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July 18, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:11:09

Stefan Molyneux Interviewed by Dr Bob Murphy on His Return to Twitter!

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	the bob murphy show episode 424.
	There's a title with coming.
	What you gonna do?
	Get ready for another episode of the Bob Murphy Show, the podcast promoting free markets, free minds, and grateful souls.
	It's your source for commentary and interviews, conducted by a Christian handicapped.
	Now here's your host, Bob Murphy.
	Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Bob Murphy Show.
	Today I am speaking with Stefan Molyneux, who I'm sure many of you have known about for a long time.
	He was an icon in the liberty movement back in the day, one of the OGs, as we say.
	Let me read a little bit from his official bio on his website.
	Stefan Molyneux is the founder and host of Freedomain, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world.
	With more than 4,500 podcasts, 10 books, and 600 million downloads, Stefan has spread the cause of liberty and philosophy to millions of listeners around the world.
	Mr. Molyneux holds a master's degree in history from the University of Toronto.
	His graduate thesis focused on the history of philosophy, detailing the relationship between the metaphysical arguments and the political ethics of major Western philosophers such as Plato, Kant, Locke, and Hegel.
	So what we're talking about here is a few things.
	Let me just give you a teaser.
	He had been infamously kicked off of major social media platforms.
	And then once Elon bought Twitter, restored Stefan's account, and he didn't want to come back.
	And so I asked him about that.
	And then eventually he did come back.
	And so that's how he was back in my consciousness because I follow him on Twitter.
	And some of the things he was saying surprised me.
	So his views have definitely evolved since last I was regularly hearing his opinions on things.
	And so I asked him about a few of those.
	In particular, we'll sort of tease it.
	It's at the end.
	We talk about his stance towards Christianity, which is far different now than it was the last I had interacted with him about it.
	Well, I think that's enough teaser.
	Let's get right into the conversation.
	Stefan, welcome to the Bob Murphy Show.
	Great to be here, Bob.
	It's been a long time.
	How are you?
	I'm doing well.
	And how are you doing?
	I'm great.
	I'm great.
	I suppose I've been jet packed in or cannoned back from the wilderness.
	And I am fighting the brain orcs on Twitter and enlightening the masses as best I can.
	So it's quite a lot of fun.
	Well, that's unpack even right there.
	So yeah, why don't we start with that?
	Yeah, I mean, what happened?
	Was it a few years ago that you just got booted from various social media platforms and then you just went private, as it were?
	Yeah.
	Just tell us a little bit about that story.
	And then now the thing, your triumphal return, it wasn't exactly that palms were being laid down, but, you know, somewhat like that.
	Coming back to Twitter slash X. Yeah.
	So it was the summer of 2020 when I assumed that there were a huge amount of sort of wormtongue-like backdoor machinations to get me off social media for, I assume, reasons of politics, for, you know, I was opposing all the George Floyd riots and so on.
	And I guess they wanted their summer of love, so they had to step over my face in order to get their burning neighborhoods.
	So I got kicked off just about everything in a really short span of time.
	And so, yeah, I mean, I went from playing stadiums to jazz clubs, which has its own charms and was quite enjoyable as well.
	I turned, of course, to writing books.
	I narrated some of my old novels, which I've always wanted to do.
	So it had its pluses for sure.
	I suppose a tiny bit surprising that like 95% of my audience found typing in a new website to be beyond their mortal span of activity, because I actually registered one website over because I'm literally, people are like, hey man, where were you?
	You were so hard to find.
	I'm like, it's really not that hard.
	I'm not a mole.
	I'm not a ghost.
	Just one website over.
	And that actually gave me a certain amount of liberty because if you have some reasonable ability to affect people's minds for the better, and then if you go one website over and they're like, nah, that's too far, man.
	It's come on, man.
	I'm only mortal.
	I mean, I'm going to get carpal tunnel syndrome from typing in other websites.
	So it actually liberates you from a certain level of responsibility, which I suppose I'd hung on to pretty heavily for quite a long time.
	Well, I wonder if it's like both Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, when they got to be humongous, started writing novels with pseudonyms because they wanted to see, like, do people actually like my stories anymore?
	Or is it just because I'm so big?
	I don't know if it was something like that, perhaps.
	So, okay, so that's what happened.
	Let me just push that a little bit because, yeah, it was with you and there were a few others.
	I don't want to say names and be wrong.
	I think Alex Jones is probably one, where it definitely looked coordinated.
	It was not just that the people who run YouTube independently came to a decision and then on a completely different track, the people who run Facebook.
	You know what I mean?
	Like it was just, it certainly seemed like there were those coordinated behind the scenes efforts.
	So do you, I mean, was it the COVID stuff?
	Or, I mean, you were saying there, the George Floyd riots, but anyway, what, because this was all happening, you know, right when society was being transformed around the world.
	Yeah, I mean, I'll obviously never know because I never got any indications as to what it specifically was.
	I am such a urinator on third rails, I suppose, that it could have been any one of a half dozen to a dozen topics that wiser men than me choose to eschew, which I foolishly ran in.
	Whatever it is.
	I mean, I feel it was necessary.
	I feel it was important.
	And of course, you know, philosophers, particularly moral philosophers, you have to have at least a couple of centuries in your business plan because you're generally reviled in the here and now, but you are recognized As being right down the road, that's sort of the goal, right?
