises them, and we are trained and evolved as a species to bond with whoever raises us.
That's how culture gets transmitted and all of that.
So I think with libertarianism, you're just going to be always trying to solve the problems caused by 12 years of indoctrination.
I said this on a speech at Night for Freedom some years ago.
They're making crazy people way faster than we can fix them.
I remember the scene for M.A.S.H., the sitcom from many years ago, where there was some new weapon that burned skin on contact, and the doctors had to try and fix people, and one of the older doctors just got enraged.
Like, they keep coming up with horrible new weapons faster than we can come up with cures for them.
And that's kind of... I think that's kind of where we are.
There's this conveyor belt.
Like, society, as you know, is not static.
There's just a conveyor belt. Of indoctrinated state-sucking brain zombies coming off the educational conveyor belt.
And, you know, it's like the catcher in the run.
You catch the kids going to the cliff edge and you can't fix them.
You can't fix them. You can't fix it.
And all we can offer them, those of us who think clearly, we can offer them a lot of pain, a lot of isolation, a lot of exclusion, a lot of women who won't date them, a few men who won't date them.
We can't offer them a middle class.
We can't offer them wealth.
We can't offer them community.
We can't offer them security. It's just, would you like to suffer for something you will almost never see achieved?
Or you're very unlikely to see achieved.
You can achieve it in your personal life.
But as far as politics go, so I think for me, yeah, I mean, political action is great.
I would view it as a much better...
It's great to get a community.
It's great to meet like-minded people, which I think we're going to need.
We're going to need community. But as far as being able to fix...
You know, the statism is a state of mind.
The state is a state of mind.
It's something that's perceived to be necessary.
Why is it perceived to be necessary?
Because when your children put you in a government school, that is such a tacit approval of the government that you can't ever really turn back on it.
Can you really criticize the government?
Which would be to criticize your parents, right?
Because if your parents put you in government school, then your parents obviously think that the government is a great and wonderful entity which can educate you in virtue and wisdom, truth, facts, and so on, right?
So to criticize a state becomes to criticize your parents.
Now, to criticize your parents is something that very, very few people have the hardiness to.
It's one of the reasons why culture is both so stable and so decaying so often is that the criticism of the parents is very, very hard.
We're not programmed for that.
We're programmed for quite the opposite, which is to mimic and to ape our parents, imitate our parents.
So I think that you can find people who just are predisposed to liberty and have survived through gritted teeth, the educational catastrophes that characterize the current system.
But that conveyor belt, you know, there's just way, like 10,000 people a day, a million people a day, I guess, a million at certain points of the year, just come and flow in off that thing, and then they flow into the next thing, which is...
The government schools. And if you start to question anything, you get kicked out of school.
If you start to question anything, you get kicked out of university.
And you have debt.
And people won't hire you.
And maybe you don't know how to become an entrepreneur or nothing's happening for you that way.
So... And then the last thing I'll sort of mention is that...
Of course...
People, whether they're right or they're wrong, is somewhat irrelevant.
But people, millions and millions and millions, hundreds of millions of people around the West, genuinely and deeply hold the conviction that if the government stops stealing, they die.
If the government stops stealing, they die.
Now, we could argue this, oh, you'll find a way to adapt it, but it's sort of irrelevant because...
That's their foundational belief.
And they wouldn't be willing to risk it, right?
They wouldn't be willing to risk it, right?
I mean, if you were standing, you know, 20 feet off a cliff and you wanted to jump into what looked like an icy lake or jump and you'd kill yourself on that icy lake or whatever and somebody says, oh, no, no, no, the ice is like, it's very thin.
It's just a bunch of snow off top and it's going to be really cool and refreshing just...
Would you be willing to risk it?
I wouldn't. If I really wanted to do it, I'd climb down and poke around on the ice or whatever, but I wouldn't just jump on somebody's say-so that I was going to be fine.
We think of the sort of prototypical example of the woman who has three kids by three different men, and she's overweight and has a very unpleasant attitude.
Because she doesn't actually have any voluntary customers like a husband or a boyfriend that she needs to satisfy or please in the same way that you could be really surly at the Department of Motor Vehicles because they don't need to...
serve you in a voluntary environment.
There's no competition, right? So she's, you know, unattractive, unpleasant, comes with three probably very badly behaved children, and she lives on the welfare state, and her kids get health care from the government, and they get a school, and so she makes probably, she would need to earn well over $100,000 a year just to break even.
She's probably not super smart, not motivated, And she has an entire social circle of people who've made similarly catastrophic life choices.
And you're going to say to her, what thou shalt not steal is really important.
Now what's she going to say? What are my kids going to eat?
How are my kids going to get healthier?
Oh, you're just going to watch them starve, will you?
You're just going to watch them die. They get sick and they're just going to die.
Now she genuinely, passionately, deeply believes that.
And she's... Is she going to roll the dice?
Are you going to say, well, no, but look, you will be happier.
You will be happier.
Because there's no such thing as quality without voluntary.
Voluntarism and quality are exactly the same thing.
Whatever you're compelled to do, whatever you're compelled to choose, is crap, by definition.
By definition. And...
Yes, it's going to be a rough transition, but you'll be happier, you'll be better, your kids will respect you more, you'll have a job, you'll feel more productive, your self-esteem will go up, you might even get a man who'll want to stick with you, and you'll be a better person because you won't just get to scream at him and abuse him, knowing that if he walks off, the welfare state is going to take care of you, so you'll actually be limited in your capacity for negative behavior by the need for resources that you can't get at the point of a voting gun.
And we can say all of this to her, but she doesn't care.
She doesn't care. And if you were to try and move forward with something like that, she would send her teenage sons out to wreck the neighborhood.
And that would be pretty bad.
It would be pretty bad, right? And then, this is what I said about the Ron Paul thing many years ago.
Oh, let's say he ends the welfare state.
Okay, well then he tries to end the welfare state.
And there's riots all over the place, like bloody riots all over the place.
And then what's he going to do?
Are you going to call in the National Guard and suppress them?
And then the entire, ah, this is what happens when you get libertarianism.
You get blood in the streets and there's police dogs on the protesters and libertarianism then looks like complete fascism and is discredited for another five generations.
So, can you get people to act against their own self-interest?
For life itself, their own self-interest, their own survivability for the sake of an abstract principle.
Well, if you want to be a libertarian, you have to believe that people will put principle above discomfort.
Principle above discomfort.
Now, it was about 12 years ago, 11 years ago, I gave a speech about this very topic.
It was kind of an experiment. I guess I could reveal it now.
It's kind of an experiment, right? Now, the experiment was the only way libertarianism can survive is if people put principle way above comfort.
So, I introduced the against me argument.
The against me argument is if somebody wants your taxes raised, like say 10% or 5% or whatever, and you say to them, so do you want me...
Thrown in jail if I disagree with you.
I don't think taxes should be raised.
You want taxes to be raised.
Would you be okay?
Are you okay, or do you support me being thrown in jail if I disagree with you that taxes should be raised and live that way?
Now, of course, if they want a law passed, then they do want you thrown in jail for disagreeing with them.
So you want costumed armed men and women to come to my house and drag me away and lock me in a cell if I disagree with you.
In other words, you want the power of the state used against me.
It's not just raising taxes or, I don't know, whatever it is.
You want the power of the state used against me for disagreeing with you.
It's called the against me argument.
Now, I personally will not be in a relationship with somebody who wants the power of the state used against me for disagreeing with them.
If you think, oh, well, the welfare state is how we should help the poor.
It's like, well, I disagree. Am I allowed to disagree with you without you supporting the use of force against me?
Am I allowed to functionally or practically disagree with you?
Because, you know, in a personal thing, that's just called criminality, right?
In your personal life.
If someone comes along and says, like if somebody asks you for $10, if someone on the street says, I want $10, are you allowed to disagree with them?
Well, that's the difference between charity and being mugged.
Somebody wants $10, are you allowed to disagree with that person who wants $10 from you?
Yes, okay, well then you just say, sorry, I don't want to give it to you, I don't have any money or whatever, and you just walk on.
