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Aug. 11, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:27:27
Death and Censorship: Susan Wojcicki
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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
11th August 2024 and just polled the watchers and the listeners before we started.
And I have thoughts, of course, on 1S Wojcicki.
And she died.
It was really quite a bit of a surprise.
She was only 56 years old.
She'd been battling, I think, small cell carcinoma in her lungs for two years.
Rare for non-smokers, but I don't know.
If she was a smoker, I would be very surprised if she was.
So maybe it was just bad luck for her, which I certainly have experienced myself with regards to that fell disease and I certainly sympathize with that.
You know, I I don't particularly care about Susan.
I'm just gonna call her Susan, sorry for the informality, but that's quite the mouthful of Polish syllables.
So, yeah, I don't really care.
There are people and there are symptoms, right?
And I view her tenure as kind of a symptom of the problem of power in society and that is Where I'm going to sort of start my analysis as a whole.
I'm going to give you a little bit of history and mostly some philosophy.
Because you know, it being the philosophy show, good luck on your job interview on Tuesday.
Although with the right preparation, with the right preparation you won't need luck.
So that's important.
All right, so let's look a little bit about her tenure, right?
So Susan became involved with Google when the founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page set up shop at the garage of her home in Silicon Valley in 1998.
She became the company's first marketing manager a year later.
And then she was promoted to CEO of YouTube in 2014.
It had just hit the milestone of 1 billion users.
currently host 2.5 billion users worldwide.
Many YouTube creators, also known as YouTubers, carving profitable careers out of their individual
channels.
Jimmy Donaldson, better known as Mr. Beast, was YouTube's highest earning content creator
last year as of 2023.
In 2017, advertisers, I suppose, were upset that their ads appeared next to extremist
content and so there was the ad-pocalypse where ads were then removed from what was
deemed to be extremist content.
you So she wrote back in the day, today after nearly 25 years here I've decided to step back from my role as the head of YouTube and start a new chapter focused on my family health and personal projects I'm passionate about.
The time is right for me, she said this to her employees, the time is right for me I feel able to do this because we have an incredible leadership team in place at YouTube.
So There is a bunch of censorship, of course, that happened over the course of her tenure there.
So, on the one hand, this is an article from 2018.
On the one hand, YouTube has invested significant resources into going after extremist content.
In 2016, it added automation to its moderation repertoire and last year announced a plan to, quote, bury extreme content that doesn't actually run afoul of its rules.
The company also banned advertisements from running alongside videos that contain, quote, hateful or discriminatory content and expanded its Trusted Flagger program to include a variety of NGOs designated to report content.
So in 2019 there was an updated harassment policy under Susan's reign that punishes creators that go too far with language, was criticized for punishing YouTubers for certain types of behavior but allowing late-night talk show hosts to continue engaging in that same behavior.
So, YouTuber PewDiePie pressed YouTube for an answer on this and cited these host's relentless criticisms of President Trump as an example.
YouTube responded by saying that they're allowed to do this under an American media rule that says you can ridicule public figures.
However, PewDiePie pointed out that this answer from YouTube doesn't really make sense.
Aren't we all public figures on YouTube?
Isn't that the point?
This doesn't make sense to me.
Why do they get a pass and some don't?
Some don't.
It seems very selective.
If someone understands, explain it to me.
I don't understand this.
It should be the same.
Wojcicki also recently said that YouTube won't recommend YouTubers during breaking news events.
Instead, it will recommend companies that, quote, have a long tradition of delivering reliable news.
Right, right, right, right.
In 2019, she said, of course, someone out of their garage can upload a video and say their point of view about what happened with the news, but we're not going to recommend that when there's a breaking news event.
We're going to recommend companies that we know have a long tradition of delivering reliable news.
In August of 2019, Susan wrote about YouTube continuing to push authoritative voices, especially during breaking news events.
Leaked videos show that YouTube's plans to boost what it deems to be authoritative sources were being openly discussed during internal meetings as early as June 2017.
She, of course, they removed about a million videos related to COVID and I understand where they're coming from.
She said anything that goes against World Health Organization recommendations should be a violation, would be a violation of our policy and so removing it is another important part of our policy.
So anyway, we can sort of go on and on with this stuff.
It is very interesting as a whole and what interests me is the financials.
So, they do take some government money, right?
And this is always the interesting challenge with regards to this stuff, right?
So, Alphabet owns Google, which owns YouTube.
State and local subsidies, two billion dollars.
Federal loans and bailouts, almost 64 million dollars.
From 2008, and it's hard to find this data, So, from 2008, after YouTube's acquisition in 2006, they got a $6.9 billion bandwidth subsidy.
Right?
that is a massive amount of subsidies and of course we can look at the sources.
I'll put the sources here.
And nobody knows exactly how much this costs but...
That is a lot of bandwidth and if there is, it's all a question, if you take government money, are you genuinely a private company?
Right?
Because private companies profiting from government subsidies is kind of the definition of fascism as a whole, right?
So fascism is private profits from government money.
Communism is no profits from government ownership of anything.
The free market is private profits from private companies but private profits from public companies or
public spending is fascism.
reliable sources of news.
I get all of that.
I get all of that.
So, with regards To Susan as a whole and again I don't particularly care about her as an individual because nobody, I mean Elon Musk being as usual the exception that proves the rule, nobody really gets to that position of power who's not willing to censor as a whole, right?
As a whole.
So I want to talk about some of the morality and philosophy behind censorship.
So, one of the problems that happens is greed, right?
Greed.
You know, that sort of famous Gordon Gekko speech from Wall Street, greed cuts through, it clarifies, it captures.
Greed, for want of a better word, is good, right?
That was the greed is good mantra of the 80s.
It's very, very easy to get sucked into the numbers.
I mean, I've done it myself and all of that, but I have to be pretty strict with myself over the years about my greed for numbers.
So the greed for numbers are, are we growing in number of users?
Are we growing in revenue?
Are we growing in reach?
Are we growing in market share?
The growth, growth, growth.
Now what happens when you prioritize growth?
I have both prioritized growth in my career and really quite the opposite of growth.
So what happens when you prioritize growth?
Well, you grow bigger and bigger and bigger, you spend more and more money, your payroll gets bigger and bigger, usually quite uselessly.
I mean, as everybody knows, Elon Musk fired 80% of the Twitter staff and Twitter is doing better than ever.
And they're finally going after the advertising cartels.
You get bigger and bigger and bigger and then you become more and more dependent upon the advertisements from, the revenue from advertisers, right?
So there was a business model that you too could have pursued that would have been my particular choice which is to allow tips on the platform and take a percentage.
Allow tips on the platform and then take a percentage.
Now if you allow tips on the platform and take a percentage then advertisers won't get
mad at you because you can't advertise on the platform you simply take a percentage
of tips so then McDonald's won't be upset that they're next to some objectionable content
or at least what mainstream would consider objectionable.
So they didn't take that business model they took the advertising business model and the
advertising business model means that you have a concentrated source of revenue that
is susceptible to manipulation and frightening and ideology and oh my god and corporate reputations
and how dare they put this next to that and you know there's a certain amount of manipulation
that can go on with these kinds of things.
