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July 24, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:38:42

The Ultimate Power of Philosophy – Stefan Molyneux on @The Red Man Group

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	Boom! Howdy folks!
	Anthony Johnson here today, founder of the Redman Group, founder of 21 Studios, 21 Convention, 22 Convention, the Patriarch Convention, 21 University, and about 10,000 other things on the internet.
	Appreciate you tuning in to today's episode of the Redman Group, The Ultimate Power of Philosophy.
	With returning guest to the show, Stefan Molyneux, also former speaker of 21 Convention back in 2019.
	YouTube legend. He was famously deplatformed off of almost the entire internet, kind of Alex Jones style.
	Later, we saw like a Trump style.
	He was banned off YouTube, Twitter, all kinds of stuff.
	It was all ridiculous nonsense.
	It was a huge hit job.
	And it was really sad to see.
	He had almost a million subscribers just on YouTube.
	And that was even after heavy shadow banning and censorship and probably, in my opinion, employees at YouTube and stuff targeting him, which is really, really lame to put it nicely.
	Anyway, he's still around, still kicking, alive and kicking, still writing, still philosophizing.
	I would also say, too, that Stefan is, in my view, one of the best philosophers alive today.
	And that's another reason why, too.
	It's so sad to see him get killed off YouTube like that back in 2020.
	His channel was legendary, and he had thousands of videos, and all of them were erased.
	And that's wrong. That's beyond wrong.
	Now, that said, though, today's episode is sponsored by our own event, 21 Summit.
	That includes the 21 Convention for Men, the Patriarch Convention for Fathers, and the 22 Convention for Women.
	You can go to the link in the description for this webpage you're looking at now, 21 Summit.
	You can get early bird tickets, buy one, get one free, bring a friend, bring your wife, your girlfriend, your brother, whatever you want to do.
	Girls got to go to the 22 convention, but the men's events, you can kind of go back and forth.
	You get complimentary access to both events as a man.
	That's your male privilege, and we're at work there.
	Some speakers include Jack Donovan, Coach Greg Adams, Richard Grannon, myself, Elliot Hulse.
	Elliot Hulse's wife will actually be there, too, speaking to the women.
	It's a really good time. Come on out.
	Link in the description, or you can visit 21studios.com.
	Now, without further ado, please help me welcome back to the Redman Group, Mr.
	Stefan Molyneux. How are you doing?
	I'm well, thanks. How are you doing, brother?
	Doing good, man. Really glad to have you back.
	We've been working on this for a little while now to have another interview.
	Really excited. Also, to you guys, I'm going to go through a list of questions and ideas I want to discuss with Stefan, but we'll also take viewer questions throughout the show and especially later in the show.
	So first of all, what have you been up to now that you were removed off of the internet so rudely back in 2020?
	I know you're still on BitChute, you're still on Rumble, you're still on Locals, you're still on a lot of platforms, but you were killed off all the main ones.
	Even Instagram, I heard recently, you got nuked off of.
	Is that correct? Yes, that is correct.
	Well, it gives me the opportunity to shift focus, right?
	So you speak to the world and you can have a big effect by getting ideas out there.
	If your reach is curtailed, then you end up having conversations with individuals, right?
	So from the very beginning of my show back in 2006, I've been doing call-ins with individuals which then get published as shows where they just bring up any issues that they have in their life.
	And we try to bring moral philosophy to bear on the problems that they have because moral philosophy is really the big solution to most of the ills in life.
	It's such an effective and powerful solution that, you know, from the days of Socrates onward, moral philosophers have to be silenced because if we solve particular issues in the world, then there's less for power to do, less for power to promise you.
	So I've been having more individual conversations.
	I... I wrote a book, which I'm very happy about, very excited about, and I've been continuing to do what I do.
	My business plan, like if you're a philosopher, your business plan has to be at least half a millennia, right?
	So you kind of have to step over the everyday.
	You have to step over the immediate.
	And you have to say, okay, can I create content that will be of value, a timeless sort of universal moral value in 500 years, in 1000 years?
	That's my particular aim.
	It's a ridiculous timeframe, of course, but that's where the best work tends to come out of me for.
	So I'm continuing to work on that with the recognition that to be harmed in the present as a moral philosopher is almost a requirement.
	I mean, it happens to just about any decent one.
	But of course, the goal of moral philosophy is to help in the long run.
	It's sort of nutritional science rather than ER medicine.
	Like ER medicine is, oh my God, terrible things are happening in the moment.
	Who do I need to cut or stitch up or something?
	Whereas nutrition is, how do we prevent sort of health issues 10, 20, 30 years down the road?
	So it's the price you pay for trying to affect things in the moment.
	But what it does is it refocuses you to the long term, which in many ways I think is where the major value will be.
	Yeah, that was on Rand's view as well.
	The philosophy is basically what drives the world.
	It's what drives human beings.
	It's what drives civilization.
	So when you do focus on that, I mean, yeah, you're right.
	Number one, truth tellers and anybody who really challenges an establishment, as you have done, as other figures that history have done, MLK to Socrates and everyone in between, people can get killed for it.
	That's what people don't realize, too, is that you did a lot of public speaking, whether it's in America and Canada and Australia.
	And you were never actually physically harmed, but you went through bomb threats and other serious threats of violence just for speaking your ideas and your beliefs to the world, never advocating violence or anything like that, speaking out against violence with parenting, for example.
	And you could have been killed for these things.
	Shinzo Abe, you know, recently was killed.
	I do remember going to the bathroom before some speaking events, before I had sort of security.
	I had to have security in some places.
	And just, yeah, people would come into the room.
	It's like, hey, hope I don't get shift while I'm peeing.
	You know, that was one of the things that does sort of run through your minds.
	And it's a funny thing, you know, and I think it's kind of an old school idea.
	At least it is for me. So when I was growing up, when I was a kid, I mean, I didn't just come into controversial topics and debating with no background, no history, no personal exposure.
	I happened to be surrounded by a really great group of very argumentative friends from my sort of early teens onwards.
	And we would debate and argue and get into it and be ferocious.
	I mean, just everything under the sun.
	Abortion, death penalty, morality, origins of life, existence of God.
	I mean, we would just, boom, in there.
	You know, like any skill that you have as an adult...
	That hasn't been honed as a teenager is probably quite a bit behind.
	And we would really get into it.
	We'd be really ferocious, but you know how it is among men.
	You get very aggressive with each other and then you shake hands and go watch a movie.
	And that idea that you are passionate and aggressive in your approach to the pursuit of truth, but that doesn't make you enemies.
	In fact, we continued our friendships for many decades into the present.
	Now, the idea, though, that if you lost a debate, like when I was a teenager, and sometimes I won, sometimes I lost, like, just about everything, right?
	And when you lose, you get better.
	But the idea that when you lost the debate, you would try to get the person who beat you fired, or you would make up something and send it to the school or the teacher, or you would, I don't know, be like let out the air in their tires or loosen the brakes on their bicycle. be like let out the air in their tires or The idea that you would try to destroy someone for beating you in a debate, I mean, it wasn't even something that crossed anyone's mind at any time.
	Now, that's the environment that I grew up in.
	You know, you strap on your boxing gloves and you go toe-to-toe in the ring for as many rounds as it takes to get a little closer to the truth.
	And you were raised in Canada, right?
	That's a social endeavor. You were raised in Canada, right?
	And say, oh, this person who is really good at debating is an evil Nazi who must be fired for he must destroy his income.
	Like, this just wasn't something that I grew up with.
	And seeing it kind of emerge in the world is, well, it's somewhat troubling to put it mildly.
	Yeah. Now, you mentioned your new book.
	It's called The Future, right? It is.
	Yes, it is called The Future.
	So for those of you who don't know, and there's not many people who would, you know, delve into my biography in this kind of way, I didn't start out moral philosophy.
	I mean, I've always loved philosophy since my mid-teens.
	So yeah, going on 40 years.
	You have a degree in philosophy too, right?
	Yeah, a master's degree, a graduate degree in the history of philosophy.
	I mean, in history, but my focus was on the history of philosophy.
	So, yeah, I mean, that's what I loved.
	But I was an art guy originally.
	I wrote novels. I've written like 30 plays.
	I've written half a dozen novels, poetry, and all of that.
	And I went to the National Theatre School.
	I studied acting and playwriting.
	And so I'm an art guy from sort of way back.
	And I've mostly written nonfiction.
	In philosophy, and my books are available for free for the most part at freedomain.com slash books.
	But I wanted to get back into novel writing, and I wanted to write, in a sense, the antidote to George Orwell's famous novel 1984, which is a novel of existential despair and horror, as I'm sure everybody knows.
	And I wanted to say, okay, what if we could get a truly vivid sense of a truly free world?
	Because I've written about stateless societies, societies with spontaneous self-organization and how law and defense and so on would work in the absence of a state.
	And that's nice. You know, it's all in your head kind of theoretical, but I thought, what if I could really work hard to create the world that I want in fiction so that it would come alive for people with characters, with conflict, and so on.
	So a very brief synopsis.
	It's a story of a powerful man in the present who's cryogenically frozen, who then wakes up in the future and is put on trial for his life.
	It's a way, of course, of getting future morality to look at the present, which is a way of dislodging our certainty about our perfect morality in the present.
	So it's a work of science fiction, which goes all the way back to my very first book.
	It is a way of saying, at least for me, here's what I'm fighting for.
	What I'm fighting for is a world where children are protected, where you have peaceful parenting, where you have voluntary interactions as far as humanly possible, where ostracism and not violence is used as the last resort of social defense and violence.
	I mean, I think I succeeded.
	I'm very happy the reviews that are coming in are very positive.
	And if people want to get it, they can go to freedomain.locals.com.
	And so I think that's been my sort of major glory birth, so to speak, over the last little while.
	Nice. Yeah, I'm sure it was hard as hell writing it.
	Writing a book's not easy, man. I've written like small e-books and stuff, and even that's pretty hard.
	So it's available for free, you said, if they're a paid subscriber at your Locals.
	Locals is awesome, by the way.
	At the moment, it's a couple of bucks a month if you want to try it out.
	You can get 12 bucks for the price of 10 if you want to sign up annually.
	But yeah, I mean, it's a way of supporting Philosophy and getting a great book.
	It's in e-book format. I've also read it as...
	An audio book with, you know, all my acting training going on and so on.
	So I'm very pleased with it.
	It is kind of thing, like it took 40 years to write because it's 40 years of everything that I've been thinking about in terms of human liberty, the non-initiation of force, the non-aggression principle, peaceful parenting, and just moral law and a free society all kind of rolled into one tasty digestible package.
	So I hope that people will check it out.
	Yeah, two questions.
	How long is it? How many pages?
	And is it going to be available in paperback on Amazon soon or anything like that?
	Yeah, I mean, I will probably try and find a way to get it out in paperback in terms of the number of pages.