He doesn't do anything, he asks the next guy.
That's voluntary, that's charity, right?
But if that person says, I'm going to use force against you if you don't give me $10, that's called a mugging.
You want to have sex with a woman, you say, hey, do you want to have sex?
And she says, yes. Well, that's called lovemaking.
It may be ill-advised, but it's not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
If you want to have sex with a woman and she says no, and then you use force to compel her, that's called rape or sexual assault, and that's deeply evil.
So in our personal lives, the difference between voluntary and violent is the difference between freedom and criminality.
And just because somebody hides behind the state or the voting or propaganda or whatever doesn't change the fundamental thing that if somebody wants you to obey the state, then they want you to to be brutalized violently for disagreeing with them.
They think the welfare state should handle poverty.
I think the charity and entrepreneurship should handle poverty.
I did a lot more good for the poor by creating 60 or 70 jobs over my tenure as an entrepreneur than I ever did by paying taxes.
So I put this forward and this was an experiment.
So the only way libertarians can inspire others is if they lift those principles themselves first.
Lecturing people about principles you don't want to take on yourself is worse than useless.
It actually discredits those principles.
I mean, you know, like if you're somebody who says, you know, diet and exercise are the most important things in the world, and you're a fat layabout with the muscle tone of your average piece of ripened feta cheese, well, then you're clearly not...
You're going to be very effective at motivating people to adopt your mantra that diet and exercise the most important things in the world.
Or, you know, Kevin Samuels, the guy on YouTube, very smart guy, very good debater.
He's a personal image consultant.
Now, if he showed up in ratty shorts, unshaven, whatever it is, like some Mickey Mouse t-shirt, then that would be a particular image.
No, but the pictures he has of him looking smart in a three-piece suit and looking at a phone and his hair perfectly cut like some laser from space.
So he's a personal image consultant, so he's got to look good.
So if you have values that you want the world to adopt, you must first live them yourself.
And I don't have any values that I have proposed in this show.
Not one value have I ever proposed in this show that I have not first implemented in my own life.
I talk about the voluntary family.
I implemented that before I ever became a public figure in my own life.
Peaceful parenting implemented it.
In my own life.
Non-aggression principle. Implemented it in my own life.
The against me argument.
Implemented it in my own life.
I simply will not be in a relationship with somebody who wants to use force against me for disagreeing with him or with her.
I simply won't do it.
Because that's called putting principle about comfort.
Is it comfortable to have those conversations with people and point out to them that they want force used against you for disagreeing with them?
That they're kind of like...
You know, propagandize sociopaths, right?
A sociopath is perfectly happy to have you be aggressed against or disagreeing with him or her.
They're not comfortable to have those conversations.
They're not fun. But that's what it means to put principle above comfort.
Now, if we put principle above comfort, then we, I think, gain the moral right to lecture others about putting principle above comfort.
Because that's what we say. People got their guarantee.
It comes from state. They can't be fired from welfare or from government employment.
Teachers get sums up, gracious, health care, tenure, job security.
The pay and benefits in the government is about a third higher than the private sector.
Not to mention the astounding levels of job security and the fact that you don't have to spend your time on new technologies if you're in IT or other places.
So, we're good people.
You ought to get really accountable for the sake of principle.
But it's worth it. Okay, so...
Why would people take us seriously?
There's nothing more discrediting to an argument, a moral argument, than to be hypocritical.
Because then you're using morality.
I'm not speaking about you, the person I'm talking to.
You're using morality as a way of being superior and lecturing people and so on, but you're not actually willing to do the things that your morality requires.
You know, I mean, Socrates, his death for the principles that he claims.
And so did Jesus, and we remember them.
Now, to be fair, we also remember Aristotle, who also fled, saying he was not going to allow Athens to sin against philosophy twice, but still lived with great principle.
Martin Luther, a person who lived with great principle.
Whether you agree or not, they're still willing to make sacrifices for the sake of principle.
So libertarians are out there in the world saying to everyone, you've got to make all these sacrifices for the sake of principle.
Okay, so I'm like, okay, let's see if libertarians are serious about this.
It's very easy to ask other people to make sacrifices.
This is what the government said.
We're all in this together.
It's very boring. It's very predictable to ask other people to sacrifice.
So I put forward this argument to libertarians saying, look, you've got people in your life who support the use of violence against you.
If you support the government grabbing you with guns and throwing you in jail, where, you know, it's a fairly high likelihood that you will, in fact, be raped.
So, kidnap isn't most likely raped, but he's certainly possibly raped, for just disagreeing.
Now, if there was someone in your life who said, yeah, no, I totally support you being kidnapped and imprisoned and probably raped, if you disagree with me, you can say it can suck.
And so, I said to libertarians...
Make this case. And it is an ironclad case.
It is an airtight case. Now, I said be patient.
You know, people, it takes a little while to unplug them from the matrix.
The propaganda takes a little while to unravel.
Could take a couple of weeks, maybe even a month or two, but at some point, you've made the case.
And given the time to acclimatize and time to adapt or time to adjust, but at some point, You know, if you're serious about Judaism, you're not friends with the Nazi.
So I said to libertarians, you've got to put principle above comfort.
Take your ideas seriously.
Now, if you've had leftists in your life and you've talked about the science of IQ, I mean, they'll just cut you off, right?
Look at all the people turning on Nick Anish for a relatively mild statement of caution about someone she knew who had a vaccine reaction that was pretty negative.
So the leftists, if you disagree with them, they will ostracize you.
They will get you, not just from themselves, but from others.
De-platforming, right? So the leftists do this.
They take their ideas very seriously.
And so my challenge to libertarians was, okay, Can you take these ideas at least half as seriously as the left does?
Because the left will try and destroy your life if you disagree with them.
And I'm not saying that's particularly moral, to put it mildly, but people are very much devoted to supporting the use of violence against you if you disagree with them.
I mean, look at the leftist activists.
Look at the people who are writing.
Look at the people who set up in Seattle or Portland or whatever.
So The left take their ideas very seriously and will attack, ostracize, try and destroy your life if you disagree with them.
And so I think that's immoral because it involves lying, usually.
But if libertarians could at least take their ideas seriously enough to say, look, if you support the use of violence against me, you can't be in my life.
So I put that argument forward about 12 years ago, maybe a little longer.
I mean, that was sort of my big formal speech that I gave and took questions to the audience and all that kind of stuff.
And saying, okay, well, look, if libertarians don't put above comfort, then you're not going to succeed as a political movement.
You may have, you know, again, little bits here and there, right?
But I mean, it's sort of like saying to someone, if you want to put comfort and you're overweight, you will never lose weight.
Because anytime you get hungry, which is uncomfortable, you'll just eat to make yourself feel comfortable again.
So losing weight or exercising, whatever it is that you're at, means you've got to embrace discomfort for the sake of principle, whatever principle, like losing weight or gaining muscle mass or whatever.
Now, it may be the case that, oh, I just didn't feel hungry that week or I got sick or I got the flu, in which case maybe you dropped a few pounds.
And that's sort of the equivalent of, yeah, there's some little victories here and there with libertarianism.
And I won't even do the whole thing on peaceful parenting, which is a whole other thing around libertarianism, you know, commitment to the non-aggression principle.
And so what happened was, when I put this argument forward, saying, look, if you want to lecture people that they have to put principle above comfort, then you have to put principle above comfort first, because nobody's going to listen to you if you're not living your values.
Nobody is going to listen to you if you're not living your values.
And in fact, you're just discrediting those values, right?
So, I put this forward because I know what works in the world.
I know what works in the world. And I'm sorry if you've fallen asleep by this point, but what do you think happened to me in libertarian circles when I put forward this argument?
Which was exactly how libertarianism could have been, because knowing how Intense the communists are and the leftists are about their beliefs and how they will ostracize and destroy people.
I wasn't saying destroy anyone. I was just saying ostracize people who want to use violence against you if you're into the non-aggression principle.
What do you think happened to me in libertarian circles after I put forward this entirely moral and practical and rational argument?