So that's it.
That's not good.
So I would imagine, of course I don't know what went on in Susan's mind, neither do I particularly care, but in general the process is that if you aim for growth, growth, growth, Then you become vulnerable.
So if you aim for growth, you become more influential and thus you're more worth controlling.
And if you aim for growth, you generally end up with more concentrated sources of income and those are open to manipulation and bullying and control and threats and so on.
So when YouTube decided to go for growth, growth, growth, Rather than free speech, free speech, free speech, which can be very profitable of course, but when YouTube decided to go for growth, then they became more reliant on advertisers and that means you're more susceptible to boycotts, which means that free speech is not long to go.
And of course you end up with a significant overhead, right?
You end up with significant overhead.
So, I mean, if I were running a social media company, I would go for a revenue model that had people donate to the people they care about.
And that way, nobody would have to fund anything they found objectionable.
You simply wouldn't fund it.
And if there were complaints about the speech that was on the platform, right?
What I would say is something like this.
Yes, I find this content objectionable too.
I find it irrational.
I find it false.
It can be dangerous and so on.
And that's a big problem.
So how do we solve that problem?
Well I don't like the idea of playing whack-a-mole with particular opinions because it's very hard to apply that consistently.
Whoever you put in charge of suppressing speech is going to inevitably suppress the speech they dislike and favor the speech that they like even if the same principles apply to both.
So that's not a great idea.
Let's look at the root causes as to why this horrendous, terrible, nasty, objectionable
speech is there.
Now clearly if the person isn't popular it doesn't matter that much.
If they are popular it means that they're saying something that is false and egregious
and nasty and people don't know how to think about it critically and can't evaluate it
from a rational or empirical standpoint.
So how do we solve that?
Well if you really, really care about people having better ideas what you need to do is
you need to advocate for your local schools to start teaching children objective, rational,
Socratic style critical thinking.
That's what you need to do.
Because people say, well, there are all these terrible, bad, dangerous extremists out there, without ever really pointing out that they've gone through 12 plus years of government education.
So the problem is not in the fact that there are dangerous, crazy extremists out there, whatever you want to define that as.
The problem is that they're not being taught how to think critically in government schools.
So they're not being taught how to evaluate information, they're not being taught how to build an argument, they're not being taught how to unravel false syllogisms, they're not being taught rational debate, they're not being taught critical thinking as a whole.
Now if there's been a massive failure and there is no particular course or focus or curricula that focuses on critical thinking in any government schools in the West that I've seen.
I mean some private schools might do it but across the West there is no focus or foundation of critical thinking in any of the government curriculum.
So that needs to be fixed.
There's no point having the government churn out indoctrinated emotionally reactive people who don't know how to evaluate information and just fall into these rabbit holes of quote extremism.
There's no point trying to play whack-a-mole at the end of that process.
What you want to do is solve that process at the beginning so you need to join your school boards, you need to advocate for The inclusion and advocacy of critical thinking in government schools.
There's absolutely no point trying to play whack-a-mole with the effects of bad thinking if governments don't teach good thinking.
just going to end up with more and more and more of it and you cannot expect me as a social
media executive to solve all of the problems caused by a lack of education and critical
thinking in the government schools.
That needs to be solved, that needs to be fixed and then this problem will go away.
But taking all the deficiencies of government schools and laying them at my doorstep and
saying that I need to spend a billion dollars a year on content moderation when instead
we could for far cheaper get a way to minimize this extremism by having people learn critical
thinking and empiricism and reason and arguments and debates and government schools, that will
But the failures of government schools cannot be laid at my business doorstep.
I did not create them.
I have been advocating for critical thinking my whole life.
Therefore, if the voters don't want critical thinking, in other words, they don't say to their schools, you have to provide critical thinking, If they don't care about that, if people don't care about reason, evidence, empiricism, critical thinking, rationality, arguments and debate skills, if they don't care about that, then let's not pretend that they care about people who go off the rails intellectually when there are no rails.
Intellectually in the schools at all.
How can you complain that people think irrationally or don't think at all when you don't care enough about the children to teach critical thinking to them in schools?
You're not making that a requirement.
You're not making that a demand.
You're not advocating for that.
That's not a central thrust of any kind of educational reform that I've ever seen in the country.
So, I don't understand why you would object to, quote, extremist thinking when the cure for extremist thinking is reason and evidence and you don't care to teach the children reason and evidence, then don't pretend that you care about extremism because the way to combat extremism is reason and evidence, philosophy, debate and so on.
So let's not pretend that society cares about extremism when they won't make critical thinking a core part of government education because that's the one universal thing that is going on.
So yeah, let's not.
That's sort of what I would say.
There is, I mean this is one of the things that Elon Musk says is that
he will not restrict lawful speech and if people want different kind of speech in their country then they need to
change They need to advocate for changing the laws in the country.
So okay, so let's talk about some of the male-female stuff.
I think this is very important.
Because I understand and in fact deeply sympathize with the idea of ideas or arguments causing real-world harm.
You're right, that would be a good show.
Somebody said, if you could make a K-12 curriculum, what subjects other than philosophy could you include?
That would make a good solo show.
I agree.
Thank you for the idea.
That is very nice.
Very nice.
So, let's talk about some of the philosophy.
So, one of the things that has happened, and the censorship regime that is in the modern world, obviously it may be 51, 49, a little bit more, so none of these are absolutes and none of these are binary, black or white, but in general The censorship regimes in the West tend to be more feminine or female in character, maybe a little bit more than males.
And you can see this, I did the data, the truth about free speech many years ago, that males, and in particular white males, tend to be free speech absolutists and that's it, right?
Everybody else tends to vote for some level of censorship, right?
So the question is why?
Well I refuse to think that women are corrupt or bad or immoral or anything like that because women have handed us through evolution the best brains in the universe so I'm not gonna have anything negative to say but the question is why?
So then I've had, of course, one of the most philosophical things I've done is be a stay-at-home dad for now close to 16 years, right?
My daughter will be 16 in a couple of months.
So one of the great things about being a stay-at-home dad is you get to spend a lot of time around the moms of toddlers.
Everywhere I'd go I'd generally be the only male and you get to spend a lot of time around moms and toddlers.
In other words, you get to see female nature in its natural element.
It's Native Element.
Very, very, very interesting.
Well, and I think one of the reasons why, by the by, one of the reasons why men have more of a devotion towards free speech, particularly in the West, Western men, European men, is because we have this history of philosophy going back close to 3,000 years, and we've sort of learned how to debate and all of that, and debate is better than violence, right?
And we understand that if you don't have debate, you have violence, right?
If you suppress debate, you end up with violence, so.
I'm going to talk about women and toddlers because women were evolved to deal with babies and toddlers, right?
They'd have this endless succession of babies and toddlers and then by the time that ended, to a large degree, their firstborns would then be having babies and toddlers, so women as a whole just spent most of their evolutionary lives dealing with babies and toddlers.
Now, hit me with a why.
I want to know how detailed to get.
Hit me with a why.
If you spend a lot of time around Afforementioned babies and toddlers.
