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April 14, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:38
ELON MUSK TAKES OVER TWITTER?!?
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Hi, everybody. All right, let's jump straight into it.
So this morning, Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter for $43 billion so that it can be transformed as a private company.
It's about $54.20 a share, about $43 billion.
I think that's about 40% over the existing share price and value.
And Musk wrote a letter sent to the Twitter chairman, Brett Taylor.
He said, I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe.
And I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.
And predictably, of course, everyone who said, hey, man, it's a private company, it can do what it wants, now that something that occurs with private companies, which is, I mean, this is not a hostile takeover.
This is the royal speechless man basically writing a check to buy the whole thing.
It's not like some leveraged takeover or something, so...
It's pretty wild.
Now, for those of you who don't know, everybody is upset and they're saying, oh my God, an oligarchical billionaire having control of a social media platform, having control of a voice of democracy.
You know, they didn't seem to be too bothered when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post and Carlos Slim, what did he put?
$400 million into the New York Times, after which the New York Times went pretty pro- Because Carlos Slim gets money when there's immigrants, then he remittances back to Mexico.
Lauren Jobs, over $20 billion net worth, bought the Atlantic.
Terms were not disclosed.
Patrick Soon-Schlong, $7.2 billion.
He invested in the LA Times to the tune of half a billion dollars.
Mark Beniot bought Time at $190.
Million dollars. So, yeah, I mean, this stuff happens all the time.
But here's someone who's dedicated to free speech.
I don't know what his politics are.
I don't know what he's on the left or the right.
It doesn't really matter. But he is committed to free speech.
So, you know, one of the things that I got really tired of doing is why I stopped doing politics is it just goes so relentlessly boring to point out the hypocrisy of people with double standards.
You know, like people who say, well, it's...
It's wonderful if Jeff Bezos buys out this particular newspaper, but it's really bad if Elon Musk buys out Twitter.
So it just got really boring with people who claim to have principles and the moment it threatens their political interests, those principles are reversed without any particular commentary or notice or discussion or anything like that.
So why should you listen to me on this?
Well, you shouldn't.
Because I don't have any inside views.
I can talk some philosophical stuff.
But I do have experience in this area.
In the 90s, I co-founded a software company.
I grew it to a fairly large size.
And the company was bought out twice.
One was friendly.
One was not so friendly. So I've been on the inside of this kind of stuff going through this process.
So I know a little bit about it.
There won't be a lot of people who are, you know, vlogging or podcasting or anything who've actually gone through this process.
Of course, not at this rarefied level and all of that.
So I do have some insight as to what might be going on.
So the first thing to understand is the Twitter price has really crashed over the last year.
Maybe a little bit longer. I just went back a year.
But the price has gone down enormously.
And that, of course, when your share price declines...
Then either the market is bad or the management is bad.
Now, if the market is bad, then you should see a decline of everyone in the industry.
But if other companies are making money in that field and you're not making money, then the market isn't bad, which means the management is bad.
Now, if the management is bad, that has you ripe for a takeover, of course.
In other words, if...
Let's say that your neighbor is an Uber driver or something like that, but he only works 10 hours a week.
But you're willing to work 40 hours a week.
So which one of you can bid more for the new car?
Well, you can bid more for the new car because you're going to make more money out of the new car driving much more.
So if you can make more out of a particular resource, you can bid higher for that resource.
And so if... Twitter is perceived to be underperforming, and it is because its share price has declined relative to some other social media companies.
Then the market isn't bad, which means the management is bad.
And if the management is bad, the shareholders are kind of hostage unless someone new comes along.
So why has Twitter gone down so much?
Because it's become boring.
And why has it become boring?
Because... All the interesting people are gone.
All the interesting people are gone.
And there was an article not too long ago, actually, about...
Of the coronavirus information on Twitter, half of it appeared to be generated by bots.
Now, I personally don't know why.
I mean, if I had a social media company, I would never in a bazillion years...
I would never in a bazillion years allow for bots on that.
I mean, if you had a dating site, would you allow bot activity on that?
Well, no, because it would fake a whole bunch of users.
And I think that dating sites do fake a whole bunch of users, but this would be a little bit too obvious, if that makes sense.
So the problem with bots and allowing bot programming and so on, and maybe you do allow for bots, but you would have to make sure that the bots were clearly marked as bots, right?
I mean, that would be sort of the goal.
So, yeah, I mean, if you go through captures, you go through a whole bunch of different things to make sure that people are real and so on, you could, I mean, there would always be some fake accounts on there, but you'd want to minimize it.
So, of course, investors don't know what is the actual user base of Twitter because, again, they have all of these bots.
And, of course, it's funny.
So everyone who got, you know, complained about censorship on Twitter or social media platforms, It's like, oh man, just go build your own Twitter.
Go build your own thing. Just leave.
They're a private company that can do what they want.
But if what they want is to actually allow free speech, if Elon Musk takes over, then suddenly it's a really terrible thing that has to be banned and barred and prevented, right?
It's so obvious, right? So, hey man, if you don't like Twitter as a free speech platform, you just leave.
It's a free company.
It can do whatever it wants.
So if they want free speech on the platform, hey, just leave and make your own Twitter, right?
That's the argument. Of course, again, they won't do that because they'd just rather complain than create, right?
So I'll tell you a little bit about...
Look, and I'm no expert in this, like SEC regulations and what goes on in the board and Twitter.