I imagine most probably rejected it or Took it as not quite as serious as it actually is.
Well, they did end up ostracizing people.
Well, not people. They did end up ostracizing as a whole.
Did they ostracize the people who wanted them taken, thrown in a cage?
They ostracized the people who wanted to use violence against them.
I would assume they ostracized you and what you put forth.
Right. They ostracized me as a whole, right, and looked at me askance and with discomfort and, you know, there were, you know, moments of that, you know, he just wants to destroy families, maybe some kind of cult leader, that kind of stuff, right?
Okay, well, and you just accept the information of how people respond to those arguments, right?
And there was not a passionate debate about this within libertarianism.
And, you know, I still got invited a couple of places here and there, so it's not like it was some, you know, like, never speak to him.
It wasn't some big phalanx or wall against me.
But there was no debate about this within libertarianism.
There wasn't this, you know, boy, that's pretty intense.
But, you know, I mean, if the left are willing to throw people in gulags, maybe we should at least ostracize people who knowingly want to use violence against us.
I mean, that is, obviously, if you have friends who would beat you up every time you disagree with them, or would lock you in a cage, I mean, obviously, that would not.
So, it's a pretty stark moral thing, and that's a win, right?
I also think that if you're into the non-aggression principle, you should apply it.
The most consistently to the place where you have the most effect and power, which is in the family.
Children should not aggress against your children.
One of the very earliest articles I wrote was the case against spanking, which was like A to Z. Spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle because children are not aggressing against you.
It's not self-defense. It's an immediate danger.
So it's a violation of the non-aggression principle.
Now if, and this was probably fifteen years ago, right?
So, if fifteen years ago, libertarians had breast-signed peaked by the doses, right?
Because if someone's you put in jail, disagreeing about a little mate that you use a little cheap pill at the doses, right?
And if, turn some breasts upon the fans back, they impresses, and we deal with those around.
The violence all clogged in propaganda and seemingly real interactions by command to, uh, look ahead upon this source in a construction time and break all of it in George Washington's agency of fire.
So, you know, if the Libertarians had done that, then we'd have had a fight against the Libertarians as a whole, and some exceptions, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush here, but in general, Libertarians as a whole did not do that, and in fact, they were happy to ostracize the right people's view against them.
And that is interesting.
It's obviously a little sad, but you can't make people see the truth, right?
You can't. You simply present them with the truth.
What are you supposed to do?
Lariat them and tie them down and, you know, like Clockwork Orange poking the guy's eyes open.
You can't do that, right?
That's a violation of the non-aggression principle anyway.
So libertarians like doing the political action stuff because there's no personal confrontations involved.
It's like a hobby. And it makes you feel like you're doing something.
But it's not. It's not serious.
If you don't do it in your personal life, it's not even remotely serious and nobody will take it seriously.
Because people don't judge your ideas.
This is the basic reality. People don't have enough philosophy to judge your ideas.
All they do is they judge your commitment to your ideas.
Because deep down they know that the most committed will win.
The average person cannot possibly judge libertarianism versus socialism.
They have no capacity. And in fact, given that they're raised in a socialist environment, which is the government schools, right?
They're raised in a socialist environment, so they bonded with socialism.
So the average person, and this is like literally 99 people out of 100 or more, the average person has zero capacity to judge free markets versus central planning.
Property rights versus collectivism.
There's no capacity to judge it whatsoever.
But they deep down know that the people who are the most committed to their ideas always win in history.
And it's not even a close second.
The people most committed to their own ideas always win throughout human history.
So they don't want to bother evaluating the content of anyone's ideas.
All they do is they look at their commitment to those ideas.
And in that commitment to those ideas...
They see the future. Now, if they commit to libertarianism and socialism or communism wins, then they're going to come to a very bad pass, right?
Because freedom lovers don't tend to do very well in the old gulags, right?
So what they do is they look at the two groups and they say, okay, who's really serious about what they believe?
Because if they're really serious about what they believe, then that group will win.
Group A, Group B, right? Group A is 10 times more serious and committed to their ideas than Group B. Well, then Group A will win, which means you really don't want to be part of Group B if they're in opposition, because you come to a very bad pass after that, right?
And this is why I said all this to libertarians, because I know what wins.
I know what works. And if the communists and the leftists and the socialists will try to destroy your life, physically attack you and so on if you contradict them, But libertarians will just hang out with people who directly want the use of force used against them for disagreeing with them.
Then the libertarians will lose and the leftists will win.
In which case, nobody's going to take libertarianism seriously.
In fact, they're going to avoid it.
They're going to avoid it.
Because to be on the libertarian camp, if the leftists win, is to be in a very bad situation right now.
Now, that's, you know, study of history, my own life, integrity, and that's what you need to do to even have a fighting chance.
It doesn't mean you'll win, but at least he puts you in the ring.
It means you have a fighting chance.
Now, I won't even get into the whole UPB discussion, universally preferable behavior.
I gave the ironclad proof of libertarian ethics and...
I remember presenting it out in Vancouver while the block was in the audience.
I wrote countless articles.
I did PowerPoint presentations.
I debated it ad infinitum.
And nobody took up the mantle.
And so if you give people the practical way to win and you give them all the theoretical underpinnings to assure them that they are in the right and they ostracize you as a whole, then they're not going to win.
Again, there may be little victories here and there, and I don't want to say that the gun thing you were talking about is just like a tiny little thing, but as far as the overall pattern goes, and now, you know, now it's probably too late, right?
Maybe, you know, 10, 15 years ago, but now it's really probably too late, and Now, in which case, the libertarians are probably not going to want to alienate those around them because they'll probably need them for whatever social trials are to come.
You may need more of a tribe or a community or whatever.
But, yeah, the leftists, they're just very serious about it.
And they will mess you up if you disagree with them.
And libertarians is like, it's a big tent that just collapses in on itself.
And the small focus group grows to a large political group and take the price.
So, anyway, that's sort of a...
Sorry for the long... Bit there that's a big thing about what I saw and what I observed.
I was one of the more successful people coming into libertarianism in that I had been a successful entrepreneur and built companies and all of that from nothing and come from a poor background.
I had a lot of success and credibility in various areas.
I wasn't Some academic who was protected by the state or someone with a government license, like a lawyer or whatever, allows them to print money and so on.
I had actually been in the free market, actually built a company, had been in the free market, and knew a lot about it from that standpoint.
And because I was very interested in selling and did a lot of sales, I remember in one five-month period, I closed over a million dollars in sales, right?
And that was a very big deal for us as a smaller company.
And one of the ideas that came to me, because I was visiting a car manufacturer, an auto manufacturer.
It doesn't really matter.
Let's just say it was Ford, right?
And as you can imagine, you go to the Ford Motor Company, and you've got lots of Ford employees.
What are the cars in the parking lot?
What kind are they? I guess I'll answer for you.
They're Ford cars, right? You can't show up as a Ford employee, particularly if you're a manager, you can't show up as a Ford employee in a Volvo or a Lexus or whatever it is, right? Can you imagine being a Ford salesman and showing up in a Volvo to make a sale and saying, well, Ford are the best cars, man.
I mean, you'd get laughed out of the place and you'd get fired the next day.
Because what kind of idiot shows up to sell a Ford car in a Volvo?
In other words, if you're not willing to do it yourself, why would you want to sell it to others?
And that's just sort of a basic thing, right?
That's just a basic thing about sales.
And in fact, some of the car manufacturers will give their employees cars Oh, I remember I was also at a gym once.
I just grabbed some t-shirt, went to work out.
I was at a gym and it was actually an ad for another gym.
So the gym owner, it was like an ad on my shirt for another gym.
I just didn't realize it. And the owner was like, hey man, here's a free shirt.
Don't wear somebody else's shirt.
Gym logo on your shirt, right?
He gave me a free shirt, asked me to change.
I'm like, you know what? You're totally right.
You know, obviously, right?
I'm not going to be working out. Now, imagine if the guy who owned the gym was in some other gym shirt.