	I mean, it's not 1984 length, but it also ain't Atlas Shrugged length, so it sort of comes in somewhere in between.
	But, you know, people say that they've raced through it in an entire weekend because the story does flow.
	I mean, I'm a pretty fast-paced storyteller as far as that goes.
	Yeah, nice. I'll check it out, man.
	I'm excited. I didn't know you were working on it.
	I still follow you on Telegram mostly, but I know you're on Rumble too and BitChute and stuff like that.
	I'm so glad you had those platforms.
	I was noticing your BitChute is still like huge, over 100,000 subscribers, I think.
	So it's pretty badass. And now we see the rise of Rumble and stuff too, which is good.
	And I was happy to see you join that too.
	A lot of people still haven't joined it.
	I don't know why the hell they didn't, but good stuff.
	Some more recent news, Roe v.
	Wade was overturned in America.
	Pretty shocking and jaw-dropping in our gynocentric matriarchy we live in.
	But it actually happened.
	And I'm still kind of stunned by it in a way.
	But I wanted to get your kind of basic thoughts on that.
	Growing up in Canada, did you ever think that would happen in America?
	And what was your view on it philosophically?
	Not even close because, of course, the tendency tends to be more towards victimhood and, as you talk about, sort of female-focused legislation and so on.
	And the fact that it was overturned, you know, is really quite jaw-dropping and signals that it is really hard to know what the future is going to be.
	It's hard to know what the future is going to be, which is why we always need to sort of rely on, you know, objective universal moral principles to try and make our decisions.
	I think there was a huge opportunity that seems to have come and gone with Roe v.
	Wade, and I want to get your thoughts on this and your audience's thought on this.
	Sure. I had a debate with a woman about this, and I really tried to get across that she was appalled and outraged that women would be forced into parenthood, right?
	That women would have no particular choice when it came to parenthood.
	And I did try to get across to her that this is an issue that men have been facing for decades, if not centuries, to be forced into parenthood in that, as you know, the woman can choose to terminate the pregnancy or could and still can in many places in America because all Roe v.
	Wade did was say it doesn't exist in the Constitution and push it back to the States.
	But men being forced into parenthood has been a huge issue for men and men's rights and trying to get her to understand that the The sort of shock and upset that she was facing is something that we as men and women should be able to come together on and say, yes, I don't think anybody should be forced into parenthood.
	And, you know, her reply was, you know, when I was sort of went over, you know, that the woman can choose to have the baby.
	The man has no choice.
	He goes to, in a sense, baby jail for 20 years.
	And if he doesn't pay his child support, he can go to jail.
	It's like the only place where debtors prison still exists.
	And her answer was, what?
	He can always leave the country.
	And just trying to, and this is just one particular person, I'm not saying it's indicative of everyone, but wouldn't it have been an amazing thing when women said, wow, being forced into parenthood, even though there are 18 different forms of birth control, being forced into parenthood is a really terrible thing.
	We could have really had a moment of empathy for the male, where men regularly get forced into parenthood, and for a lot longer than nine months.
	And I feel this absence, you know, after so long working to say, you know, men have feelings too, men have preferences too, but not just disposable pawns to build your sewers and air conditioning, that empathy for the male, getting out of the disposable male scenario, boy, did that ever come and go without a blink?
	And the other thing too, of course, I mean, this is a pretty obvious insight, so I'll keep it brief, but man alive.
	After 18 months of people being forced to take these vaccines, forced, bullied, threatened with firing, unable to travel, unable to socialize, unable to go to restaurants...
	The my body, my choice thing, boy, that just seemed a little precious.
	And I do think that when you weaken a central pillar of somebody else's argument, it's usually just a matter of time before it's just going to crack and fall.
	It's like when there's a big giant crack down the middle of the dam, you better move out from the water flow.
	And I think when people were willing to give up bodily autonomy...
	For the sake of COVID, then getting back into my body, my choice, it was such an easy thing to overturn, right?
	Because all you do, and you could see people do this all the time, somebody would say, my body, my choice, and then you would immediately see other people say, oh, but on social media, you said people should be fired or fined or whatever for not taking the vax.
	And it just the idea that it was a big, powerful moral argument, my body, my choice, of which abortion was one of the effects rather than there is no principle there.
	People just want what they want in the moment.
	You can't once you lose your moral authority, once you lose your moral integrity, man, it's it's just a matter of time.
	And I think I think in a strange way, COVID and the response and the social control that was imposed over the vaccines led in many ways to the overturn of Roe v.
	Wade, which means that the virus that came out of China, killed hundreds of thousands of people, also is going to save tens of billions of babies.
	I mean, it's strange in life. It's really hard to predict how things are going to go.
	Yeah. No, I've read essays discussing, or at least discussing the issues around that, 100% of what you're saying, that they abandoned their moral position, you know, my body, my choice.
	This was, in my view, wrong in the first place, but whatever it is, they abandoned it.
	And they shot themselves in the foot, and they set up the ultimate decision by the Supreme Court.
	I also think, too, that Trump was hugely responsible for this, though.
	And that was discussed, you know, right after it happened, but that seems to have even faded.
	I mean, that's for him a win, being consistent on what he promised, which is pretty rare for any politician, obviously.
	Well, and people who supported Trump and who got deplatformed as a result, yeah, the deplatforming is kind of rough, although it could also be society's way of protecting people who are speaking the truth.
	But I really think that people can say...
	If somebody gave you a deal, right?
	Like let's say there's a guy named Bob, right?
	And Bob had a big social media presence.
	I'm not talking about me by proxy.
	I'm just saying there's a guy named Bob. Big social media presence and was sort of pro-Trump.
	Lost his big social media presence, but in return, Roe v.
	Wade was overturned. Like if someone had come ahead of time to Bob, right?
	And said... Okay, well, you're going to lose some reach, some clout, some subscribers, some platforms.
	But in return, you might save or you probably will help save millions and millions of babies.
	I would say that's actually a pretty easy decision to make.
	And of course, the other thing too, which is really understated, is like, wasn't it kind of nice to have four years without a war?
	It wasn't that...
	I mean, people just forget that.
	I mean, America, which is bounded by peaceful neighbors largely to the north and south, giant oceans to either side, should be able to pursue a pretty pacifist foreign policy for the most part and has been at war for all but about a dozen years of its entire history.
	But wasn't it kind of nice?
	Wasn't it just...
	Four years without poking hornets' nests, without funding extremist groups.
	I mean, that was kind of nice.
	And I think people kind of waken up to what they missed and what they were told versus what actually happened.
	And now it seems to be back into sort of a pro-war footing and all of that.
	Yeah, that was pretty sweet.
	So, you know, again, for Bob, who helped Trump maybe, okay, so probably saved half a million lives by preventing escalations in Yemen or Syria or Ukraine, for that matter, or other places, Libya and so on.
	So, again, number of subscribers versus lives actually saved.
	It's a pretty good trade, I think.
	Yeah, the orange man loudmouth saved millions of babies.
	In my view as well, and I'd like to know your thoughts on it, I've always viewed, for years now anyway, that feminism basically was an ideological weapon to commit genocide, infanticide against babies.
	In America at least, they killed over 60 to 65 million, possibly even more than that, but those are I think some of the official numbers, babies.
	And that now, it's not over like you mentioned, you could still get an abortion in California, New York, whatever.
	But that has been massively curtailed and ended federally.
	So do you think, with Roe v.
	Wade ending, is this kind of the beginning of the end of infanticide, in America at least?
	Is that your philosophic view of it?
	Well, I think it's certainly lost its moral legitimacy.
	And the fact that...
	I mean, it's always amazing to me that...
	If you look at someone like Elizabeth Holmes, I know this is a little bit of a whiplash tangent, so hang on to your hats, but if you look at someone like Elizabeth Holmes who got convicted for fraud, I think Sonny Balwani, boyfriend slash CTO or CEO, chief operating officer, he also got convicted recently.
	So if you look, oh, there was fraud and they could face up to 20 years in prison, I think, or something like that.
	It was really bad fraud and so on.
	Okay, but there was just money.
	Money is not unimportant. I mean, I'm fine with them being prosecuted, but The fact that a right to kill babies was invented in many ways, and for those of you who don't know the history of Roe v.
	Wade, it's pretty important to look it up, that the woman who was put forward claimed to have been raped.
	She wasn't in fact raped.
	She then turned against Roe v.
	Wade later on in her life, and she was, I think, manipulated by some pretty Heavy ideologues.
	And so the history and the number of women who were claimed to die from abortions was vastly exaggerated.
	It was, in fact, in the 20s or 30s per year.
	And so if you sort of look at the history, this right, so to speak, was invented.
	And it turns out, you know, on closer constitutional review, it didn't exist.
	So Elizabeth Holmes seems to have misled a whole bunch of investors, lost a whole bunch of money.
	But that was all voluntary and nobody died.
	Well, that was all voluntary.
	So what do we say about a judicial system that invented a right that caused the deaths of 50, 60, as you say, million babies?
	It doesn't seem to be much of a desire to circle back and have any reckoning.
	I mean, that's 10x Holocaust, right?
	I mean, that's a big number.
	And I don't know where there doesn't seem to be much stomach to look back and say, okay, since this turns out to have not been a right, since this turns out to have not been constitutional, what can we put in place to make sure something like this doesn't happen again?
	There doesn't seem to be much stomach for that, which is, I guess, not too surprising.
	But again, from my sort of moral philosophy perch, it's like, hello, anybody?
	Anybody? No, it's still important to call out.
	It reminds me of the fraudulent Iraq war by the Bushes and Cheney and stuff.
	Nobody went to... I mean, this is complete fraud.
	A million, allegedly 500,000 to a million kids and women and people died in Iraq from it.
	Not to mention American soldiers dying and stuff.
	For what? It was all a lie.
	And who went to jail? Nobody. So yeah, it's kind of the...
	I mean, it's an even bigger scale with abortion.
	We had this fraudulent, invented fake right out of nowhere for 50 years.
	And then all of a sudden the orange man finally killed it.
	But in the meantime, in that interim, you know, millions of babies died.
	Mostly, well, disproportionately to black babies.
	Kanye West famously pointed that out.
	But 20 million of them, vastly disproportional to the black population, black babies were killed.
	Margaret Sanger, one of the founders of Planned Parenthood, and look at her statements about the purpose of it.
	It's pretty jaw-dropping, the sort of social mechanics behind this and the goals of the people who got this going.
	Now, I mean, I do get that it's...
	It's tough for women. And I understand that because for women, it's something that men as a whole...
	I'm always trying to cross that gap, like gender gap.
	And it's a big-ass gap, to put it mildly.
	And for women...
	The ability to offer consequence-free sexuality is such a power and such a high and such an offering.
	I mean, it is obviously, evolutionarily speaking, the greatest gift that a woman could give, which women withheld from like 40 percent of men throughout most of human evolution, which was the ability to reproduce.