Have you spent a lot of time around?
Babies and ze toddlers.
Hit me with a Y. And of course I worked in a daycare as well.
Those kids were a little older.
We had 30 kids aged 5 to 10.
It was me and one other person, although the other person was kind of lazy.
So basically it was me writing... writing Herd on... on... 25 to 35 to 10 year olds.
to 35 to 10 year olds.
So as a whole, when you are around toddlers, you want to restrict the flow of information.
You want to restrict the flow of information.
Let me sort of tell you what I mean by that.
So, when you're… when you have a toddler, do you want the toddler to learn how to turn
on the stove?
Do you?
I'm not sure.
you.
you Understand that women do not want toddlers to learn how to turn on the stove.
Do women want toddlers to learn how to open the latch on the front door?
How to open the front door?
Right?
They do not want them to do that.
If you have... Do they want the toddlers to figure out how to get to the knife drawer?
Do they want toddlers or little kids to figure out the Combo code to the gun safe, right?
And the answer to that, of course, well, no.
So, one of the ways that you restrict the danger to toddlers is you restrict the information that is available to them.
Right?
Do you want your toddlers figuring out the pin to your iPad?
Well, probably not.
Oh, you're rocking your ten month old to sleep for his nap as we speak?
Okay, I'll try not to be too loud.
I'm sure you have headphones on.
So, restricting information for the sake of safety, do you want your toddlers figuring out how to work a lighter?
Yeah, they do not want them to learn how to remove the electrical socket protector.
Yeah, and the whole point of childproofing, right?
So, you understand that restricting information for the cause of safety is deeply, deeply baked into female DNA, the female mind.
So, for men, the idea that, thank you for the tip, the idea that words lead to real-world harm is incomprehensible to men.
Now, it's not totally incomprehensible, sorry, let me sort of preface that.
So if you go around insulting some guy's mother and you trash talk him and you insult his wife and so on, yeah, you're gonna get punched in the face.
So that kind of language can lead to real world harm, but that's...
So ridiculously foolish and clearly incentive in that that kind of information, that kind of approach, trash-talking some guy's mom and wife and whatever, right?
There's no benefit to that.
It's entirely designed to be harmful and it's never good for anyone to do that in particular, right?
It's never good particular-wise.
For anyone to do that.
That is an incitement to violence for which there's no other option.
However, the difference is you don't want your toddlers to know how to turn on the stove, but you need to turn on the stove.
You don't want your toddlers playing with fire, but you need to play with fire to build a fire.
You don't want your toddlers knowing how to open the front door, but you need to open the front door.
Yeah, fighting words, right?
So, words that are direct incitements to violence – yo mama stuff or whatever to a volatile guy – men understand that and we avoid it, but there's no value or utility in that stuff.
However, protecting toddlers from things that are true and useful is essential to female nature.
Keeping information that is true and useful, how to turn on the stove, how to open the door, somebody's going to need to unlock the gun safe if there's a home intruder.
So, you understand that true and useful and factual information must be kept from toddlers.
So when you go to a woman and you talk about, this language leads to real-world harm, you
say, that they don't particularly care whether it's true, they only care whether their instincts
tell them that it could be harmful.
So, you understand that true and useful and factual information must be kept from toddlers.
Does that make sense?
I don't want to... I don't want to... Oh, hello.
You didn't know you're still around.
Glad you are, Steph.
Well, nice to meet you, Doom Gnome.
A great pleasure.
Thank you for joining today.
Right, so does this... I don't want to belabor the point.
I think this makes sense.
So for women the idea that language leads to real-world harm and it doesn't matter if it's true or not the only thing that matters is does it create that connection to real-world harm in their mind and women have to keep true factual useful information away from toddlers in order to keep toddlers safe, right?
So when you have a lot of women in charge of public discourse They are relatively easy to trigger with, this language is hateful and leads to real world harm.
And they don't sit to themselves as often, as often, obviously it happens to some, but they don't quite as often sit to themselves and say, but is it true?
And are they toddlers?
It's just, it's so instinctual.
It's so instinctual.
Women are also, oh, and they also, by the way, women need to control the information that goes to toddlers, not just from adults, but also from older siblings.
They don't want their older, they don't want the older brother teaching the younger brother
how to work the lighter, how to get out through the front door, how to take the safety plug
off the electrical socket, how to, like, they don't, so they really have to control the
flow of information in order to keep people safe.
So when you get a lot of women in charge of intellectual discourse, it's relatively easy
for a lot of women, again, not all, right, but for a lot of women, it is relatively easy
to get them to censor for the sake of danger.
That this information can lead to real-world harm.
Now the other thing that's true as well is that men tend to evaluate facts and women tend to evaluate intentions.
In other words, men tend to judge reality and women tend to judge emotion.
Right?
And this is free speech versus hate speech.
Hate speech is the divination of motives in language.
It's the reading of tea leaves.
Intentions is a form of mysticism.
Well, why did someone do that?
Why would they do that?
What excuse would they... Oh, they just hate people.
So, it is a form of mysticism that allows you to reject the liberty of speech for the sake of mind-reading intentions.
Now, of course, women have evolved.
Women have evolved to read intentions because men tend to mask intentions, right?
So, I mean, I took this course many years ago in university on the rise of the novel and Victorian novels and early novels were very commonly trying to get women to understand that men who were good-looking, wealthy and aristocratic could be absolute narcissists that only wanted to use them for sex and would destroy their reputation.
So, women need to be incredibly good at reading intentions.
Does she allow a man to court her?
Does he just want to sleep with her?
Does he just want to use her as a trophy?
Or does he actually want to marry her?
Does he want to be a good husband and a good father?
So women really need to read motives and intentions because women invest of course a lot more into Reproduction, right?
Men don't put much into reproduction but women of course invest a massive amount into reproduction so women need to be able to read intentions.
So the way that you would control a woman's view of something is to say that the person has a negative intention, right?
Negative intentions are very dangerous for women because it would mean that they would have a kid with a guy who didn't
stick around or would beat them or be a bad husband, their lives would be miserable, they'd be trapped, they couldn't
escape, and all of that, right?
So...
you That's the challenge.
So if you can convince women that the motive for speech is hatred, right, and you can see this in the Telecommunications Act, I think it was, in England in 2003, that anything which incites hatred or anything that's motivated by hatred or whatever is a bad thing and they're kind of using that at the moment.
So then if you can say, well, that person is motivated by hatred, Then the female mind in general as a whole, tons of exceptions, but the female mind will say that's bad because the intentions are bad, because bad intentions for women are a complete disaster.
So they're very, very afraid of bad intentions, but men tend to be afraid of more empirical things.
Because the bad intentions for women lead to negative empirical outcomes in that they end up, like you understand, for most of human history, if a woman, particularly in the West, if she had a child out of wedlock, in other words if the man slept with her and then didn't marry her, and this is quite common, like 30% of, I did in my presentation on the Wild West, which you should definitely check out, I pointed out that in most places in America about 30% of the marriages were shotgun weddings, right?
You could just tell from the date of the birth and the date of the wedding that the woman was pregnant, right?