So these are just general thoughts about how this stuff might work as a whole, not any specific knowledge or details.
So this is no deep, deep, deep dive or knowledgeable advice or analysis or anything like that.
So... The board is there to represent, for the most part, the interests of the shareholders.
That's why you have a board, to make the company good, to keep the share price high.
Now, if the shareholders could basically have their share suddenly valued at 40% higher, which is to some degree what would happen if Elon Musk puts in an offer and the offer is accepted for 40% higher value than the company actually is, then the shareholders suddenly see, at least in the snapshot, the value of their shares go up 40%.
Okay, so if you are on the board and you're not just kinda, kinda, but your actual legal responsibility, this is not a nice to have.
This is a have to have. You have to represent the interests of the shareholders.
You have to represent the interests of the shareholders.
So do the shareholders want, like when the stock price has been declining enormously over the past year or more, and you have a huge offer.
And this is not just an offer for Money.
This is an offer for publicity.
You know, every time Elon Musk does anything, like he's got huge numbers of followers, he's a huge social media presence, a huge media presence as a whole.
You know, if the guy who wants to take over your company is hosted SNL, you know, you get a lot of publicity out of that and there's a lot of perception.
You'll get a lot of write-ups.
You'll get a lot of interest in the company and investors will have another look.
Every time management changes hands at a company, investors will have another look.
And if it's committed to free speech and maybe they reduce the number of fake accounts and all that, or bought accounts, then that could be a very interesting thing.
So will the share price go up?
And of course, also we have, I mean, whatever you think of Elon Musk, he is a productive genius.
I mean, he's a Midas touch kind of guy.
He didn't become the world's richest man just by following Nancy Pelosi's stock trades.
So you have a guy with a Midas touch Hank Reardon, so to speak, of the business world coming in and taking over a company when he has a proven track record of creating staggering amounts of value in other companies.
Arguably, he's the best businessman in the world and certainly in terms of proportion of wealth over the course of history.
So if the very, very best, you know, Freddie Mercury wants to be your front man, I don't know that you're going to go with your cousin who's pretty good at karaoke.
So for the shareholders, Obviously, the board has to look at this and say, what is in the best interest of the shareholders?
Now, they do dilute it by saying, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, but what's in the best interest of the company as a whole in the abstract?
But that's just a common good argument.
You know, there is no such thing as the best interest of the company as a whole.
The company is the employees and the shareholders and this and that and the other, right?
Now, if the board were to somehow reject the offer, and I don't think they can do that just yet, but if the board were just out of hand reject the offer, They could, as far as I understand it, get sued for fiduciary misconduct by the shareholders because are they acting?
You have a fiduciary responsibility.
It's a legal responsibility to do what's best for the shareholders and if a huge offer, an unbelievable offer of 40% over value from one of the world's best businessmen and the world's richest man is rejected at hand by the board, then I would never imagine Just personally, I would never imagine that that would be in the best interest of the shareholders in any way, shape, or form.
So they have to really look at this seriously.
And here's the thing, too. So this offer where...
I mean, it's a brilliant move.
I mean, it really is a brilliant move.
So this offer... Why would they reject the offer unless they had censorship for political reasons?
Like, unless they wanted to continue censorship for political reasons, right?
So, like, if someone puts an offer in on a car repair company, and the offer is 40% over value, and they, you know, they want to turn around the decline in value of the car repair company, there'd be no reason to say no to that offer, right?
A really competent businessman with great media contacts is offering you 40% over the value of the company, which has been declining over the last year.
Of course you would take that offer.
Why would you not?
Well, because a car repair company usually doesn't have a political agenda, right?
So why would you not want...
In other words, why would you want an expansion of free speech?
Which was Twitter in 2016, you understand?
This is like Twitter in 2016.
We're still continually reiterating.
We're a free speech platform with a free speech wing of the Free Speech Party, right?
So this is returning it to its original mission plan.
It's basically like New Coke.
In the 90s, they introduced this new formula, Coke, that tanked like Exxon and...
They just went back to their old code.
You try something new and it doesn't work.
You're trying mass censorship and it doesn't work.
So just returning it back to its original mission, which was actually very effective.
So it's very interesting because if they say no to this or if they push back hard, it's because there's something that they have that is not free speech.
Now, that's also very interesting as well because, of course, they claim, Twitter claims to be a platform, not a publisher.
In other words, they don't moderate based on content, right?
They don't have a political agenda.
They don't exercise editorial control or anything like that, right?
So if – and this is why they have immunity from lawsuits for content, right?
This is a Section 230 thing in the U.S.
So if someone comes along and says, yeah, I actually want you to comply to the Section 230 thing and have neutral free speech.
I actually want you to comply to the Section 230 protections and have neutral free speech.
And they say, oh God, no, we can't do that.
Does it really look like they're in the Section 230 ballpark if someone who says, I want free speech, which is a requirement for Section 230?
You have to have free speech if you're a requirement for Section 230.
You have to be a neutral platform. And if they say, well, God, no, we can't possibly operate as a neutral platform, what's that going to do to their Section 230 protections?
I don't know, but it could be quite interesting.
So here's the other thing, too.
It's not about Twitter, fundamentally.
I mean, it is, of course, in this moment, but it's a ripple effect, right?
So if the takeover happens with Twitter, it's a reasonable chance it will.
I mean, I think it will unless, you know, the heavy weight of regulatory agencies just puts a stop to it for, I assume, political reasons.
But let's say that he's able to do this, right?