	So women have this power.
	And the more consequence free the sexuality, the more power they have to gain male attention, male resources.
	Now, in the long run, it doesn't play out very well for them in terms of happiness and security and all of that.
	But I didn't have that when I don't know about your level of studliness when you were a teen.
	I didn't have that when I was growing up in my teens and my 20s.
	There weren't women who were saying, I'll buy you a car if you'll go on a date with me.
	Like, there just weren't, there wasn't, I couldn't sort of say, I'm going to put a topless picture of myself on the internet and get $10,000 a month.
	Like, these things just didn't exist for me, and they don't exist for men in general.
	I mean, a few rare exceptions, but...
	My experience was similar, by the way.
	That's why I found the pickup artist community and the manosphere.
	I was terrible with women growing up.
	Socially awkward, no social skills.
	And it took me, I had to approach like 6,000 women to really figure out how to, well, how to get laid, frankly.
	But given how to socialize as a man.
	Yeah. So for, well, yeah, with women, right?
	The more you want, the less you get.
	It's one of these, in the realm of hungry ghost Buddhist kind of thing, right?
	For women who have adapted to the situation of relatively consequence-free sexual offerings, it's kind of tough.
	You know, it's kind of tough.
	I mean, it's almost like nepotism, right?
	Like if your dad was the CEO and you've been appointed CEO, but then your dad dies, the company gets sold, and other people who have no connection with you move in and figure out what's best for the company, you kind of freak out because you've had this subsidy called nepotism.
	For your whole business career, and now you've got to compete in an open market without that subsidy.
	And so for women who have adapted to be hot and offer sexual access, consequence-free sex and so on, to ask them to readapt to consequence-heavy sex, and of course babies are the heaviest consequence of sex that exists.
	And it was really wild to see this play out on social media where women would say, Okay, we're going on a sex strike.
	We're not just going to go for chats and boy toys anymore.
	We're not going to go for the bad boys anymore.
	We're going to hold off having sex until there's a guy who's stable, reliable, financially secure, and we're going to make him sign some kind of contract that if there is a baby, he's going to take care of it.
	It's like... You know you've just invented marriage again, right?
	Like you think you're coming up with something new, but that was the whole point of marriage, was to withhold sex until there is a lifelong commitment, whether it's enforced by the law or, as it was in the past, enforced by social ostracism, which in many ways is even more powerful.
	So it was pretty wild to see the relationship between a woman's desire to choose a good father for her children rather than choose a good lay for her loins.
	That was pretty wild to see that.
	And these vast social mechanics when they change and you see people change their behaviors and their perspectives based upon this.
	And you're like, oh, so if women now want, because of overturn of Roe v. Wade, if women now want better husbands, better men, better fathers, then they're rewarding virtue rather than sit-ups, right?
	They're rewarding honor rather than usually daddy's money to buy a flash car or whatever's going on in the market these days.
	And then when you see that, you say, okay, well, then that had to be the effects of Roe v.
	Wade coming in, was that women could turn from virtue to hotness.
	And so looking for qualities of character rather than looks good in a selfie is really, really wild.
	And I think it's going to be for the betterment of Because that kind of subsidy, consequence-free sexual access, power corrupts, man, and that's one of the biggest powers of all.
	Yeah, I've said for a while that feminism, it's kind of a bombastic tweet or saying, but feminism enslaves women to their own worst impulses.
	And Roe v. Wade, I think, highlighted that almost more than anything.
	Like you said, it unchained their sexuality, but then it made them miserable, really.
	There's huge studies that even to this day show that the women are more miserable or unhappy than they've ever been.
	They had more feminism until a few weeks ago than they've ever had, right?
	Roe v. Wade, an endless kind of, you know, female privilege is a real thing, unlike male privilege.
	Yeah. But another thing you mentioned too, the sex strike, what came to mind is that the, I don't even know if it's still going, but yeah, that sex strike hashtag and all these women screaming about it early on, the first few days at least, this to me kind of revealed the fraud that, you know, they say, you know, they want to always promote abortion was for rape and incest and all these really extreme outliers that really just don't happen.
	Almost all of it is like selective or elective, they call it, right, just for whatever.
	But basically, they were using abortion as a form of backup birth control.
	It was not because the mother was in danger.
	It was not because you're raped.
	It was not because your uncle molested you.
	It's because you're an irresponsible jerk.
	And you have a kid, and you're four months pregnant, and you're just going to off that kid.
	Because you think you deserve the power to determine who lives and who dies.
	In a way, I think, maybe, I don't know if you agree, but feminism kind of made women...
	You're mentioning it almost like a drug.
	They kind of got high on this drug.
	The political power it gave them, or the social power...
	Even the genetic power to determine who lives and who dies.
	But it almost made them like gods.
	Like women unilaterally in America, at least, in most countries around the world.
	There's a few, I think, that stand out.
	Where the father was required to participate in the abortion or sign off on it.
	But it gave women the power to unilaterally kill children.
	To determine who lives and who dies.
	Like a god. Like a god of ancient myth.
	A kind of god. A Greek god or whatever.
	I'm so glad that's over, at least federally in America.
	But what an amazing power.
	Like you said, power corrupts, absolutely.
	And they had that power for a long time.
	And men are supposed to not even have an opinion on it.
	How dare you even have an opinion, you non-birthing person.
	You cisgendered heterosexual, heteronormative, whatever, patriarchal pig.
	Well, this to me is the great tragedy of this sort of modern ideology.
	So the Dimorphic characteristics of males and females.
	I mean, we can go through the list.
	You know, men have a 40% greater upper body strength than women menstrual.
	So the fact that we have all of these differences and differences in brains, differences in bodies, differences in even down to the skeletal structure.
	So where did they come from?
	Well, evolutionarily speaking, men and women, we are who we are because of the historical choices Of thousands of generations going back to, I don't know, apes or whatever.
	And so this is who we are.
	We have different sexual characteristics because of the choices.
	So why do men have, on average, 40% upper body strength improvement over women?
	Because that's what women chose.
	Why are women smaller and have higher voices?
	Because that's what men chose.
	And so the fact that we are the result of our ancestors' choices has all been boiled away.
	And now it's just like, well, it's just an evil patriarchy that it was one-sided.
	Women never had any choice. Now, of course, that was right throughout history and so on.
	But human beings take so long to raise.
	Like men are like a quarter century.
	It's 25 years for men to reach full brain maturity.
	It's just slightly less for women.
	Yeah. And that you simply cannot raise any kind of cultural continuity civilization without the participation and enthusiasm of women.
	So it wasn't all rape all throughout human history.
	And sometimes women would choose, quote, the bad boys.
	You know, in a time where there was social chaos, where there was scarcity, where there was war, where there was issues, women would choose the more aggressive men.
	And we can see that latency in, you know, the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon, which kind of ripped a lot of men's blinders off regarding violence.
	Some of the hellscape of modern female sexuality.
	And so men chose women and developed those characteristics through choice.
	Women chose men and developed those characteristics through choice.
	And to reduce it all to ideology rather than to significantly voluntary biology is such a tragedy because it means that we can't like each other, we can't love each other.
	And when you have an ideology, particularly for women, I think, when you have an ideology that sets them against The love of men, the love of masculinity.
	I mean, I love women.
	I love femininity. I find them delightfully incomprehensible, but it's a wonderful part of my life.
	I'm, of course, married to a woman.
	I've been a stay-at-home dad to a wonderful daughter, so love femininity.
	Some of it I don't quite get, but, you know, again, delightfully incomprehensible.
	It's going to be a little different from my way of thinking, just as mine is different from theirs.
	But learning to love Men and love women is foundational to our pair-bonding nature as a species.
	Like, we are a pair-bonding nature.
	An ideology that comes between, that severs that bond between men and women just produces a lot of miserable people.
	Now, men, you know, we are busy, we're active, we create things, we build things.
	I mean, some women do, of course, as well, but, you know, in general, it's a little bit more on the masculine side.
	So we have that kind of stuff to keep us going.
	But for a lot of women, right, if they're not going to have the grand careers that they were sort of promised and they age out relatively slowly of high sexual market value and they then get dumped a lot of times into these empty Martian wastes of their 40s and 50s and Can't go back and fix it.
	You know, men, we don't get all of that high sexual market value as much when we're younger, but we have a lot of time to make up our mistakes.
	We can still start to have kids in our 40s, even our 50s, or even older, but women don't have that option.
	And I think the fact that these ideologies have portrayed all the complexities of human evolution to just be like evil Nazi patriarchal overlords has just meant that you can't, women can't Almost for their honor, they can't find anything positive or wonderful about men and that strips them of their capacity to love and pair bond, which is devastating for both sexes, but I think slightly worse for women.
	Yeah. My view is basically that feminism is kind of this modern crusade against masculinity and against men and against boys and against fathers, against fatherhood itself, even more broadly against the nuclear family.
	A lot of feminists have been very explicit.
	They want to restructure or rethink the nuclear family or outright destroy it.
	There's a few famous ones, PhDs, you know, professors and stuff who've outright said that.
	But looking back on it, they cartoonized all of history to be this crusade against women and femininity, but there was no such thing.
	And there's definitely never been, to my knowledge, any such thing as a more targeted one like we're engaged in now, like we see all around us.
	This war on men, this war on masculinity, and this war on family, particularly the father as head of the household, anything even remotely alluding to patriarchy.
	And I mean by that too, like a kind of Christian patriarchy, not like a Muslim one where they're throwing gays off of buildings or something, or beheading women for adultery.
	I remember seeing a video about that many years ago on like break video or something.
	Anyway, I wanted to switch topics a little bit or go back a minute.
	So I want to talk to you about the philosophy behind abortion itself.
	Like, why is abortion...
	I think even Clarence Thomas said it's such a profound moral issue.
	And by that, I think it almost means complex.
	And the opinions on life and death...
	Or not life and death, but the right to life.
	Does a child have rights?
	Is a child a full-blown human being?
	Does a child not have rights, pro-choice, pro-life?
	What are some of the philosophic issues behind that?
	Like, why are people so divided on this?
	I'm an objectivist myself, but even Ayn Rand, I disagree with her 100%.
	She was 100% pro-choice.
	She was not in any way what you would consider pro-life by today's standards.
	So what is your view on the foundations behind abortion and why it's super, super divisive, almost more than any other issue politically I can think of or socially?
	Well, I think it's a great challenge to narcissism.
	So, in narcissism, you view other people, if you're a narcissist, you view other people not as objects in themselves, but as tools or utilities to serve your own needs, right?
	So, you know, I've got a little cup, a brew here, and this white cup I don't view as an individual.
	I simply say, oh, you can hold my coffee, grab, pour, and carry, right?
	Yeah. And to a narcissist, you look at everyone like an object, like an implement.
	You know, you want to screw in a screw, you grab a screwdriver.