That would be weird, right? And of course, you know, the guys who own the gym tend to be pretty fit and they tend to work out at their own gyms.
Anyway, this is all pretty obvious stuff.
But... That's sort of my major issue with libertarians.
It's like, okay, we have these ideas.
These ideas have particular consequences.
And if we shy away from the consequences of those ideas, because it might cause us some discomfort or alienation in our relationships or what we think of as relationships.
They're not really relationships if they want the use of force against you.
So if we don't want the negative consequences of our own actions, when those negative consequences are merely emotional, How on earth could we demand other people give up their jobs, their incomes, their healthcare, their security, their welfare, their military-industrial complex, billions and billions and billions of dollars, when we don't even want to have a frank conversation with our brother-in-law who wants to raise our taxes?
We won't have those difficult conversations, but everyone else out there, you know what you should do?
You should give up your $150,000-a-year job.
You should give up your three months off in the summer and your free healthcare and your pensions.
You should give up all of these things, but we're not going to have any challenging conversations with people around us.
And that's when you know it's not going to win.
Because everybody looks at that and they say, well, these guys on the left, man, they're committed.
These guys on the right or these guys who are small government, they're just mostly talking.
And people... The average person is like a mammal at the foot of battling dinosaurs.
They don't have any way to analyze or deconstruct the arguments that are being put forward.
All they're doing is scanning for dedication.
Are you dedicated? Is it important to you?
Are you willing to be uncomfortable for the sake of what you believe?
Are you willing to fight for what you believe?
And particularly when it comes to morals.
All they're doing is scanning to see who's going to win and they'll side with that person or that group or that idea or that ideology.
Of course! They have no capacity to evaluate it.
They're never trained to evaluate it.
They may not have the intellect to evaluate it.
But, you know, human beings did not evolve without a very strong sense of who's going to win and siding with that person or at least refraining from fighting, right?
Who's going to win? Who's going to win?
Who's going to win? And...
Everybody's scanning and saying, well, the libertarians are not going to win.
And they won't take 1% of the medicine they demand others take.
So no one's going to take that medicine, which means the left is going to win.
And because I knew all of this, I didn't know what the outcome was going to be.
I had my suspicions, but I didn't know what the outcome was going to be.
But because I knew all of this, because I had the unique...
Experience of being heavily into sales.
And you don't show up to sell a Ford driving a Volvo.
And you don't demand of other people a hundred times the sacrifice that you're not even willing to take yourself.
I mean, you can do anything you want.
It's just, it'll never work. It's just a bunch of noise and wind and nonsense.
So because I knew all of this, and I put forward these arguments very clearly, very consistently, year after year, until nobody wanted to talk to me anymore.
And that's fine too.
That's freedom. That's free will.
My public life is a fairly small part of my life.
I have wonderful relationships in my personal life, which is the majority of what I do.
But I put all that forward because if you have a cure and you don't even offer it, you feel terrible.
If you have a cure, you offer it and everybody runs away, at least your conscience is clear.
And I'm pretty charismatic.
I'm pretty convincing. I'm pretty good with a turn of phrase.
And, man, I worked my ass off for years to get this idea and this argument across.
And why? And even the libertarians were acting as if the left was going to win, which means, of course, the left wins.
So, yeah, sorry, that's the end of the ramble of the speech or whatever you want to call it.
I hope that makes some kind of sense.
It makes perfect sense.
And honestly, I was really just enticed in what you were saying, which is why I wasn't able to get to my mic when you asked that question.
I absolutely just love the way you speak, and like I said, it just enticed me.
Yeah, it's really interesting.
I've been a fan of yours for several years, and I've heard you talk off and on about the libertarians and Putting forth these ideas and how you were basically treated because of that.
And so it's really interesting, especially now with kind of how some of the party itself is actually really split around, I guess, more...
They get called Woketarians, which I think is...
Oh, the Left Libertarians, right?
Yes. Yes and no.
I mean, there's some left-leaning libertarians that are not quite woke.
But yeah, the more left-leaning, I guess the ones that follow people like Vermin Supreme.
And it's creating a lot of...
I'm sorry, follow people like who?
Vermin Supreme. He was a presidential candidate.
He wears a boot on his head.
I'm sorry. Was his name Vermin Supreme?
Vermin Supreme.
That's... So they scorned me and went to a guy named Vermin Supreme?
Yeah. That's delightful.
That really is. So...
It's really split along the lines of the Cato Institute and the Mises Institute.
I come from more of the Mises side of things.
I'm involved in the Mises Caucus and other things like this.
Just recently, the National Committee actually kicked out the Secretary of Due to unfavorable words.
Wait, what do you mean?
They basically redefined the non-aggression principle to include hate speech.
And that really drove...
Really? Yeah, it was very interesting, and it has really set the course for how the party is now behaving.
There was a...
Do you know what is the argument?
Like, if you upset people enough, that the same is pointing a gun at their head?
Pretty much. I mean...
I'm sure somebody else would describe it differently, but that's ultimately what it comes down to.
I'm sorry, don't they even remotely understand that that completely destroys their entire position?
I don't believe the people that are behind this do.
No, because I mean, if you're on welfare and the libertarians want to end welfare, It's going to be perceived as hate speech.
You're going to be taking away the livelihood, taking food out of my children's mouths.
It's hate speech because you're suggesting that I live on air and water, and therefore anything that is proposed by libertarianism that goes against the immediate economic self-interest of anyone is going to be massively upsetting to them, and therefore they'll have to stop because it's hateful.
Exactly. Excellent.
I guess they ran away from me, and that's where they ended up.
It kind of makes sense, right? A lot of them, yeah.
And then that's where the Mises Caucus comes in, which is they get called all the typical things, Russian bots, they're racists and Nazis, all because they want to return the Libertarian Party to Libertarians.
And a lot of these people that are in these not powerful positions, I mean, being on the committee for the libertarians, you don't have any power.
But these positions have definitely attracted these types of people that definitely would have shunned you.
And taking the against me argument is just a joke.
It's just really interesting to see, especially with your opinion, because there actually was a takeover, so to speak, of New Hampshire's Libertarian Party.
The chair at the time of the National Committee actually basically started a whole new party, stole a bunch of information.
And kicked everyone out and said well if you want to join the party you have to sign this thing and it became a big issue.
He was confronted about it and actually resigned.
He didn't want to defend himself.
And the person who blew the whistle was the secretary that they just recently removed.
So it's very, very interesting seeing all of this kind of unfold.
And the people who, I would guess, or I would say living more principled by what they are preaching versus the people who, like you said, don't practice what they preach.
Interesting.
Interesting.
Yeah, I think also, I mean, the one thing that libertarians should have been very much prepared for is that their most effective communicators would be the ones with the most attacked.
I think that's kind of foundational.
And I think instead they said, you know, people like myself and others, of course, who were the most attacked.
They were like, whoa, that kind of discredits them in our eyes, or that's kind of dangerous, or that's kind of bad.
It's like, okay, well, but...
Of course they're going to target the fire on the most effective people, right?
And so I think there was a sense of like, wow, the normie world is really going to battle against these guys.
That's pretty bad. I don't want any part of that.
And look, I can understand that.
I really can. But what happens is if people are very good at defending and promoting libertarian values, And then they get attacked and ostracized, not just by the mainstream, but also a little bit by libertarians themselves.
Then all that will happen is very good communicators will look and say, well, I don't want that, because the better I am at communicating those ideas, the worse my life becomes.
Like, why would you want that at all?
And so it does prevent other people from moving into the sphere.
And I don't know that there's been somebody to replace someone like me.
Maybe there has. I don't, because I'm not really in that world anymore.
But certainly, you know, I got a billion views and Downloads and books and you name it, right?
And a billion is a lot.
It's a lot of views and downloads.
I don't know that there's been like a number two in that way.
And certainly no one new seems to have come along who's willing to take up that mantle.
And that's because anybody new would probably have listened to me and saw how I was treated.
And they'd be like, okay, well, I'm not going to.