So, to have sex before marriage, okay, it was fairly common, but the man had to marry
you and that was considered to make it okay.
So for the woman to have sex, oh, a woman to have sex before marriage, if she didn't
have sex at all before marriage, she could risk losing the guy, but if she had sex before
marriage with the guy who had bad intentions...
.
Then she could lose her life because what would happen is she'd get pregnant, the man wouldn't marry her and then she would live in shame.
No man would marry her.
She'd often end up descending to some horrible job with strangers or her parents taking care of her kids or kid and she could end up as a prostitute.
I mean just an absolutely catastrophic life just based upon misreading intentions.
So for a woman to focus on intentionality is perfectly rational from an evolutionary standpoint.
And so, if you say to women, this language is not motivated by love, but it is in fact a false cover for hatred, right?
That triggers women and I understand that and it's no criticism of women.
It's why we're all here is that women had to be able to judge intentionality.
So this is why you have this free speech versus hate speech.
Free speech is a male thing where we have to have free speech because otherwise we end up with violence and for women it's like well the motivations of the speaker is more important than the truth.
Right?
The motivations are all that matter.
Right?
So the motivations matter because if a woman mistakes what a
man says for his motivations in other words if he says I love you I
just wanna have sex now we'll get married soon blah blah blah right
if the woman accepts the truth of what a man says
but does not accurately read his motivations then her life can very easily be completely destroyed
and her offspring are going to have a terrible life and the family honor will be destroyed and all of that right
Oh, there's always been premarital sex.
Right.
So somebody says, did women need to read intentions of men as much before the normalization of premarital sex?
Well, no, they don't need to read the intentions of men that much anymore because children out of wedlock has now been normalized, right?
And they have the government for welfare and education and dental care and health care and optometry and they have child support and all this kind of stuff, right?
So, if you say to a woman the intentions matter more than the facts, she would say the intentions do matter more than the facts.
In other words, the fact that the man says he loves me, right?
You know that song, will you still love me tomorrow?
Tonight the light of love is in your eyes, right?
Will you still love me tomorrow?
It's really, really foundational to women.
They cannot judge the truth of what the man is saying, because the truth is entirely shaped by the intention.
If the man just wants to sleep with them and run off, then he's not going to say that.
He's going to say, I love you, we're going to get married, just one time, let's just try it out, I want to touch you.
So then if she surrenders to that and the man runs off, then he just lied.
He lied to her and her life is destroyed.
And so intentionality is essential for women to evaluate which is why when you get women in positions of authority you end up with hate speech laws.
Because the intentions matter.
The facts don't matter.
The intention alone matters and women who are unable to read intention.
Intention leads to real world harm.
Right?
Is the intention for him to marry me or is the intention for him to just sleep with me?
So I just want to sort of point that out, right?
So men and women have different perceptions of these things.
Because men produce goods and women produce people.
So when you produce people you're much more concerned with feelings and subjectivity and restricting the flow of information and controlling toddlers by controlling what they know.
And so you just tend to be a little bit more dictatorial.
And I don't mean dictatorial in a political sense but you have to restrict The behaviors of toddlers on a pretty constant basis.
Don't do this.
Don't pick that up.
Don't climb that.
That's too wobbly.
That's not stable.
You'll never make that jump.
Right?
I mean my daughter wanted to run down a hill and jump across a rocky stream.
I mean she's a smidge of a daredevil but hey, given my public career, who am I to talk about that?
And I just had to run through her like the cost benefits, right?
Like you could easily break your ankle because if you don't make the jump and it's a rocky stream you're going to land on wobbly rocks and you're going to turn and twist and break your ankle.
Now I understand that you want to do it and I'm a big one for you know take some risks but we kind of have to manage this stuff and we have to You know, but I'm not just like, don't do it!
But then, you know, who am I to talk?
I have the luxury of one child, right?
Somebody says, intentions can be completely subjective.
That's a challenging statement, though, because saying something can be doesn't give you any information, right?
A woman can be taller than the average man.
It's like, yes, but we're looking for general trends here.
But if intentions were unreadable, we would not have survived as a species.
Because men want sex more than they want marriage, right?
And women want marriage generally more than they want sex in terms of the sort of long-term
happiness, right?
And so if women could not read the act, could not accurately read the intentions of men,
we never would have had monogamy and pair bonding, which is what is required for our
brains to get this big, right?
Because that which is slower to develop ends up more complex.
So you needed pair bonding and monogamy in order for the parental investment to be there
to allow our brains to grow so big.
Like it takes a quarter century for a male brain to mature, slightly less for a female
brain, and we need that quarter century of investment.
So the fact that women are able to separate the cads from the dads is the only reason
why we have these big giant brains.
So we should thank them for that ability.
It's just that all human instincts are beautiful, but when combined with political power, turn pathological.
Right?
Having cells that grow is great.
Having cancer cells is not.
And all human instincts are wonderful but when combined with political power they turn cancerous.
Right?
Then they're no longer instincts for anything other than power and control.
So women's concern about intentions, concern about language and so on is a beautiful thing unless it's combined with political power.
And you say, ah but it's YouTube.
What's the relationship between that and political power?
So we'll get to that In a second, I just want to make sure that what I'm talking about is interesting to you.
Just hit me with a Y. If this works for you, hit me with an N. Right, Peter Keating telling that woman he would marry her the next day.
He ends up not doing that and the woman ends up a bittersingle feminist.
Yeah, that's fantastic.
Thank you for that.
That's a brilliant observation.
I appreciate that.
And quite right.
And this is why all the chads are just creating feminists, right?
Okay.
Thank you for the tip.
So it sounds like people are finding this interesting.
Good.
I will plow on.
Okay.
Now, I view Susan and myself, the Susan and Steph show, the Susan and Stephane show, I view us as opposing forces in a battle for free will.
Opposing forces in the battle?
What do I mean by that?
So, how free were people to quit smoking when they did not know that smoking was bad for them?
Right?
If they thought smoking was fine for them, it was an innocuous habit, and so on.
How free were people to quit smoking before they knew?
Well, of course, they were technically free to quit smoking.
They could quit smoking because it cost too much money, or they didn't like the smell later, or whatever.
Their wife was allergic to cigarette smoke, so they could always quit smoking, but they were much more likely to quit smoking when they understood that smoking, like one out of two smokers, dies from smoking.
Smoking takes, what, ten plus years off your lifespan on average.
So they're much more able to quit smoking or they have enough information to make a truly informed decision once they know about the dangers of smoking.
So, information is foundational to free will.
You can't choose what you don't know.
I mean, if you imagine that there was some hairline switch just at the back of your neck, that if you found just the right spot you could fly, well, you'd feel kind of stupid for walking and taking the bus and the train and the... right?
You'd probably fly places instead, right?
But if you don't know about that switch and you don't know you have the choice to fly, then you'll walk and drive and... right?
So, information is foundational To free will.
Right?
Which is why you see this widening divide.
As people get more information, they either pursue the information that expands their free will, in other words, which challenges their programming, or they choose the information that reaffirms their programming and they become more NPCs.
So some people are losing free will through the internet, other people are gaining free will through the internet.