So what that means, and I believe that the value of shares or the value of Twitter as a whole will increase out of that because, well, I can get into a variety of reasons.
I'm sure you understand most of them.
They've become more interesting places and so on, right?
So... It's not just about Twitter though.
Just think of social media company MindBank or something like that, right?
Social media company MindBank.
Now, MindBank, let's say, is engaged in political censorship.
In other words, you can do horrible things if you're part of one political party, but you can't even have mild skepticism or sarcasm or sense of humor or whatever if you're on another political wing.
And so MindBank, if it sees Twitter get taken over because of political censorship...
Then what would happen is MindBank's board, its CEO, its CXOs, and the shareholders would look and say, wow, what that means is that political censorship is a vulnerability for a company.
If the value of Twitter goes up if Elon Musk restores free speech, then that means that a lot of investors are going to look at various companies and they're going to say, wow, Twitter's share price went up 50% after free speech was reenacted on the platform, and they'll look at other companies in the social media space whose value is depressed by a lack of free speech.
Now, again, I'm not saying that political censorship is happening at any social media company, because I have no proof of that.
I mean, there's evidence and this, that and the other, but I'm just saying that if the perception of political censorship is pushing down the value of a company, then every investor known to man with half a brain would look at that and say, wow, you dismantled, you restored free speech to Twitter and the price went up 50%, which means we can get a whole lot of loans to replace a board that is perceived to be censorious, And we could then drive the price of that.
So there's a huge ripple effect.
Every other company is looking at this and saying, wow.
So when we, and this is, you know, I was in the glory days of the internet from 2006 to 2016, where there was pretty good free speech, pretty good free speech as a whole.
And so if the value of social media companies is artificially depressed because of censorship, then if Elon Musk proves that a lack of censorship improves the profitability and value of a company and the user base and so on, That's going to have a ripple effect out everywhere across social media companies, which is really an amazing thing.
The other thing too is, you know, if you think of, you know, I ran a software company.
I was chief technical officer of a software company.
And you try as little as possible to have anyone touch anything, right?
So what do you want to make money at a social media company?
Well, you need servers, although I guess you can rent those out as well.
You need coders and you need a user base.
Now, one of the problems that I had as a chief technical officer was customers wanted to customize the software.
And the moment you start customizing the software, the moment that the code base changed, you have to go through full QA, QC, you've got to do more documentation, the training materials need to change, and it's a big problem.
So trying to find a way to sell a software product with As little human engagement is humanly possible is the ultimate profit model.
I mean, you buy a copy of an operating system, people don't come over and customize it for you, and the code base doesn't change just for you and so on.
So the fewer people who touch the product, the more profit the product makes, right?
You understand? And this is, I mean, think of farming, right?
I mean, at the turn of the 20th century, like in 1900, 70% of Americans were involved in farming.
Now it's way below 3%, right?
And so fewer people are touching farming.
The product, right? Instead of people out there cutting wheat by hand, you've got a combine harvester and so on, right?
So the fewer people who touch the product, the lower your payroll and the more your profit.
So if you think of a social media company, and I've sort of made this case before, there is already a mechanism for speech which should not be allowed on a social media platform.
That mechanism already exists, and it's called the court system.
In other words, if somebody is found guilty of death threats, of planning a crime, of defamation, of incitement of violence, of rioting, or whatever it is...
Then that goes through a legal process and that speech is illegal and will be removed from the platform.
So there already is a mechanism by which you determine whether speech is allowed or not.
It's called the court system, where there is in fact due process and requirement for proof and so on, which is fair and right and how it should be.
So how much would it cost for a company, whatever company, it doesn't matter, how much would it cost to hire someone to review court decisions about legal speech and apply it to the platform?
I don't mean principles.
I mean actual, you know, this guy posted X, Y, and Z. X, Y, and Z was found to be illegal speech in a court of law.
Therefore, we remove X, Y, and Z from our platform if it's even there, right?
So if someone uses your platform to plan a crime and that is found to be illegal and then you remove that, that's one part-time guy.
I'm not kidding. That's one part-time guy because the amount of court cases involving that is not really enough for there even to be a massive team.
Maybe it's one full-time guy.
I don't know. But it's not many people, right?
As opposed to how many people are used, and I don't know the number for this, but how many people are used in social media companies for content moderation?
Again, not illegal stuff.
Just, you know, what's called vile speech, you know, speech that just really offends some people.
Not hate speech because it's not really a thing, but vile speech or whatever, right?
Speech that's really upsetting to people.
So if you were to take a software company and say, look, our standard is, is the speech legal?
Other than that... No, because that's not in the best interest of the shareholders, it's not in the best interest of the employees, it's not in the best interest of anyone.
We've got a rule which says, yes, of course, all the reporters in the known universe are going to find this horrible, vile speech tweet, right, and saying the worst thing that you could possibly imagine, and which will say, look, we have a fiduciary responsibility for our shareholders, which means that we can't spend money, we can't spend their money wantonly and against the value of the company.
So, you know, yes, I think that is vile speech.
And the best way to deal with vile speech is to have it bubble up and then have lots of people debate and argue and tell the person how it's wrong.
So that you see the counter-arguments to vile speech.
That's the basic argument. One of the basic arguments for free speech is, look, everyone has stuff that is just appalling.
You know, like it just revolts you.
Like for me, pro-child abuse stuff.
It triggers me, right?
It's absolutely appalling.