I'm not going to get involved in that because if I'm as good as Steph, then I'm just going to get kind of ostracized and betrayed and left to fight the battle with the mainstream media alone and all that.
And that's different with the Christians.
The Christians are a whole different group, and I know that there's a lot of overlap, but the Christians have been very staunch and stood by me, which is why I think my sympathies generally flowed away from libertarianism and towards Christianity because, I mean, those guys take their ideas very seriously in a way that libertarians seem to struggle with.
And honestly, I'm not very religious.
Personally, I was raised religiously.
But I've definitely been leaning more towards the Christians as well.
I still wouldn't consider myself very religious.
But there's something to be said of people who stand by their convictions.
And I can at least say, I'm not sure exactly how much impact I have at the party.
I do quit quite a bit, although it is not my main focus, just a peaceful solution to do something.
However, I can definitely say that I take a lot of what you have taught me, what I've taken away from your teachings, and I definitely I'd like to promote it in any capacity where somebody would listen to me.
So you've at least got one person.
Oh, no, and I'm sure.
I'm sure there'd be more.
But, you know, if you want to do the acid test, right, you just say, hey, let's get Steph to give a speech at some gathering.
You can obviously be remotely these days or whatever, right?
Let's go, Steph. And if there's a, like, oh, you know, that's kind of a bridge too far, or, you know, that's going to cause us to get a lot of negative feedback, and it's like, okay, and that's fine.
That's totally fine. See, the left embraces actual terrorists, right?
Like, the weather underground, like, a lot of them ended up in universities and teaching and were welcomed, you know, when Alger Hiss, Went to jail for perjury, for denying he was a communist.
You know, when he got out, everyone threw him a big party, invited him over.
So these are people who actually went to jail.
And some for very serious and violent offenses, they're just embraced by the left.
They're just like, yeah, come on in, man, we love you.
You know, you sacrifice for the cause, you're heroic, blah, blah, blah.
You know, I get called a racist and everyone's like, whoa, stay away from that guy.
And it's like, okay, well, without that loyalty...
You know, people would just be like, okay, so I can go to the left and they'll embrace me even if I end up in prison for violent behaviors, right?
Or I can go to the libertarians where if the left calls me a racist, they'll just shun me for the next 50 years.
It's like, you know, again, people have no particular moral compass.
Which group do you want to join? Yeah, it's very true.
It's absolutely amazing to see somebody say that they believe in something And turn tail and do the exact opposite.
I've personally never been one to really be upset about that because at least somebody would be able to show their true colors.
And my morals will still be intact.
So, I guess I can't hate too much.
Libertarians know, I mean, they know how much the media lies about Ayn Rand, right?
They know how much the media lies about men.
They know how much the media lies about men.
Well, I don't know.
I'm going to talk to you about the media.
I'm going to talk to you about the media.
I don't think it's interesting.
But I think it's a piece of the piece of the people's work.
I'm going to talk to you about the media.
So, I'm going to talk to you about the media.
I'm going to talk to you about the media.
You know, your family name is Molyneux, so I take it you're aware of it all being from, like, Ireland and...
I'm sorry, dude. If you want to talk, you're going to...
I'm sorry to interrupt.
I don't know if your connection is slow, but if you want to talk, you cannot have these truck-sized pauses between.
It's going to put me into some kind of hypnotic state, so you're going to have to push the words out.
Yes, can you hear me? Hello.
All right. I guess we're going to have some technical issues with that one, so we will have to...
Yes, hello. Can you hear me?
Hello, hello. I know I can hear me because the green button is glowing, so...
Going once.
Going twice. All right.
We will go to someone else. Roy, I think you're on.
You'll need to unmute. Hey, Stefan.
How are you? I'm fine.
How are you doing? Yeah, I'm doing great.
Yeah. Just had a couple questions for you.
Things that I was chewing on based on what you've been saying lately and not coming to clarity anyway.
So one of the things I was wondering about was you're saying, and you said this earlier today, you said there will be And you correct me if I get, you know, if I get the drift wrong, but you said there will be, you know, amid all this and this bumpy ride down, there are a significant enough amount of people that are wealthy, that are desperate for freedom, that there will be a jurisdiction, there will be a place.
In the world where they will establish freedoms, and then there will be a brain drain in the reverse.
People will leave America or wherever it is, and they'll go to this place.
Now, maybe I'm getting lost in the weeds here by asking how, but I tend to think that that step involves political action.
And this is where I'm uncertain about your...
Because you say, well, politics, I don't want to talk about this.
This is not a winning strategy that I wasn't listening to.
I gave the foolproof practical solution through universal ethics to people, and they shunned me for this.
So, you know, I'm giving my go-around with the things that happen in Australia and New Zealand and all this.
I've soured on commentary on politics.
And now I'm wondering, how is this freedom zone or whatever it is, how does this come to be?
And if this is the thing to look forward to, you know, how can we affect that?
How can we... Oh, no, no, we can't.
I've never said we're going to affect it.
No, I've never said we're going to affect it.
No, we just keep your eyes peeled.
Someone's going to figure out that there are very smart entrepreneurs who've got crypto, who've got resources or just great talents and who are just desperate for freedom and who are looking for a place to land so that they can apply their skills.
95% of the economy is run by 5% of the people, and I'm not kidding about that.
95% of our entire economy is run by 5 people, and that's going to change going forward.
I've not really talked about this much, but it's worth mentioning here in context.
We are on the verge of this robot revolution that is, I think, kind of intertwined in what's going on these days in the world, right?
And so this robot revolution...
Means that we don't need much population to have great wealth anymore.
And I simply say this from an economic standpoint.
40% of people's jobs could be gone in the next 10 years.
It could be higher. It could be shorter.
So we have a huge reality.
So right now, 95% of the economy is run by like 5% of the people.
In terms of creativity and entrepreneurship and intelligence and skill and all of that.
And that's going to change to like 99% of the economy is going to be run by like 1% of the people.
And by run, I don't mean like they're in charge.
I just mean that the wealth that is generated, the value that is generated.
Pareto principle. Pareto principle, right?
I mean, you know this.
If there's a million people in the economy, half the value is produced by a thousand of those people.
Now, with robots, that ratio is going to change even more.
And we have the great problem.
The great problem is, what the heck are people going to do when they can be replaced by robots?
I mean, this is the Tucker Carlson thing about self-driving trucks, where he's like, oh God, the first thing I would do is ban self-driving trucks, right?
Because it would be a complete disaster for large sections of the lower middle class if...
Self-driving trucks became like a thing.
It'd be a massive disaster.
And, I mean, nobody's really talking about what is everyone going to do when you have robot waiters, robot cooks, robots running robots on assembly lines, when you have robots picking fruit and vegetables.
You can get robots to pick grapes and strawberries and all kinds of stuff now.
And what on earth are people going to do who, through no fault of their own, aren't very smart?
And I, you know, it always sounds like a put down when I say, you know, not very smart.
I don't mean it that way at all.
It's nobody's fault.
Well, government debt selected for them.
Well, this is why UBI is being pushed, right?
Right. And this is huge.
I mean, there's more sinister elements of the internet that are like, because the robot revolution is coming, we're having depopulation through vaccines.
I mean, that's the really wild area.
I don't follow that or accept that, but I know that there are certain theories out there like that.
Why don't you accept it?
I don't mean to confront you.
I'm just very curious.
Like, why don't you accept this?
I mean, I see these Boston Dynamics robots and it's not a hop, skip and a jump, Stefan, to say, well, these things are going to be busting down doors, you know, and they're not too near future.
And you don't want to get caught on the wrong side of that.
I don't see how that's wild or...
You know, now I see the counterpoint that, well, if that's happening, then there are robots that can be made, you know, programmed to mitigate these regime bots or whatever.
Oh, no, no. Hang on now.
The first thing that governments will do is make sure that robotics manufacturers are heavily licensed by the government so that there would only be, like, underground robots or black market robots.
So it would be – they would kill that industry that would compete with them, but – Look, I mean, the depopulation agenda and so on, I would just like to see more evidence than some stuff that's taken half out of context in a TED talk.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and white papers and stuff.