Now, of course, we all have free will, but the information that you have available to you is foundational to how your free will can be exercised.
So, not really free to protect themselves from the damage of smoking if they don't talk about the risks.
Yes, I think that's a good way to put it.
That's way too succinct for me so I'll do another ten minutes on it.
So, let's look at this from a standpoint of human health.
Is it beneficial?
to humanity to suppress advertisements that promote how cool smoking is.
Because this is the case in a lot of places, right?
I think here in Canada you can't show people drinking alcohol on TV, you can't advertise for cigarettes, in fact the cigarettes have to be hidden now I think behind a blank wall and so on.
So if you control Arguments, images that promote smoking?
Isn't that beneficial?
Doesn't promoting smoking lead to real-world harm?
Right?
So what's the counter-argument to that, if there is one?
Because when you say, well, should we just promote smoking like crazy?
Should we just allow people who promote smoking?
Should they be allowed to To speak?
Well, no, we should probably suppress that.
I don't want people on my platform.
And listen, if I took ads, I would not take ads from companies that promoted smoking, I would not promote ads from people who promoted alcohol, I would not take ads from people who supported or promoted smoking drugs, weed and so on, right?
No, but promoting smoking will definitely lead to more people Getting cancer.
So, is that not language that leads to real world harm?
Makes sense to suppress information that promotes harmful addictions.
Well, isn't that interesting, right?
Isn't that interesting?
Yeah, cigarette.
Yeah, they used to have these, what are they, Popeyes?
There was like, there'd be cigarette sweets for kids.
You'd pretend to smoke and you'd have, in England, with the cold air, you'd pretend to smoke, you'd drag in breath and, right?
In China we have drinking and smoking promotion everywhere so here you have an explanation on the situation.
But China is a masculine, I mean hyper-masculine society, right?
In many ways.
So that's an argument that seems to make sense.
Well of course we should restrict advertisement that promotes smoking because you will then have more people getting sick and dying from smoking and all of that, right?
So what's the counter argument to that?
Because people are free to smoke.
They can buy cigarettes.
They can smoke cigarettes.
So what is wrong with advertisements for cigarettes?
Because it's really tempting, right?
I mean, I feel the temptation.
Because all you do is you You have pictures of people smoking through their throats and coughing and dying from lung cancer and so on, right?
Sorry, that may be a tad insensitive given what Susan died of, but... So what is the argument against that?
How can they promote smoking while being truthful, though?
Well, I mean, yes, you can have truth in advertising, for sure, but then you're saying we have to ban advertising that is false.
Now, it could be the case, of course, that you would simply have laws about fraud, right?
To do all of that, right?
So what is the argument for that?
Now, the one thing that's been great about the last twenty to thirty years is that nobody with any brains ever doubts the validity that the slippery slope is real.
So, okay, so first of all, yes, cigarettes do have an advantage if they make you more productive.
Cigarettes can vastly increase creativity and these aren't ads for cigarettes, I'm simply talking about the documented results.
And so, if you say to people, well, all smoking is bad, Then you have to, it's sort of the drug argument, all drugs are bad, therefore you can't listen to Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles, right?
So, if you give someone the choice and you say, well, you can write a great novel or
you can risk getting sick in 50 years, a lot of people would say, no, I'm going to smoke,
I'm going to write the great novel because the smoking might help me do that, I'm going
to smoke and I will take my chance later.
So the cost benefits.
If we're going to say that we cannot promote things that harm health, it doesn't stop anywhere in particular, right?
It doesn't stop anywhere in particular.
Say, well, we can't promote smoking, we can't promote drinking.
Okay, what about fatty food?
What about sugary food?
What about, you know, other foods that could promote ill health, right?
So there's a problem in that it's a principle.
Everybody wants to seduce you with a compelling instance and then they use that to expand to general principles, right?
They use it then to suppress things that aren't so bad.
So what you notice, of course, is that, yes, cigarettes are definitely frowned upon, but you can still advertise for bad food, you can still advertise for greasy pizza, you can still advertise for giant fatty burgers, you can still advertise for empty calorie sugar bomb sodas, you can do all of this stuff, right?
So that's a challenge.
So where does it stop?
Bye.
So, for instance, if we say that ideas and arguments lead to real-world harm, then you can say, oh, this guy's a bigot or a racist or whatever, and so we're going to ban him.
Okay, well then you've got the principle that ideas and arguments, would it be wrong if junk food ads were banned?
Well, what you're doing is you're taking away choice from people.
And you're taking away ideas, arguments, imagery and so on, right?
Junk food can save lives.
What if somebody's super depressed but they eat junk food and they feel better?
And it prevents them from committing suicide.
This is not impossible, right?
So, people take pleasure out of junk food.
Every, I don't know, maybe once, what is it, maybe twice a year I'll just have a big-ass greasy burger.
Now I'm not saying that's necessarily the worst thing in the world, you know that meme where it's like the bread's okay, the lettuce is okay, the meat is okay, and the tomato is okay, but you put them all together and blah blah blah, right?
But every now and then, yeah, I mean, for my wife's birthday, I had one of my favorite desserts, a rhubarb crumble.
Now, I have not had a dessert in a restaurant in probably, I don't know, eight months?
Nine months?
No, about nine months.
About the turn of the year I stopped really eating added sugar.
So, does that mean that you've got to stop all of this?
In other words, because some people Because some people use substances irresponsibly, nobody can talk about them, right?
Some people use alcohol responsibly.
in the movie Misery, obviously that's a piece of fiction, but the writer used to
be a smoker and now would allow himself one cigarette at the end of a novel, right?
What about sitting is the new smoking, right?
So what about offices where you don't have standing desks?
That's as bad as smoking a not inconsiderable number of cigarettes a day.
So where does it end?
What about loneliness?
Right?
Things which promote loneliness, a lot of internet social media stuff gives people the illusion of contact without real contact, People with children tend to be happier.
What about social movements and so on that promote sterility, that promote not having children, that interferes with people's happiness?
It makes sense to ban junk food adverts for children.
Does it?
See, you have something that you find tempting, and I understand that.
I mean, I'm tempted by all of these things.
But you have something that you find tempting and you say, well, that makes sense, but you can't think of things in the individual instance because this is a philosophy show, which means you really, really do have to think about things in terms of principles.
So because... So some children will have... Look, we all had fun as kids eating junk food, right?
We all had fun eating bad food as kids, right?
I mean, that's what Halloween is, right?
Halloween is the ultimate advertisement for candy.
In fact, it's free.
Are you going to ban Halloween because it leads to children eating junk food?
Junk food is a pleasure in life for a lot of people.
For a lot of people.
So, are you going to say that children should not Be exposed to images of junk food because they're not allowed to have fun that way.
I mean, it's really the parents who are exposing them, the kids, to the ads and the parents who are refusing to negotiate with the kids.
So, I mean, I negotiated with my daughter about candy and junk food and so on and she's fine, she's slender and healthy.
So, because I'm responsible, other people have to be restricted.
Because other people are irresponsible.
Because other parents are irresponsible.
Other parents don't know how to say no, so you can't have ads for sugary food for children.
Does that make sense?