	You don't say to the screwdriver, oh, are you busy?
	Do you mind if I just interrupt you for a second to turn this screw?
	No, you don't ask your television set what show it wants to watch and negotiate that way.
	So for a narcissist, other human beings don't exist as separate entities with their own needs and preferences.
	Now you get that other people have their own needs and preferences, but you only use that to manipulate them to serve your own needs.
	The selfishness versus the focus on the philosophical and moral truth, which is that everyone's an individual, everyone has their own needs and preferences, and the only civilized thing to do with people you care about is to negotiate with them.
	So if you have something like the right to abortion, what is the foundational argument?
	It's my body, my choice.
	Now, a narcissist views another person as an empty vessel to serve that person's own needs and preferences.
	And for a wide variety of reasons, I think that narcissism has really grown and swollen in society.
	Narcissism is generally also, it flourishes when you don't have an external set of standards that you must subjugate your ape-like rampaging ego to.
	We all want sex.
	We all want food.
	We all want power like the simian bonobo part of our brain.
	That's the animal side of us.
	And in opposition to that animal side of us, we're supposed to have these crystalline virtues, these ideal abstractions, these things to strive for more than our own animal egos of satisfying our dopamine addictions in the here and now.
	For Christians, of course, it's entry to heaven.
	For objectivists, it's reason.
	I have universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics.
	You've got to have something that hauls you and lifts you out of the animal, puts you on the path to something truly human, which is fidelity to ideal abstractions, ideally moral abstractions.
	Now, of course, atheist communities and I don't include the objectivist communities and the atheists because they're anti-statists and so on.
	So I know there's a big roundabout answer, but I think it's really important to say, what do you sacrifice yourself to?
	Well, Christians, of course, following the example of Jesus, entry to heaven, resistance to Satan, for objectivists is following reason and evidence, opposing initiation of the use of force, and so on.
	Now, if you take away from people ideal moral abstractions which they are obligated to follow, We fall into narcissism.
	We fall into the animal. Because why would you defer your own pleasure, your own gratification, if there aren't any moral rules or ideals or abstractions out there that you have to follow, that you must follow, or at least try to?
	It's almost like you're saying people fall to the lowest common denominator of philosophy, which would be narcissism, I think is what you're saying.
	It's anti-philosophy.
	It's just the animal, right? And so, like, you look at two frogs that are attacking, two male frogs attacking each other to get access to the female.
	There's no empathy. There's just this desire to win and reproduce.
	And that's fine for frogs.
	It ain't so good for human beings.
	We're supposed to have something just a little higher than the animal satisfaction, lizard brain lust of the moment.
	We're supposed to have this post-monkey beta expansion pack called Abstractions and Virtues.
	So when you look at my body, my choice, what do you see?
	You see this really bottomless narcissism.
	Because, honey, it ain't your body.
	It's not your body.
	It's in your body.
	It's not your body.
	How do we know that? Because let's say you've got a spleen.
	You've got a spleen, you've got a kidney, you've got a liver, right?
	Your spleen doesn't leave your body, doesn't develop its own personality, doesn't poop, get up, Learn how to shave.
	Argue with you. Go out with boys too late.
	Have their own spleens later on down the road.
	You can't have philosophical conversations with your spleen.
	You don't raise your spleen to go out into the world and your spleen doesn't outlive you.
	That's how you know it's not your body.
	Well, your spleen doesn't outlive you.
	Children do. That's kind of the point.
	Your spleen doesn't have a heartbeat.
	Your spleen doesn't have a different blood type.
	A baby can have a completely different blood type from the mother.
	So when you look within yourself as a woman, you look within yourself and you say, I have a human being inside me.
	It's my body.
	It's me. It's not distinguishable from me.
	It's not separate from me.
	It has different DNA. To ping off your wonderful listener here, yeah, it has different DNA. Your spleen does not have different DNA. You don't send your spleen to school, you know, right?
	Your spleen can't be propagandized.
	So it is not your body.
	To say, my body, my choice, absolutely, you can say that, of course, about your spleen.
	You can say that about your kidney.
	Nobody can force you to give them a kidney because they need a kidney and you just have a spare.
	See, absolutely, my body, my choice.
	But things that are in your body are not yours.
	If you have a penis in a woman's vagina, she doesn't own that penis.
	She can't remove it and keep it in a job, Bobbitt style, right?
	It's in her body, but it's not her.
	If a woman is getting a dental procedure, the dentist has his hands in her mouth, she can't bite off his fingers saying, hey man, my body, my choice.
	I just want these fingers. They're tasty.
	No, that would be assault because he's a different person.
	So my body, my choice is a call.
	It's like a dog whistle or a secret tribal drumbeat to say, are you a narcissist?
	And the people who fall for that, I would view as narcissists.
	It's unbelievably narcissistic.
	To the point where they would look at getting an abortion like getting a haircut.
	It's like, hey man, it's my hair.
	It's my choice what the haircut is.
	Absolutely it is. But your hair doesn't detach from you, outlive you, have different DNA, a different blood type, and go off and do its own thing and can't have more hair of its own.
	Somebody, you know, wants to get a nose job.
	Hey man, it's my body, my job.
	Absolutely! But the idea that another human being with different DNA, different blood type, different personality structure, different levels of intelligence who detaches from you and goes out into the world, that that's exactly the same as your fingernail, your hair, your spleen. It's such a blindness to the existence of the other, of another mind, of another human being.
	Whatever we say about it, my body, my choice is to me a just massive skywriting danger signal.
	And I would say this to women out there to really look inside yourself and say, how could you possibly look at another human being the same as you look at your cuticles?
	Or, you know, you might get a tooth extracted.
	My body, my choice. Yeah, okay, but...
	To look at another human being like you would look at some part of your own body that never leaves you.
	Look at that. And I would also say to men, a woman who's like pounded the table saying, my body, my choice.
	Oh yeah. Get away immediately.
	Now here's a question. A lot of state laws in America, before Roe v.
	Wade, it's actually, I think, part of what triggered the fight.
	And since, a lot of them focused on stopping abortion at the heartbeat, approximately four weeks or six weeks, depending on the state.
	So in your view, philosophically, where does life truly begin in terms of an unborn child?
	Is it a heartbeat? Is it later on?
	Is it conception, fertilization?
	Do you have a view on that? My view is the heartbeat.
	I think if there is a detectable heartbeat, that to me means it's alive.
	If you're going to stop its heartbeat, then you're going to kill it, so it's alive.
	I mean, yeah, there's different ways of measuring it.
	I mean, the way that we measure life in general is heartbeat.
	And if the heart stops...
	Then the person is considered dead.
	However, of course, there are, when you're old, there are external measures to keep your heart going.
	And then it could be brainwaves, brain activity, which comes a little bit later.
	But of course, you can't build a heart unless something's alive beforehand.
	This is the sort of almost infinite regression thing, right?
	I mean, from a biological standpoint, life begins at conception.
	Because everything that comes later has to have that conception ahead of time.
	And if you have an antecedent cause, you can't just say the heartbeat doesn't appear on its own.
	Obviously, though, your cells are alive, too.
	Obviously, though, your cells are alive.
	Your sperm cells are alive.
	Yes, the sperm cells don't lead to anything else.
	The sperm cells are alive, but they don't lead to anything else, in that when you cut your hair or you cut your fingernails, they're still alive, in a sense, for a little bit of time, but they don't lead to anything else, and there's no capacity of them leading to anything else on their own.
	I would say that that is my body, my choice in a sense, right?
	I mean, the sperm is disposable because it can't lead to anything without the egg.
	So I think, though, that because we have this paradigm of laws and prisons and judges and courts and all of that, we don't have a good mechanism.
	Law is just a big, giant club.
	And it's fine for things like, I don't know, immediate self-defense, rape, murder, and so on.
	Okay, those are things where a big, giant club is appropriate.
	Someone is running at you with a knife.
	You can hit them with a big, giant club or shoot them or whatever in self-defense.
	Or at least you used to be able to.
	And so for relatively simple moral issues, you can understand that the state – and the state was developed for that because, of course, the state was developed and laws were developed when simply opposition to violence and fairly obvious fraud was its major goal.
	There was no such thing as abortion for most of human history.
	And so – I mean there were attempts and so on, but there was no particular way to do it medically – So is the law a good way to deal with the question of life and death and birth and abortion?
	I don't think that it is. Now, what I do think is the case, though, is that there are times when Birth control is going to fail.
	I mean, it's very rare. It's very rare.
	But birth control is going to fail.
	There is going to be a woman who doesn't want to keep her child.
	Now, the way that it works in the law is a woman can take a child who's been born.
	She can take that child in America, I think, maybe in other places as well.
	She can just take that child and drop it off at a hospital or a police station or a fire station or any sort of official guy in uniform place.
	And no questions asked, the baby will be taken off her hands and placed into adoption.
	Now, the adoption thing is a whole mess right now.
	So for every baby who's born, who's not wanted by the mother or can't be kept by the mother, there are over 30 families who want to adopt that baby.
	I mean, talk about a mismatch between supply and demand.
	And I hate reducing babies to a sort of economics equation, but But it's better than then ending up as medical waste, right?
	So we'll just put the economic blinkers on for the moment.
	So in a free society, what would we do?
	Well, we'd say, look, there are women who have an excess of fertility in that they have children that they don't want.
	There are other women or couples who have a deficiency of fertility, like 10% of married couples have significant trouble conceiving, but they really want babies.
	So here we have people who have babies that they can't keep or don't want.
	And here we have people who are desperate for babies.
	So finding a way to make adoption less onerous, trying to find a way that maybe the woman can be compensated for the discomfort of pregnancy.
	Oh, but we're paying women to give babies themselves.
	That's human trafficking. It's like, well, I mean, how do you think slavery ended?
	I mean, the British Empire ended slavery by buying all the slaves and paying off the slave owners and didn't even finish paying that debt off until this millennia.
	So we quite often will pay to free people.
	And so you wouldn't want to make it a profitable thing for the woman, like $10 million a baby would be a bad idea because that would then generate its own supply.
	But if you could find a way to balance the people who desperately want children but can't have them with the people who have children but can't keep them or don't want them, there's a way to ease that transition.
	I don't know how it would work because I'm not an economist, but without a doubt, there's a better way to do it than shaking the giant fist of the law at people and, of course, the adoption situation is really complex and horrible and expensive and time-consuming.
	Making that easier would be a way of getting babies from the people who don't want them or can't keep them into the houses and homes of couples who do want them and will treat them well.
	I mean, there are fewer better parents than people who've been trying to have kids for a long time but haven't been able to because they really do treasure the existence of the children.
	They really are in hot pursuit of the joys of parenting.
	So there's a way to solve this problem.
	I don't think it's particularly practical under the current system, but I think in a truly free society, this mismatch of supply and demand would be solved to the benefit, I think, of everyone.
