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July 17, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:34:45

How to be a JERK! Twitter/X Space

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	I do want to thank everyone who dropped by last night.
	That was a really, really good conversation, a really, really good show.
	And I appreciate that.
	So here was a question.
	Again, happy to hear from you.
	Here's a question that came in from Joshua Vasquez.
	He said, What are some questions to ask ourselves to discern whether or not we are falling for propaganda?
	It's a great, great question, a really, really important question.
	And I'm going to give you some of the things that I have noticed about this issue of falling for propaganda.
	And the first thing that is important to, I guess, Grok or understand about the issue of falling for propaganda is that propaganda works on punishments and rewards.
	It does not work on reason.
	It does not work on evidence.
	It does not work on facts.
	It works on punishment and reward.
	So anytime somebody comes at you with an idea or an argument and implicit or explicit in that is threat or reward, then you are absolutely in the realm of propaganda.
	You are absolutely in the realm of propaganda.
	So, for instance, I said to young men that while they suffer, their suffering is not unique, and there still has to be a way to overcome the obstacles placed in front of you.
	Now, this is something that I don't exactly know where it came from in me, and maybe people out there have more insight into this than I do, because, well, you know, it's hard to see yourself, right?
	It's hard to see yourself.
	The way that I sort of view a lot of personality traits is, you know, for most of human history, there was no such thing as a mirror.
	I mean, I guess you could look in a writing on the, you could look in the reflection of a lake or something like that, but there really was no such thing as a mirror in the way that we understand them now, polished metal and so on, right?
	But we see ourselves all the time now.
	I mean, I get to see my giant thumb visage for hours and hours a week when I'm doing sort of video live streams and so on.
	So for me, it's kind of like in history, other people saw you all the time, but it was very rare to see yourself.
	And it's the same thing with self-knowledge.
	So maybe you all have better insights as to why this is the case with me.
	But I have, you know, this, I've always been fascinated by this idea, this argument, like the unstoppable will.
	The unstoppable force meets the immovable object.
	It's sort of a paradox in physics, right?
	If you have a force that can't be stopped and it hits an object that can't be moved, what happens?
	Well, of course, this is impossible.
	It's an impossibility because it's like a square circle, right?
	If it can't be stopped, then the object has to move.
	And if the object can't move, then the force has to be stopped.
	And so it's a paradox.
	But for me, I've always had, and then there's pluses and minuses to this.
	I've always had a, just keep trying.
	Just keep trying.
	Whatever obstacle you have, just push back, just keep trying.
	Find another way, find another path, find another route.
	And I would say, as a whole, I mean, you know, it's tough.
	It's tough in life.
	It's costs and benefits, right?
	Trade-offs.
	So in life as a whole, my find a way to make it work, find a way to make it happen, I sort of view my will as, it sounds a little passive, but if there's a sudden giant spring that opens up on the top of the mountain, then the water will just find its way down.
	Let's say it's just a lot of rocks and it's a really rocky mountain.
	The water will just, if it pools and there's more water coming, it would just find its way down.
	Path of least resistance, because it's water, it would just find a way.
	You know, that old Jurassic Park cliché in life finds a way.
	They were back doing gay frogs long before Alex Jones, I think, brought it up even.
	So I've always felt I can find a way.
	And this, in the business world, when I was a programmer, if you've ever done any computer programming, you just know that there are all of these obstacles, things that just, it's supposed to work together.
	It doesn't work.
	The install fails.
	There's this particular DLL that you overwrite in order to get your tree to work on the screen.
	There's just a lot of issues and problems and compatibilities and so on.
	And you just have to find a way.
	There's always a way.
	There's always a way.
	Just find a way.
	And I think that's been pretty beneficial for me in a lot of ways in life.
	And it's, I mean, also, it has its negatives for sure.
	I mean, I'll be straight out with you.
	It has its negatives.
	Because when you have that just will everything, then you don't end up in the Aristotelian mean.
	So people who think they can will too little end up kind of passive.
	People who think they can will too much either end up like dominating bullies or they end up being exploited in a way because, you know, in my 20s, of course, I was in relationships, sometimes in the business world and sometimes in the friendship world and sometimes in the world of romance, where things weren't working and I just thought I could find a way.
	And for me, finding a way when it involves, you know, technology or building something physical or working with my hands, you can almost always find a way.
	The problem is when you start working with other people, they can harness your willpower for their own ends, right?
	This is the I can fixer thing, like you don't have control over other people and you can't fix people in that kind of way.
	So I've always had this will to overcome, this will to dominate.
	I will not lie down until nature pushes me into the six foot deep dirt map of eternity.
	I will not back down.
	That doesn't mean I won't change course, right?
	He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.
	Doesn't mean anything like that.
	But it does mean that I won't back down.
	So over the last couple of days, I've been trying to transfer this thing to young men.
	And of course, young women as well, but I think the focus has really been on young men, which Is don't give up.
	Don't be blackpilled.
	Don't give up.
	You're not trying to date all women.
	You're not trying to date crazy women.
	You're not trying to date leftist women necessarily.
	You're not trying to date irrational women.
	You just need one.
	You just need one.
	And given that I view my audience as the top 1%, you only need one out of 100 women.
	So even if you say 90% of women are crazy, I don't believe that.
	But even if you say that, well, they've self-selected themselves out of a pool of people you don't want to marry anyway.
	So I've really been focused on the don't give up.
	Now, if I were to say to someone, you have the opportunity to live to be 250 years old.
	And I mean, like under current circumstances, not with some magical new technology.
	So if I were to say to someone, you have the opportunity to live to be 250 years old, then people would write back to me and say, no, like the longest human lifespan is like 120 or, you know, most people only live to 85.
	Like there's nobody who lives that long.
	Would they get angry at me?
	I mean, they might roll their eyes a little.
	Would they get angry at me?
	Would they say, you effing boomer, you out of touch, whatever, right?
	There wouldn't be this rage, right?
	When my daughter was little and she made mistakes in math, you know, two and two make five.
	I mean, just correct her, right?
	I don't need to get mad at her.
	Just made it, you know, like when kids, you know, they want to bring you a glass of milk on a tray, right?
	And they're little.
	And, you know, it's even odds that the tray is going to make it to you, right?
	Because they're wobbly and so on, right?
	So most likely they're going to drop.
	And you say, you know, use a plastic glass so it doesn't break, right?
	So, you know, odds are that my daughter was going to drop.
	And she was actually pretty good.
	She's going to drop the glass for the most part, right?
	I'm not going to get mad at her because she's learning, right?
	You know, I mean, one thing my mother was quite patient with me and my brother about was teaching us racket sports.
	Racket sports take a while when you're a kid because a racket's so big and playing tennis is not easy.
	And she was pretty good.
	She was pretty.
	We used to actually, she was a little cheap.
	And I shouldn't say that.
	That's actually unfair.
	She was frugal, frugal, because we didn't have any money, really.
	And so we used to be able to play on tennis courts for free.
	And then they charged a nominal fee.
	It wasn't much, five pennies or something like that.
	Yes, I'm that old.
	And then they upped it to like 10 pennies.
	And then we stopped paying for it.
	And what we would do is get up super early in the morning.
	My whole family, my brother and myself and my mother, we would get up super early in the morning, like dawn.
	And then we would climb the fence to get into the tennis courts.
	And then we would play an hour of tennis and climb back out before the guy came to open the courts.
	And that's how we played our tennis when we were little.
	Kind of crazy.
	Well, I shouldn't say crazy.
	Kind of crazy looking back in it on hindsight.
	But that's, I guess maybe, maybe that's kind of where the will is, right?
	And my mother was adamant.
	She says, listen, I didn't mind.
	I mean, when it was free, that was fine.
	We'd pay our taxes.
	But when it went to five pence, that seems, but now it's 10 pence.
	That's unreasonable.
	I'm not going to pay it.
	But I'm still going to play tennis.
	And my mother had that sort of will for that kind of stuff.
	So when I was talking to young men about find a way, find a way, don't give up.
	Don't give up.
	Well, what came back was, of course, a level of anger and rage that is not dissimilar, as I talked about in the live stream last night.
	It's not dissimilar to the feminists, sort of incoherent rage and so on, right?
	Because feminism is a coping mechanism for women who feel they can't find and achieve and maintain love.
	Feminism is the blood that rushes into the void of not just a broken heart, but a heart that feels it can't be loved.
	It can't pair bond, it can't attach.
	It can't relax into the benevolent love and regard of another.
	And feminism punches at the pair bond, and then when the pair bond breaks, it puts on the caste emotional invulnerability of sour grapes.
	And that's not the only thing that it is, but it's certainly a big part.
	And masculism, which is like the reverse image of feminism, kind of goes the same way.
	So when I said to people, you should have hope, and I didn't just say you should have hope.
	I gave them all, like on X, I gave people, no, you don't have to worry about 50% divorce because here's a way to get your risk of divorce down to 5% or lower, which is pretty good.
	Because if you get married, you live five to seven years longer.
	You have better health, lower levels of stress, better mental health, better physical health.
	You're wealthier than you are if you're single and you're generally happier.
	So there is a great benefit to marriage for men and for women too, but just talking about the male side.
	So if I say, don't give up hope, why would people get this angry?
	Well, because that's what propaganda does.
	Propaganda, what it does is it says, if you question me, then you're a bad, terrible person.
	And propaganda tells you that verbal abuse, rage, hostility, like the crazy stuff that went on on my X account over the last couple of days is all perfectly justified and valid.
	It opens up the permission to rage.
	It opens up the permission to abuse.
	And propaganda, by opening up your capacity or willingness or eagerness or justification for abuse, what it does is it punishes people for asking questions.
	It punishes people for having different perspectives, different data, different opinions.
	So that's how you know the main reason you know you're in the grip of propaganda is when questions come along, you feel rage.
	And not only do you feel rage, but you feel justified in expressing that rage.
	You feel perfectly justified.
	And that's the number one thing.