	So you just have to be willing to have, you know, that sort of CCP half a millennia business plan to make it.
	But yeah, it could have been the George Floyd stuff.
	It could have been group differences in IQ.
	It could have been stuff I was doing between males and females.
	It could have been the stuff I was doing about China being the source of the virus.
	It could have been any number of things that would have been a hot topic.
	But I think it probably had something to do with the 2016.
	So 2016, as you know, the election of Trump was a seismic shock to the ruling classes because they'd never had to deal with anything like that before.
	And the glorious days of internet freedom, the decade of 06 to 2016, was unprecedented.
	You know, it's fine to let the masses have free speech as long as you're the gatekeeper and it doesn't really achieve anything.
	And the best you can do is sort of photocopy something and stuff it in people's mailboxes.
	But when you have people out there who are actively pushing against mainstream narratives and gaining significant traction, like my untruths about Donald Trump got millions and millions of views, you know, and the perception is, I suppose, that that may have had a tiny effect on the election.
	Who knows, right?
	But I think it was like, oh, this guy's free speech might actually be changing things.
	Well, we really can't have that.
	We just need to give people the illusion of free speech rather than free speech that actually might change something.
	So I assume it had something to do with that.
	Oh, yeah.
	So just to be clear in terms of my earlier remarks when I was, you know, saying like, what was it?
	And then you were listing.
	Yeah, I think it was, as you say, the ruling class, for lack of a better term, realized that, oh, this internet thing is really picking up steam.
	And now lots of people are turning to it to get news and just to figure out what the heck is going on with the world.
	And they realize for our agenda to continue being fulfilled, we have to nip this in the butt.
	So of course, at the beginning, at the outset, they're not just going to start kicking off people and saying, oh, it's because we disagree with them politically.
	Like that's not going to work.
	So instead, they go for, quote, the low-hanging fruit, the people who have said shocking things, because then, you know, a lot of people aren't going to go to the barricades over.
	It's like, oh, yeah, well, that guy, yeah, he's got a bad reputation.
	I'm not going to defend him.
	And I think also, I mean, as an economist, I'm sure you're aware of this.
	So you may, whether you agree or not, of course.
	But I remember when my daughter was little showing her my tweets, say, versus mainstream media tweets.
	And boy, there's just no comparison, right?
	I mean, if you have a knack for this kind of stuff and you have interesting things to say, I was getting hundreds of times more views, likes, and retweets than like huge mainstream media platforms.
	Now, of course, they have other ways of getting their information out, but there is just a certain amount of this guy's taking our eyeballs, this guy's taking our readers, this guy's disrupting our narrative.
	So if we just write negative articles about the guy and paint him as like the worst guy in the universe, then this can be used as evidence to get him deplatformed.
	And then hopefully some of those eyeballs will come back to us.
	It's, you know, standard, say that the competing restaurant has rat feces in the soup kind of economic sabotage, I think.
	And also a chilling effect on everybody else to know, like, oh, so that where, you know, they're trying to figure out what line is there so that I can still stay on the platform.
	And then they can see, well, whatever the line is, Stefan obviously must have been over it.
	And so therefore, let me, you know, dial down.
	Okay, so that's what happened in the past.
	And then, you know, I, people who knew you and stuff, like, okay, well, yep, Stefan went into his own thing and he's got his hardcore fans that are, you know, with him.
	And okay, and I'm going to go throw it on because I'm still on Twitter.
	And then you came back recently.
	So can you just explain?
	And I know people had asked you when you had principled reasons for why you weren't going to come back, even after Elon bought it.
	So can you just explain what your old thinking was and then what made you change your mind?
	Well, of course, Bob, it just turned out that those principles were quite inconvenient.
	So naturally, I just had to jettison them.
	You know, like when you're on a ship and it's like really low in the water, you just jettison any excess baggage, people, old ladies.
	So, no, I mean, my basic argument, which was overthrown by a surprising person, my basic argument was, you know, they did me dirty, they did me wrong.
	And in my view, they were not upfront and honest about the reasons that they gave for my deplatforming, at least from Twitter.
	So when you, I bought and sold corporations, well, sold.
	I mean, I co-founded a software company, grew it, and actually ended up selling it twice.
	And so I know that when you buy a corporation, you inherit the liabilities and the assets, right?
	You don't just get to reboot it and erase all the debt.
	So I felt that, as Elon Musk said, he didn't buy a company, he bought a crime scene.
	So my feeling was, okay, so if somebody wrongs me or if I've wronged someone, what do they owe them?
	I mean, I was raised a Christian, so I owe them apologies, I owe them restitution, and some reasonable certainty that it's not going to happen again, right?
	So if I'm really angry and I scream and throw things, you know, I'll apologize.
	I will, you know, fix whatever I broke, and then I'll enter into anger management classes so that there's some decent chance it's not going to happen again.
	And that's sort of the bare minimum for me of apologies and restitution.
	So that was sort of my standard with Twitter.
	And of course, I wasn't getting that.
	So I held off.
	But then, kids, man.
	So my daughter then made a very compelling case, which was, she said, can Elon Musk or can Twitter apologize without incurring legal liability?
	Right.