	And right now, Roe v.
	Wade is a step, I think, in the right direction.
	But I mean, it's a long way to go, I think, until the children are protected in a way I think that would satisfy the most strict moralists among us.
	Now, the feminists claimed Roe v.
	Wade as a victory 50 years ago, probably one of their biggest victories ever, if not the biggest.
	Obviously, a lot of them were very, very, very angry about Roe v.
	Wade being overturned, much to my enjoyment, my amusement.
	Do you view the Roe v.
	Wade being a return as a major blow to feminism?
	Do you see feminism, maybe as its wishful thinking, but on a decline in terms of its stranglehold on culture and on politics?
	Trump also perhaps being elected was a blow to that, but I think Roe v.
	Wade was probably even bigger. So do you have views on how Roe v.
	Wade has impacted feminism and its stranglehold on culture?
	Yeah, I mean... For those of us who've been like us, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners, for those of us who've been in this cultural fight for, you know, for me again, for four decades, for those of us who've been in this cultural fight, It's always darkest before the dawn is one of these things that I think has been kind of elusive to look for these kinds of changes in the culture.
	So, you know, you can fool some of the people some of the time, you can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.
	Ideology leads to the opposite of its intended goals.
	That's how you know it's ideology, right?
	So we had a welfare state that was supposed to eliminate poverty.
	It's entrenched and exacerbated poverty.
	You have feminism that was supposed to make women happier, and women are unhappier, as you've pointed out.
	Decade by decade, women's self-reported misery index is going through the roof.
	So at some point, this is true for most people in life, at some point, the accumulated evidence begins to tip against the artificial structure of ideology.
	You know, if you say, oh, well, if I live on a steady diet, if I'm on the cheesecake diet, I'm on the steady diet of cheesecake.
	And you eat a whole bunch of cheesecake and you gain weight.
	At some point, your weight gain is going to, however committed you are to the ideology of the cheesecake diet.
	And it's moral and it helps the poor and, you know, whatever, it rains food down on the hungry.
	At some point you can say, yeah, but I'm seriously getting fat here.
	So when evidence accumulates to the opposite of ideology, that's where choice begins to arise in society.
	Now, I think people like us, we want to provide the intellectual ammunition, right?
	For people to question their own ideology before sometimes unrecoverable disasters strike, right?
	So you don't want, you know, you don't want people to smoke and smoke and smoke to the point where they get lung cancer and only then question smoking.
	You want to give them the evidence that lung cancer could result from, or is likely to result from smoking.
	So at some point, the accumulated evidence becomes so bad.
	That people begin to foundationally question what's going on in the world, right?
	I mean, Biden getting COVID despite being quadruple-vaxxed and all that.
	People are going to like, wait a minute, but we were told something different.
	I think it was about a year ago that Biden said if you get the vaccine, you won't get COVID, you won't spread it.
	So as the evidence begins to accumulate, people at an unconscious level, like whatever they might say at the top of their brains, I'm still fully committed to her.
	But deep down, their illicit brains are like, I don't know about this one.
	This is not looking good.
	Something is not working out here.
	Something is not going right.
	And it is that point where the ideology begins to fracture.
	I do think that we are at that point in the West at the moment where the accumulated evidence of the disasters of particular ideology, the ideology that says, we're going to divide society into groups with different outcomes.
	And we're going to ascribe all the differences in those outcomes to often white male patriarchy or whatever it's going to be.
	Capitalism. Somebody sent me someone's tweet the other day.
	It was a woman who said, you know, it's not right that I go to work for eight or nine hours a day and that I have four hours a day for myself, some of which is used preparing for the next day.
	This isn't any kind of life.
	And, you know, of course, underneath it's like capitalism, capitalism, capitalism.
	But there were some people saying, well, yeah, but you're paying half your income in taxes.
	So... That's one of the main reasons you don't have time for yourself, right?
	So people are beginning to push back.
	Ideology is a strange structure that grows in the brain when limitations are removed from life.
	Why do we need economics?
	Because all human desires are infinite and all resources are finite.
	There's no philosophy of the property of the air that you breathe because essentially it's an infinite resource.
	Everyone can be breathing the same air.
	I mean, not in terms of air quality or pollution or something, but where resources are infinite, you don't need morality, you don't need reason, you don't need to limit your appetites.
	I mean, you just go around breathing air.
	Nobody goes on an air diet and says, man, I've got to find a way to breathe less air, you know?
	So... When resources are perceived to be infinite, our sense of morality, our sense of hierarchy, our sense of prioritization all begins to diminish, right?
	So you think of these sort of very primitive tribes.
	I was talking about this back in 2019 at the convention.
	Think about these primitive tribes where food is just ridiculously abundant relative to the population because the population is usually whittled down by disease or things like that.
	So you got, you know, coconuts, you got mangoes, you got fish in the bay.
	I mean, there's no... So you don't really need property rights for food because it's just so easy to get a meal and so on.
	But where things get scarce is to look at Northern Europe or Siberia where the East Asians came about.
	Man, come February, it's pretty tough to get your food because you got to prepare it, you got to plan for it.
	And so you need property rights because of scarcity.
	Now, the problem with our system as it stands, I mean, one of the major problems...
	It's that we've lost all sense of scarcity.
	And this really started in the 1960s when you had, under LBJ's Great Society, you had massive expansions in the welfare state, along with massive expansions in the military-industrial complex.
	So when I was a kid growing up, World War II was still hanging heavy.
	I was born 21 years after the end of World War II. Boy, that makes me feel young.
	But it was really hanging heavy.
	And there was something I remember hearing about when I was a kid.
	Guns or butter? Guns or butter?
	What do you want in society? Guns or butter, right?
	So if you spend more on the war, you've got to ration people's consumption of consumer goods.
	And you would get these ration books.
	But that all cracked with central banking, with money printing, with counterfeiting of modern currency.
	So now people don't have any cost-benefit analysis.
	And when you don't have any cost-benefit analysis, all you have left is virtue signaling.
	And this is why everybody's just addicted to talking about being good rather than actually doing good and measuring the effects.
	Have we actually done good?
	Because this perception of infinite resources has really decayed our sense of morality and virtue and the need to make tough decisions, have tough love with our own impulses.
	And to sort of bring it back to abortion, okay, so the infinite resource called consequence-free sex has taken a bit of a curtailment.
	And as you can see, when the perception of infinite resources or the existence of infinite resources takes a curtailment, people up their moral games.
	Oh, I can't get easy access to abortions?
	I need to choose better men and I need to not have sex with bad guys.
	Going on a sex strike immediately.
	People will up their virtue when resources become limited and our current system of central banking and money printing and so on.
	Were lockdowns and the vaccine and social distancing, was this the very best possible way to deal with COVID? Well, I doubt it.
	Because if you said to people, okay, I'm going to take $10,000 from every member of your family and work to try and develop this vaccine, which may or may not work, and blah, blah, blah, people would say, is there a cheaper alternative?
	Because, you know, that's pretty expensive.
	And, oh, and by the way, you know, you can't sue anybody if there's damages from it, their immunity from any lawsuits.
	I think people would say, can we look for a cheaper solution?
	But when you have infinite resources, money, printing, and debt...
	You can just do anything you want, and anybody who opposes you is just weirdly selfish.
	In the same way that if money is perceived to be as common as air, if you say, oh, we've got to limit that person's air, well, you're just somebody who wants to harm someone.
	Why would you want to do that? Air is infinite.
	Why would you want to restrict someone's access to air?
	It's the same thing with money and debt and central banking and counterfeiting and so on.
	So I think as the system begins to really hit up against its limitations, And you can't just keep printing and creating forever.
	Historically, it never has worked and never will work for the longest period of time.
	We will start to see people having to begin to make difficult decisions.
	And when you have to begin to make difficult decisions, oh, look, philosophy becomes of great value.
	But philosophy doesn't have value if there is the perception, and I can understand why people do have that perception of infinite resources.
	It really corrodes our capacity to have any kind of strictness or virtue, really.
	Yeah, in any sense of reality, you get detached from it.
	I've talked with Professor Janice Fiamengo, if you know her, she's also Canadian.
	I think she lives on the West Coast.
	But she talks about decadence and how the West is basically drowning in decadence, and America is drowning in decadence particularly, with the money printing and the debt and the endless military power, which is now waning, especially under Emperor Biden.
	But yeah, it's decadence. And I would think, too, that this happened to Rome.
	I mean, decadence, you get so wealthy, you get so powerful, you get so arrogant.
	I was thinking about that when America pulled out of Afghanistan under that total failure back in 2021.
	I mean, what arrogance did it take?
	The first six months may be understandable going after bin Laden, but he eventually left pretty early on.
	And then we stayed there for 20 years.
	For what? And this is also...
	Afghanistan, of course, had the notorious title of the Graveyard of Empires.
	And America is coming up on 250 years old.
	And we're going to go into the Graveyard of Empires?
	Did anyone in the military or in command think about that for two seconds?
	Is this really a good idea to go to the Graveyard of Empires for 20 years and blow trillions of dollars?
	Well, they didn't owe trillions of dollars.
	They transferred trillions of dollars.
	Blowing would be one thing.
	Transferring is a whole different matter.
	And yeah, I want to see a bill and I want to have a choice.
	That's what it comes down to for me in society, right?
	Oh, we're going to make these hardcore drugs illegal.
	It's like, okay, what's the bill for that?
	And do I have a choice? Because if I don't get a bill and I don't have a choice, I have no idea if anyone's making the right decision.
	This is an old argument from the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises.
	He says, look, in the absence of a price mechanism, you have no idea what the value of anything is.
	because value is subjective, right?
	So, you know, the war on drugs, I mean, I did this math years ago, but it's like $20 billion and so on.
	It's like, okay, is that the best way to do it?
	Is that cost-effective?
	Well, nobody gets a bill and nobody has a choice.
	So we can't look for cheaper alternatives.
	I mean, if you really want to end people's addiction to drugs, if you really want to diminish the demand for drugs, we all know how to do that scientifically.
	You simply raise children reasonably and peacefully and they won't end up as addicts.
	Are you telling me parents shouldn't beat their children and you shouldn't beat people you love?
	What a wild radical you are.
	Clearly I should be the platform for promoting peaceful parenting.
	So, yeah, scientifically, psychologically, biologically, medically, we know how to remove most dysfunctions in society.
	There was a study done many, many years ago now by Kaiser Permanente, a big healthcare provider, And they enrolled tens of thousands of people in a healthcare study and they ran them through what's called an adverse childhood experience survey, ACE for short.
	And it's a little sexist.
	It only deals with male violence, not female violence, but it asks you a series of questions about how rough your childhood was.
	Were there substance abusers?
	Were you beaten? Was anybody ending up in prison?
	Did you not get healthcare or food at times?
	So your difficulties as a child, were you molested?