	You're a good person if you believe X and I will approve of you and I will smile at you and I will invite you to be part of the group and you will get a job and you will, so you're bribed, you're bribed into believing something.
	Or on the, you know, the opposite side of that, of course, is that if you don't believe X or if you oppose, I can't use X anymore because it's the name of the platform.
	the thing, the current thing.
	So, if you approve of the current thing, then you're a good person and we'll praise you, and we'll give you rewards and kibbles, right?
	Like how you train dolphins, right?
	Just give them a herring whenever they do the right thing.
	And if you don't believe in this or you oppose it, then you're a bad, terrible person.
	And I'm fully justified in deploying the most horrifying, infantile, demonic levels of rage against you.
	Well, that's how you know people are in the grip of propaganda.
	And of course, we see it clearly.
	If you're more conservative, we see it clearly on the left, right?
	Where, well, you have to believe that all differences in group outcomes in society are the result of prejudice because everyone's the same and therefore the only difference could be prejudice.
	And if you question that or have counter data to that, then you're an evil Nazi misogynist and you should be punched and driven from society, right?
	So that's propaganda.
	I will reward you for holding the current thing position, and I will rage at you and try to harm you if you don't hold or question or even oppose the current thing position.
	And that's the most fundamental thing is do people have reasons?
	And so, or just rage.
	And so when people come at you with rage, you know for absolute certain, and I say this with sympathy, right?
	You know for absolute certain that they're in the grip of propaganda.
	Because when you have facts, you don't need rage.
	Now, just because people are raging at me, it doesn't mean that they don't have good facts on their side.
	But the facts are incidental.
	The permission to rage is the foundation of propaganda because then it attempts to convince people through threats and bribes rather than reason and evidence.
	All right.
	Sorry, there were some people who wanted to talk, and I'm certainly happy to take you in, Austin.
	You had a question or a comment or a criticism?
	I'm all ears.
	Stefan, and I hate that, you know, I saw the system turn most of my people my age into what they are now.
	And it's just, it was weird because I don't know what's your take on homeschooling, but I'd like to hear it.
	Oh, yeah.
	I'm obviously a big fan of homeschooling.
	We've homeschooled my daughter both at home and in very lovely groups.
	And so, yeah, I mean, it's not even a question, especially, I mean, it was only boring and mildly dangerous when I was a kid.
	That's all it was.
	Like, school was just this sort of torture prison of absolute boredom.
	And weirdness, of course, the sex education among kids is always completely weird and bizarre.
	And I've never liked it.
	I think that the government should not be teaching any sexual matters to children.
	It's too easy to hijack and turn creepy.
	And it was pretty creepy even when I was a kid.
	But mostly it was just boring.
	Now it's both boring and toxic.
	Now it's like straight up psychological warfare against the young, particularly the boys.
	So, yeah, I mean, I don't know why people send their kids to government schools.
	I mean, I know some people have to in Germany.
	I think there was a German couple who fled to the U.S. as refugees because of being persecuted for homeschooling in Germany.
	And boy, you know, if there's one thing that you'd want in Germany, it's a reduction in the size and power of the state.
	But apparently that's not a thing anymore.
	So some people really, really can't do it very practically.
	But wherever you can do it, in Canada, it's easy.
	And in America, it's pretty easy and other places.
	So I don't know why you would send your kids to these terrible indoctrination camps, these lack of concentration camps, and watch their brains get slowly dissolved under the most hideous propaganda that's around.
	I don't know.
	And this is the other thing, too.
	It's like, you know, if you're a young man and you grew up in a place where homeschooling is an option, I'm not sure why you're raging at me.
	I didn't send you to government schools.
	In fact, I've been advocating homeschooling for the 20 years that I've been doing this show.
	And most, I mean, the homeschooling was like, like back in 1970, it was like 100,000 kids in America.
	So it's tiny.
	Now it's well north of 5, 6, 7 million.
	I mean, the latest data is a little sketchy, but certainly post-pandemic and post-lockdowns, it's grown enormously.
	So people have both heard of it.
	Even if it's just, what was it?
	Oh, that really nasty lefty show, 30 Rock.
	Was it that one?
	Oh, no, it wasn't that.
	Was it that one or some other?
	Well, you know, they open up with homeschooling, or maybe it was mean girls, mean girls.
	Yeah, they open up with homeschooling, but it was the same writer, right?
	That woman from Saturday Night Life with the leftist glasses.
	So it opens up with all the, you know, the usual, the southerners are dumb.
	It's like, well, no, southerners, they actually had a, they had an intestinal parasite that slowed them down quite a bit.
	It was pretty nasty until quite recently.
	But of course, the leftists always mock the South because the South is patriotic and Christian and the leftists are globalists.
	And, well, a lot of it is just straight up Satanism cloaked in secular garb.
	But it was like a bunch of kids, dumb kids, right?
	Yeah, went back at the time when Jesus rode the dinosaurs, you know, just that homeschooling is just religious bigotry and so on.
	And you can't, the creepy people can't get their holds, can't get their hands on your kids when they're homeschooled.
	So, yeah, people get mad at me.
	So when it was their parents who sent them into these places voluntarily to some degree.
	So yeah, I'm a big fan of it.
	And what was your experience of it as a whole?
	Oh, I was, I loved it.
	Actually, my parents put me to work.
	They made me do customer service, like, you know, go on a task badge to work, you know, three or four times a week after school, you know, get in front of people.
	You know, it was, it was a good experience.
	I enjoyed it.
	I was taught, you know, how to deal with people.
	And, you know, talking to somebody like you who's a master marker, you know, you know how to talk to anybody.
	That's, you know, and that's a very powerful tool.
	There's, you can go in a room and talk to anybody and there's no anger coming in the room.
	There's no like, you know, you, you can stall the room to at least an idea of what you believe could be, you know, stable.
	I learned that At an early age.
	And it's just like, it's a tool that we don't have anymore.
	We just want to have anger.
	Are you at an air show?
	What is that noise?
	It's, I'm right down, I'm right on the road here trying to catch a ride.
	But I just wanted to call or ask you about homeschooling.
	I apologize for the noise.
	No, no, don't, don't apologize.
	It was fine.
	All right.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	Tech Chariot, you are on the ether.
	Manifest your thoughts in bits and burps and bytes.
	TCPIP, our passive trade to wisdom.
	What's in your mind, my friend?
	Don't forget to unmute.
	It's actually kind of funny, right?
	I don't know if he's got technical issues or not, but he's been wanting to talk for a while.
	All right.
	How about now?
	Okay, there you go.
	What was the issue there?
	There was a second button that I had to click.
	Steph, thank you for your time.
	If you wanted to keep this just about propaganda, I had a couple of things to add to the previous conversation.
	I, of course, have a non-propaganda related question for you.
	It is your show.
	It's your show.
	You have the mic, you have the ear.
	I'm happy to chat about whatever's on your mind.
	Oh, excellent.
	Well, then in that case, I'll just add a couple of things that you can react to if you want.
	You can refute it or you can affirm it, do whatever you want with it.
	But the first thing is I've noticed a lot with propaganda is, I know it's just kind of, they sort of teach you this thing in school, but we never really think about it until we have the chance to experience.
	But from my experience, which can be helpful in calibrating a propaganda measuring device, is that if you value, if somebody in your life values media programming over their personal interaction with you at the expense of your relationship with them, chances are they are a victim of propaganda.
	So I think we all have that example of a friend from high school that we knew quite well.
	And then after graduation, went our separate ways.
	And in my case, I had a friend that voted differently than I did.
	And when she learned about that, decided that I could no longer be a part of her life.
	And I'm sorry to interrupt.
	So were you voted for smaller government?
	She voted for bigger government or was it something else?
	I don't want to say, but what's important is that we voted differently and that this person valued what they saw on the news more than what they knew about me, you know, about going to all of my parties as a kid, hanging out.
	I get that people can change, but I think it's pretty good advice in general in life that you should judge a person based on what you see them do instead of what some media says they should be doing.
	Okay, so hold on, hold on.
	Sorry, just want to make sure I understand.
	Was she a leftist?
	I don't want to say it.
	I don't think it's important because I think there's propaganda.
	No, it is important.
	No, it is important.
	Hang on, hang on.
	What if she was, I'm not saying she was, but what if she was a communist?
	Would that be important?
	I think that the argument for propaganda and communism historically is quite strong.
	And so if your assumption is that she has left-leaning views and I have right-leaning views, I think that would be a good assumption.
	But again, I'm not here to trash one ideology within America over another because I do see it happening in ways.
	No, no, I am.
	I am.
	No, I am.
	I am.
	So leftists, if you're more conservative or more on the right or want a smaller government, what happens to you when leftists get power?
	Quality of life goes down.
	And why does the quality of life go down?
	Because individual liberties are infringed upon.
	Right.
	So they want to initiate, they want to use the government to initiate the use of force against you for peaceful activities.
	I think that's, yeah, that's an accurate assessment.
	So why, when someone is bloodthirsty to control you with violence, why the living hell is that not an important factor in evaluating them?
	Well, it's just not something I wanted to necessarily bring up on the platform.
	I just wanted to help people how to calibrate propaganda detection.
	Hang on, hang on.
	You don't have to answer the question, obviously, if you don't feel comfortable, but it's an important question, wouldn't you say, that if somebody wants to, like if somebody hires a thug to rob you, would that be an important factor in your relationship with them?
	I would say that I would not want them knowing where I live after that point in time.
	Right.
	So you wouldn't want to be friends with someone who hired someone to steal from you.
	Yes, that is.
	I mean, I don't think that she necessarily sees it that way.
	I mean, in the case of stealing, it's a targeted action against somebody who is operating within the confines of law.
	So it's not a perfect analogy.
	In the case of friends of mine who are left-leaning, I still want to be friends with them.
	Maybe there's a chance that there's a conversation that happens that me or one of my other conservative friends says something.
	Sure.
	There's a great conversation that can, hang on, there's a great conversation that can happen.
	Do you support the use of violence against me for disagreeing with you?
	Absolutely not.