And I would never want it banned because the people who believe in, you know, hitting children or whatever, the people who believe that need to be exposed to counter-arguments so that their minds can be changed.
And if you ban them, all they do is they go to their own platforms where no one challenges them, no one opposes them, and the...
Like a cyst, right?
The beliefs just isolate, they fester, there's an echo chamber.
You need that kind of stuff.
It's how people's minds are changed, this open debate.
So if you're a moralist, like I am, you find the most immoral stuff you can find and you challenge it.
So I don't want people banned because I want to engage with the people who have the worst kind of ideas.
And you have the same thing in your life.
There's something that you read that's just like, oh, I would never want to see that again.
I'm talking legal speech and so on, right?
And so we'd say, look, you find this, someone contacts you and says, this is absolutely appalling.
And you're like, oh my God, that is absolutely appalling.
That's a terrible thing. Well, you've got to remove it from the platform.
I'm like, well, no, because you can't.
You can remove it from a platform. You can't remove it from people's minds.
The best way to remove this vile stuff from people's minds is for people to come in and engage with them and prove them wrong.
And maybe that doesn't change the original person's mind because maybe they're just crazy or evil, but everyone around gets these counter arguments and they then drop this terrible stuff, right?
So this is how you deal.
It's like saying, well, the way that you get rid of illness is you ban people from seeing doctors.
Right? I guess the numbers would go down, but you're not exactly dealing with illness.
So that, I think, is the business case, which is to say, you know, I don't know, thousands or tens of thousands of people all on a payroll, all who need benefits, all who need management and HR and like all of this stuff that comes with a high payroll, well, you can eliminate it. And you can still comply completely with the law by having a procedure by which you take down legal speech or copyrights, you know, all of the stuff that goes on and so on.
But, I mean, as a business person, that would be the first thing that you would do.
I think it would make sense.
This is what you do. It's just eliminate unnecessary payroll.
And censorship is not only unnecessary, but given the more the censorship has occurred, the lower the price has gone for Twitter.
I'm not saying it's causal, but it certainly is a correlation between So that would be something.
Now, here's the thing too, though.
So hostile takeovers, and again, this isn't technically a hostile takeover, but there will be a lot of people in Twitter who would actually hate this free speech stuff, right?
And of course, if your job depends upon censorship or content moderation, I guess that's the phrase, right?
So if your job depends on content moderation and someone's coming in and saying, we don't need content moderation...
Well, of course you're going to hate that because it's your job.
That's what you're trained in. And if thousands of content moderators suddenly don't have a job, They're going to hate that.
I mean, there may be political or ideological reasons as to all of blah, blah, blah, but everyone who's going to get laid off for being redundant doesn't like it.
This goes back to the Luddites.
The Luddites were the people who used to do things by hand in the 19th century, 18th century, and when machines came along that automated what they did, they smashed up the machines because they didn't want to be Out of a job.
You know, when slavery was deemed illegal, great, then the slave catchers and the slave traders and the slave managers, I mean, they're all out of job, right?
So nobody likes this kind of progress if it threatens your paycheck, particularly when there's massive inflation.
So, a hostile takeover is a problem if the core employees really hate you, right?
So, to take a theoretical example, just totally abstract, let's say Microsoft bought out Apple, right?
But I think a lot of the Apple people really don't like Microsoft.
They're kind of fanboys of Apple and there's the culture jobs and all of that, right?
And so, a lot of people in Apple would quit if Microsoft took it over because they don't like Microsoft.
If the key, creative, productive employees hate the new owner, there's no point doing the takeover.
Right? It's something that someone told me very early on about the software industry.
It's very true. So like 95% of your value goes down the elevators every day at 5 o'clock or 8 o'clock or whatever, right?
Because it's all intellectual.
It's all around, you know, it's like if Brad Pitt's attached to a movie, the movie's probably going to get made.
If he's not, or no famous person is attached to the movie, the movie probably won't get made, right?
So I was very aware of that when I was running a software company.
I had up to 30 employees and I was very aware that the value of the company without the employees was very little.
And once you get employees, like it takes six months usually to get up to speed on the code base and actually be productive, so there's a lot of training and so on.
So it's human capital, which is mobile, right?
If you buy a factory, the machines aren't going to get up and quit because they don't like you.
And you can replace the factory workers relatively easily, but if you have people with a deep knowledge of, you know, 20 million lines of code, you can't really replace that very easily.
And so if the key employees, if the most creative and productive employees using the Pareto principle, if they don't like you, There's no point taking over the company.
So Elon Musk has doubtless done this and said, okay, so who's going to dislike me the most?
Well, the people who do the most content moderation, if he wants to restore free speech.
But he's like, okay, so if the people I don't want to be there are going to quit if I take it over, that's good.
Right? This I'll quit Twitter if Elon Musk takes over is the new I'll move to Canada if Trump wins, right?
So Elon Musk would look at, I don't know, obviously, this is what I would do, right?
I'd look at the company and say, okay, so the people I don't want to be there are the most upset with me taking over.
Good. Well, that's good because that means some of them will quit if they're on a court and have to pay a severance.
So that's good, right?
I mean, that... Now, the real question is, what about the core engineers, the people who are just really working close to the metal, deep in the bowels of the code, working with the binaries, you know, juggling the syntax?
What about those people?
Now, my guess would be, I mean, he's basically an engineer, right?
I mean, I think he dropped out, but he basically is an engineer.