	Because, you know, in America in particular, right, you can't apologize for anything because, you know, people are, oh, okay, then he's admitting fault.
	And so she said, well, wouldn't he just have to run it past legal?
	And wouldn't legal get to say whether he got, because it wouldn't just be me, right?
	There were lots of people who were.
	Right, right.
	Right.
	So would that have a negative effect on the value of the company if he apologized for stuff and then opened himself up to legal action or whatever it is, right?
	So is it possible in a practical sense for him to apologize?
	Again, you're a consultant in business.
	You know this probably better than I do, but fiduciary responsibility is kind of a big thing for people on the board, especially the CEO.
	If you act in a way that harms the value of the company, you can yourself get sued and it can be a big sort of ugly drawn out process.
	So, she basically said, Do you have a standard which cannot be achieved?
	Now, having a standard which can't be achieved, well, I'll apologize when you're nine feet tall.
	It's like, okay, so just say you're not going to accept an apology and don't have this obstacle course that no mortal being can surmount.
	And so, I was like, oh, that's a, well, that's a good point.
	And then I sort of did some research and, well, she's right.
	And so, you know, if you have a standard of apology that can't be reached.
	And she also said, look, the guy's been committed to free speech for a couple of years now.
	I think I got my account restored a couple of years ago.
	And she said, look, is it not apology enough that he has remained committed to free speech for a couple of years?
	In other words, if somebody, even if they don't apologize directly, which could be for legal reasons, if they've gone to anger management, if they haven't gotten angry in a couple of years, is there not an apology by implication based upon better and consistently better behavior?
	Again, that's a pretty good argument.
	So given that she made these arguments, I couldn't really push back against them.
	And I'd always, you know, your dad, you say to your kids, we live by reason and evidence.
	And if you make a good case, you know, then that's great.
	So she made a good case.
	And I had to, well, I didn't have to come back, but she made a case that I really couldn't resist.
	I couldn't overturn.
	And again, it's the empathy thing.
	If I was in Elon Musk's position, would I kind of do the same thing?
	Well, yeah, because when you're a CEO, you kind of got to do what legal tells you in those kinds of situations.
	So sorry for the long answer, but that's no, that's great.
	I had seen you mention to people, you know, very briefly on Twitter slash, there was a period when I thought I would sooner give up my left arm than call it X, but now I'm slowly moving towards there.
	Yeah, I had seen you say to people, oh, my daughter convinced me, but I didn't know what that, but that's really interesting.
	So how, are you allowed to tell us roughly how old she is?
	Just to appreciate her.
	Oh, sure.
	Yeah.
	She'll be 17 this year.
	She's 16 at the moment.
	Okay.
	Wow.
	Yeah.
	That's really good.
	Yeah.
	I'm trying to think of, I suppose an analogy would be like when these world leaders, and I want to, actually, why don't we just jump right into it?
	I'm curious in your thoughts about Iran and Israel and all what's been going on over there.
	And one of the things that I think is intriguing about this is how like it's, you know, oh, well, we bombed them.
	They obviously have to send some missiles at our bases, but they warned us ahead of it.
	You know what I mean?
	It's sort of like you got to, you know, they have people they got to placate over there.
	They got hardliners.
	They got to show their pop.
	You know what I mean?
	I always thought it was kind of interesting how at some level there is a sense of just, you know, getting in the other person's shoes and realizing, yeah, we got to give them a face-saving thing.
	It's like you're saying with Elon that I know exactly what you mean, the various corporate legal won't let you do anything.
	You know, I, when I was younger, I came up with what I thought was a great script to use the Transformers characters and something.
	And I wrote to, I don't know if it's Hasbro, I forget who owns them.
	And they just gave me a blank, you know, or not blank, a form letter response.
	No, absolutely not.
	And I just realized because they're legal team.
	Like they just can't, you know what I mean?
	They get all kinds of requests and just no, no, no, you can't do it.
	So anyway, I was mad at the time and the suits don't get it.
	Man, the story would be awesome.
	They're blocking my creativity.
	Right.
	I understand.
	It would cost them too much to have.
	What are they going to have?
	Like whole teams devoted to like parsing all the fan mail.
	So anyway, I think it's the same thing.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	I think it's the same thing of the Simpsons writing team.
	They get scats and scads of mail of people saying, I wrote a Simpsons script.
	You should really use this.
	And they literally have to keep it sealed in a box to prove they never opened it because they just happen to make the same joke or they have the same plot, you know, because it's only a certain number of stories, right?
	And so the guy's going to say, hey, man, I sent that into you.
	You stole it.
	And they're like, no, no, it's sealed.
	We never opened it.
	It's documented.
	This is the amount of defensiveness you have to do because of this crazy IP stuff, which I'm not a fan of, of course, because I like classical music.
	And as you know, classical music arose the most in the places with the least IP.
	So yeah, that's that, the legal rules.
	That's what you got to march behind.
	Okay, so since I opened up the can of worms, I'm curious, do you have any thoughts on what's been going on the last two months with Iran and Israel?
	Yeah, I mean, it is, I'm not doing too much politics.
	I'm sort of skirting the general information.
	Of course, as you know, Iran is to some degree a result of intense American meddling and all the way back to the 1950s with the Shah and then, of course, Khomeini.
	So you build the enemies and then you fight the enemies.