	I think people are going to be able to do it.
	No, of course not, right?
	So that's what you say to leftists, right?
	I don't like the welfare state.
	I think it's morally wrong, coercive, and destructive to the poor.
	And they say, well, we agree with the welfare state, right?
	Say, do you want me thrown in jail for disagreeing with you about the welfare state?
	And of course, the leftists, who up until they gained power, were very pro-free speech.
	The leftists will say, well, of course, you shouldn't be thrown in jail for disagreeing with me, right?
	Say, okay, then I should be able to withhold my tax money from the welfare state.
	Otherwise, there's no practical way to disagree with you.
	It's just a voice, right?
	It's like if a woman is going to be assaulted and she says, I don't want you to assault me, then it doesn't really matter if the guy assaults her anyway, right?
	She's just speaking into the wind.
	So am I allowed to practically disagree with you or do you want me thrown in jail for actually acting upon my disagreement with you?
	You prefer the welfare state.
	So you think that, I don't know, whoever is the department of welfare or whatever it is, like whoever's in charge of that, right?
	So let's just say it's a Billy Joe Bob, right?
	So you think Billy Joe Bob, who's in charge of the welfare state, is the guy to solve the problem of poverty.
	So you should send your money to him.
	But I don't think Billy Joe Bob is really at all good.
	In fact, the welfare state, like 90% of the money never even reaches the poor.
	It's one of the most inefficient, quote, charities around.
	Am I allowed, do you Accept that I have the right to disagree with you in a practical sense and not fund what I find morally objectionable and horrible.
	Right?
	You shouldn't fund things that you find morally objectionable and horrible.
	So I should not be forced to fund things that you like that I don't.
	So do you reject the fact that I should go to jail for not funding what you like and I find morally abhorrent?
	Do you reject the use of violence against me for peaceful actions?
	Now, if they say, yes, I reject the use of violence against you for peaceful actions, they say, okay, well, you're a libertarian then.
	I mean, at an absolute or level of integrity, you're an anarcho-capitalist.
	Do you support or reject the use of violence against me for disagreeing with you?
	That's the conversation, isn't it?
	It's a conversation that I would love to have if I had the opportunity.
	Unfortunately, people tend to surround themselves with others that think similarly, and I just, I enjoy a challenge.
	Sorry, maybe I misunderstood something.
	I thought you said you had leftists that you wanted to stay friends with.
	I had friends who are left-leaning that I would like to remain friends with.
	Sorry, you have?
	I have.
	You said you had friends.
	Yeah.
	You had or you have?
	I suppose I probably still have some friends that are left-leaning, but the ones that are really hard left-leaning, I have not seen in a very long time.
	And that was the primary reason why.
	Is it because they rejected you?
	Yes, unfortunately.
	So you let them reject you.
	You didn't confront them.
	See, leftists, and this is true of people who support government action as a whole, right?
	So we'll just talk about the leftists because they're more extreme that way.
	They support the use of violence against people for peaceful actions.
	Look, I have no problem with self-defense.
	Self-defense is the use of force to protect yourself from grievous bodily harm or death.
	No problem with that.
	In fact, I actually think it's a big plus.
	So if leftists are confronted on the fact that they support the use of violence against people for peaceful actions, then they are exposed to the moral roots of their ideology, which is kind of bloodthirsty.
	And so, you know, it's funny because, again, just sort of based upon the last couple of days on X, you know, everyone's like, well, you don't have a solution.
	What's your solution?
	Now, of course, there's no reason why people who are just coming into the conversation and coming in hot, let me tell you.
	There's no reason why they would know all about my historical answers, but my historical answers have always been the same.
	We confront people on the corruption, immorality, and violence that they support, particularly as leftists.
	Because leftists don't see a human behavior.
	They don't want to change really at the point of a gun.
	Now, that gun is cloaked and hidden under syllables and law and text, but it comes down to the same thing.
	You know, it's like that old joke from Monty Python, come see the violence inherent in a system.
	So to say to people who support the initiation of the use of force against peaceful and often legally disarmed citizens that what they're doing is bloodthirsty and coercive, and the fact that they don't know about it or have never really thought about it, I mean, of course, I would give them forgiveness for that, right?
	They exist in a sort of innocent, wide-eyed, kind of half-zombified state of nature with regards to the violence that they're advocating.
	But I've always said to people, it's called the against me argument.
	I've been going back 20 years, right?
	The against me argument is, do you support the use of violence against me for disagreeing with you?
	And if you do, then get the fuck out of my life.
	Because why would you want people in your life who want you thrown in jail for disagreeing with them?
	That's psycho.
	Now, again, forgiveness and understanding, because forgive them farther above, for they know not what they do.
	But there was a significant portion of leftists who wanted children ripped from the arms of their parents for not submitting to them to the mRNA shots.
	That's psycho.
	Why would you want people like that within a thousand miles?
	Well, I would hope that I'd be able to change their mind, perhaps.
	If you have friends of diverse viewpoints, maybe they can call upon those fond memories as a kid or those things that you did for them and recall that you're a good person and worth listening to.
	But that was the other thing that I wanted to add about propaganda that you were discussing is that it's value-driven, right?
	It's about this idea that if somebody disagrees with you, they're a bad person.
	And when somebody is a bad person, it's justifiable to go to more extreme measures to keep them out of your life or exclude them.
	So that's what I'm saying.
	Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean.
	And I'm not criticizing.
	I just don't follow what you mean when you say propaganda is value-driven.
	Is that what you meant?
	Well, human values, right?
	Just because something is true doesn't necessarily mean that people are motivated by it.
	For instance, let's say that you have a friend in your life that needs to go get a job and you say, go get a job.
	And they say, no, I don't want to.
	It's not important.
	How do you convince somebody that it's important?
	That's all an amalgamation of everything else that's going on in somebody's life that you don't have control over.
	So you can present all the logical arguments for why something may or may be the right or wrong thing to do, but you can't make that horse drink out of the well if you lead it to them.
	Sorry, why would your friend need to get a job?
	It's just an example of, A non-moral example.
	So somebody living off of the state, off of a tax.
	No, you didn't say that.
	No, you didn't say that.
	Well, what else is the implication?
	What's this jobless?
	Oh, come on, man.
	Maybe there's fun leaching in the woods.
	Maybe you just won the lottery.
	Like I took a year and a half off from working to write novels, and nobody told me to get a job because I was working on something else.
	So this could, I mean, if you're going to say, okay, the guy's on welfare, he's kind of leeching off the system and he doesn't, or maybe he's faking an injury or something like that for disability, which is depressingly common.
	So then you would say to the guy, listen, you're kind of lying and taking money that's really supposed to be there for really injured people or people who just can't get a job.
	This is kind of wrong and bad.
	Okay.
	So let's say he tells you, nope, I'm going to continue to leech off the system and lie in order to get benefits that are supposed to be for people really in need.
	Okay, so that's a moral issue.
	So then what?
	Let's say he doesn't.
	So yeah, it's a potentially moral issue.
	He could say, I'm more sick or I'm more disabled than you understand, or I have a good setup to live with family.
	Whatever it is, right?
	The important thing is that people will have different values over different facts, and propaganda is value-driven.
	It's driven off of the idea that two people can be looking at the same object or the same policy and see different things depending on who's benefiting.
	So that's why.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Are you saying that propaganda recognizes, accepts, and values different viewpoints?
	I'm saying that propaganda is difficult to dispel because of this concept.
	Stay with the question.
	You got to listen to questions and answer them if it's going to be a conversation.
	Otherwise, we're just two people talking past each other.
	If I understood what you said correctly, and it was possible, of course, that I've not understood things, and I'm not criticizing.
	I'm striving to understand your thinking.
	What I thought you said was that propaganda respects the fact that people can have different perspectives on the same facts.
	No, I don't think propaganda respects that at all.
	I think it's the exact opposite.
	Okay, good, because I think so too.
	Because propaganda says there's only one way to interpret facts.
	And if you have a question or a disagreement about that one single way to interpret facts, and sometimes not even facts, you're an evil person who needs to be attacked and abused and driven from society for the most part.
	Right.
	It's all nuanced now and hidden and everything like that.
	When you learn about propaganda in school, it's never about modern issues, number one, because the parents would be outraged.
	But number two is propaganda has definitely gotten a lot more sophisticated in the past 100 years.
	For the school children, you could pull down a poster of how filthy the Germans were in World War I or World War II or something and how they're less than human.
	And there were people back then that believed that to justify some very transparent actions.
	So that's all that I'm saying is that propaganda pushes that there is no interpretation and that this is the way that your values should be set up.
	And you could still be a good person and have a different set of values today as somebody else.
	You could value freedom and self-determination more than a friend of yours.
	And it would be very difficult to prove that.
	I think it could logically be proved that I wouldn't be here if I didn't think that.
	But I just wanted to add that that is definitely, in my view, a contributing factor is propaganda depending on somebody being a bad person and being a bad person is much harder to prove than the facts or reason about a specific policy example.
	Okay, my head's kind of spinning, but I'm sure that there was good stuff in what you said.
	So is there anything else that you wanted to mention?
	Yes, actually.
	I wanted to ask you one more thing, Steph.
	I really appreciate your indulgence.
	I understand it's have a difficult time talking to people sometimes, so it's a good litmus test for me.
	I wanted to ask you about whether or not you believe that, and this is completely unrelated to propaganda, so you can skip over it if you want, but do you believe that humanity is destined to evolve into a colony organism or a colony type animal?
	And I can explain that a little bit more if you wish, but you could go with it now if you want.
	The problem I have is not with colony type animal.
	The problem or the question I have is what do you mean by destined?
	Well, it seems that at the beginning of human civilization, maybe 10,000 years ago, the average person was a lot more likely to die from accidents, from natural disasters, from sickness, than they are today.
	Those are no longer selecting characteristics in our evolution like they were 10,000 years ago.
	But that has come at a cost.
	And that cost is that we are more independent upon each other today than we were 10,000 years ago.
	Sorry, we're more independent or dependent upon?