So, if an engineer committed to free speech takes over a company whose greatest value is the engineers, it's engineer to engineer.
And... I don't think the engineers, I think not only do they not care about the content moderation, I think they find the content moderation kind of frustrating because they have to write all of this extra code which gives people power over users and power to suppress and power to censor and power to ban and all that kind of stuff, right? Now, again, I'm using the word censorship here just to mean content moderation.
I'm not talking about any legal stuff, right?
So, I don't think that the engineers are going to walk if an engineer takes over the company and has them return to their core mission of building the greatest social media platform around, as opposed to, you know, half the engineers being peeled off to create all these interfaces to do content moderation, which probably doesn't feel that good.
It probably doesn't feel that good to be an engineer handing these tools to people to suppress free speech.
That's not great, right? Now, there will be blowback.
This kind of stuff never happens easily, so I'm sure he's aware of all of that, and I think there's already legal stuff going on.
But they're going to try and resist this, because, you know, once people get power, they get addicted to that power, and taking away their drug, you know, addicts who are heavily addicted to a drug, and power is the most powerful drug, and it is literally a drug, right?
Like, They've studied this.
Like monkeys that rise higher in the hierarchy and bully other monkeys get additional dopamine.
It's a drug.
It's a genuine, literal drug and one of the most addictive around.
Which is why societies that take the path to power, the power swells to collapse in the same way that somebody who's a really committed alcoholic drinks till he dies.
That's just the way it goes. So when you take away a drug addict's drug, which is power, They become emotional terrorists, right?
They lie, they manipulate, they steal, they use violence, right?
All of these things, right? So there's going to be a lot of blowback.
Now, but there's an enormous opportunity.
This is where I'll finish up here.
So there's an enormous opportunity for maturity, for maturation.
There's a basic principle of life.
If you can't manage your own emotions, you almost inevitably end up controlling other people.
If you can't manage your own emotions, you end up controlling other people.
So, if you are on a social media platform and someone posts something that triggers you, Then you basically have three choices.
One, you can stop using the social media platform to avoid getting triggered.
Number two, you can work through getting triggered, integrate that emotional energy into your maturity and learn how to manage your own emotions and then engage with the person, if you want, who triggered you to try and show better arguments, if not to him, then to other people watching or reading.
And that's maturity, right?
Where you just don't get triggered and lash out.
That's called acting out.
If someone upsets you and you just punch that person, right?
That's called acting out.
You're not managing your own emotions.
You're committing a crime and will pay savage consequences until you learn how to manage your emotions, right?
So if something triggers you, and listen, triggered is fine.
We all get triggered, and triggered can be very important.
It tells you what's important to you and where your morals are and where your outrage should be and all that.
There's nothing wrong with being triggered. But you manage being triggered, and you don't say that the solution to me being triggered is for this person or this idea or this perspective or this politics to be banned, to be deplatformed.
You don't do that in a civilized society.
That literally is throwing a punch in a debate.
That's the actions of a savage.
That is not the actions of a civilized human being.
So you can either quit the social media, you can grow, mature, and handle being triggered, or you can demand that the triggering idea or argument or data be banned.
You know, really the only three things that occur, right?
Now, if you are punching above your class, right?
In other words, so I learned some pickleball not too long ago, so it's kind of a fun game, right?
Now, I've played tennis, I've played squash, I've played badminton, and so I'm not too bad at pickleball.
You know, I'm probably in the top 20% of players, which is okay, not bad, right?
But there are people way better than I am at pickleball.
So, let's say that I enter, because of my hubris and craziness, I enter into a pickleball competition and try and compete at the top levels.
Well, I'm going to lose because people are going to serve so hard I can't respond to it.
They're going to have so many spins, I won't know where the ball is.
They're going to do so many drop shots, I'm going to pull a muscle trying to get to the net.
I'm just going to be bounced all over the court and dribbled out with shame and humiliation in my tail between my legs, dribbled out off the court, right?
So I'm punching above my weight.
I'm engaged in a competition that I'm not competent for.
Now, what can I do?
Well, I can just try and up my game.
I could just battle my way through and learn my lesson that I've got to improve my skills before engaging at that level of debate, right?
Or at that level of pickleball.
Or I can, during the break, I can punch competition.
My pickleball opponent so that I won't lose, right?
Okay, but then obviously I'm triggered, I've acted out, I've acted violently, and that's an immoral thing to do.
Or I can go to the umpire, right, the judge of the pickleball competition, and I can say, look, man, he's just serving way too fast.
You have got to stop him from serving that fast because I can't return those serves.
Of which course the umpire is going to say, no, these are the rules of pickleball.
He can serve as fast as he wants, as long as the ball goes diagonal and into that corner.
Sorry, if you can't return the service, I'm not going to slow down.
Hey man, his spins are killing me.
You've got to ban him from using spins.
Those drop shots, stop him from doing those drop shots.
Make sure every shot goes out of the kitchen.
That's the little red part right by the net.
And the judge would be like, no, no, sorry, these are legal things.
You entered this competition voluntarily.
Nobody's forcing you to be here or to stay here.
But every legal move that he makes is perfectly acceptable.
That's why we have rules called Pick a Ball, and I'm not going to change those rules to satisfy your lack of competence.
But it's the same thing with debating.
If you are triggered and get insanely angry and want to ban people, it simply means that you're not good at debating.
You're not at the level of skill you need to be at.
You're not competent to debate.
Like, why do you get angry and want people banned?