	And then because the enemies fight back, you then get to expand your power over the population as a whole.
	So it is a horrendous situation.
	Of course, foreign policy is almost universally corrupt beyond words.
	So I think it would be kind of nice if America, I don't know, was interested in its own borders rather than laying money all over the universe for everyone else to have borders and security.
	But that's not quite as profitable, I think, for the military-industrial complex.
	And it doesn't give the politicians as much excuse to expand their powers.
	Well, I'm curious if you had any take, because I know, you know, like you say, when Trump first came on the scene politically, you know, you were people, you know, one of the first people to really get in, you know, in his head, as it were, and make analyses.
	Let me just throw this theory out.
	And again, if this is something that it's not been something you've been paying too much attention to, you know, fair enough.
	But I have no dog in the fight.
	I didn't vote for him.
	But looking at the various press conferences he was giving and especially him dropping the F-bomb and stuff when he was getting on the plane, my take was that behind the scenes, he and his people were telling the Israelis, give us time for the negotiation.
	We're making assurances to the Iranians that we're the adults at the table and we're working with them, blah, blah, blah.
	And then Israel's just doing the game theory and realizing, no, we can hit them.
	And then what's Trump going to throw us under the bus and take their side over?
	No, he can't.
	And then we're going to say he was in on it.
	And what's he going to do?
	He's going to have to go along with that.
	And I think Trump was just outraged and shocked the first couple of times.
	They can't believe they just did that.
	And so I think he got, and now, you know, again, I'm not saying that to try to make excuses for him or whatever, but that was my read in terms of his body language and stuff of The few occasions where they asked him, you know, did you tell Nutan Yahoo to hold off?
	And he said, Yes, I did.
	Yes, I did.
	And then when he was saying, you know, they both don't know what the F they're doing or something.
	That to me, that looked like I don't think that was acting.
	I mean, that was like Al Pacino-level acting if he was acting there.
	I think he was pissed off.
	Well, politics is presenting moral platitudes to the masses while pursuing cold Terminator style calculations behind the scenes.
	And so most of politics is pretend to be good and then act in at least what you perceive to be your own naked self-interest.
	And I think that's the best way to...
	It would be like a nutritionist talking about astronomy in some sort of passionate way.
	It's like, well, the stars don't eat anything, so your skills don't really apply.
	And that's how I sort of view this kind of stuff.
	And it's one of the reasons why the deplatforming was clear for me in that, of course, as a free speech absolutist, the goal is, of course, to have words, not swords, right?
	We want to keep that S out front, to stop attaching itself to the beginning of words.
	And when speech is significantly suppressed, then it goes to real politic.
	It goes to brute power.
	It goes to force, manipulation, lies, money printing, funding, debt, all of that sort of stuff.
	It goes to anything but the argument, the debate.
	And so for me, at least, the Overton window, which I was working to push, you know, kind of slammed back and took half my nose off.
	And that means that people are choosing coercion or force or manipulation over recent and argumentative debate.
	And it's one of the things you posted a picture of yourself on X when you were, I think, slightly younger.
	Did I have that?
	Just a smidge, a tad, a tad younger.
	And you were 24.
	Back when I was a young baron, back when I believed, hey, I'll just talk about the free market reason and evidence with people and we'll sort it all out.
	And I mean, I think we all have that optimism, and that's a good fuel.
	It has to be tempered by what's possible in the situation, of course, as you well know.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Why don't we just, I'm curious to get some more elaboration from you on that.
	So for context, folks, what happened was I recently was interviewing Dave Howden of the Mises Institute.
	He's a research fellow with them.
	And he had with Parabile and he had co-edited a volume of essays in honor of Joe Salerno, who for a long period now has been kind of running the summer fellowship program.
	And then Dave kind of just, you know, as an aside, said, yeah, Bob, you were in that program, right?
	And I said, oh, yep, yep.
	And he said, and I don't know.
	And so then the guys, like, you know, the tech guys doing the podcast went and dug up a photo of me from the year 2000.
	I think it was like the second year I was a fellow there.
	And I looked much younger and probably a tad thinner as well.
	And so anyway, so people were getting a good chuckle out of that.
	And I tweeted that out and said something like, oh, this was a period in my life when I thought if I just write essays explaining how a free society will work, everyone will get on board.
	And so there is that.
	And, you know, I will confess, Stephen, I mean, this is embarrassing to say, but I don't know if you remember that there was this website, anti-state.com.
	And I was a, you know, a regular there.
	And we had this forum and there were a bunch of anarcho-capitalists that kept joining.
	I feel like an idiot just even telling you this stuff, but this is what happened.
	Like I would sit there and do the extrapolation and figure out at what date would 10% of humanity be anarcho-capitalists because I was just looking at the numbers.
	So that didn't happen.
	And the thing is, it's not that I was wrong with my views.
	It's just I can't believe talking to people how much they are like just, they know what they want the answer to be and they'll backfill and figure out a rationale to get there.
	And I just, I'm, I've been, I mean, I'm not surprised anymore about it because I've just seen it for 20 years now, but I do remember just being shocked at, but no, I just showed you logically that that's not what, how can you, you know, well, you know, that's a big enough topic that you can't possibly leave in 45 minutes.