	We are more interdependent today.
	Interdependent upon each other.
	Okay, got it.
	Yes.
	Than we were 10,000 years ago.
	And the logical conclusion for that would be is we become even more connected, right?
	And we were just talking about propaganda.
	There was a time when having a book, finding a book was like finding treasure, right?
	And now we're bombarded with information from all over.
	We're interconnected through fiber optic cables.
	It's almost getting to the point where sometimes, and the cynic in me says that we can't even think for ourselves anymore, many of us, or don't want to.
	We outsource that to others.
	So my question is, I watch this trend about the explosion of human population.
	And these are all good things, right?
	Freedom, self-determination, resolutions through peace.
	This is all fantastic stuff.
	And it's leading us in a very exciting direction where we can have these sorts of debates and conversations about how to build the future of our species.
	But the logical outcome of that that I can see, and this really bugs me, pardon the pun, is that we are becoming like bugs.
	Like we're becoming like ants or honeybees and an erosion of liberty.
	So do you believe that that erosion of liberty is an inevitable consequence of cooperation with each other?
	I'm trying to puzzle out what is it you're saying.
	Okay.
	So because you use these terms, I don't know how you're using them, right?
	And these terms are not objective, right?
	So are you trying to say that we are losing freedom because we have become more specialized in our productivity?
	Because interdependence, right?
	I mean, there are people in the world who are much better farmers than I am, and I'm usually hopefully a better philosopher than they are.
	So they'll exchange my food, their food for my philosophy, right?
	So I can specialize in philosophy, they can specialize in growing food, and we both benefit, right?
	They want my philosophical wisdom more than they want their bushel of apples.
	I want their bushel of apples more than my philosophical wisdom.
	So we trade.
	So the fact that we specialize in a more narrow and productive way and become more interdependent with regards to trade as a result, is that what you mean by a loss of liberty?
	I'm not sure where the loss of liberty comes in.
	Well, when I look at, if I'm walking along a sidewalk and I look down and I see an ant and I pity it, I don't pity that ant because it is unintelligent.
	I pity it because it has lost its free will.
	It is so specialized and so interdependent upon its fellow members of its colony that it does not have freedom.
	It can't say no.
	It has to.
	Sorry, what do you mean?
	An analogy of a human being to an ant is not answering my question.
	So are you saying that people lose their freedom when they specialize economically and thus need to trade more?
	I believe that that is a strong possibility.
	I mean, what if you're not?
	This is your argument.
	Don't give me special possibilities.
	This is your argument.
	I am saying that that seems highly probable, and it concerns me greatly.
	So, what do you mean by highly probable?
	Like, if I take some guy and lock him in my basement, he's lost his freedom.
	I wouldn't say it's highly probable that he's lost his freedom.
	You know, when Solchenitsyn gets thrown into a gulag by the communist government in the Soviet Union, he's lost his freedom.
	It's not highly probable.
	So I'm trying to understand, and I'm sympathetic to the idea.
	I'm not, you know, nothing negative about it.
	I'm just genuinely trying to understand what you mean by a loss of freedom.
	If I choose to work on philosophy, I, by definition, am not repairing my air conditioner.
	Now, if my air conditioner goes out, then I need to call someone to come fix my air conditioner.
	And that frees me up to work on philosophy.
	And then, you know, basically what happens is we I exchange some wisdom with the air conditioning guy who values my wisdom and then fixes my air conditioner.
	Obviously, we use money as a medium, but that's kind of the idea.
	So he's focused on how to fix air conditioners or, you know, HVAC in general.
	And I'm focusing on philosophy.
	If I have the choice, I would much rather work on studying philosophy than learning how to fix an air conditioner.
	And he would much rather learn how to fix an air conditioner than whatever other options he have.
	And we know that because that's what he's done.
	So I'm free to focus on philosophy because I'm trading philosophy for fixing the air conditioner.
	The guy who's fixing the air conditioner is free to do whatever he wants.
	He chooses to do the air conditioner fixing for whatever reason.
	So how are we less free as the result of exercising our free choice?
	That is an excellent question.
	I suppose it is why this show and the commitment to liberty is even more important.
	200 years ago, if you accept my analogy or the trend that I've described, people could generally produce their own food better than they could nowadays.
	So if you were ever in a situation where people didn't want to trade food to you for whatever reason, you could still kind of eke out an existence by producing your own.
	Nowadays, if somebody refused to trade food to you, if all people refused to, let's say the government came down and said, we're not doing this because these guys are crazy over there, then you would have no choice, right?
	You would have that loss of that freedom.
	So that's my concern is that by becoming increasingly specialized, we are increasingly vulnerable to tyranny, the way that tyranny is the law in many of these colony insects.
	Okay, so what we would have to do is we would have to go back in time where far more people, I mean, this is an empirical test, right?
	You would go back in time and you'd say, okay, so when there were far more people involved in, say, farming, we would be more free.
	When more people were producing their own food, we would have more liberty.
	Is that what you mean?
	It's yeah, it would be harder to impose tyranny in a situation like that because people would be self-sufficient.
	Okay.
	Obviously, you've taken into account the issue of slavery, which is how 99.99% of human food was produced, right?
	99.99% of human history.
	And of course, slaves were the exact opposite of free.
	I reject that.
	I don't believe that 99% of food was produced by slaves.
	It could have been produced by people that were in a bad economic deal, if that's what you mean.
	But outright ownership, I just, I guess I don't understand.
	You'd have to explain that to me.
	Explain what?
	Your statement that 99% of food produced throughout human history was created by slaves.
	Sure.
	I mean, we could also include serfs, which are, you know, 90% slaves or 85% slaves or whatever, right?
	They have some nominal private property, but they're bought and sold with the land like cattle.
	And of course, I've done a lot of research.
	This doesn't mean that I'm right.
	I'm just telling you, I've done a lot of research on the Agricultural Revolution of the 18th centuries.
	In fact, I wrote a whole novel set in the Agricultural Revolution.
	And one of the things that happened was England finally got true private property in land.
	And this was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and so on.
	So, if you, I mean, ancient China, which I did research on for my documentary on Hong Kong and Chinese communism, this, of course, was produced with serfs.
	The ancient world ran, as you know, on slaves, particularly agricultural labor.
	In the West Indies and in other places, there was, of course, both black and Irish slaves.
	In fact, the Irish slaves were cheaper because they didn't last nearly as well in the hot sun because of their pale skin and red hair, and they just got sunburnt and got sick.
	So, yeah, slavery was, I mean, you look at the ancient Egyptians, they ran on slavery as well.
	So, you know, I'm not saying it's, I've got it down perfect to the last two decimal points, but I mean, certainly the vast majority of food in the past was produced by people who had no economic, no real economic or political freedoms.
	They weren't voting.
	They didn't have the right to buy and sell the land that they worked.
	There was no free market in labor.
	And so, of course, the American South ran significantly on slavery, as you know.
	And the Muslims, of course, took 2 million Europeans as slaves to do their manual labor.
	And so you generally, if you were an elite, you used slaves or serfs to do your manual labor.
	And the biggest manual labor was farming.
	And of course, then what happened was when people got liberated, the end of slavery, when people got liberated, it was the end of serfdom to begin with.
	And then the end of slavery came a little bit after.
	Then you started to get a true market in manual labor.
	In other words, rather than just having slaves, you had workers.
	Now, when you have slaves, you have no particular interest in developing labor-saving machinery.
	And so when you have hourly wages or weekly wages that you pay workers, you have a significant incentive to create labor-saving devices, which was the foundation, of course, of the Industrial Revolution.
	So I think your thesis that when we produce more of our own food is tricky to sustain in the historical reality that when more people produced their own food, it was near universal.
	I mean, there was no freedom really in the world before the last couple of hundred years.
	Yeah, I've taken up more than my fair share of your time stuff, but thank you for using, you know, like freedom and slavery as an example for how if we remain vigilant, we can retain our liberty even as we become increasingly interdependent on each other.
	Thank you so much, sir.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	And listen, great questions.
	And I'm sorry if I was sluggish out of the gate trying to understand what it is that you were saying.
	I always like to make sure I have a full comprehension of what it is that someone's saying.
	And of course, it's not always other people's lack of communication skills, but my ability to grasp things.
	So I appreciate your patience as I tried to puzzle out what it is you were saying.
	And just to otter, otter, you otter set me straight.
	But don't yes, that's right.
	Dad jokes about.
	What's in your mind, my friend?
	Don't forget to unmute.
	Hey, Stefan.
	Good to talk to you.
	Glad you came back to Twitter.
	I was going to ask a question about relationship stuff, but this left and right political discussion has me considering a question that's been bugging me for years.
	And I was interested to hear your take on it.
	What do you think the reason is for the asymmetry in the Overton window for left versus right politics?
	It seems like the left can come up and call for violence.
	They can riot.
	They can actually enact violence.
	But the moment the right-wing political sphere comes even close to violence, it's pro-clutching, you know, pro-clutching a bound.
	And, you know, January 6th, we'll never hear the end of it because of that one moment in time.
	Where do you think that asymmetry comes from?
	Because this is something that I notice everywhere.
	It's almost as though the left is treated like children and the right is treated like adults.
	Oh, no.
	If the left were treated like children, particularly in America, they'd be beaten senseless because spanking and physical violence against children is quite common in America.
	But it's a big question, and I appreciate you bringing it up.
	And I'll touch on it a couple of key points.
	Obviously, it's a whole long, long thing, but very briefly, the reason why the left wins is that they take their ideas very seriously, and they're willing to commit to them.
	So we all, you know, as the first caller was saying, and we've heard these stories all the time.
	So on the left, it's like, well, if you voted for Trump, you're a Nazi, get lost.
	Right.
	So they're very serious about these ideas.
	Whereas on the right, and I think this comes out of Christianity, which is why I had a whole bunch of exciting fracas back in a week or two ago on X about the concept of forgiveness.
	Because on the right, it's like, well, I don't want to let politics get between us and I value the person and we agree to disagree and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And that's just a losing strategy.