Because you can't answer them.
If you could answer them and you could give good arguments and good debates and so on, then you would do that.
Or you'd let other people do it or whatever, right?
So People who can't manage their own emotions should not be involved in contentious debates in the same way that I can't play at the top level of pickleball so I should not enter those games.
It would be hubris and narcissism and ridiculous and boring and dull for the other player if I entered into a game that I couldn't possibly win at or even provide any challenge to my opponent.
And of course, if I thought I was a great pickleball player, if I had that belief, oh man, I'm like number one pickleball player, and then I play against a really competent pickleball player, And they just completely smoke me off the court.
That's humiliating because I'm not just confronting my lack of skill.
I'm confronting my own delusions about my presence of skill.
That's really tough. I thought I was pretty good at badminton.
It's a game I love, right? And it's very delicate and there's lots of drops and all that.
And you can really whack it. That's what I like about squash too.
Tennis is just too controlled.
It's like squash but toilet trained at gunpoint.
So I was dating a woman whose brother was a, like, champion badminton player.
And so he just, you know, I'm like, yeah, I'll come play with you because I played some badminton.
I'm pretty good at it. That was ridiculous, right?
I mean, the guy just had me all over the court.
I couldn't get any shots back.
He just dropped and dinked and that and the other, right?
Because he just had placement all over the place, right?
Yeah. And so that's just one of the, and everyone's had this, right?
I mean, sure you've had this at some point in your life.
Something you think you're pretty good at, you know, like you're a big fish in a little pond, you're like the best baseball player in your local league, and then you go to some real game where people are really skilled, and it's just like, oh God, I guess I'm a long way off from what I thought, right?
So everyone has this. You know, I was the best actor in my university because I always got cast in the lead in all the plays.
And then I went to the National Theatre School and I was around some incredibly talented actors.
And yeah, you've really got to up your game.
And so we're in this situation and this comes out of the whole everyone gets a trophy, everyone gets a participation ribbon, everyone gets praise, nobody gets failed and so on, right?
So people go with a very highly inflated...
They have a sense of their own abilities.
And if you're in an echo chamber, if you're on the left and you only talk to other people on the left, and same thing, if you're on the right and you only talk to other people from the right, then you don't get exposed to the ideas and arguments which really challenge your worldview.
And that's how we grow. That's how we grow.
That's how we know that we're right, is we don't just talk to people who agree with us, but we talk to people who significantly disagree with us, which is why I do debates with people I enormously disagree with and have for 16 years straight.
That's how we grow.
Now, if you think you're good at debating because you surround yourself with people who agree with you and you never read counter-arguments and you never read counter-perspectives and therefore you think that you're really good at debating.
In other words, if I think I'm top-tier at Pickleball and then you go into someone who's really good.
You go up against someone who's really good.
Then the limitations of your abilities are very quickly exposed.
It's humiliating.
And you realize that really deep down you haven't done yourself any favors by locking yourself in an echo chamber.
That's pretty rough. It's tough on the ego.
It's tough on the vanity. To be put in your place.
To be put in your place.
Now, that doesn't mean you've got to stay in that place.
But it's kind of an objective measure.
As to how good you actually are.
How good are you actually?
Doesn't mean you've got to stay there, but you're ranked, right?
Now, I mean, when it comes to pickleball, if I'm playing against someone who's really good and I can't score a single point, then I'm kind of infinitely worse than they are, right?
Like, you can't even... If I get one point, then at least I'm, you know, one-seventh as good if we're playing to seven and one-eleventh as good as we play to eleven.
But if I don't get any points, I'm like...
Infinity symbol worse, like you can't even measure it because I didn't get one point, right?
That's where I am. Now, and the funny thing is too, the reason I'm not as good as my opponent, if I really want to be good, the reason I'm not as good as my opponent is because I think I'm as good as my opponent.
Whereas my opponent, who's much better than me, got better than me by realizing where his limitations were, getting a coach, getting trainers, getting analysis, doing video analysis of his pickleball game and all that, right?
The only way you get better is to have an actual evaluation of where you are and you do that through competition.
If you get incredibly angry and wish to hurt your opponent in a pickleball game, you wish to bribe or threaten the judge to rule, or the umpire, to rule in your favor, it simply means that you're not that great at pickleball, but you can't handle the fact that you're not that great at pickleball, so you want to cheat. Right?
You understand? De-platforming is cheating.
It's cheating. It's like drugging.
If you're going to be a boxer, you're going into a boxing match and you drug your opponent, well, that's cheating.
Or you drain the gas from his car so he can't make it.
You de-platform him from the...
So what I would say to the Twitter employees or the people who are into this content moderation is like, look, I understand where you're coming from.
I really do. And I sympathize with where you're coming from.
There's speech out there that you find absolutely appalling and want scrubbed from the human condition.
I get that. Everyone has that impulse.
Everyone has that thought. And the way that you deal with that is you get really, really good at countering those arguments and you engage so that you can eliminate that perspective from as many minds as possible, as voluntarily and peacefully as possible.
De-platforming does not create the end of those ideas.
All it does is take them out of your view where they go underground and they get into an echo chamber and they fester and they may re-emerge as a political party.
They may re-emerge as some horrible movement.
So you're not doing any good.
You're not doing any good.
In fact, you're doing harm by suppressing these viewpoints.
There's vile speech out there for me.
There's vile speech out there for you.
For some of you, I'm vile speech for...