No, you can't.
You can't have ads for sugary food for children.
So, let's go one step further with regards to censorship.
So, if arguments that lead or arguments or imagery that lead to real-world harm must be banned, what do we talk about with regards to something like communism and fascism?
Or totalitarianism, or socialism, right?
Empirically leads to real world harm.
You know, in many places communism provoked fascism, which provoked wars, and communism has been reliably sourced to have caused, just in the 20th century alone, a hundred million deaths.
Right?
Now that's the challenge, right?
So when you say to people, well, we should ban ads for junk food because it causes real-world harm.
We should ban ads for cigarettes because they cause real-world harm.
We should ban anything that promotes smoking because it causes real-world harm.
Okay, so there's an ideology that causes real-world harm, empirically proven.
So what do we do?
Right?
So, then, ban ads for sugary foods full of carbs.
So, what's wrong with sugary foods full of carbs?
You say, oh, but they're not good for you.
That's not true.
If you have one of those in your lifetime, you're not going to die.
Pretty sure of that.
I'm not a dietician.
I'm not a doctor.
But I'm pretty sure that if you have one Cinnabon over the course of your life, You're not going to die from it.
So it is an excess of consuming these things that causes the harm.
So why should people able to moderate themselves lose their free speech rights for people who just keep stuffing their faces with Cinnabons?
No harm, no hate for Cinnabons.
They're really good.
Myself, I mean, I have no particular ceiling on the sugar that I can ingest, which is why I don't do.
I don't do sugar anymore.
Right?
Say, ah well you know, people who are leftists have more mental disorders and so
leftism promotes mental disorders which are defined in a sense by
unhappiness and therefore leftism promotes unhappiness and therefore
we should ban that, right?
So if you're going to say ideas and arguments that lead to real-world harm should be banned, tell me where on earth do we stop?
And you know, once you surrender the principle, it's never going to stop.
You'll want to live even more once you taste cheesecake, yeah?
There was a, uh, many years ago, uh, Red Lobster had a vanilla bean cheesecake.
That was great.
28 grams of sugar daily is my limit.
Yeah, read the label on chocolate bars.
Okay, so you are responsible with your sugar intake and a lot of people are.
Now some people aren't.
So then what you're saying is the people who are responsible have to lose free speech rights for the sake of the people who aren't responsible.
Right?
Having kids exposed, you can make an argument that having Aren't Annie's pretzels a sugar and carbs weaponized?
Oh, it's not just sugar and carbs because you also get the fat from that delicious space cheese dip that they have.
And it is actually pretty good.
You make my mouth water.
Dipping those pretzels that have the crystal sugar salt on them on top, giving them a big dip and then just chomping that down.
It's great.
I have a, you know, whenever I'm around and they're around, I have a couple of those a year.
Yeah.
Cinnabon smell in the mall is the true Satan.
Yeah.
Right.
So, Tim Hortons cinnamon buns are great.
I don't think I've ever had those.
But I don't mind from Tim Hortons once in a while the toasted raisin tea biscuit with butter.
And they just shotgun that butter, they might as well mainline it straight up your nose.
Okay, I'm not talking about illegal material, right?
I'm just talking about you can make the case that, look, kids are going to be exposed their whole life to ads for things that are bad for them in excess, right?
You can't just say something is bad for you.
In general.
I mean, for the most part.
I mean, you can think of extreme examples and so on, like bullets to the head.
But is smoking bad for you?
Well, if it helps you write a great novel and you smoke for a couple of months and then never pick up cigarettes again, you get a great novel and it probably hasn't done you a huge amount of harm.
Again, I'm no doctor, I'm just kind of guessing, right?
Is sugary, salty, fatty food bad for you?
You can't answer that.
You can't answer that.
I mean, it's probably not the end of the world if you're underweight and need to gain weight.
What if it just makes you happy enough to get through another day?
What if you only have it once in a blue moon?
The whole point of exercise is to get to eat unhealthy food.
I mean, I exercise in part because... Because I like to eat.
and if I don't exercise I gain weight.
And is the is the
opposite of bad information censorship
or education?
For more information, visit www.FEMA.gov.
Right?
That's the big question.
Right?
So back to me running this fictional company, right?
Is the problem of irrational people Is the problem internet videos or podcasts or is it that neither their families nor their church nor their school nor their relatives have taught them how to think critically?
Yeah, if you're digging a trench, Auntie Annie's or Cinnabon's are fuel.
I mean, when I worked up north, I did a ridiculous amount of physical labor every day.
I probably needed five to six thousand calories a day because I was just doing a ridiculous amount of physical labor in the cold, which is even more calorie intensive.
So I would have a breakfast of like, you know, four sausages, three eggs, toast, sometimes pancakes, because I didn't eat lunch and I just needed to do eight hours of brutal physical labor.
So you look at that breakfast, it's like the opening, there's this sort of a very funny but bitter movie called Withnail and I, and it opens with eggs deep-fried in fat, right?
So yeah, well, British diet is famously bad, and it's like, yes, but there's a lot of physical labor there.
So I would never eat those breakfasts now, but I'm not doing eight to ten hours of brutal physical labor a day.
I mean I've mentioned this years ago on the show but I remember being quite influenced by a diary of a guy I read who was a worker in the Industrial Revolution.
He worked unloading barges on the canal and he wanted to quit beer.
And he did quit beer, but then he just couldn't do his job.
He said, I just can't get the energy.
I've tried milk.
I've tried bread.
I just, I cannot get energy.
Beer is what gives me the energy to do my job.
And of course, beer said, well, beer is bad for you.
you well for most of human evolution at least beer would be less likely to have bacteria in it
ah so it's tough We can all think of extreme cases and we are tempted.
That kind of temptation is satanic and I'm not kidding about that.
It is satanic.
It's just a way to get you to break your principles based upon sentimentality.
To break your principles based upon sentimentality.
Well of course we've got to ban smoking because smoking is bad for you.
It's like yes smoking is bad for you for sure.
So then you're saying we should ban things that are bad for people.
Well, is current government education good for kids?
No.
Yeah, cold climate plus hard labor equals calorie-rich diet.
Yeah, I did gain weight working up north.
At all.
Is alcohol bad for you?
Well, I don't particularly like it.
I mean, a light beer after working in the hot sun for a while is a pretty good thing, but I don't particularly like beer, but a lot of people drink fairly responsibly, and there are some people who don't.
And the question with advertising to children is, okay, Are toys that are expensive good for children?
The argument could be made that they're not.
because if the parents have to work very hard or have to work extra hours
for toys that are good for children, then the children have less time with their parents
and they end up as empty materialists who are lonely and isolated and think that money buys happiness.
So what's good for kids?
What's bad for kids?
Is it good for kids to be told that their ancestors were evil and everything they do is wrong?
No.
So, it's, you can't evaluate individual instances, you can only evaluate principles.
Philosophically, right?
So, if you're going to, because they talked about sort of reliable news sources, right?
Reliable news sources.
So these sort of so-called reliable news sources are constantly getting things wrong that cause real-world harm.