	Like whatever you say about it, you know, whether it's going to get you a reward in heaven or something like that, you're going to freaking lose.
	You're just going to lose.
	Because if one person takes their ideas very seriously, or as Ayn Rand used to say, the most consistent position will always win.
	If the left is like, no, no, if you voted for Trump or if you're a conservative or if you're on the right, then you're a Nazi fascist, blah, blah, blah.
	And I don't want to have anything to do with you.
	Well, that gets a lot of people to shut up and get in line.
	And what I've been talking about, of course, for 20 years, and, you know, everyone's mad at me, like, where's your solution?
	But the fact is I've given the solution and I know it's the solution.
	I've given the solution for 20 years, but people don't want to do it.
	And the solution is talk to people about the evils they don't know that they're advocating for.
	And if they continue to advocate for the evils after you've explained it to them and shown them, then get them the frack out of your life.
	Not talking to you in particular, but that's taking you seriously.
	If you believe in the non-aggression principle and you believe that violence is the wrong way to solve social problems, then people who advocate for violence should not be invited to your barbecue.
	People who advocate for violence against you, against your loved ones, should not be over at your dinner parties.
	You should not be breaking bread with them.
	But people on the right don't want to do that.
	And I honestly can't tell you why, other than I think that there's a certain amount of self-congratulatory posturing of how open-minded and tolerant and accepting.
	And it's like, that's not going to save you, bro.
	So I always reject the initiation of the use of force.
	Of course, right?
	People shouldn't use violence to get what they want.
	But people who advocate violence against you for disagreeing with you, why on earth would you want them in your life?
	You can't love someone and also want them thrown into the semi-rape rooms of modern prisons for disagreeing with you.
	Well, I think we should send money to this or that country.
	Am I allowed to disagree with you?
	No.
	If you don't pay your taxes to send money to this or that country or this or that cause or this or that group or this or that continent, it seems like these days, then you go to jail.
	It's like, well, then you're kind of a psycho.
	Like, and again, state of nature.
	People don't understand what they're advocating for.
	They don't understand the bloody machinery that is behind all of their advocacy.
	So we sit down and we calmly and patiently explain it to them.
	And you've got to draw it out.
	Hometh style, draw it out, homeath style, whatever, right?
	Just draw it out.
	This is, where does the money come from?
	Okay, what happens to the people who don't pay it?
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	The left is just, they're just committed.
	They actually believe in the morals that they espouse.
	I don't agree with those morals, but they do.
	And they're willing to actually live by their values.
	And I have more respect for the integrity of the left than I do for the integrity of the right, because the right defines things as evil, won't bring it up with people, and smiles and shakes hands and feeds them greasy burgers on July the 4th.
	Whereas the left, if you disagree with the left morally, I mean, the best you can hope for is ostracism right there.
	And so ostracism is a profound social mechanism for changing people's behavior.
	I mean, I grew up in England, so ostracism is a big thing.
	And of course, I've been advocating for ostracism as a means of correcting social ills because it's peaceful, right?
	Ostracism involves no violence whatsoever.
	So I've been advocating for ostracism for 20 years.
	And, well, more than that, but obviously publicly for 20 years.
	And people on the right do not want to ostracize people who kind of want them thrown in prison.
	They want the people on the right thrown in prison for disagreeing with them.
	And the right would rather be conflict avoidant.
	The right would rather praise themselves for their open-mindedness and their tolerance and their acceptance.
	And well, I would never get, I would never let politics get between me and my brother-in-law's cousin.
	It's like, why not?
	Because if your brother-in-law's cousin gets his way, you go into a gulag, bro.
	And so I don't have status like the people who are big fans of political power to solve complex social problems.
	I don't have them in my life because somebody can't claim to love me and also want me thrown in prison for disagreeing with them.
	So the left has much more integrity.
	They take their ideas much more seriously and they're much more committed to their moral standards.
	And that's why they win.
	Yeah, so I agree with you on most of what you said.
	I think something you said in the very beginning of that statement was illustrative, which is you said, you know, so if we treated the left like children, they'd be getting a spanking.
	And I think you're absolutely right about that.
	I think the problem is that we've abdicated a responsibility.
	And I don't mean to say like one particular group of people against another.
	I think in terms of the ideas that are presented from the left, they need to be shut down, you know, as though the parental wisdom of the right who has seen this movie before, has seen these scenarios play out before, we've abdicated our responsibility in shutting them down firmly saying, no, you can't stay up past your bedtime and have cookies and watch TV until midnight.
	You got school tomorrow.
	And that's, you know, obviously like kind of a lighthearted metaphor.
	But we've allowed ourselves to be hectored by their social ostracism into allowing them to stay up past their bedtime and have the cookies.
	And then the next day they feel shitty at school and then they turn around and sort of cause chaos and blame us for that.
	I think that the right somehow lost control of this whole balance, whatever balance could be said to have existed, you know, maybe 50 or 60, 70 years ago.
	I don't know if that social ostracism became more leveraged by the left because of social media and technology.
	You know, Dunbar's number being exceeded by Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, where you have thousands upon thousands of people seeing your statement, all of a sudden, the law subversion psychology dynamics behind social ostracism lend themselves to be in favor of more of the feminine, passive aggressive social ostracism power.
	But now we're in a scenario where you can't say anything that would be mildly offensive, even though it might be necessary to be said to that childlike idea.
	Like you said, that would cause all kinds of havoc and chaos.
	And you might say like, well, just tell nobody to, you know, don't break bread with them.
	And I agree with that.
	I don't know what the solution is and how we push back.
	But there does seem to be a tremendous asymmetry in just the Overton window alone.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	So this is the problem here exactly, right?
	So you said, I don't know how we solve this problem.
	I don't know how we push back.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	I literally spent 10, 15 minutes giving you the solution and it just passed right through you like a ghost.
	I listened to you, sir.
	And, you know, I don't break bread with people who say, you know, we want to defund the police or we want to kill people or send money to do this and that.
	I don't break bread with them.
	Okay.
	Do you suggest that?
	Do you suggest to others that they do the same?
	Of course I do.
	Yeah.
	And do you continue to break bread with those who break ranks and continue to break bread with those who advocate for violence?
	Well, no.
	I mean, I only have like a couple friends.
	I literally have like one or two friends and I live in a big city.
	And I'm not complaining about that fact.
	I'd rather live by my principles and be lonely than be one of these people.
	Well, you know, you're not lonely.
	Hang on.
	You're not lonely if you live by your principles.
	If you have a couple of friends who mirror your principles and respect your values and are virtuous, that's the only companionship you get.
	Self-erasing yourself for the sake of conformity with the corrupt is the loneliest thing of all.
	No, I agree with that because you lose yourself in, you know, sort of the compliance with whatever they're pushing.
	And I didn't ask this question because I'm languishing in solitude and feel like, oh, I want to be friends with these people.
	I don't.
	I'm just curious from an academic perspective, like what the hell is going on.
	You know, I just find it to be curious because of the chaos.
	Yeah, people don't want to make their values real.
	Whatever you define as evil, you must shun.
	And if conservatives say that, you know, government is force, which it is, I mean, government is defined as the only social agency that can initiate the use of force.
	And Barack Obama was talking about that.
	And George Washington was talking about that.
	And, right, this is sort of a well-known and understood thing.
	So if you define the initiation of the use of force as immoral, thou shalt not steal, right?
	Then the people who advocate for that which is evil, you have to either correct them or shun them.
	And you should gently and positively and friendly, in a friendly and helpful manner, you should point out to them that what they're actually advocating for is violence.
	And if they're like, oh my gosh, you know what?
	That makes sense.
	Let me think about it.
	But, you know, they get back to you and I thought I can't find a way out of it.
	I'll stop doing that.
	Fantastic.
	Beautiful.
	You've enlightened the soul and you've taken one person to the intellectual heaven of potential consistency.
	But if they're like, nope, there's the only way these things can be solved.
	It's the only way they can be dealt with.
	And if they're like strident and they continue to advocate the use of violence, don't break bread with them.
	Don't have them in your life.
	Now, you can have them in your life, but then don't pretend that your values mean anything.
	Don't pretend that your values mean anything if you're going to break bread with those you define as evil.
	Like either your definition is wrong, in which case you should self-correct and apologize for even thinking that they were evil, or if your values are consistent and correct and you continue to want to break bread with people who are evil, then you don't care about your values.
	Just be honest about it.
	I'm not saying you in particular.
	I'm not talking about people in general.
	But people want it both ways.
	They say, well, no, I take my values really seriously.
	My values define my brother-in-law's cousin as evil, but I still want him to come over to the barbecue because I like having warm bodies on the lawn.
	So the left takes it seriously.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	That's one of the most denier-the-ground observational differences is that, like what you just said, is that the conservative folks will have the crazy leftist over for Thanksgiving and the leftists will mob.
	And I don't think that that provides any kind of abstract definition of the difference between left and right, but that's just what you see on the ground right now is the left will shun you because you said a mean thing about a transgender person and they won't ever be your friend again.
	And the right will literally let communists over to have dinner with them.
	And I don't, you know, I wouldn't necessarily use that observation as a means to hector the right-wing people.
	I'm just curious to understand why the hell that is.
	And what we, you know, maybe that would lead to an understanding of what we could do at scale.
	I don't know.
	It's simply a matter of a combination of willpower on the one side, but you just have to will it.
	If you define someone as evil and they continue to be evil after you've patiently explained it to them, then you just have to will the ostracism.
	And the other thing too, and this is why I fight so hard against this treakily anti-Christian notion of infinite forgiveness no matter what, that's just a way of avoiding a necessary conflict.
	Sometimes conflict is necessary.
	Sometimes, I mean, often conflict is very healthy.
	And I mean, of course, just verbal conflict.
	I'm talking about punching anyone, just verbal conflict.
	And so unfortunately, because the feminization of Christianity has extended the slave morality of infinite forgiveness to everyone, you have to forgive everyone all the time, no matter what.