For me, some of you are vile speech, and the way that we deal with that is we get out there in the marketplace of ideas, and we do get out, and we up our skills.
You know, like, one of the reasons that I've done well in debates is I've been debating, I mean, for 40 years straight.
I debated in college.
I debated as a teenager.
I debated everywhere I've gone.
I debated, of course, a lot in the business world, trying to get my perspective or viewpoints across.
I debated with clients about whether to buy the software.
I've just been debating in this show.
But if I have a big debate coming up, I will still, literally, and I have recordings of these too, I will go to people I know and care about and say, okay, here's my argument.
Here's what I think they'll say.
Here's what they've argued before. Here's what I'm going to counter it.
Here's my data. What do you think?
Is this convincing? Does this make sense?
Like, I don't care how experienced I think I am.
I approach every new debate.
Like I've never debated before and I run everything through to make...
And also I will come up with new arguments because I don't want people just studying my old arguments and countering them.
I want people studying my own arguments and then I don't make those old arguments but new arguments.
So that gives me an upper hand.
But the new arguments have to be coherent and convincing, right?
So I will...
Check with a lot of people for days and days.
I really work hard on my debates, even though I've been debating for four years.
Maybe because I should be able to do it in my sleep and so on.
So I get it. There's like vile speech out there for you.
There's vile speech out there for me.
Absolutely. I would really, really like it if people did not think about hitting or beating or spanking or yelling at or abusing or humiliating children.
I wish those ideas weren't out there, but they are.
And they're very common. They're the majority of you on the planet, right?
So what do I do?
I create my videos, The Case Against Banking.
I put out books and videos and everything on the non-aggression principle and peaceful parenting.
You continue to make your case.
You win people over.
Or you expose them as irredeemably immoral if they won't take better moral instruction.
And that will cause them to be less in the public sphere.
So I get it. You see these ideas, you consider them terrible, that they're going to lead to terrible consequences, and you want to get rid of them, for sure.
But a free speech platform is for challenging immorality.
And so if you view speech as immoral, and it's hard to say that speech is immoral, actions can certainly be immoral.
It's kind of hard to say. That's thought crime, right?
But you see particular arguments and ideas, and you want to get rid of them.
Of course! Bad, wrong, immoral ideas?
Yes, we want to get rid of them, but you can't get rid of ideas by getting rid of people, right?
You can't. Because the ideas still exist in people's minds, and the internet is big, they'll find some other place, and they'll never get challenged again.
Nobody will ever bring counter-arguments, no one will ever bring counter-factuals, they will never be challenged again.
And if you think that sealing people up in an echo chamber is a way of getting rid of bad ideas, well, it's not, obviously, right?
If you feel the urge to get aggressive and If you're censorious towards people you disagree with, that's a sign that you need to get better at debating.
Or you can withdraw yourself from the realm of ideas.
I don't enter top-level pickleball competitions because I'm nowhere near competent to do it.
So I just don't do it. I don't get into things I can't win because I lack skill.
It's the same thing with debates.
And here's the other thing, sort of final thing that I want to say.
Power. Power.
A lot in the left is about an analysis of power.
And I love what the left has done in some areas with the analysis of power.
The power of imperialism, the power of colonialism, the power of dominant narratives.
These are all fascinating and important things to examine and dismantle, without a doubt.
Great service to humanity.
Great job. Good job.
Now, but the analysis of power It's founded on the principle that human beings are bad at power.
Like, we're terrible at power.
We're terrible at power.
And we know this because it's so foundationally addictive.
It's like saying, cocaine is really bad.
So we should give people a lot of cocaine so they can manage it well, so they can make good decisions when they're high.
Of course they can, right? If one of the characteristics of being high is you make bad decisions, then saying that people should be high in order to make good decisions is fundamentally contradictory.
If we're saying that power corrupts, but you should have the power to silence people in the conversations of the world, then you're saying power corrupts And the best way we can deal with the corruption of power is to give people a lot of power to silence others because that's going to make them make great decisions.
We all know that power, being an addictive substance, distorts your decision making and has you make bad decisions.
If you look at the power of Hitler, if you look at the power of Chairman Mao or Stalin or Pol Pot or you name it, right?
They make very terrible decisions because their brains have been scraped out and replaced with a kind of demonic power lust.
So people make bad decisions when they have too much power, which is why the goal of society should be to disempower people from coercive abilities or censorious abilities as much as humanly possible.
So, if you think that power is really bad and you fight power by silencing people, you've made a fundamental mistake.
Now, I understand why you've made that mistake.
I mean, I'm tempted by that power as well.
Absolutely, completely and totally, I understand where you're coming from.
But if you... Have concerns about power, which the left does, and the right does, but the left in particular ways, right?
If you have concerns about power, and we all know that power corrupts.
I mean, let's be honest. Let's be frank with each other.
Come on, we can have this conversation, right?
If you believe and you understand that power corrupts, and you believe that the best way to oppose dominance is to silence people, then you're saying power corrupts everyone except me.
Now, everyone who abuses power, which is everyone who has power, and by power I'm talking about the power to...
Break rules to punish enemies.
I'm not talking about like somebody's, you know, got a million dollars or whatever, you can buy a bunch of stuff.
Well, that's still all voluntary.
Everybody who engages with that person is engaging with them voluntarily and so on, right?
I'm talking about the power to break rules to punish enemies, right?