	These kinds of questions, right?
	And they said, okay, let's track people over the course of their lives and rate their mental and physical health status and outcomes and correlate it to their childhood adversity.
	And boom, I got a whole series.
	People can watch this called Bomb and the Brain.
	You can just do it. FDRpodcast.com.
	You can just do a search for it. The videos will be below.
	And I interviewed one of the people who was key in the study on the show.
	Massive increases. Every single time you had an adverse childhood experience, you had an increased promiscuity, addiction, heart disease, cancers, severely abused childhood.
	And again, I think absence of like therapy and dealing with the issues and so on.
	It took an average of 20 years off people's lifespans because of stress and dysfunction and bad health choices, obesity, overeating, dysfunction of just about any kind, divorce went up, bullying went up, criminality went up enormously depending on adverse childhood experiences, particularly for men. So we know how to cure most of the ills, the protection from which is sold to us by the powers that be.
	We know how to cure them. We know how to prevent them from ever coming into being.
	But if we do prevent thoseills from ever coming into being, if we cut criminality by 90 to 95%, if we cut drug addiction, promiscuity, all of these things by massive factors, well, we don't need the powers that be nearly as much because we don't have nearly as much danger in our lives. we don't need the powers that be nearly as much Which is one of the reasons why when you promote peaceful parenting, people get mad at you who have a lot of power because you're undermining the danger of the delivery of the danger that they sell their protection for.
	So, yeah, we know all of this stuff.
	And so do we grab people who are self-medicating the results of an abusive childhood?
	They're in constant psychological torture from their abused childhood.
	So they reach for heroin.
	They reach for crack.
	They reach for meth.
	They reach for whatever, right?
	Maybe even marijuana.
	So they're self-medicating because they're in chronic pain because of their history of abuse as children.
	Do we grab those people and throw their ass in jail, thus perpetuating the cycle and disrupting their family and continuing the problem?
	Or do we say that's really tragic?
	I don't want to put you on the welfare state because that's just going to put more money into the hands of the drug dealers.
	But we do really need to deal with the effects of your childhood and we need to train the next generation of parents on how to raise children who aren't going to end up this way.
	That would be a very cost-effective way to do it.
	Because people who are raised in an abusive environment cost five to ten times as much in society as they ever produce in value, right?
	Because you've got to chase after them with the law.
	They tend to be dysfunctional and underproducing.
	They don't kick much back into the tax system and so on.
	So they're very expensive, very costly.
	What is the cheapest and most efficient and moral and effective way to deal with dysfunction inside?
	It's through parenting, through peaceful parenting.
	This has been known for decades, and yet it still doesn't seem to be much of a thing, which I think is really tragic.
	But again, I should also look at the positives that I've helped, I don't know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of families get exposure to these ideas.
	My inbox is regularly full of people who are like, hey, man, I chose to have kids and I'm raising them peacefully because of your arguments.
	And so at least we have that option or this option part of this conversation to get the That's a white swan about black swan event that we weren't expecting.
	I guess like the Roe v. Wade thing.
	Who knew that there was going to be this opportunity to get these conversations out into the world?
	What a wonderful thing.
	And I do thank you again, Anthony, for giving me access to your audience to make this case.
	Yeah, 100%. They're loving you, man.
	Everybody, it's not just my fans in 21 Studios.
	It's people on YouTube, men on YouTube in particular.
	They love you, man, and they miss you.
	And you're still around. You're not dead.
	I mean, I'm one website over.
	I mean, you can just go freedomain.com slash connect.
	You can follow me.
	You can subscribe. I'm still doing my thing.
	And for the people who want philosophy, okay, I will tell you a story of demonic possession.
	Are you ready? Okay, My Story of Demonic Possession by S.B. Molyneux.
	My Story of Demonic Possession was...
	Politics can be kind of seductive, right?
	So I did a lot of sort of the personal philosophy stuff.
	I got heavily involved in politics, and there were some pluses, some minuses.
	Politics is a dangerous game.
	I didn't learn from my antecedents, right?
	So Plato tried—I didn't obviously run for office or anything like that, but Plato got involved in politics.
	And the end result of Plato trying to run for office in Syracuse was that he was captured, falsely accused, imprisoned, sold into slavery.
	And it was only because one of his former students happened to notice him on the slave block that he got bought and returned to some kind of liberty.
	So philosophy and politics, matter and antimatter, fire and ice, whatever you want to call it, matter and – the thing and its explosive opposite – But it is kind of seductive in a way because philosophy has very long-term benefits, right?
	So, as I said, the 500-year window.
	Politics is a much shorter-term cost-benefit thing, which is why the blowback tends to be more intense.
	So I got seduced by that fishnet stocking, swinging purse, pouty-lipped vixen of politics.
	And I'm not saying I have any regrets.
	I think there was some important stuff to get out there.
	But I'm back to the source, the origin story of me, which is talking to people about philosophy and how it can directly help their personal lives.
	There's a longer payback for that.
	You know, there'll be people who will be emailing me on my deathbed saying, hey, my parents raised me peacefully because of what you did.
	Thank you so much. And so on.
	Whereas politics is a little bit more immediate.
	You know, politics is the heroine.
	Philosophy is like the dieting and working out, which takes a long time to produce some significant benefits.
	So, yeah, that was my story of being tempted by the dark mistress of politics and then returning to the golden goddess of philosophy.
	Yeah, I mean, I follow that a lot.
	I understand it. I mean, even Ayn Rand put political philosophy pretty far down the chain of philosophy, from metaphysics to epistemology to moral philosophy.
	Her politics in particular, and this is why she was so angry with libertarians in her time, she felt that they were stealing a lot of her ideas and objectivism.
	And not connecting the dots for how she arrived at these conclusions.
	So she considered these a lot of libertarian stuff, even anarchism to a sense.
	Her criticism was that these are floating abstractions.
	They weren't grounded in objective reality.
	They weren't grounded in reason. They were too far down the line as a starting point.
	But to that end, political philosophy, like you're saying, deals directly in the application of force and the management of violence.
	So yeah, it is very immediate.
	But also, that's why I think it is the best long-term solution to focus on parenting and moral philosophy, even epistemology, getting people to focus on reason and evidence.
	A lot of people, too, that's why I don't...
	I think I've been cognizant of what you're saying.
	And my company and my channel does deal in politics a little bit, but it's never been like a main primary focus.
	And part of it is I don't want to get kicked off the internet like you did.
	I would like to learn from, I don't think what you did was a mistake, but obviously there's consequences.
	So I'm going to speak the truth where I can, but also focus my efforts where I think it's like you are the most important.
	I want to focus, in my view too, that's not only philosophy, but masculinity and femininity.
	But I'm happy to support two other issues like moral philosophy and peaceful parenting.
	My view, too, is that I realized that it's kind of a fortune cookie philosophy soundbite.
	But with peaceful parenting, my view is that basically you should not hit people you love.
	And if you do, you're a fraud.
	Like, if you love this person, why would you make a fist and beat this person?
	Like, you're either a fraud or you're crazy or you're stupid or something.
	These are kind of crude arguments, but...
	But to Ayn Rand, of course, you know, the big challenge with Rand...
	She is, I mean, a total brilliant human being and a stone genius on just about every level.
	I mean, the idea that she would come to America fleeing communism in Russia and then learn English and become such a master of English that she wrote one of the most influential novels or series of novels ever penned.
	That is an incredible feat.
	I mean, imagine I moved to Russia and write one of their seminal works of literature in Russian, which I didn't learn growing.
	I mean, it's an amazing thing that she did.
	But the challenge with Ayn Rand was the last 40 years, right?
	How do you sustain it?
	So she wrote when she finished Atlas Shrugged in 1957 after working on it for 13 years, right?
	Gets published.
	And then she faces the withering blast of hatred and hostility for her ideas.
	And I think that shocked her.
	And there's some contemporaneous evidence from people around her that this was, in fact, the case.
	That she began to realize just how desperately poor the cultural situation was.
	And then she never wrote another book, other than some nonfiction, but she never wrote another book for the remaining 40-plus years of her life.
	She died, I think, in 1980.
	81, I think. 81, sorry, a long time, right?
	So it was at 44 years since the publication of Atlas Shrugged.
	So that's a long time to not be productive, to not express your joy.
	And being able, like when you have an effect on the world and you run up against some really dark forces in the world, the challenge of how you continue to do what you're doing is, I think, one of the biggest challenges.
	If you never confront the evils that are in the world, you can kind of sail along, but then they kind of swallow you whole, right?
	But if you do confront them, then how do you continue with enthusiasm in what it is that you're doing?
	I don't know that Ayn Rand found her way forward from that particular challenge.
	And that's one of them. She didn't have kids and so on.
	She was rumored to have an abortion, but I don't think there's any proof of that.
	But to her credit, though, she did go on a pretty large or pretty long-term TV, major TV appearances.
	Johnny Carson, she went on Phil Donahue twice as late.
	I think once in early 70s and once in the late 70s.
	So she did do some public speaking on major TV shows, and she was specifically doing that because she was so concerned about the state of the culture.
	And she thought that she should do some TV appearances and radio and stuff like that.
	And she also worked on a screenplay, I think, for an Atlas Shrugged TV series, a miniseries.
	I never finished, obviously.
	Well, and I mean, that's a couple of TV shows in 44 years is not exactly putting your nose to the grindstone.
	Again, however brilliant she was and all of that.
	And I think then she wanted to surround herself with people who were like-minded.
	And this, of course, was where the whole cult accusations and all that came from.
	And it is tough when you look at the forces arrayed against...
	Liberty and progress in voluntary human interactions, it can be pretty daunting for sure.
	And then that's when you need to sort of extend your horizon.
	And you also need to...
	I mean, this is my...
	I'm not telling anyone what to do.
	This is how it sort of works for me.
	But there is a common sense element to human consciousness.
	This is what we were talking about earlier, the accumulated evidence of the unconscious that challenges the structures that are imposed through propaganda in the mind, right?
	Because we all have these big questions and answers.
	You know, like there was some guy, somebody sent me some tweet about a guy who was saying that the women's basketball association, that women players get paid way less than the men.
	And that's unfair.
	It's sexist.
	It's unjust.
	And then, you know, somebody underneath and it was the top reply posted.
	Well, yeah, but they make like one twentieth the income of the NBA.
	So, of course, they're going to get paid less.
	So there is a certain amount of people are just constantly trying to divide us and set us against each other and say that all differences are due to bigotry and blah, blah, blah.
	And then there is this common sense thing which does arise within people.
	There's a pendulum, right?
	There's a pendulum that the ideologues will push the pendulum way, way over and try and get people to go to the extremes.
	But there is a weight and a momentum to human consciousness.
	I mean, we have to be a self-correcting species.
	Otherwise, we would have self-destructed thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ago.
	We are a self-correcting...