	It's a virtue.
	And you only hurt yourself if you don't.
	That's what Nietzsche referred to as slave morality, which is the slave cannot enforce his will upon the master.
	The slave cannot negotiate with the master.
	Therefore, the slave takes comfort in fantastical revenge ideas such as hell and makes it a virtue to forgive because he can't change anything.
	He can't affect his master.
	He can't control his master.
	He can't even negotiate with his master.
	Therefore, when his master mistreats him, the slave takes moral superiority in endlessly forgiving and feeling that that makes him better.
	In other words, if you have no chance to affect your will and you're going to consistently be exploited, the only, quote, virtue you're capable of is forgiveness, right?
	So that unfortunately has really, really infected modern Christianity to the point where whenever there's a conflict that might arise between a Christian and the corrupt, the Christian retreats into this, you know, hyper-estrogen mindset of, well, I'll just pray for that person and forgive that person and be better.
	And it's just a way of avoiding conflict and feeling like you're a good person.
	But when it comes to evil, if you're avoiding conflict, you're avoiding virtue.
	And the Bible is very clear about this.
	The Bible says, if somebody harms you, offends you, does something that's wrong and corrupt, you confront them privately and you talk to them and you reason with them.
	And if they don't listen, then you confront them with a few people who understand.
	And then if that doesn't work, you confront them in front of the whole congregation.
	And if that doesn't work, you kick them out.
	You ostracize them.
	And Christians have fallen prey to a devilish temptation.
	Not all.
	And of course, and it's not like atheists or they're just often worse in a different way.
	I'm talking about the Christians on the right here.
	They have fallen prey to a devilish temptation to avoid confrontations with evil and to avoid ostracizing consistent and committed evildoers and retreating into the thoughts and prayers and forgiveness mindset, which means they can't actually enforce any of their values, which means the left takes over and Christianity suffers.
	The devil couldn't plan it better.
	So anyway, I appreciate your question.
	I'm going to move on to another caller, but thank you so much.
	Ipso facto, I feel it's inevitable that you're up.
	You may need to unmute.
	I cannot hear you.
	Wait, all right.
	I'm learning this technology slowly.
	Yes, go for it.
	Yeah, how's it going, Stefan?
	It's going fine.
	What's your question?
	You know, you know, the left and right dichotomy of the whole thing, I see it as a hundred dollar, you know, bills rolled in a rubber band and a left wing made out of, you know, wheat and welfare checks and the right made out of arrows and bombs.
	And every once in a while, they slap another bobblehead in there and fucking shake it at you, right?
	So, you know, like in this whole left and right thing from the screen sold to us, not amongst people to people, you know?
	But what's like, I guess, what's your perspective there, you know, in the tug of war of reality, when we can always see that there's always more money being spent than had, therefore, the only real goal that they want is being done.
	Still, I mean, a very enjoyable use of language, very florid, very descriptive, but I'm still not sure what question or comment I can respond with.
	Well, I mean, I guess, all right, it's kind of talking about the world of people-to-people talking.
	It was interesting.
	I did like your last conversation with that guy.
	The general gist of washing someone's foot while they're kicking you in the face, principally.
	Still not sure what the comment or question is.
	Well, I guess, and I don't know, I'm just trying to, I guess, talk with you for a minute, right?
	Period.
	Just bounce things around.
	Can we just talk for a moment?
	Can we philosophize in that manner?
	Well, I'm not sure what comment to make because you're saying things.
	And I listen, no problem.
	I mean, maybe I'm misunderstanding something.
	So why don't you try another run at it and I'll see if I have something to add.
	Okay, done.
	So if I approach the entire political system as looking at it as a stag dollar bills with a bobblehead and welfare checks and guns, and I just see them shaking the new head, I'm saying this and this, you know, and then they always spend more money than they have.
	I guess what I'm getting at is like, you know, we sit and talk about left and right.
	Isn't it really just government overspending, turning everything into an inflated, like, it's like government making Weimar happen everywhere just by overspending on utopian bullshit and bombs?
	Yeah.
	I mean, you can't get into you can't get into power by cutting the money that's going to people.
	People are bribed to support statism for sure.
	And that's why nobody has any.
	I mean, I guess you can take a swing at it, and they did manage to shut down USAID.
	And I'm sure they'll just find other ways to get the money out to their corrupt crony friends.
	But of course, you know, the spending is just massive and catastrophic.
	And to cut the spending, to cut the spending would require a population capable of sacrifice.
	And the boomers have erased the idea of sacrifice almost completely.
	So if you were to say, of course, you know, the First World War, Second World War, and so on, there were sacrifices that people had to make in order to survive.
	But the boomers, because they grew up in a time where money was printed like water or candy, but you can't really print candy or water.
	But yeah, it was just created out of thin air.
	The government paid it.
	You could throw 100 zeros on it, and then a quarter can be worth more than the fucking bill in its weight and metal.
	Yeah, so it's like if you have really rich parents, like when I was growing up, my mom could legitimately hearing.
	Am I allowed to do that shit on the internet?
	Can I get away with it?
	Just wondering.
	It's nice for you to ask after the fact.
	No, when I was growing up, if I'd say, I want something, my mother could legit say, we can't afford it.
	Can't afford it.
	And wealthy parents, though, you know, I mean, if you have a lot of money as a parent and your kid says, I want something, you can't say, we can't afford it.
	So you have to come up with something else.
	And the government never said to the boomers about anything they wanted, we can't afford it.
	I mean, occasionally, if it was something that the right wanted, you know, like it's too expensive.
	It's $5 billion to build a wall.
	We can't afford that, right?
	Apparently, there's $500 billion for free health care for people who come into the country illegally, but you can't afford it.
	But the boomers were never...
	You never paid me back.
	No more thirds for you.
	I think family shows itself much better than the government in the sense of like actually seeing and judging someone's weights.
	And yeah, it is shitty that the government want to be mental master.
	You know what I mean?
	It's a frustrating thing.
	Yeah.
	I mean, so when the boomers wanted something, well, we want to spend this and we want to spend that, the government never said to them, okay, well, what is it that you want to cut?
	Because that's how the real world works.
	You know, if I need to buy a computer, then I have to, you know, not spend $1,000 on something else, right?
	That's the reality of what happens in the world.
	But the boomers, and not just the boomers, of course, but I think primarily.
	Because the boomers couldn't have done that without like, you know, I mean, there's always the ask.
	I mean, in Italian land, it's a, with the hand comes the thumb.
	With the give comes the fucking crushing of the thumb.
	I'll give you 10 bucks.
	Are you going to pick weeds for the next three hours?
	You know what I mean?
	And, but, you know, like they did the give to them and put the thumb on the next, the next generation, the next ones that shot out two, three, whatever.
	Everybody eats the inflation.
	I mean, I principally get what you're saying, but it's the same thing.
	I think it's all just different tools of pulled money since the Fed Reserve came in, you know, in a midnight mass and shit.
	And it's, you know, it's, I don't know.
	You ever see the movie Space Pirates with the little, with the midgets and stuff?
	I don't think I have.
	No, it's Time Bandits.
	You ever see Time Bandits?
	I did.
	Deterregillium, I think it was, but I don't remember it very well.
	Yeah.
	Do you remember the scene when they saw Robin Hood and they're like, oh, have you met the poor?
	Oh, they're a real noise.
	And they walk up across a bridge and they're like, we're going to give them the treasures we stole.
	They start like giving him the treasure and there's that one gigantic psycho that just busts him in the head after he gives them like a vase.
	That's what I think of with all this money given to everybody else, you know, like given around in a circle like assholes with no permission.
	Like there's not even charity.
	Charity would be me choosing to give to somebody, not it being taken from me under the supposed guise of a bobblehead that I get to vote for, getting to spend it, like control of the literal line item.
	That's where people miss what, you know, representation really means.
	I mean, if I can vote for the goddamn things right now with a checkbox once a month, it's just as easy as paying my bills than voting for a human head.
	You know what I mean?
	Yeah, yeah, I appreciate that.
	Yeah, and morality comes from scarcity.
	I'm going to move on to the next caller, but thank you.
	Morality comes from scarcity.
	And when you remove scarcity through money printing, through the Federal Reserve Central Banking, you remove the requirement or need for morality.
	All right.
	Marcel.
	Oh, I hope you're not a mime, man.
	That's going to be a real challenge.
	But Marcel, if you want to unmute, I'm happy to hear your thoughts.
	Go for it.
	I wanted to address a point you had made before about the problem with the right being that we don't ostracize people enough and the left takes our ideas seriously.
	And I'm always skeptical of explanations of systemic phenomena that come down to like our personal opinions or our personal consumption patterns, even though, of course, it is good to examine how you interface with the world.
	But I think it is because the left, one, like they control the legal system, they control the bureaucracies.
	And very often, you know, the fact that the right does not defend itself, you know, you would find in the past that they did.
	And in some cases, I think there were four sit gunpoint, right?
	That already happened.
	And that the right's so-called leaders had no interest in defending them.
	So for example, if you look at like the National Lawyers Guild, I don't know if you read a book called Days of Rage by Brian Burrough, but he talks about, you know, it's a fantastic book about this wave of left-wing terror that occurred in the late 60s to the mid-70s and how groups like the National Lawyers Guild would actually use their kids to smuggle bombs for their own clients.
	They would help their clients evade arrest, put them on their houseboats about, you know, two miles off the coast of Manhattan where the Coast Guard couldn't get to them while they would negotiate sweetheart deals for them, how people who were known terrorists would then become professors at Columbia University.
	And there is no such thing on the right.
	There is no group that is being paid by wealthy conservatives to defend at all costs, seemingly against all reason and against all sense of professional ethics, to defend right-wingers who step over the line.
	So I think the reason that the left can, you know, their violence is speech And our speech is violence is because the left has an entire army of people that are, you know, at every left-wing protest, right?
	There's a small army of observers that are there to like just standing with notepads, looking at every single arrest to get everybody's name and look at the cop and make sure the handcuffs aren't too tight.