So if you have a rule that says, yeah, you can say stuff on Twitter that's alarming or challenging, but we're really committed to free speech, but you break those rules to punish your ideological enemies, that's power.
Right? That's power.
I mean, in communism, the communist elites, they have their own private property, but private property is then denied to their political enemies and it's used to reward their political friends.
So when you have a rule, but you break the rule to punish your ideological enemies, that's power.
That's power. And you can't do that in the free market, right?
In a genuine free market, you really, you can't do that, right?
I mean, if you try to be a real estate agent and you say, well, I'm not going to sell to this ethnicity, I'm not going to sell to this gender, I'm not going to sell to this particular political ideology, you're going to have a tough time.
Very tough time. If you think that power corrupts everyone except you, or that you're going to use the Ring of Power well, you're going to be your Baramir who turns into some princeling, right?
Sorry, it's completely nerdy references, but sometimes that's really all I have.
So, if you think that power corrupts everyone except you, you're wrong.
And it's a soul-saving exercise to remind people.
That breaking rules to punish ideological enemies, breaking integrity to punish ideological enemies, is the idea that you can sacrifice your own virtue for the cause of virtue.
You cannot sacrifice your own virtue for the cause of virtue.
You cannot destroy individuals for the sake of saving humanity.
You cannot create morality by betraying your own principles.
There is the great temptation.
And your emotional apparatus is stimulated by very black thoughts which says, oh, but the domino effect of this bad idea will be absolutely catastrophic.
And because you catastrophize, you're willing to crush and suppress your own integrity.
Because integrity is having principles which you stand by regardless of consequences.
And the reason you have to stand by principles regardless of consequences is because if you're willing to break principle for the sake of consequences, those consequences will always be invented and transmitted in order to get you to break principle.
Your principles have to be inviolate.
They have to be absolute. Now, that doesn't mean we all absolutely achieve them at every moment of our day.
It's an ideal, so you do your best.
But you can't say, well, if somebody can tell me that if I don't break my principles, this absolute catastrophe will occur.
If I maintain my principles, an absolute catastrophe will occur.
Then you don't have any principles.
Nobody can prove to you that these absolute catastrophes will occur.
They're simply ghosts used to chase your own integrity out of yourself.
It's a bribe given to you to betray yourself.
And the bribe is, you get to avoid this catastrophe if you break your principle.
But the catastrophe is never proven.
And it can't be because we have free will, right?
When it comes to human choice, you can't prove inevitable catastrophes because we have free will.
Choice. So, if you have a principle, the whole point of the principle is it won't break.
That's the whole point of having a principle.
It won't break. You can't be bribed.
You can't be bullied. Into breaking your principle.
Now, if you don't want to have principles, that's fine.
Then don't pretend to have principles, right?
That's the whole point, right? I don't pretend to know great ballet, right?
I have to be a great ballerina.
So, if you're going to have principles, then being threatened with negative consequences.
Oh my God, if we allow this idea out there, then these terrible consequences will occur.
It's like, okay, well then you don't have any principles.
And you can be threatened or bullied or bribed.
Into breaking your principles, which means you don't have principles.
The whole point of principles is you've got to stick by them regardless of bullies or bribes.
That's what principles are.
Otherwise they're just getting by in the moment and pleasing whoever has the most stuff to offer you or stuff to threaten you with.
That's not a principle. That's just getting by.
That's just slithering through and surviving like any mammal would.
So If you can't handle a debate, get better at debates or stop debating.
If you're very easily triggered and your response to triggering is to harm other people and break your own principles, recognize that you need to strengthen your principles and you need to understand what a principle actually is.
You know, yes, of course the whole point of free speech is there's vile speech out there that just about everybody finds appalling and horrible.
But that's what free speech is.
If I say kittens are cute, that's so uncontroversial that there's no free speech issue there.
The whole point of free speech is to defend the vilest thing you can think of.
Of course. Like if you want to be a good doctor, you can't just treat people you like.
You have to treat people even you dislike.
In fact, that's really the test of your commitment to health is treating people you dislike.
And the last thing I'll say as well, and it's very brief, is you understand that when you break principles for you, you break principles for your enemies.
Conflicts tend to devolve to the lowest common denominator.
Like if you're in a fight and people say, like your opponent says, you know, we're not going to hit below the belt, right?
Okay, that's the rule, right?
Now, if he starts hitting below the belt and you can't leave the fight, what do you do?
You start hitting below the belt. So if you break your own principles...
Because you've been scared by this imaginary disaster called catastrophe.
If you break those principles, you break principles to your enemies too.
Please understand that you're not going to be in your position of power forever.
You're not going to be in your position of power forever.
And at some point the pendulum is going to swing and then the people you consider the worst people in the world will have power over your freedom of speech and they will have power over your presence on social media platforms.
Inevitably. We defend the rights of the worst people because we wish our own rights not to be violated by the worst people who will inevitably, like the more power that you accumulate, the worse people will be attracted.
Like the more, even worse people will be attracted to that power.
So the more power you accumulate, the power to shape discourse, control elections, punish people, reward people, allow people to speak, block people from speaking, destroy their investments, the more power you gather to yourself, the darker the souls will be drawn to that power.
And they will end up with power over you.
Integrity is not just morality, but fundamentally, it's self-defense.
What you have done to others will be done unto you.
So, thank you for listening.
Thank you for watching. freedomain.com forward slash donate.
If you would like to help out the show, I would really, really appreciate it.
Have yourselves a wonderful day.
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