	Now, there's a lot of suffering in that self-correction, but that can only be managed, not eliminated.
	So I think that, back to our conversation about Roe v.
	Wade, I think that there is...
	An inevitable empiricism to human consciousness that you can only push people too far into the ideological unrealities of resentment and guilt and blame and self-hatred and so on.
	And at some point there does seem to be a reassertion of our base sense data.
	Is it working? Are people happier?
	Is the system sustainable?
	I mean, I think people are getting this very uneasy sense these days You know, the medical establishment has shot itself in the foot in terms of credibility.
	Economists have shot themselves in the foot with regards to credibility.
	I mean, in America, you guys are facing inflation rates that will halve people's income in seven years.
	And this was all, oh, it's just temporary.
	So I think Oh, and inflation's good for you.
	Didn't you hear the news? Look, expertise, right?
	Because you've got to think for yourself. And the people who claim expertise who've been proven wrong time and again in just about every conceivable situation, the people who claim expertise who've been proven wrong are opening up huge windows for people to start thinking for themselves and not outsource their thinking to politically motivated hack jobs.
	That's a very fertile place for people to begin to return to reason.
	And I do believe that pendulum is coming back.
	I'm so sorry. You were saying something and I totally talked over you.
	I was just a quick joke.
	I don't even know what the hell I said. Oh yeah, they were saying, the redhead one, Paskey or whatever the spokeswoman was, she was saying, you know, inflation, first inflation doesn't exist, then it does exist, but it's not so bad.
	Then it's good for you. CNN was running headlines and shit.
	Here's why it's good for you.
	Ten reasons, you know, blah, blah, blah.
	I mean, it's the level, the propaganda, yeah, it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.
	And it's a shit show now.
	It's a cartoon. It's this non-stop fictional narrative of everything bad is good for you, everything good for you is bad, and all this stuff.
	Back to the suit pyramid.
	And the question I think people have, and we can maybe drop on the topic of forgiveness, I want to run your show for you, but I think the question people have is, you know, society is really divided between those who are looking at the wall of Plato's cave, like at the reinterpretations of reality by ideologues presented often in the mainstream media or mainstream social media, and then people who are actually sort of looking at the facts, looking at reason, looking at evidence.
	We're really divided. And the big question, I think, for a lot of people is...
	Okay, do I continue my pursuit of truth or do I go back and save people who are stuck in propaganda?
	I don't have any particular answers.
	It's a very personal question, but a lot of the emails I get are, you know, man, people are just around me.
	They're just parroting talking points from people who don't know any sort of facts or reason or evidence.
	And I'm I'm woken up and so on.
	And do I continue on my journey to promote truth, to gain a new community, to inspire others?
	Or do I go back and try and wrestle people free from the demons of obfuscation known as the modern media?
	That's a tough question, but I think that's kind of facing people a lot these days.
	Yeah. Now you mentioned forgiveness.
	I do want to focus on that as a final topic for today's show.
	Specifically, what are your philosophic views on forgiveness?
	And I could be even more specific.
	It's not just him, but Jesse Lee Peterson was well known and many others in self-improvement Twitter, kind of on YouTube.
	There's a wide range of people, religious, secular, whatever.
	They use forgiveness as kind of like this magical pill, like a magical tool.
	Forgive your parents, forgive your mama, forgive your daddy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Now, in some cases, there is no abuse, right?
	It's some feminist who didn't get a pony as a kid, and feminists have propagandized her that she should hate her father for not getting all these being spoiled, growing up, or something like that.
	I'm not talking about that.
	I'm talking about there's a lot of people, like you mentioned, that were raised very poorly by single mothers and otherwise just abusive parents, male or female, father or mother.
	And you're supposed to just forgive, forgive, forgive, forgive your ex, forgive your mama, forgive your daddy.
	And that will set you free and has all these magical benefits.
	They never connect the dots for how this happens, but it's like this is magic pill.
	Not a red pill, it's a magic pill that will fix everything, cure all.
	Rainbow pill. So what is your view on that from self-improvement gurus and otherwise who promote forgiveness as a magical fix-all?
	Do you have a stance on that?
	Yeah, I mean, I actually had this debate with Jesse Lee Peterson shortly after my father died, which was a couple of years ago now.
	So I've had some time to really mull this one over.
	So justice is obviously a very essential philosophical concept, and justice is honestly paying what you owe to people.
	Now, there are people who've done you wrong, who earn your forgiveness, right?
	Right.
	So somebody has said something mean to you and then comes up to you and says the next day, man, I'm I'm sorry.
	That was that was really unkind of me.
	It was wrong.
	I don't believe that.
	I'm sorry.
	I've told everyone who heard it that that I'm sorry and that I'm wrong.
	And I'm really going to try and figure out we can have a conversation if it's worth it for you.
	Really going to try and figure out why I said what I said.
	And I really feel bad about it.
	Should you forgive that person?
	Well, if you have a longstanding relationship, they've done the right thing and they've given you restitution in terms of combating whatever falsehoods might have been perceived about you.
	Okay, that person has done a good deal to earn your forgiveness.
	So I think because they've earned it, you should pay it.
	You should forgive that person.
	Now, there are other people who've done you wrong, who double down, who escalate, who whatever, right?
	And never apologize and never retract and never try to make restitution.
	Those people are not in the same moral category, just logically.
	That would be like if you're running some online business and somebody wants to buy something from you and they send you $500 and the $500 check clears or the visa thing clears, then you owe them whatever you're going to send them, an iPad or whatever.
	You owe them that because they paid you and their money is good and you've got the money, you're keeping the money, so you owe them the iPad.
	But there are other people who send you a check and the check bounces.
	Do you still owe them an iPad?
	Well, no. I mean, I guess you could choose to send one, but that's charity then.
	It's not something that you owe someone in an honorable standpoint.
	So people who earn your forgiveness and do as much as they can, and also what they've done is something that can be made whole.
	I mean, if they, I don't know, cut your arm off or something when you can't regrow a new arm, so restitution is kind of not possible for that kind of thing.
	That's an important point, if we can pause on that for a second.
	Some people, when they throw out the, you know, forgiveness is magic, take this magic pill.
	They seem to whitewash the idea that there are unforgivable acts that some people do.
	Murder is an obvious one, but also things like job molestation, sexual abuse, horrendous physical violence from parents or other family members or whoever.
	And it's like these things don't exist to you.
	Like someone should forgive their mother who molested them as a kid or their father.
	There's an extremeness to the idea that forgiveness is a magical fix-all that they just don't even want to acknowledge, I think, when people throw this stuff out there and advocate it.
	Well, and the problem with forgiving people who are unrepentant is it doesn't drive the narcissists and sociopaths out of your life.
	So you've got to have standards, boundaries, right?
	Standards, basically standards, right?
	And if forgiveness is like fiat currency, you can just borrow and print and hand it out, then there's no limitation on your forgiveness, which means that people will have no limitation on doing you wrong.
	So if you have in your life, look, if you do me significant wrong and you make no attempts to make amends, I will talk with you about it.
	I will sit down and reason with you.
	I have like a two or three max conversations.
	So if someone's done me significant wrong, I will sit down and talk to them about it and say what they did wrong and why I think it's wrong and so on.
	If they double down or escalate or refuse to apologize, then I'm done with them.
	It doesn't mean I'm going to spend the rest of my life cursing them and mad at them every day, but it's like, I'm sorry, this is just not a situation where I can feel security in.
	And so the people who've earned your forgiveness, and look, we're all going to step on each other's toes.
	I have to apologize. You have to apologize.
	We're all going to step on each other's toes.
	Nobody's perfect. So this is just a natural part of life.
	And if people earn your forgiveness, you have to treat them differently from the people who've not earned your forgiveness.
	Because then you're not giving any benefit or rewards to people who are acting honorably and justly in your life.
	You have to reward people who do the right thing in your life.
	I mean, if a friend borrows $1,000 from you and then pays you back when he says he's going to pay you back, great, wonderful, right?
	But if he borrows $1,000 from you and then ghosts you, won't return your calls, avoids you, never pays you back, you can't treat these two people the same because one has acted honorably and the other one has acted dishonorably.
	And you have to not treat people both the same in the same way that if somebody's check clears, you owe them the goods you've promised them.
	And if their check doesn't clear you, you can't treat these people the same.
	That's unjust.
	That's wrong.
	If I can reframe what you're saying.
	Who do wrong and not rewarding or in a sense punishing the people and if people say, oh, well, he'll just forgive everyone no matter what so I don't have to treat him that well.
	You're actually inviting and subsidizing more bad behavior in society and that can't ever be a good thing.
	Yeah, if I can reframe what you're saying, it's almost like I kind of missed this previously thinking about it.
	There's an element of moral relativism by dishing out these forgiveness to people who don't always deserve it, don't even ask for it in a lot of cases.
	That's something else I noticed when people promote and advocate this kind of hyper-forgiveness attitude.
	It's like, forgive somebody who was egregiously dishonorable to you or abusive, and they're not even asking for forgiveness.
	They haven't even done anything.
	To repent or to make amends, to advocate for a just solution to it.
	So it seems like a lot of your focus seems to be that there is, if I can accurately describe it, there's an element of moral relativism to it, and there's an injustice to it.
	It's a disrespect for justice and for honor.
	It's also kind of drug dealing, and it's a strong way to put it, but you know how the mantra goes.
	It's like, well, man, if you don't forgive people, regardless of what they've done, whether they've earned it or not, if you don't forgive people, you will be cursed with misery for the rest of your life.
	And you will regret.
	And when that person dies, you will regret.
	It's really almost like a voodoo curse.
	It's like I'm going to give you the drug of dopamine if you just go around forgiving everyone, whether they've earned it or not.
	And I'm going to curse you with unhappiness and misery and regret for the rest of your life if you don't.
	That's not an argument. That's just a threat and a bribe.
	That's not a moral situation.
	We talked about taking some cues from the audience if you want to fire up some.
	Yeah, there's a couple. Yeah, we'll go through.
	But yeah, one last thing is I think maybe if you hit on this, there's almost like a special pleading to what they say, especially when it's parents, right?
	Forgive your parents. Oh, but it's your parents.
	It's your blood. It's your sister.
	It's your brother, whoever. So that kind of came to mind too when you're kind of going through this.
	There's just a variety of logical fallacies basically they use to kind of advocate this.
	Yeah, we've got some questions. If family is so important, why do they mistreat you?
	You've got to treat your family the best and give them forgiveness.
	Even if family is so important, it's where the greatest moral good is, then why would they mistreat you?
	I mean, if your parents don't Think that family is important enough to treat you well.
	Why do you think that family is so important enough by their standards that you have to give unrepentant people?
	Sorry, go ahead. No, it's a love thing.
	If your mother loved you, why did she make a fist and beat you in the face?
	There was nothing disciplinary about that.
	Question from Red Pill Dude.