	And if you look at any of the big right-wing donors in America, I mean, they would sooner jump out a window than do anything like that for their supporters.
	And I think that if something like that ever did exist, right, if a group like that ever tried to exist, I think the right would fight harder.
	The so-called right in America would fight harder than the left to destroy it.
	I think that, for example, the federalist society would never pick line lawyers into it and so on.
	So I don't think it's a matter of people like forgetting how to be mean or forgetting how to, you know, take a moral stand.
	I mean, I think that all the people that knew how to take a moral stand got arrested by the FBI in 1967 or, you know, say 1994 and everything else is just the survivors.
	I mean, I appreciate the analysis.
	I feel a little bit baffled, though, because this has nothing to do with anything I said.
	And that's fine.
	It's not like you have to follow my track of, but it's like you're not even mentioning that.
	So do you remember what I was talking about with regards to ostracism?
	By my understanding, and I could be wrong, but by my recollection, you said the left takes their ideas seriously, and you can expect at best ostracism if you oppose them.
	The right has assimilated this ethic of forgiveness, refusing to stand up for itself, treating its ideas as almost a consumption good, almost like a joke.
	That was my understanding.
	Okay.
	So let me just do a mental exercise with you, if you can indulge me for a second.
	So do you think that the average person, let's call him Bob, do you think that the average person, Bob, can do anything about mega donors setting up legal challenges to people on the right getting arrested?
	Besides drawing attention to it and demanding similar from his own side?
	No, but he can't achieve it.
	He can maybe, I don't know, he can write a blog post about it.
	I mean, he can't achieve it, though.
	He doesn't have the hundreds of millions or billions that the left has.
	He doesn't have the commitment.
	So he can complain about it.
	He can be annoyed about it.
	I mean, let me ask you this, if this is a big, important issue for you.
	And I'm not disagreeing with you, but I mean, what have you done to achieve it?
	Just in my online dealings, just as you do, I'm an internet person.
	So I maintain that as a demand.
	I'm often, whenever something like this comes up, I tell everybody who can hear that this is an expectation.
	You should have your thought leaders.
	You should ask questions.
	If you were ever an opportunity to talk to a politician or talk to a policymaker, these are the kinds of things you should ask about.
	That's the best I can really do.
	Okay.
	How long have you been doing that for?
	I'd say probably since I read Age of Entitlement.
	So maybe like five years, six years.
	Okay.
	What measurable progress have you made?
	As of now, none.
	So does that not trouble you?
	Does that not trouble you that you're out here advocating for shit that hasn't worked for half a decade?
	I mean, Stefan, we're both Rothbardian libertarians.
	None of us, neither of us have achieved our goals in a decade.
	Oh, quite the contrary.
	Quite the contrary.
	I have done pretty much the most of any public intellectual to reduce violations of the non-aggression principle around the world.
	Around the world.
	A measurable.
	I can't argue that.
	I'm sorry?
	I can't argue that.
	I mean, if we're just talking about convincing parents to parent peacefully and getting people to have abuse of relationships and so on, then yes, sure.
	On that personal level, that is absolutely true.
	And I'm not going to contest that point.
	Sorry, you're saying personal level like that doesn't matter or it's not as important as you windbagging about things that are not going to come to pass for half a decade.
	And I'm not, listen, your heart's in the right place.
	You're a very smart guy.
	So I'm sure you can handle a little rough and tumble, but this comes out of the business world where, you know, you have to have measurable results.
	Because it's, you know, it's funny, like the Rothbardian voluntarists or anarcho-capitalists or the government is unaccountable.
	The government, you know, if they fail, nobody pays the price.
	It's like, okay, how are you guys doing?
	I mean, where's your accountability?
	Are you achieving?
	So what you missed in your earlier part was you were saying, well, you know, we need to get these fundings for these legal things and defenses and this and that and the other, which you can't achieve and I can't achieve and so on, right?
	But that's not what I was talking about with regards to ostracism.
	With regards to ostracism, it is if the non-aggression principle is moral, then those who advocate for the initiation of the use of force are immoral.
	Educate them if they continue by their immorality.
	Ostracize them in your personal life.
	Not, well, I can't wait for some uber millionaire to discover his conscience and decide to throw a billion dollars into the ring to protect righteous causes.
	Like that's not going to happen in any measurable way that you and I can affect.
	Now, maybe if you had a billion dollars and you were calling me up to say, this is what I'm going to go do, okay, yep, you know, go for it, right?
	But you're not.
	So where's your accountability?
	I'm telling people things they can actually do, not cross my fingers and hope a billionaire starts funding things that I like, which isn't going to happen.
	So what I'm saying is ostracized the people who support the use of violence against you and your loved ones, who advocate immoral, corrupt and evil practices.
	Not it would be nice if we had a billionaire who wanted to spend money on our cause, but things that you can achieve and have an effect on and impact in your life as it stands.
	That's why I was a bit bewildered when I'm talking about ostracism based upon your personal relationships or non-relationships, if it's relationships with the corrupt.
	And you're talking about zillionaires funding causes.
	That was why I was just a little confused.
	Well, okay, so then the reason why I'm skeptical of it is because we see a pattern of people.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Sorry.
	Skeptical of what?
	I'm not disagreeing with you.
	I just, you say the reason I'm, I talked about a lot of stuff and you said the reason I'm skeptical of it.
	I don't know what it refers to here.
	Sorry.
	The reason why I was skeptical of the idea of ostracism as a systematic behavior pattern to solve issues of what the person said was, why is the Overton window on the left so much wider than it is for the right?
	Why does it seem, he gave the example of it seems like the left is treated like children and the right is treated like adults.
	You gave a very good answer as to why that's not exactly correct.
	But that was what he was wondering.
	Why is it that the left can get away with calling To bomb subways or whatever, and the right can't get away with it.
	Now, my understanding of get away with it comes down to: do you get investigated by the police?
	Do you lose your job?
	Do you lose your bank account?
	Right, and I can't affect that, and you can't affect that.
	I cannot affect that, but what I can do is I can affect who I invite over to my house.
	I can affect who I provide resources to, who I provide counsel to, who I provide love to, who I provide affection to, who I provide support to.
	I can control that, and so can you.
	I agree with you.
	Yes.
	So that's what we should be advocating for, because that's actionable.
	I'm very much concerned when people have advocacy for things that they can't control that nobody else can control, and they don't advocate for the things that people can control, which is who they break bread with.
	And I agree with you that we should be more selective in who we associate with.
	But I think also then, if I can build Maybe perhaps skepticism was the wrong word.
	I felt your answer was insufficient than wrong.
	It was correct.
	It was necessary, but not sufficient.
	Okay, so what you're saying is the stuff that people can actually do is insufficient.
	The stuff they can't possibly affect is somehow more important.
	I disagree that it can't possibly be affected.
	If somebody, if we see that right-wingers are interested in a lot of portable consumer products, so I'm not saying you do this.
	To my knowledge, you've never done the Alex Jones Supermale Vitality thing.
	But we see that people on the right are, they believe that going to the gym is a political act.
	They believe that different health supplements, sunning their balls, you know, all sorts of health fads, cleaning their room.
	This is Jordan Peterson's entire appeal, right?
	That lifestyle changes create large-scale political outcomes.
	You saw people saying that Mark Zuckerberg was going to become a right-wing thought leader because he was doing Wai Tai, right?
	If we see that right-wingers maintain a thought pattern where not only are their politics a consumer product that they don't take seriously enough to ostracize people from, like it's an opinion, but they also take consumer product as their politics, right?
	It works both ways, where they treat their politics as something for which it's like choosing Coke or Pepsi, but they also take your favorite martial art as a sign of political loyalty.
	So if we see that, I feel as though recentering or addressing points so that right-wingers no longer feel this way, that this consensus cannot be built or manufactured.
	That if somebody hostile to them is enjoying a legal privilege and they say, you know, why is it, as a person asked you, why is this happening?
	Why can they do things that I can't?
	While part of it is, as you say, correct, this, you know, false, this idea that, well, the left, for one thing, has moral confidence and the right doesn't.
	But I think the second half of having moral confidence is also having a really good lawyer.
	And I just think that should be added on top of your explanation.
	Okay, so if you think that what I'm doing is more practical, but if you need a lawyer, what you're doing is more practical, then how much have you, how much time or effort or energy have you spent talking about personal ostracism of the irredeemably corrupt?
	So are you asking me how much activism I've done getting people to ostracize each other?
	Well, that's not getting people to ostracize each other, but putting forward the argument.
	I would say it's an underlying premise in any advice if I've ever been asked.
	No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	Don't give me underlying premise.
	I'm looking for practical action.
	I have not engaged in any activism that I can really think of that was centered around getting people to ostracize.
	Getting people to live their values.
	If you define something as evil and somebody continues to advocate for it, they're evil.
	You should not consort with unrepentant and irredeemable evil.
	It's not getting people to be able to do that.
	I was too moderate, actually.
	I was too humble before.
	Actually, Stefan, I'm sorry.
	I do tell people probably all the time, probably one quarter of the things that I tweet about are me saying, don't associate with people like X, they are E. Actually, I was, you have a stronger impact on me than I realized.
	Okay, good.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	And as long as we can tell people to do that which is actionable.
	See, we have to get people to care about what we value.
	But in order to get people to care about what we value, guess what?
	We have to care about what we value.
	I can't tell someone how to have abs if I'm 300 pounds.
	I mean, I can tell them anything I want, but they're just going to laugh at me.
	This is like bad comedy, right?
	So you have to live your own values in a virile, consistent manner, and then people might start to take you seriously.
	But if you don't, and if all you're doing is talking about things that nobody can achieve in any direct way and avoiding the things that people can achieve in some direct way, then people will not take what you say particularly seriously.
	Marcel, a great pleasure to chat.
	I know we've got a lot of people and another little bit of time.
	Enormous.
	Enormous, Peter.
	That's very, very funny.
	Hugh, G-Rection, you're up.
	Enormous, Peter.