I don't want to get into that debate if that's all right right now.
I just want to talk as a whole because you and I don't have access to the information that would prove or disprove that.
So it would be largely theoretical.
But... What I will say is that we just have this huge issue.
We're on the eve of the biggest change since the end of slavery.
Biggest change in human history since the end of slavery.
Really, there's been three big ones.
The first is hunter-gatherer to agriculture.
That's a huge one, really the basis of civilization.
And then you could sort of, you know, machinery, capital formation and so on, 19th century, but that all came out of the end of slavery.
I view the Industrial Revolution was merely in effect at the end of slavery.
So we got the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago, which gave us enough calories that we could actually have something other than hunting and surviving forever.
Which gave rise to written language and culture and art and all that kind of stuff, right?
So you got the three biggies.
You got agricultural revolution, end of slavery, robots.
And each of them involve a massive reduction in necessary labor.
I mean, you know, hunter-gatherer societies, it's like, you know how it works.
It's like, I need 2,500 calories a day.
If I get 2,501, I'm happy.
If I get 2,499, I will die.
You know, like that was the thin edge of the razor, right?
Which is why those populations never particularly grew.
Infant mortality was crazy high.
And again, you catch the deer and you eat.
You don't catch the deer and you have that much less energy to hunt next time.
And it's often a death spiral, literally a death spiral.
So agricultural revolution is like massive reduction in the effort to calories required and a massive increase in the predictability.
Of your food supply, right?
And, of course, with agriculture comes property rights and the beginnings of the Pareto principle.
So, the amount of labor required to produce food went down enormously with the agricultural revolution.
Now, with the end of slavery, The amount of labor required to produce food and just about everything else went down enormously because as soon as you end slavery, you start to get labor-saving devices, capital investments in machinery that eliminate the need for labor because labor has gone from an asset to a cost.
If you bought slaves to pick your cotton, to thresh your wheat or whatever, you don't invest in a combine harvester that does it automatically because that lowers the value of your slaves, right?
It would be like investing in horse and buggy and cars simultaneously.
It's a zero-sum game, in fact, a negative-sum game, one to the other.
So agricultural revolution, labor required went down massively.
End of slavery, labor required went down massively.
And robots, what happens?
Labor goes down massively.
Requirements for labor. It's hard for us to comprehend because we've not actually lived through this kind of stuff.
We have the internet revolution and so on, which has been big.
It's been big for sure. But we have a massive population at a time when the requirements for labor are going to crash.
What's the plan? I don't know.
I don't know what the plan is.
I doubt there is a plan. Other than maybe UBI. Now, UBI... See, here's the thing.
In a free society, UBI could be totally fine.
Like, if we're allowed to talk about IQ, right?
Which is the big question, right?
If we're allowed to talk about IQ, we say, look, you don't go to someone who's 5'2 and say, I can't believe you're so freaking lazy you can't even be bothered to be a basketball star.
Right? Nobody comes to me and says, Steph...
How come you're not a hair model?
Right? Because, you know, I've genetically lost hair and somebody happens to be genetically short or whatever it is, right?
Or to put it conversely, we don't go to a guy who's six foot six and say, why the hell didn't you ever become a jockey?
I mean, I knew a woman who loved riding horses and when I was younger and I said, did you ever think of being a jockey?
She's like, I'm way too tall.
I'm like, you're like average height for a woman.
And she's like, yeah, so I'd have to weigh like 90 pounds or 85 pounds to be a jockey, which means I would be starving and I would like take decades off my lifespan or something, right?
So you don't look to someone of normal height or above average height and say, why the hell?
You're too lazy to be a jockey. Like, we understand those limitations.
We don't look at fat women and say, how come you're not a bikini model?
Well, maybe that's not the case anymore, but you know what I'm talking about, right?
So... We don't look at people who through no fault of their own have limitations that preclude them from certain professions.
We don't look at those people as wrong or immoral or bad or lazy or anything like that.
Frank talk about IQ brings an enormous amount of compassion.
It's not people's fault that they happen to be on the lower left side of the IQ spectrum.
Not their fault. And we should have compassion for their limitations.
In the same way, you know, it would be asking a lot, but very intelligent people, we should have compassion for their limitations as well.
Because very intelligent people can't really do the lower rent jobs because we go kind of insane from boredom.
I remember listening many years ago to a guy who went to work at Walmart.
To sort of do research on what it was like to work at Walmart.
And he said, you know, like, oh, there are these people that are perfectly aware of their options and they do this and they take their training and so on.
And he's like, like, I just, you know, I had to quit after two weeks because I just, I couldn't take the border.
And yes, the way to drive a smart person insane is have them do, in general, not when they're young, it's fine and all that.
I did the low rent jobs for years when I was younger, but, you know, you do kind of have to Get something that's appropriate.
You know, you don't put Freddie Mercury in the back of the choir.
You know, do things that are kind of appropriate to your skills or all that, right?
So we all have our limitations.
The smart people have their limitations and the less smart people have their limitations and we should be compassionate and kind and gentle and understanding and reasonable because no one is to blame in general.
I mean, there's wisdom and, you know, there's things you can do and still 20% of Intelligence appears to be malleable, which is actually quite a lot.
There's 20 points.
The difference between 80 and 120, or even 90 and 110, is the difference between being a waiter and maybe doing an undergraduate degree.
That's a big difference, right?
So, I mean, I would be fine with you.
In a free society, let's say we've got a lot of people who are being replaced by robots, and they're not smart enough To be trained in other things.
Because the robots, by definition, are replacing all of the less brilliant jobs, right?
Less smart jobs. So I'm like, let's help them.
Because the robots are going to generate so much wealth for us.
Because they're tireless.
They don't get sick. They don't get divorced and can't concentrate.
Obviously, they need repairs and all that.
But the robots are going to generate so much wealth for us that I, for one...
Let's say that we get four times our wealth because of robots, right?
Easily possible, easily possible.
I mean, if you look at agriculture, we got a 30-fold improvement in productivity in a very short, like 30 times, not 30%, 30 times.
So let's say that robots, let's just be conservative, they just give us four times the wealth, right?
Robots give us four times the wealth.
Would you be willing to give 25% of that wealth for the sake of taking care of people who through no fault of their own got displaced by machines?
Of course you would.
Of course I would. Because, you know, we're still three times wealthier, right?
And they get their full income that they have now.
And I mean, I think that would be a humane and positive and practical way to deal with it.
there.
And that's what the free market would do.
Right.
Well, who's going to own the robots?
Well, I just, you know, who's going to own the robots?
Well, no, in a free market, right?
I mean, that's the Pareto principle at work again, right?
So the people who would be best able to deploy those robots for the sake of productivity would be the ones ending up with the most robots.
And we would probably end up with 10 times the wealth.
Because of the robots, right?
So your $50,000 a year would become $500,000 a year in a free market and even some increase.
And so let's say you end up with 10 times the wealth, 5 times the wealth or whatever.
Okay, so let's say somebody needs $50,000 a year to live, but because of robots, the average salary goes from $50,000 to $250,000.
Now, fewer people are earning it.
I get all of that. But would you be willing to give $40,000?
Of course, because things would be more efficient, everything would cost less because you wouldn't have all the labor costs.
So you wouldn't need to give as much money now as now in the future because the price of a house built by robots would be like one-fifth the price of a house built by people.
The price of a piece of clothing assembled and delivered by robots would be like one-fifth the price of the clothing now.
So you wouldn't need to give people that much money.
The price of food that was grown and harvested and delivered by robots would be like one-fifth or one-tenth the price of food now.
So you wouldn't need to give people too much money in order for them to have a decent standard of living.
The price of robot doctors, whatever it would be.
I don't know how that would play out.
But you wouldn't need to give them that much money because everything would be so much cheaper.
We'd have way more money. Everything would be so much cheaper.
We could help out the people who got displaced.
And I think most people would.
But to do that, we would have to have a compassionate discussion about IQ. Because otherwise you just get stupid things like, you know, that learn to code thing, right?