I mean the most obvious example that most of us will remember is the war in Iraq
which was based upon falsehoods and caused and I've got a whole video which you should
watch called um
10 years in Iraq the brutal truth Let me actually just go and get the actual title for this because 10 years of hell, that's it, 10 years of hell.
Just do a search at FDR podcast for Iraq and watch this.
I ended up being on Abbie Martin's show on TV way back in the day talking about this.
False information that leads to real world harm.
you How about, uh, all your problems are caused by this racial group or that religion or the other.
And then that causes a lot of people to get... Iraq, a decade of hell.
Thank you.
The show is 2371.
Iraq, a decade of hell.
Thanks, James.
So, as far as false information that causes real-world harm, there's quite a lot of it coming out of the mainstream media, right?
The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 changed the results of the election.
I mean, we know that statistically.
I think it was 16 or 17 percent of people would have changed their vote if they'd known
about it and suppressing the Washington Post story changed the outcome of the election.
So as far as that goes, they say, well...
False information leads to real-world harm.
Okay, well, then we would look at the mainstream media that has lied the West into just about every war known to man, right?
I'll give you another example.
So, smoking can take a decade or so, or more, right?
It obviously varies off people's lives.
And, James, can I just get a fact check on that?
I'm going from some fairly vague memory.
The other number I know better, right?
So, significant adverse childhood experiences, and of course PeacefulParenting.com, you can
check that out, but significant adverse childhood experiences can take up to 20 years off your
lifetime.
time.
So significant chronic child abuse can be twice as dangerous as smoking.
Right?
Now of course nobody can get you to quit smoking in the past.
They can only get you to quit smoking in the present, right?
So this is the problem with these principles, right?
It's on average a decade.
Yeah.
Thank you.
So, when I talked to people back in 2007-2008 for
When I talked to people about you don't have to have chronic emotional abusers in your life.
If your parents are abusive, they continue to be abusive as adults.
Then I'm saying to people, you had inflicted upon you abusive relationships as a child,
you do not have to continue to have those.
.
abusive relationships as adults, I'm asking people to quit, I'm saying to people you have
the option to quit a toxic substance called abusive relationships that's damaging your health.
Do you see where I'm going with this right?
So, if people genuinely believed that we should promote that, which, let's say, we should definitely promote people quitting smoking, right?
Because smoking takes 10 years off your life.
Okay.
Then, if I'm promoting the option of getting out of abusive relationships, which can take up to 20 years of your life, because, and I don't know the answer to this.
It's a big question.
I don't know if it's been studied.
I don't think it has.
Yeah, uncontrolled diabetes is right.
Uncontrolled diabetes is the same as smoking a decade off your life and yet we won't allow cigarettes to be promoted but we will allow fatty food and sugary food and so on to be promoted.
In fact, it seems that there's quite a bit of falsehoods in the past about blaming fat for the effects of sugar, right?
There's sort of all of these studies that seem to have been paid off and so on in the past to shift the blame from sugar to fat, right?
So, when I say to people, stressful relationships are bad for your mental health and they can be difficult for your physical health.
Again, I'm no doctor, right, but stress seems to have an effect on overall health, chronic stress.
So when I say to people, you don't have to be in abusive relationships for your life, right?
If you had them inflicted upon you as a kid, you don't have to keep doing them as adults.
There could be some potential health benefits from that.
I mean, I obviously think it's better in terms of peace of mind to not be in abusive relationships.
But the real question is, the 20 years of extreme child abuse, I'm not talking about, you know, minimal to medium levels, but extreme child abuse taking up the 20 years off your life.
Is that because of the child abuse or because you continue to spend time with the abusers into adulthood?
Right, so if you had a mom had you at 25 and she lives to 85, right, then you're 60.
So is the negative effects of child abuse what happens to you as a child or the time from 20 to 60, those 40 years where you're still in that stressful, difficult and abusive relationship?
Dunno.
I think you could make a case, but it would be interesting to see the data.
But it's not something that is likely to study.
I mean, from what I've read, and again, don't take any medical advice from me, but from what I've read, if you stop smoking fairly early and you exercise and so on, it mitigates a lot of the risk.
Again, look all of that stuff up yourself.
I don't know what I'm talking about.
If you quit smoking and you exercise and do all other good sort of health practices, some of the damage can be mitigated.
In fact quite a bit of it, I believe, can be mitigated.
And so, even if you smoke for a while, if you quit, it mitigates the damage.
If you were abused as a child and then you don't spend time with stressful, relentless child abusers as adults, does that mitigate some of the health risks?
I can certainly see the case where it might.
But again, it's not proven.
I don't know for sure.
But it's interesting and it certainly should be studied.
Of course, right?
Of course.
So, if a toxin In a cigarette is something we should advocate for people to quit but when I even talk about the possibility of quitting a toxin called a narcissistic sociopathic or destructive personality everyone gets mad at me then you see that nobody cares about mitigating health in that way right?
So then the question is if people don't evaluate say well You know we really should advocate for quitting smoking because that's better for people's health and then I talk about not having to be in abusive relationships as an adult and people get mad at me even though not being in abusive relationships as an adult can have very positive effects on your health.
We can see that there's no principles at play here so if it's not principles then it's power.
That's all there is in life.
If it's not principles it's just power.
If it's not principles, it's just power.
Do governments really care about smoking?
Well, they seem to be quite keen to make money off weed.
And weed is often smoked, right?
There's some theories out there that Nicotine societies tend to be more rebellious and weed societies tend to be more compliant, which is why the government doesn't like nicotine but does like cigarettes.
Sorry, does like weed.
I don't know.
I don't know.
It's just an interesting theory.
But I obviously don't know the answer to that.
I don't know if that's been studied either.
So often it's financial incentives masquerading as benevolent censorship.
Right, so if you're a government, if you import an adult immigrant, they get to work right away.
They're either voting for you or working or both, contributing taxes and so on, and propping up the value of housing for your voting base and so on.
Whereas if you encourage your citizens to have children, it takes 20 years for that investment,
which costs government a lot of money, to flower into a citizen who votes and produces taxes and so on.
And, sorry James, if you can have a quick look, just to see if we can, if it has been, has anyone studied
The effects on health of abusive relationships.
I mean, I know that we've talked about this in terms of ACEs, that study has been done pretty well, but I don't know how much of the adverse childhood experience damage to people's health out of the Kaiser Permanente studies, out of Dr. Vincent Felitti's studies, I don't know how much of that damage in terms of shaving off longevity is the result of early child abuse, What proportion of that is just the early child abuse and what portion of that is having the abusive people still in your life over the course of your life?
I don't know.
But yeah, if there have been any studies done, maybe it's been done on abusive marriages or abusive dating
relationships or boyfriend-girlfriend relationships, but it would be interesting to know if there's something like that.
So, are we going to say that...
Language that could lead to real-world harm should be banned because some people... Ah, here we go.
So we got this from ChatGPT, which, you know, use at your own risk.
I know it's a little hinky on sources.
ChatGPT says, yes, there are studies indicating that abusive relationships can significantly impact health.
Research shows that victims of abuse often experience higher rates of depression, anxiety and chronic conditions like heart disease.