	I'm going to have to, you know, do the, what Scott Adams fears the most, which is watching somebody in a show get tied to a chair because he says that happens in every movie and it's so predictable.
	So, yeah, that, that big question of why, why don't people listen to reason and evidence?
	And, you know, one of my big tweets when I got back was talking about, you know, like 30 to 50% of people don't have an inner dialogue, don't have an inner voice.
	And it's not specifically related to intelligence.
	I mean, you can have very smart people, engineers and so on.
	They think more in terms of images and relationships rather than actual language.
	But those of us who are sort of machine language hamstrings, we sort of think in terms of those things.
	And then, of course, I just tweeted out last night about the sort of famous Milgram experiment that just about everyone will torture if told to, and two-thirds of people will kill you if they're told to.
	And so, and I remember when I first read about that, I was like, well, didn't this provoke a massive social panic?
	Didn't this like, oh my gosh, something's entirely wrong with the way we raise children, with the way we educate people?
	Like the fact that you end up with this soulless, easily programmed murder husks instead of people, isn't that something we should really panic about?
	And people are like, no, it didn't really change much.
	Because I suppose, again, it's kind of convenient to have willing executioners for the powers that be.
	But yeah, why people don't listen to reason?
	I think individually they kind of want to, but we are social animals and we only survive with the approval of those around us.
	At least that's how we evolved.
	And I think it's not so much people's individual beliefs that resist reason.
	I think what people do is a calculation and say, okay, and if I believe this, if I believe this, and I tell people that I believe this, then what?
	And I think that aspect of things, people who just willfully defied the tribe or the group or the nation or the king in the past, well, let's just say those genes were not enormously positively selective for continuation.
	So I think this process of not is this true, but what will happen to me if I say, if I repeat this to people?
	And you could see this with the Trump phenomenon, like Trump went from like the most popular guy, never accused of racism or sexism or anything like that, to like, you know, Orange Hitler reincarnated with Windstorm Herdu.
	And people didn't know why.
	It's just that if you said to people, I think that there's positive things about Trump.
	I think he really cares about America.
	I think he's outside the system.
	I think that, you know, and the media certainly lied about him pathologically.
	So the question is, what do people think other people are going to think of them if they hold a particular position?
	I mean, I was obviously skeptical about the COVID vaccine for reasons we can go into if you're interested.
	But I mean, reasons to be skeptical, right?
	So, but then the anti-vaxxer and you want granny to die and, you know, all of it, you're just a bad person, you're crazy.
	And so then people are like, okay, well, if I show skepticism to the vaccine, how do people perceive me?
	And I think it's really the sort of social networks that prevent the transmission of sort of reason and evidence.
	Because, you know, if you talk to people individually, you know, like Saul Janisin used to say about the Soviet Union, that you can only tell the truth with your wife under the covers at night when you're sure there's nobody listening.
	So individually, people are like, yeah, that kind of makes sense.
	But then they sort of pop out into their social circle and they don't want to be ostracized.
	As you know, like social ostracism stimulates the same parts of the human brain as physical torture.
	And that's for reasons of what we need people to guard us as we sleep.
	We can't hunt alone.
	We need to reproduce.
	So we need some approval from the females or their clan or whatever.
	So I think that this torture mechanism of rejection, which I actually think is very positive for anarchism, I think that social rejection, economic rejection is how we enforce social rules in the absence of a state.
	But it really is a double-edged sword because it really cuts through people's capacity to stand tall with reason in their social circles.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	A lot there.
	I definitely I have seen that, for example, even to go earlier, the like the 9-11 truth stuff, there was a period where even among pretty radical libertarian groups, you could tell like that was just like, oh, we're not going to, we're not going to go there right now.
	Like it's, it's enough that we're already opposing the U.S. government's retaliation and blah, blah, blah.
	And we're looking at blowback and things.
	We're just not going to go there.
	That's going to give our enemies something on silver.
	I mean, no one told me what the rationale was, but I just, I for sure observed there was a period.
	And then it was just eventually like it became more and more acceptable to talk like that.
	But even there, like Tucker Carlson recently had some guy on, I forget the guy's name, where, you know, they were tiptoeing up to it and like all this weird stuff about, you know, what the government knew and the cover-ups.
	But you know what I mean?
	So that was just one example where clearly people were thinking things themselves, but they were kind of like, well, what are we, you know, what's going to happen to my career?
	What, you know, what's going to happen if I cross that line on that element?
	I suppose the moon landing is another one that I know there's some people that are really, whereas like the flat earth stuff, that's so out there that somebody could, you know, they wouldn't worry about their job being hurt if they were tweeting out, you know, these flat earth people make some sense because it's just like you would think they were kidding.
	Whereas if somebody said, no, I really don't think that we went to the moon, like I think a lot of people would be afraid to say that because they would be concerned that their employer might say, what are you doing?
	Like, you know, HR would call you in or something.
	So anyway, I definitely have seen that element at play, you know, with things that are, you know, relevant.
	Well, I mean, JFK, of course, the assassination.
	Yeah, that's another good one.
	Gulf of Tonkin.
	I mean, we could sort of go through the list, whether the nukes were necessary to win World War II.
	Like there's a whole bunch of stuff that formerly was, I don't know, you know, this is sort of an old trope that the alphabet agencies that came up with the term conspiracy theory, which is a magic wand to just dismiss anybody whose arguments you don't particularly like.