It's like, no, coding? Coding is tough, man.
Coding is a high IQ occupation.
I'm not just talking like HTML markup, but real coding?
I mean, I did heavy duty coding for many years.
And the Pareto principle is totally at work there.
I mean, the smartest coders are 20 to 30 times more productive than your average coder.
And average coders are high IQ to begin with.
So you can't just take a truck driver and say, learn to code.
I mean, it's not the average, right?
On average, it's just not going to be...
It's like me saying to everyone, hey man, just go create a philosophy podcast and find a way to make a living off that.
I mean, that's not a reasonable thing to say to people.
Well, can I run this by you, Stefan?
Yeah. And I look at a lot of what you say about,
well, you know, I was burned, I was pushed aside, I was censored, and this and that.
And I say, well, isn't that, like, downstream from fiat?
I mean, the people in this environment that Fiat has created politically, doesn't that just make sense that people spurned you?
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what your actual question is here.
Sure, sure. Partly, that's the question.
Don't we assume that then, that you would be spurned in this kind of environment of incentives?
Hang on, sorry. You're putting the spurned and the deplatformed together.
I wasn't deplatformed by libertarians, obviously, right?
And so the spurned is the people who claim to share my values, who didn't like the practical implementation that was necessary to have any chance of success.
So that's a spurning.
The deplatforming is a totally separate issue.
Those are people who I stood in the way of the political power that they wished to achieve, and therefore I had to be removed.
Right, so we'll stick with the deplatforming, and I think that's a good clarification.
Is it not then a...
I mean, doesn't it just make sense?
I don't know how else to say it, but in the environment that's created, and as far as long as we are in the cycle of money, wouldn't it make sense that the hammer would fall down on you?
Yes. And if we cycle up from fiat, I mean, what is robotics an inevitability?
And then are we sort of, are we just kind of hanging?
Are we hanging out till the robots show up?
I mean, what are we, I mean, you know, I'm sort of speaking in generalities, I'm having a hard time saying it exactly, but you sort of You took philosophy as far as it would go in this environment.
Now, I think money is going to upcycle.
It's going to go to more efficient hands, and I do tend to think that DeFi is a big part of that.
I do tend to think that robotics is a big part of that.
Yes, and robotics and UBI is a far more civilized thing than the solution to massively increased productivity in the 19th century.
So the solution to needing fewer people, particularly dumber people, that the solution in the 19th century or the early 20th century was World War I, where they developed an IQ test and they put the dumbest people at the front and kept the smartest people in the back because they had enough machines to replace the dummies, so to speak, or the less intelligent.
They had enough machines to replace them, didn't need them anymore.
So you had a war.
Mm-hmm. So now we've got another thing which is we need fewer people and I hope that war isn't going to be the solution to that.
And I doubt it will be because of weapons of mass destruction.
The front is everywhere now.
You can't just throw people on the front and say, well, we're just going to kill those people.
So we'll see.
But a far more civilized thing is to say, look, yes, robotics are an inevitability, which means that Because you're not that smart.
Again, it always sounds like such an insult, but just think of it like you're not that tall.
It's not an insult because intelligence is largely unchosen.
Obviously, wisdom matters more than intelligence for happiness.
People who aren't as smart can sometimes be a lot wiser than people who can talk themselves in and out of anything because of their advanced self-castrating verbal adroitness.
I'm sorry that the economy doesn't need you at the moment.
And there's no situation upon which the economy will need you.
And so, yes, I think charity is perfectly appropriate for that sort of situation.
But we have this excess population compared to the economic need and it's, you know, unfortunately we've, you know, we've had a social system where we've trained people to be inactive for generations now and how are we going to deal with a declining need for less skilled people?
It's, again, nobody's really talking about it because it's just kind of chilling, right?
But I mean, these are real facts.
Yeah, the state's going to deal with it.
I mean, we know pretty clearly how the state's going to deal with it.
Do we? Well, war, right?
No, war's not on the table.
Let me finish. Just one second.
You said, a week and a half ago, or two weeks ago, you said, and you were talking about the fall of Rome, you said depopulation policy, basically.
Wait, what? You said that when the debt can't be paid off, then population control measures are put in place.
I don't think I said population control measures.
I mean, this is not even my theory, but the end result of fiscal improvidence is war, because when you can't pay off your debts and you can't keep your promises to the people you promised, you just go to war to silence dissent.
So maybe some kind of war on something that we see in Australia or something like this currently.
I don't see that as a depopulation agenda.
I mean, they're not killing people. That's interesting.
Now, you mentioned gulags and camps and this sort of thing.
Is that not part of what the state is potentially going to do in the face of not being able to pay its debts?
Well, okay.
You know, this money's like that.
That's a different matter.
I'm simply talking about the economics, regardless of...
Whatever political faction is in control, the economics remain the same.
That the growth in robotics has really over the last five or ten years and what's projected over the next five or ten years is truly staggering.
It's unbelievable what these things...
I mean, they can break dance.
It's about anything.
And not to mention, of course, self-flying planes, self-driving cars, self-driving boats and cruise liners and robots that maintain themselves.
I mean, it's just incredible.
It's just incredible. And...
So the gulags, that's sort of political repression based upon what the left and the right does when the extremes of left and right get into power, right, with fascism or communism.
So that's a separate matter.
And now that occurs regardless, right?
I mean, if the left gets heavily into power, then they'll do all of that stuff for sure.
But the issue of robotics and the left of 90 bell curve...
That is, regardless of whatever happens in terms of politics, that's something which we're going to deal with.
And, of course, a lot of companies would say, a lot of countries would say, well, just ban the robotics.
It's like, well, but the first country that doesn't, and that will be China, right?
The first country that doesn't ban the robotics will be the one that ends up running the world, right?
So it's like saying, well, let's just ban navies.
It's like, well, if England doesn't, they get an empire.
So that's not really much of a solution.
Right. Okay.
Well, okay. Well, so I have foreboding, and I want you to...
Well, you just say what you're going to say.
I have foreboding when I... You know, I tune in and you're talking about like the trial of Socrates and I'm reading about aerosolized vaccines and then I'm watching these videos with these Boston Dynamics robots and I see these camps popping up in rural northern British Columbia, these holding centers and I just have a lot of foreboding about this.
I wonder if you could just speak to this at all and You know, I sort of tried to get at it a bit with, you know, mentioning the money cycle and you were so right to mention robotics.
But can you talk a bit more about the bumpy ride?
Can you tell me, do you have foreboding as you look at what's happening politically?
You know, what are considerations that you think of in this vein?
And if you could just speak to this a bit, I certainly would appreciate it.
Well, I mean, I don't really watch politics anymore.
It's not really what I do.
I mean, for me, you know, have a good community.
Have some resources. Don't spend money.
Try and get out of debt. Maybe don't live right in the middle of a city.
You know, lots of things like that.
I think that they're reasonably wise things to do.
But I would say, yeah, up your human capital.
Stay mobile and stay away from big population centers and maybe a little bit of food in the basement might not be the worst thing in the world.
But as far as foreboding goes, I'm out of the machinery, right?
I'm not in that vein anymore.
I'm not... Doing or seeking to affect politics or doing political analysis or anything like that because the machinery is just doing its thing now, right?
And the thought has been largely abandoned in the West.
And so I think it's just a time for sort of keeping your wits about you and staying alert and staying in a good community.
And I think just being aware that that's where things are.
But, yeah, as far as, you know, what's going to happen in terms of politics, I try not to focus too much on things that I have decided not to change.
It's like worrying about the weight of someone in India.
It's like I don't even know who that is.
I'm not going to do anything to affect it.
So and you say, ah, yes, politics has a big effect on you and so on.
It's like, well, yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And so does so does the sun in terms of a sunburn.
So I'll just put on some sunscreen, but I'm not going to try and talk the sun out of being radioactive, so to speak.
Right.
Yeah, I think that's a good sober take. - Thank you.
I certainly appreciate you addressing that.