	Go for it.
	Drop the log and talk to me.
	You need to unmute.
	I don't want to have to say this every time, but whatever.
	Going once, going twice, my friend.
	Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no.
	Looks like we're on the no side of things.
	That's not the end of the world.
	Okay.
	All right.
	We will go with Evan.
	I'm in Evan.
	All right.
	What's on your mind?
	Don't forget to unmute.
	I think you're unmuted, but I can't hear you.
	You know, it's funny, technology.
	It's just wild, man.
	I'll just give it another second because I know there's a delay sometimes.
	You know, when I was a kid, you used to just pick up the phone and it worked.
	It was really, really cool and really, really nice.
	But now it seems to be a bridge too far.
	Maybe I need to revise the top 1% of intelligence for people because I can't believe it.
	It's just difficult to talk with people.
	All right.
	Let's try.
	Mark.
	Mark.
	Tattoo my brain with your syllables, my friend.
	Hello.
	Hi, Evan.
	I know it's me.
	All right.
	I just want to start off reading an excerpt from Propaganda by Edward Bernays.
	Propaganda in its proper meaning is a perfectly wholesome word of honest parentage and an honorable history.
	The fact that it should today be carrying a sinister meaning merely shows how much of the child remains in the average adult.
	A group of citizens writes and talks in favor of a certain course of action in some debatable question, believing that it is promoting the best interests of the community.
	Propaganda?
	Not a bit of it.
	Just a plain forceful statement of truth.
	But let another group of citizens express opposing views, and they are promptly labeled with the sinister name of propaganda.
	So I think.
	Wait, you're trying to have me take seriously the statements of a guy dedicated to propaganda about the nobility of propaganda?
	I mean, that's like saying, is your beverage tasty?
	Well, yeah, the coke says the idea of adversarialness, you know, like you were talking about the other day, men and women, they argue that, you know, they talk past each other, basically.
	We have communication breakdown, you know?
	I'm not sure what you're talking about.
	Can you be a bit more specific?
	And I'm also not sure how this relates to what you're talking about with regards to Bernice.
	Well, if I can continue, please, then.
	No, if I don't understand what you're saying, there's no point you can.
	Well, that's what I mean.
	If I start answering you, if I start answering you in French, you have every right to interrupt me and say I don't speak French.
	So if I don't understand what you're starting with, I have to stop and tell you I don't understand.
	Because if you're building on a foundation I don't understand, then it doesn't help me understand.
	I get you.
	So I'm saying, if I can continue, please.
	We're at this point where you are arguing past everybody.
	There's communication breakdown that you've talked about a little bit earlier.
	I don't know what you mean by asking, by, I don't know what that means.
	Society as a whole pushes each other to have their own algorithmic views of stuff, right?
	So propaganda is a neutral term.
	It's just how he describes it.
	Okay, I don't know what you mean when you say pushes people to have their own algorithmic views.
	Do you mean that there's confirmation bias in the algorithm on social media?
	Yeah, like there's echo chambers, the common parlance for it.
	You know what I mean?
	Yeah, people seek out information that agrees with them.
	Okay, what else?
	So everybody is propagandized too, like you were saying.
	And I don't think ostracization is the correct solution necessarily.
	I'm not saying it's not a tool to be used, but I think the better term would be to set boundaries for people.
	Okay, not sure what you mean by set boundaries for people.
	I don't know how you don't get that.
	Boundaries are pretty basic concepts.
	Don't insult me, bro.
	I'm not going to involve you.
	No, no, no.
	I'm saying I don't want to say that.
	No, no, no.
	Own what you did.
	If you're going to say, I don't understand what you're doing.
	I'll just mute you if you don't let me talk.
	Have a good day, Stephan.
	You're not that great.
	Yeah, yeah.
	That was pretty inevitable.
	Yeah, so if people say, I don't know how you don't understand, it's a very basic concept.
	It's like, I understand what the words mean.
	I don't understand how this guy was using them.
	But of course, sometimes when you ask people for clarity who are pseudo-intellectuals or sophists, they get upset because they're asked to define things and they're used to just sounding smart rather than actually having to build up real definitions, which is a true mark of intelligence.
	All right.
	Jamie James, what's on your mind, my friend?
	How can I help you?
	All right.
	I can hear background noise, but not foreground.
	Can you hear me?
	Can you hear me?
	Yeah, go ahead.
	All right.
	Thank you, R. I appreciate your time.
	Sorry, that last conversation made me laugh a little bit, but I appreciate your time and I respect what you do.
	So there's been a lot of talk about the two political parties and the distinction between the two.
	And what kind of popped into my mind is a quote from everybody's favorites, the modern-day anarchist Michael Mallas, in his book.
	And he makes the point that one choice for dear leader is considered tyranny, while two choices is somehow considered freedom.
	And is that second choice really the qualitative difference?
	And if, and then this ties into, you know, where you're talking about we shouldn't associate with people who are voting for or supporting or advocating for an evil, for evil, right?
	Or for tyranny or evil in a political party, which I wholeheartedly agree.
	As long as it's been explained to them, sure, yeah.
	Okay, which I wholeheartedly agree with, but it's become, or I'm becoming more and more convinced that both political parties love a large tyrannical government just as long as it's in alignment with their current worldview.
	And when the monopoly of violence is on their side, they call it justice.
	But when the monopoly of violence is on the other side, they'll call it authoritarianism or tyranny.
	And I'm seeing this from both parties right now.
	And I consider both parties completely corrupt and evil and immoral to the point where my conscience, where I'm at right now, I can't vote for either party because I feel like I'm participating in an evil and irredeemably corrupt system.
	So that's a lot of words.
	So I'll kind of come to some of this background.
	So I would be curious to ask you, I'm at the point where I think our current institutions are beyond repair, whether that's our university systems, our public school system, our government.
	I'm really in the camp of, and I think these will be names and people that you will be familiar with who have done a lot of work in the realm of the meta-crisis, such as Jordan Hall, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Brett Weinstein, also who have, you know, they started at one point, there was a plan or game B, I think they called it, which kind of went downhill and isn't anything now.
	But I think we're starting to see at least new institutions re-emerging.
	We could even use Jordan Peterson with the Peterson Academy, right?
	So this is a whole new way of getting education that is separate and removed from our current institutions.
	So my question for you then would be, and you can riff on that, agree or disagree with any of that.
	Do you agree or disagree with me that our current institutions are probably beyond repair?
	You know, they've been institutionally captured.
	And then moving forward, if you agree with that, that they're irredeemable and we're going to have to start building new institutions and new communities with them, what do you— That's a loaded, terrible Term because everybody thinks something different when they think of anarchy.
	But do you think an anarchist concept, if we're going to rebuild new communities, is realistic?
	And I apologize.
	If I'm a little disorganized, you can jump in there.
	No, no, listen.
	It's not your job to be organized.
	It's my job mentally, right?
	It's not my job to know how to fix a car.
	So that's totally fine.
	And I appreciate what you're coming across with.
	So, yeah, voluntarism.
	So if you take the non-aggression principle that you should not initiate the use of force against others and you extend it to its universal absolute, and I'm sorry, I'm going to have to mute you because there's quite a lot of background noise here.
	But yeah, so if you just take that non-aggression principle and you extend it to a universal absolute, society falls into place.
	And what's going wrong in society falls into place.
	What's going wrong in the family?
	What's going wrong in marriages all falls into place?
	Like the universe used to be perceived of by the ancients and even some of the Dark Ages and early Middle Ages, philosophers or scientists, that the Earth was the center of the universe and everything spun around the Earth.
	And when that was changed to the sun is the center of the universe and sorry, the sun is the center of the solar system, then everything falls into place.
	The motion of Mars, retrograde motion of Mars, it all falls into place.
	And when you take the speed of light as a constant, then you gain unprecedented control over matter and energy, both in positive and negative ways, of course.
	And so when you take a central premise and you extend it to infinity, then everything makes sense.
	When Newton figured out that everything falls, right?
	Before that, they just thought there was the four elements, right?
	That there was the earth and you let go of a clump of earth or you let go of a rock and it falls to the earth because it's attracted to the earth and fire goes up because it's attracted to the fire element.
	And that was all wrong.
	Or the sort of humorous theory of medieval medicine.
	All of that stuff was wrong.
	I mean, 200 years ago, they didn't even know that the blood circulated around the body and was pumped by the heart.
	So when you sort of take a central principle and then you extend it, you gain unprecedented power and control, but it disorients your entire worldview.
	I mean, the Earth as a center of the universe made sense theologically when we realized that we were moving around and spinning around.
	And then when they further realized that the sun was moving around and spinning around the Milky Way and so on, and that there is no center of the universe and the speed of light is constant, it's really disorienting when you take a central principle and universalize it, but it gives you accurate and factual and powerful information about the world.
	We take the non-aggression principle and we apply it universally, then no one has the right to initiate the use of force.
	Not parents, not politicians.
	Nobody has that right.
	And so, of course, when you take that, it's very disorienting.
	But it is absolutely necessary.
	If it is a principle and it is universal, then we need to start thinking about applying it universally.
	Otherwise, we are going to continue to have this mess.
	You know, people were saying on X the other day, like, well, how long do matriarchies don't last?
	It's like, bro, the average lifespan of a patriarchy is only a couple of hundred years.
	All right, let's do one more.
	And I'm sorry, techno-barbarian.
	We talked just the other day, so I'm going to take somebody else, but feel free, of course, to come in next time.
	Oh, somebody called Stefani Mollymem has entered the chat.
	How interesting.
	All right.
	Have yourselves a wonderful afternoon.
	Freedomaine.com slash donate to help out the show.
	Freedomaine.com slash donate to help out the show and that you can sign up for a subscription there.
	I really would appreciate it.
	Have yourselves a glorious, wonderful afternoon.
	We would speak to you tomorrow morning at 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
	Do a live stream.
	Love to chat with you then.
	Lots of love.
	And thank you for all the great conversations today as in the past and as we move forward into the future.
	Lots of love for up here.

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