	You know, I mean, I'm still quite shocked that the term McCarthyism is used to mean an irrational witch hunt.
	When, of course, McCarthy was even more right than he knew.
	And this is known from the declassification of the Soviet papers after the Cold War.
	But it's funny to me.
	I mean, people say, oh, it's just a conspiracy theory.
	It's like, you know, conspiracy is an actual term in law, right?
	Like, you know, that there is a conspiracy to commit murder.
	There's a conspiracy to defraud.
	So any group of criminals that acts together, this is a term in law.
	It's not made up by wacky people with tin foil helmets.
	Like it's an actual term of law.
	And of course, you can see conspiracies playing out all the time.
	Again, the COVID messaging was so bang and on point that it was definitely coming from some sort of planned arena, whether it was pre-planned or not is sort of another question.
	But coordinated attacks, I mean, these are all things that are going on behind the scenes.
	Of course, the real conspiracy theory, which didn't turn out to be true, was that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
	And so apparently it's a bad conspiracy theory if it's information you don't like.
	But if it's a totally false conspiracy theory, you could just repeat that ad infinitum as if it's true.
	So it is one of these NPC words.
	I did a tweet asking for people for their favorite NPC phrases.
	And yeah, conspiracy theory, dismissing something by calling it a conspiracy theory is, I mean, historically and legally illiterate.
	And it is just a way, it's a magic wand to make bad, scary facts go into the ether.
	Yeah, the way I try to use that approach is to say like, how was Julius Caesar killed?
	And that, oh, that's a conspiracy theory you just gave me.
	And also the official 9-11 report is a conspiracy theory.
	It says that there were 19 hijackers who conspired.
	I actually did a search there.
	I don't think it was in the report, but I did see some official narrative where it did say these guys conspired.
	So it didn't have the word conspiracy, but it did have the verb.
	And I thought, hey, look at this.
	It's openly.
	How can you be pointing to the official report?
	You believe in a conspiracy theory.
	Okay, so why don't we jump to one of the things you've been doing lately that's been causing me all sorts of amusement is poking the guys who are very much about you can't date nowadays.
	So can you just give us a flavor of what that debate's been like recently?
	Sure.
	Not controversial, not upsetting people.
	You know, my usual gentle foot massage.
	Trying not to rock the bowl.
	Yeah, my gentle foot massage of truth confusion through the souls.
	Well, I did start tweeting about this stuff as a whole because the women that I know who were younger, it's funny because there's this, here's a conspiracy theory.
	Nobody over 50 can know anybody under 50.
	So if people are like, well, you're an out-of-touch boomer.
	It's like, maybe out of touch, not quite a boomer, but I do actually know some younger people.
	And of course, I talk to people all the time.
	I've done thousands of these conversations over the last 20 years on my show, mostly people talking about sort of personal issues, dating issues, marriage issues, and so on.
	And I've talked to a lot of young men who are in their 20s and sometimes even into their 30s who've never really talked to a woman.
	And the reason why they haven't talked to a woman is that fork in the road.
	Like you either talk to women or you don't talk to women and it tends to harden.
	Like if you get used to talking to women, you're comfortable with it.
	If you avoid talking to women, you tend to get more comfortable with that and get kind of settled.
	And then, of course, a lot of people come along and say, well, it's a wise decision.
	You don't talk to women because the family courts are terrible and you could get divorced and women are crazy and like all the ideological divide and so on.
	So then you justify people's kind of bad decisions and it tends to seal them up in a social and obviously genetic dead end.
	So, you know, one of the great curses of studying a lot of history is my graduate degree is in history, particularly the history of philosophy.
	But one of the curses of studying history and blessings is that people who claim to have it hard in the modern world are fighting from their mouth and talking out of their armpit.
	Like it's absolutely crazed and ridiculous.
	I did a graduate degree course on the history of the Middle Ages and not a lot of fun to be alive back then.
	And people still reproduced, even though you had to kiss a woman who'd never brushed her teeth and who probably had bathed about a year ago, who had a smallpox ravaged face and tooth decay.
	And still, half the babies died in childbirth and you had almost no political freedom.
	You could be strung up and killed for taking one rabbit from the king's lands or the lord's lands.
	So that was a pretty, pretty rough time.
	But at least there weren't factories oppressing them.
	Right, right, right.
	So history, and of course, if you went back, people like the Roman Empire, yeah, but if you went back to the Roman Empire, odds are highly likely you'd just be a slave.
	You wouldn't be a senator, right?
	So most people had no freedom, ancient Greece, same thing.
	So when people say it's too scary, it's too negative, it's too difficult to date right now, you know, just older guy trained in history, good perspective is like, yeah, but your ancestors, you know, human beings got down to 10,000 souls during the last ice age.
	Like we were this close to like despawning.
	And, you know, people fought their way back and people have babies during war and plagues and famines and all other kinds of natural disasters.
	And it is, it is possible.
	And people are propagandized.
	Women are propagandized.
	It's like, well, people and women have always been propagandized.
	I mean, it's, but at least you have the internet now, so you have access to both better and worse information, right?
	That's the fork in the road of the internet.
	It's like, if you take the sunny side of the street, you get a beautiful tan.