They may also face higher levels of stress and trauma related disorders.
Sources like the American Psychological Association and various public health journals provide detailed insights into these effects, right?
So, and I don't know the answer to this of course and I don't think it's been studied but How much of something like ischemic heart disease, which seems to be an effect of ACEs, negative ACEs, well they're negative by, sorry, negative adverse is kind of redundant, but how much of the shaving off of lifespan for something like cancer, which can be stress-related, and ischemic heart disease, which according to the chat, GPT at least, is impacted by abusive relationships, how much of the shortened lifespan is the result of childhood stuff and how much of that is the result of continuing abuse into adulthood?
Right?
So if governments prefer importing adult immigrants to having native citizens have children, then they will say anybody who's against mass immigration is a bigot and a blah blah blah and all right?
So all of that is Is it censorship or is it financial or economic incentives?
If there were reasonable or potentially beneficial alternatives to medical treatments for COVID and that information was suppressed, was that because it's just plain bad or how much were financial incentives at play there again?
It's hard to say.
But certainly, without a doubt, people got banned for things that turned out to be true.
And, of course, they don't get any recompense for that, right?
So, you know, with regards to Susan, ex-CEO, now ex-alive of YouTube, with regards to her, Why is she just a symptom?
Well, there's so much money in politics that censorship becomes inevitable.
The problem is not censorship fundamentally.
The problem is how much you can profit from censorship.
That's the challenge.
That's the real problem.
How much can you profit from censorship?
Well, an enormous amount.
Right?
An enormous amount of money gets made through censorship.
and as long as you have this centralized political power wherein people can make millions, hundreds of millions,
billions, hundreds of billions of dollars
from the government, then
all criticisms of that kind of government spending, it faces down massive
amounts of economic incentives on the other side of things, right?
So, as long as the governments, as long as governments around the world control
trillions of dollars, then morality will mask itself, sorry, censorship will mask
itself in morality, pretend it's for the general good while profiting from
government money.
company.
you That's just generally the way it will go.
Can bad experiences actually improve health?
Absolutely.
Absolutely bad experiences can improve health.
I mean, I survived cancer and have a renewed commitment to health.
Cancer could have me live longer, right?
Because I have a renewed commitment to sort of health and exercise and eating well and I weigh even less.
Like I put this video out with me in 2019 speaking at the European Parliament about tech censorship, which really began the whole process of deplatforming.
I think, I don't know, but that was sort of what happened afterwards.
And I was like, yeah, boy was a little thick.
So yeah, bad experiences are designed to improve health, right?
So if as a kid you ride a bike and you turn too quickly on the gravel, you'll fall and get your strawberry knees and then you're going to be more careful, right?
So then you're going to be more safe, right?
So the idea that we can promote health without kids having negative experiences is really
not very sensible.
You can't promote mental health by bubble wrapping kids from reality.
You can't promote physical health by keeping kids inside because you're frightened of the
neighborhood.
You just have to let kids take their risks and that's how they learn and that's how they
become safe.
You become safe through exposure, danger.
But that's a male thing, right?
For women dealing with babies and toddlers, you can't let them learn by experience because it'll probably kill them, right?
But for adults, for anyone beyond the age of sort of seven or eight, you have to learn by experience.
You can't be bubble-wrapped.
But because women are sort of designed to continue this conveyor belt of kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids, babies and toddlers are just what they're dealing with their whole lives, their whole adult lives.
They don't like the idea of people learning by experience.
You have to prevent problems you can't just let, right?
You can't just let children learn by experience because that could be fatal for babies and toddlers.
Alright, any other last questions, comments?
Thank you.
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Yeah, somebody says, I grabbed my toddler from falling into a river the next day.
She had no idea what happened.
Yeah, for sure.
For sure.
You can let older people, or you can let older kids learn by experience, you can't let babies and toddlers learn by experience, because they don't really learn and the consequences are too high.
No, I mean, I remember as a kid going on a hike, I was about maybe four going on a hike in Ireland with my father and his sisters, and they told me about nettles, don't touch the nettles, and I'm like, really?
I mean, how bad could it be?
And I vividly remember touching the nettle and like, okay, they're right.
We have empirically verified to do not touch the nettles.
It was very, very unpleasant.
And of course, because I was very young, it lasted for quite a long time.
Quite a long time.
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What's a nettle?
It's a stinging plant.
It's a stinging plant that's in England and Ireland and other places as well, of course, right?
Northern European stinging plant.
They have little sacks of poison that hit your skin and cause considerable discomfort, to put it mildly.
So, yeah, they were, they were, are they called dark leaves?
Right, right, right.
A job interview tips what to say when asked about weaknesses.
Oh, be perfectly frank about them.
Yeah, and don't be shy.
Like, here's my weaknesses, here's what I'm working on, here's what I know, here's the feedback I've accepted, here's the stuff I've learned about myself.
Because everyone says, oh, my weaknesses, I'm too hardworking, and sometimes I can be too honest, and everybody knows you're lying about that stuff.
Everybody has their weaknesses.
For me it can be verbosity and focus could be my weakness.
So yeah, just be honest about your weaknesses and you'll be memorable because you're honest about your weaknesses.
I have probably at least half a dozen weaknesses, at least half a dozen weaknesses that I would talk about.
Maybe I'll talk about them at some point, but I think I've talked about them before.
No, they're not like thistles.
Thistles are just thorns.
This is actually poison.
So, you know, here's my weaknesses.
I get distracted easily.
Sometimes I can get a bit too social.
I know that socializing at work can be good, but sometimes it's not so good.
These are the things I'm working on.
You'll be memorable.
And if you explain your weaknesses to people, they're more interested.
A good manager is more interested in someone who explains his weakness.
So I hope that helps.
Yeah.
Oh, I'm such a perfectionist.
I just don't like, come on.
I mean, maybe you are, but what's the downside, right?
Because when I hear, and of course I've interviewed like a thousand people over the course of my career and hired like a hundred people over the course of my business career.
So I've, I've heard it all.
And you just know when someone has a research bit of pure nonsense and then, you know, just don't lie.
The most important thing in a job interview is don't lie.
Don't lie.
Don't lie.
You know your weaknesses.
Or if you don't know your weaknesses, that's a problem.
Because we all have them.
Right?
We all have them.
And we need to... Some weaknesses we need to work with and improve, and some weaknesses we just need to get other people to do.
Right?
So... There's lots of things.
You know, I have a weakness.
I don't make my own stoves.
So... When I need a stove...
I buy a stove.
Other weaknesses, I'm not good at cleaning my own teeth with a scraper, so I go to the dentist for that, right?
So just, you know, be honest about things, right?
Moodiness.
Whatever, right?
Perfectionists are a nightmare to work with, never get anything done.
Oh, yeah, and they kill productivity in everyone else, right?
So people say, well, I'm a perfectionist and everyone thinks, oh my god, you're going to get everything perfect.
I love that about you.
It's like, no, no, you're going to be exhausting and kill everyone's motivation by detailing everything.
Yeah, I don't like doing dishes, so I get a dishwasher, right?
She's 5'2".
Oh, just kidding.
Just kidding.
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