I think, okay, one more thing, you know, and I can just sort of leave it at this or whatever, but, you know, you're very big on Bitcoin, and thank you.
Thank you, Stefan. You know, I got in at a good time, and you have been sent Bitcoin from me and from my loved ones, certainly over the years.
Thank you. How does this...
You said this could be...
And you said, you know, very optimistically, because this was maybe a couple months ago, you said, and there's the chance that Bitcoin comes and sort of lifts all ships in the harbor.
You said something to this effect, and I'm just hoping you can speak on that a little bit, because I do...
I don't know, man. Hang on.
Expand upon your vague quote.
It's not much of a... I don't have any context.
You said something to do with the weather.
Can you expand on that? It's like, is it raining?
I couldn't really get it. So what do you mean?
Right. Well, I haven't talked to a lot of people in 2021.
I've been hanging out on the farm, you know, relaxing.
So, yes, forgive me.
I'm not as sharp as I have been in the past.
But, yeah, Okay, so you've essentially, you've advocated a lot for Bitcoin.
I think you're saying it's part of the money cycle, that fiat's falling away, that money is going to concentrate itself in a more efficient hand.
This transfer of wealth is going to happen through Bitcoin, at least we hope so, and that this could be something that really takes off in the near to midterm.
I'm wondering, do you still view it this way?
Without Bitcoin, it would be tough to get out of bed in the morning.
I'm not kidding about that. Without Bitcoin, it would be tough to get out of bed in the morning because this is the first time we've had a Titanic with an actual lifeboat.
Every other time in human history.
Then your fiat currency, the degradation and bastardization of the currency just takes down everyone with them.
What the hell do you do? The only chance that you have is to go and figure out how to live in the mountains and grow food at a tree bark or whatever, right?
That's all you got. That's all you got.
Now, who would have guessed, right?
All that worry, all that concern, all that fear.
Who would have guessed? Boing! Up comes Bitcoin and you have a piece of what's next before what's is is even gone.
It's incredible. Not only is there a lifeboat, But there was a lifeboat that gets you so far away from the sinking ship, you don't get any back swill, any undercurrent.
You may not even hear the screams or see what goes down.
It's an unbelievable thing.
I mean, they just unveiled the first statue to Satoshi in Hungary, I think it was, which I think we'll be very close to adopting soon.
I know Russia's not quite there yet, but...
But no, I mean, this is the new thing.
Without Bitcoin, I mean, God, I don't know.
Honestly, I don't know. I don't know what my life, my mental state would be like.
I have no idea. I have no idea.
But that is, I mean, that's why 11 years ago, I'm like, this is the thing.
Is it the thing? Oh, yeah.
Yeah. It was clear as day back then.
Yeah. I mean, I'm just so surprised that so many people haven't jumped in on it.
Yeah. Yeah. And of course, those people are, you know, it's really tough.
It's really tough. It's really tough.
And so, yeah, with Bitcoin, all things are possible.
With Bitcoin, the transition is something that goes from a negative to a huge positive.
And without that whiplash, I really don't know.
I really don't know what would be going on in my mind, but it would be a very different place to be.
So, yeah, be of good cheer.
For once in history, we are neither isolated nor economically doomed when a system begins to plow under.
We're not isolated because of the internet and we're not economically doomed because of Bitcoin and that's it.
All my wealth involves, like all my functional productivity involves bits and bytes.
If it's not crypto or Podcasts on a server are bits flowing.
It's all bits and burps and bytes.
I'm an avatar of the future.
I'm a digital whiplash from a wiser time to come.
Yeah. I tend to agree.
Thank you, Stefan. I appreciate it.
Sorry, last thing I'll say. Bitcoin is the end of history as we know it.
Because an economy that runs off Bitcoin, you cannot have a state in the way that we understand it now.
You cannot have a state because it can't create money.
It can't print money. Let's say that...
See, the way the governments pretend that they provide value is they just borrow.
Right? I mean, if I... Take $50 from you and use that to borrow $500 and then give $500 back to you.
Well, I mean, it's called the Ponzi scheme, right?
And the only illusion that the government creates or provides any value is through debt and money printing.
And debt and money printing.
Fiat currency cannot function under Bitcoin.
They're antonyms. It's not even night and day because they can't coexist.
It's vampire and sunlight. When the economy is run...
On digital scarcity, right?
Because that's the amazing thing about Bitcoin.
It's digital, but it's scarce.
And digital usually means pretty much infinite, like copy-paste, Bohemian Rhapsody, instead of having to go out and buy an actual LP. And so Bitcoin, as digital scarcity, is going to completely rewrite society from the ground up.
Because government cannot have a monopoly on the creation of currency.
It cannot have a monopoly On collateralized intergenerational debt.
And so this entire democracide fantasy of infinite resources will return to its European roots and its East Asian roots of scarcity and a long fucking winter.
Because that's where the free market comes from.
All resources are finite.
All human desires are infinite. Well, the all resources are finite only comes out of winter cultures.
Because summer cultures, you know, like tropics and all that, yeah, there's food everywhere and Your big problem is disease and all that, which you really can't do much about.
So, Bitcoin is digitized scarcity culture that will rewrite society from the ground up.
And you will not have a state in the way that we understand it, if at all.
Because when the currency runs off Bitcoin, the government can't pretend to add value by creating money, because you can't create money.
And so the government will actually have to compete with other agencies.
Because the government seems to provide all these things like roads and healthcare and defense and courts, right?
But it only does that on the illusion that it's able to create wealth, which it can't.
It can only take wealth and diminish and destroy it.
So when Bitcoin...
It comes along and will slowly replace, and maybe not so slowly, it will replace the fiat currency.
It's the end of financial sophistry.
It's the end of lying to people from governments.
It's the end of war, potentially.
It's the end of war, yeah. I made that argument like eight years ago.
Bitcoin marks the end of war.
And it marks the end of unproductive wars against...
Terrorism and drugs and illiteracy.
No, no, because if the government operates on the blockchain, it's the end of bribery.
If the government operates on the blockchain, it's the end of imagined value-adding.
If the government can't collateralize and in debt the next generation to buy votes in the here and now, it's the end of democracy.
It's the end of the media.
All the media does is serve these lies.
Beautiful. In order to...
I mean, was it Justin Trudeau gave millions and millions and millions of dollars to the media before this election?
It's like, okay, well, that's on the blockchain and he has to get that money from somewhere and he can't just borrow and print it.
It's a whole different thing. It changes everything.
I mean, it's the biggest one that will ever come.
Right? That'll be the fourth one, right?
We did agriculture, we did end of slavery, we did robotics, and then Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the thing.
That's, you know, it's worth everything else that's been done in the realm of philosophy and economics at infinite.
Worth infinitely more than anything that's ever been done, including what I... That's worth holding.
And so, as part of your keeping an eye out and understanding the danger of the situation, I'd imagine you're also keeping an eye out for that place where Bitcoin really takes root, where the people there, I don't know, where they enfranchise it legally, or what is it they do?
I'd imagine that's a part of your reckoning.
Yeah, it's already legal currency in El Salvador.
And other places will be moving that way.
All it would take is one visionary politician to understand that the old way cannot last and the new way will be everything.
And whoever gets there first will get 95% of the world's economy fleeing to their land.
Yeah. Hey, that's great.
I love that, Stefan. Thank you.
I think it's true. It's Galt Scolch, man.
I appreciate your time so much.
Galt Scolch is going to be the new Bitcoin Society.
All right. Thanks, everyone, so much.
Such a great pleasure to chat.
I'm glad that we had people drop by this afternoon.
Thank you, everyone, for such wonderful comments and questions.
I really, really appreciate that.
And have yourself a delightful afternoon and evening.
I will see you certainly on Wednesday.
I'm sorry I haven't been doing my sort of true news stuff, but I've had a couple of other things to do at the moment.
I'm sure I will get back into that.
FreeDomain.com forward slash donate if you would like to help out.
I would really appreciate that.
And also, don't forget my free novel.
I will keep nagging you until you take it.
FreeDomain.com forward slash almost.
All right. Lots of love.
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