	If you take the dark side of the street, your NADs freeze off and your genetic line is dead.
	So just reminding people about that is really important.
	So then I did sort of an experiment, which I talked about last Friday.
	So I did an experiment where I pushed pretty hard back against these things.
	And basically the young men, some of them, were ferocious and angry and hurling all kinds of insults.
	And I mean, insults work on the young, but I'm pushing 60.
	If you don't know who the hell you are and what you're about, by the time you're pushing 60, you've kind of missed the boat.
	So they don't really have any effect.
	I just find them sort of interesting because they reveal more about the person who's insulting you than, you know, if somebody said, Steph, I hate your haircut, I'd be like, yeah, may not particularly apply to me.
	So I sort of pushed back hard.
	Can I stop you real fast on that?
	You know, when I tweeted out that the picture of me from the year 2000, there was, you know, I got like a thousand hearts on it or most people were, you know, whatever.
	I thought it was great.
	And then a few people were like, wow, you were even bald back then.
	And it was just like, it dug it, hurt my feelings.
	It was like, what's the point of you saying that?
	It's just shocking to me.
	Like, why would you think that would be, you know, anyway, so go ahead.
	I have no idea why people think the bald thing means anything.
	I get to live an extra six months because I don't have to take care of my hair because, you know, you spend two months shaving and six months taking care of your hair.
	So I guess you're fine.
	I'm getting an extra year almost.
	So I sort of did an experiment where I was pushing fairly hard and then people were like, well, you don't have empathy for the young.
	You don't have empathy for me.
	You don't understand.
	You don't, right?
	And they were so angry.
	And it's like, but you're also not displaying any empathy for me because one of the things I talked about and this org went pretty viral.
	And I try not to be too aggressive, but every now and then I think it's fine to show a bit of sword play.
	And basically it was like somebody was like, oh, you had to suffer nothing.
	You got three houses for 12 strawberries and everything was great back when you were a kid.
	I'm like, well, we, and basically I said, shut up.
	I grew up under the shadow of nuclear war and the destruction of all life on earth.
	You face some fat feminists, right?
	Now, that was fairly blunt.
	Of course, it's not entirely true.
	We certainly did grow up under the shadow of nuclear war, but they faced more than fat feminists.
	That was a bit of hyperbole.
	And, you know, this thermonuclear, people get really mad.
	And they just had no empathy for what I suffered as a young man through the propaganda that we faced.
	And it wasn't just, of course, war, the environmental stuff, peak oil.
	We were all going to starve to death by 1980.
	And the environment, the ozone layer, the acid rain, it was just constant, right?
	And you didn't have access to the internet to counter information that people have now.
	So you really didn't, you couldn't really push back against the narrative much.
	So it had a big effect.
	So then I did a show on Friday basically saying, okay, so you want me to have empathy with you as a young man, but you don't have any empathy for me as a young man.
	And that's why you can't get laid because you just don't have any compassion.
	You don't have any empathy.
	You don't have any human sensitivity.
	And so it was a really interesting experiment to see if I put myself forward about the vulnerabilities that I had as a young man, would they say, yeah, that must have been tough?
	And then I'd be like, well, yeah, well, what you're going through is tough as well.
	But as I've always said, I treat people the best I can the first time I meet them.
	And after that, I treat them as they treat me.
	So I showed compassion.
	When I got endless insults, yeah, let the cannons fly.
	I mean, it's the principle of self-defense in verbal altercations.
	Well, the thing about some of the reactions to your tweets that I saw that was just amazing to me, you know, I wonder if some of these people are just trolling and they're just making a joke or something.
	But it would just for the listeners here, Stefan, it was stuff they weren't merely saying, you know, all things considered, a young guy who wants to get married, I don't know if that's the right thing to do because of the divorce.
	They weren't just saying it.
	They were saying stuff like, Stefano said, well, why don't you go say hi to a woman that you see in the coffee shop?
	And they were sitting there trying to tell you why you would probably end up in jail that night if you did that because she would accuse you of rape.
	And it was just like, what?
	And again, they're saying it with a straight face.
	And, you know, not all men, you know, I'm not saying every guy's doing that, obviously, in terms of, but there were a lot pushing back against you with the most ludicrous arguments I've ever seen.
	And it was like, this is not healthy.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, I get that, yeah, the, you know, I'm being cliched here, but the pendulum swung too far.
	Yeah, there was a period where no matter what show you watch, the male was always the buffoon, the husband was through, through, through, and the wife was the super.
	And I get that.
	And that's there.
	And why people are pushing back.
	And yet, divorce court is very unfair to the men and blah, blah, blah.
	I totally get that.
	I even get the men going their own way and why that's a thing.
	And okay.
	But the people pushing back against you were coming up with the most ludicrous warnings about, no, you absolutely cannot even go say hi to a woman because somehow the law will come down upon you if you do that.
	And it was just, what do you do?
	Right.
	Right.
	And that is brutal.
	And I think that's being fed by people who are preying on and furthering people's insecurities and fears.
	And I think those people can look back and I just, I just want to give people a choice.
	If you don't get counter information, you functionally don't have a choice.
	Free will is about accessing counter information.
	So I just want to give people counter arguments.
	And look, again, I know you do fantastic consultations for business.