	Welcome to the channel, Red Pill Dude.
	What does he think about Sam Harris's free will argument?
	Are you familiar? Obviously, I'm sure you know who Sam Harris is.
	Have you interviewed him? No, I've never interviewed him, but...
	Free will is something that is an emergent property of consciousness.
	So yes, the argument from the materialists is everything's mechanical, everything's physical, you have an atom, you have stronger weak atomic forces, and everything's dominoes, right?
	So you don't really have a choice, you have the illusion of a choice.
	We invent choice after we have impulses and consider ourselves to have free will.
	So this is a Results of purely materialistic interpretation of reality.
	That there's no ghost in the machine, that we're all just atoms doing our thing based upon physical forces that came before just a bunch of dominoes.
	And it's insane.
	I know it's not really an argument. It's morally insane.
	It's scientifically insane.
	Because there are such things as emergent properties.
	So no individual carbon atom can get up, walk around, scratch its balls and make an argument.
	Like no individual atom can do that.
	But human beings can because we have an emergent property called life, which is self-generated, self-motivated motor behavior, right?
	So we have this thing called life which is possessed by no individual atom but in a congregation of atoms in the right biochemical soup you get this emergent property called life.
	We have an emergent property called free will.
	Free will is our capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
	And that's it because it has to be something different from what animals do because it has to be something specific to human beings because we don't consider human animals to have free will.
	So if you can compare any proposed standard argument or any proposed future action to an ideal standard, that is our capacity for free will.
	Now, with Sam, people like Sam Harris, what they do is they say there's nothing special or different about the human brain compared to everything else.
	The weather is complex and you can't necessarily predict everything about the weather, but nobody thinks that the weather has free will.
	So what the determinists are saying is human consciousness is exactly the same as every other material thing in the universe that doesn't have free will.
	Just because it's complex and somewhat unpredictable doesn't mean that it's free will.
	However, the idea that someone like Sam Harris would go out and argue with the weather and try and convince the weather that it didn't have free will, Or argue with a television or argue with a wristwatch or a tree.
	That would be the actions of a crazy person.
	So you can't at the same time say the human brain is exactly the same as everything else in the universe.
	But to debate anything but the human brain would be insane.
	You're automatically saying that the human brain is incredibly different from everything else in the universe.
	To argue with a dog is crazy to argue with a human being perfectly sane.
	Therefore, the human brain has to have something different.
	And the determinists say, we have an ideal standard called determinism, and you should abandon free will to conform to the ideal standard.
	But if free will is the comparison of proposed actions, your future beliefs, to an ideal standard, it's a self-detonating argument.
	The moment you try to change someone's mind, you are accepting that they have free will.
	So I don't accept it at all.
	Okay. Well put. Well spoken.
	Another question. Here it is.
	From Don Johnson, who has a dog avatar.
	Welcome to the channel, Don. How can we pragmatically stop the proliferation of critical theory into every aspect of our society?
	I'm pretty sure he means critical race theory, but he didn't specify.
	Yeah. I mean, I'm not an expert on critical race theory, but I think that...
	Mainstream, particularly government education, has tipped to the point of propaganda where I can't imagine a situation where it's beneficial for the child to stay in that environment.
	So one of the problems with education is that everyone thinks that school is kind of like it was when they were kids.
	But if you have kids when you're 30, you're a quarter century away from kindergarten.
	And boy, I tell you, in that quarter century, things have changed quite a bit.
	And one of the amazing things about the pandemic is with kids being Zoom, quote, schooled at home, parents have been like, wait, what?
	Did I just hear that right?
	Is that what you're learning? Is that what you're being taught?
	Because a lot of times, kids' education is kind of under the radar, partly by design.
	And so I think that a lot of parents are saying, wow, you know, that's really not good, what's being taught.
	That's really pretty toxic and dangerous.
	And so I do think that I've strongly encouraged people to look into alternatives to government schools ever since the beginning of the show.
	And that was more because they might learn might is right and some socialistic things.
	But now I think that the toxicity of mainstream education has become so high that you wouldn't let your kids play all day on the beach without sunscreen because the radiation is pretty toxic for their skin.
	Ideas that get into your head are even worse for you than radiation that falls on your skin.
	Well, in America, they're trying to teach seven-year-olds about butt sex and stuff like that.
	I mean, it's gotten really, really, really, really wild.
	I've always really...
	I dislike the government teaching just about anything, but in terms of sex education...
	There's almost nothing more wrong that is done in government schools than any, and this is true when I was younger too, any kind of sex education, that is a very personal, morally charged, foundational, cultural issue that should not be left to ideologues in the hands of the state.
	So yeah, I mean, get out of cities, get your kids out of government schools for sure.
	I think that would certainly be my advice.
	Do you homeschool your daughter?
	I know you have a daughter who's probably, yeah, nice.
	That's awesome. Yeah, I saw a video the other day on your Rumble.
	Isabella, right, is her name? Yeah.
	Yeah, that's awesome. She's like 14 now?
	She's great. She's going to be 14 this year.
	And, you know, I've been saying for many years that the purpose of parenting is to prepare you for the teen years when the, you know, the opposition kicks in and the hormones kick in and all of that.
	And, you know, she's just becoming even more delightful by the day.
	So I think if you do it right, you've got nothing to fear from the teen years.
	But I think if you, and particularly in the years one to five, if you weren't around, if you're negative, if you're destructive, if you're neglectful and so on, Man, there's a latency period from like, you know, 6 or 7 to 11 or 12 where things are pretty calm, but then, you know, these teen storms hit and you've got to be prepared.
	So, yeah, I think it's, I mean, as far as foundational parenting, I'm done and dusted.
	Like, I mean, this was all done years ago.
	Now there's a couple little tweaks here and there for both of us, right?
	But yeah, any sort of foundational parenting, it's really the first five years that count the most.
	Yeah. Yeah. Another question we got from Andrea Viola.
	As a woman who detests feminism and regularly speaks out about it, I believe it will have to be women standing up against feminism with strong men backing them.
	Thoughts, please. Yeah, listen, Andrea, it's great that you challenge...
	All established beliefs.
	That really is philosophy.
	It's just a blank slate. Okay, pretend nothing is true.
	Let's start from scratch. And that's science as it's supposed to be.
	But the challenge I think you're going to face is whether this is built-in or not, whether it's environmental or nature-nurture or whatever, but women tend to rate very high on average in terms of agreeableness.
	So you know the old statement about how Teenagers fight.
	It's a boy's fight. What do we do?
	We have a punch-up and we shake hands and we usually become, at least if not friends, certainly not enemies.
	And what do the girls do?
	Well, they spread toxic rumors.
	They destroy reputation and produce eating disorders.
	And so a lack of direct conflict, women in general, because they're smaller and weaker, they don't go and beat up men, but they'll tell their boyfriend that this man insulted me or grabbed my ass and then the boyfriend.
	So they tend to be a more reputational destruction and manipulation of others to achieve aggressive ends.
	So the mother may not want to beat her children, but she might...
	Complain to the children and get angry at the children in the presence of the husband.
	So the husband feels compelled to hit the children.
	So there can be a lot of indirect stuff.
	But women tend to rate fairly high on agreeableness, which doesn't mean being nice.
	It just means conformity, I think, to general social norms.
	And there are tons of exceptions to all of these rules, of course, you being one and other people, of course, being countless others.
	But I think it's going to be tough because men have a weakness called status.
	So how are men punished by losing status?
	Men have a weakness called status, and that's what we have to watch out for.
	So for me, it's like, okay, I want to speak truth.
	It's going to cost me status.
	It's going to cost me YouTube. It's going to cost me Twitter.
	But I want to speak really, really important truths that matter to the world.
	It's going to cost me status.
	And adjusting to the lowest status, so to speak, is a challenge for men.
	That's men's weakness in a nutshell.
	Women's weakness is vanity.
	I mean, have you ever heard a woman say, oh, no, come on, that's too much praise.
	That's too much, right?
	Men rarely say, oh, that's too much status.
	I want to share it out with the other men.
	It's not kind of how we're hardwired, I think.
	But with women, vanity is the issue.
	And the problem is, if women are praised enormously, it dissolves their critical facilities.
	And when men are offered status, It dissolves their critical facilities, which is why men will trade honor for hierarchy and women will often trade better behavior for praise.
	So the problem is that feminism praises women enormously while at the same time excusing every bad decision they make.
	Now, it's one thing to be praised and say, well, you're a strong, empowered woman, right?
	But if you're a strong, empowered woman, then you should be part of that strength and empowerment is being fully responsible for the consequences of your own bad decisions, right?
	right that's strong and empowered but if you say to someone you're strong and empowered but every bad decision you make will be backstop and backfilled by government money and created fiat currency monopoly money then you have a real one-two punch to reality which is just strong and empowered but should be in other words you're an adult but should be protected from all the bad consequences of your bad decisions which is to be a child and it's very hard for women to challenge praise and and stoking of the ego
	in the same way it's hard for men to challenge the benefits of status and the We get dopamine from climbing the status ladder, and I think women get dopamine from praise.
	And if you are going to take on some of the more radical aspects of feminism, then you will be taking away the praise and the victimhood.
	And the praise and the victimhood, I think, is the one-two punch that really sets women on their butts, and that's going to be a real challenge.
	I'm not saying it's impossible, of course, right?
	But that would be my sort of delineation of the combat you might be getting into.
	Cool. Stefan, I know you got to get going.
	I appreciate your time today. It's been a little bit over an hour and a half.
	Very much appreciate having you back on the show.
	Hope to have you back on again in the future, of course.
	Everyone, make sure you check out Stefan's website at freedomain.com.
	There is a link in the description. You should also support him and check out freedomain.locals.com.
	We have one as well at 21studios.locals.com.
	Locals is an awesome platform.
	It's just like Patreon, but it's free speech oriented.
	They're not going to ban you for having a wrong opinion, wrong thing kind of stuff.
	Check them out there. Do give them money.
	I know as soon as you got banned, I told all my fans to give you money.
	It's very simple. It's very blunt, but you guys have to support free speech.
	You have to support philosophers.
	You have to support critical thinking.
	And Stefan put his balls on the line and got hit pretty hard for speaking out.
	Speaking out against a world full of lies and bullshit.
	So we're immensely grateful for you.
	Like I said, you're still missed on YouTube.
	I know you still exist across the pond on just different platforms, but...
	YouTube had a kind of culture, and you were a big fixture in it for a long time.
	And you were very loved by, I think, the average guy on YouTube, in the manosphere and otherwise.
	And to see you get removed like that, and there's so few videos of you left on the platform, it just kind of sucks.
	Well, I appreciate that. And listen, thanks for the conversation today.
	And a big shout-out and appreciation to your listeners for tuning in.
	It was a real pleasure. Great questions, great comments, and I'm sure we'll do it again.
	But thanks so much for your time today.

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