	So if someone said to you, oh, Dr. Murphy, I got this great business idea, but the business that I want to get involved in, the sector has a 50% failure rate.
	Like I can go bankrupt, lose my house, everything, right?
	Now, if you as a consultant were able to get that risk of bankruptcy down to 5% or below, boy, you would have earned your government cheese that day, right?
	I mean, that would be a fantastic, that's a tenfold reduction in risk.
	If you had some horrible disease that had a 50% mortality rate and then some healer came along and said, I can get your mortality rate down to 5% or below, you'd be absolutely thrilled.
	You'd probably name your dog and firstborn after that person because they would have completely changed your life for the better.
	So when people are like 50% divorce rate, 50% divorce rate, I mean, I've done this research years ago and I laid out step by step, here's how you get your risk of divorce to 5% or lower, right?
	Compatible values, have the conversations ahead of time, choose someone who's got morals and integrity, have decent rules for conflict, no yelling, no name calling, no, right?
	Just basic rules and standards of virtues and values and your divorce rate.
	And, you know, a woman who's either well-educated or well-read.
	You can be an autodidact that way as well.
	And your odds of divorce virtually vanish.
	Now, if these guys wanted to get married, but were too scared of the divorce rate and I showed them, boy, here's a tenfold reduction in your risk of divorce.
	Wouldn't they be incredible?
	Oh my gosh, finally I can go talk to girls.
	This is fantastic.
	Blah, blah, blah.
	But no, it doesn't matter.
	They just ignore it and then continue to say, but you get jailed for saying hi to Woman Woman and Starbucks.
	And it's like, but, you know, hopefully for some people, it sort of sinks into their head.
	They kind of figure this stuff out.
	And I think one of the things, sorry, long answer.
	Last thing I want to mention, I think young men in particular, maybe young women, but I'm talking more to the young men, lost their ability to assess risk almost completely.
	I don't know if this is staying indoors.
	When I was a kid, we were just out all the time and, you know, climbing trees, building tree houses and forts.
	And, you know, you'd fall, you'd ride on your bike, no helmets, you'd fall and you'd learn how to assess risk at a sort of physical level.
	And so people are talking about false accusations.
	It's like, okay, but you're many, many, many more times likely to die in a car crash than experience a false accusation from a woman, but you still drive.
	You say, okay, I'll accept that risk.
	And so not talking to women, because there are a couple of crazies out there who make false accusations, which you can filter for by looking for shared values and virtues.
	I mean, they don't know how to assess risk.
	And of course, the internet does that because you see some crazy story where a false accusation destroyed some student's career.
	Maybe he didn't go to jail, but destroyed his academic career.
	Terrible, awful, absolutely, but so rare.
	If all you did was stare at car crashes all day, you wouldn't get in a car.
	But that's not assessing risk at a numerical level.
	And math illiteracy is really tough for people because if you can't assess relative risk, again, you don't have free will.
	You're just programmed by negative stimuli.
	Well, also, I liked, I'm paraphrasing here, but I took one of the points I think I saw you make was along the lines of, okay, let's just stipulate for the sake of argument that, you know, you really are this concern.
	And yeah, there are, like you said, they're not inventing things out of whole cloth.
	There are horrifying, you know, individual cases.
	Okay.
	And then you said, okay, so if you're that afraid of women because there's a chance down the road, you know, they could take half your stuff or whatever, and you don't get to see the kids.
	Okay.
	But then why was there this huge freak out over the women saying, I'd rather encounter a bear in the woods than a man?
	Because it's not like there are no examples of men brutalizing women for them to draw upon.
	And you know what I mean?
	So it was like, pick one.
	Like if you want to say, no, I'm terrified of women because, you know, there's this slight chance something horrible could happen.
	Okay.
	But then you can't be outraged when women say, you know, I'm afraid of men because, well, duh.
	But yet a lot of these guys, they do both.
	They're on the one hand like, not all men.
	How you can't believe, oh my God, you know, statistically how low it is that you're, you know, the man will be there to help you.
	And then at the same time, you can't say hi to a woman at a coffee shop because basically she's going to have half your stuff by next Thursday.
	And you'll be in jail.
	And the other thing, too, is that, and this is just, again, this is older guy.
	I have older guy privilege, which is I've seen the arc of people's lives, right?
	I mean, it's all theoretical.
	You know, you get it from movies, maybe great novels and things like that.
	Like, what are the arc of people's lives?
	The little decisions you make at the beginning have massive domino effects down the road.
	Like if you're sailing from, you know, London to New York and you're off by two degrees, it doesn't matter much at the beginning, but you're going to end up in Mexico by the end, Right, so these little decisions at the beginning.
	So, I have the privilege of having seen the arc of people's lives, having known them as a child, having known them as teenagers, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s.
	And it's really clear.
	I'm sure you've, I mean, if you haven't had the same experience, I'm sure you have, but it's really clear that the little decisions that people make at the beginning have huge ramifications down the road.
	So, you know, you see some woman, you want to talk to her, and you're like, okay, it's done.
	I'm going to go to jail, right?
	So, okay, but, but then, but then what happens is you don't get married, you don't have kids, you don't have a community.
	And, and, you know, as you sort of age out of the dating market, which, you know, happens to men too, right?
	I mean, it happens to men as well.
	For women in the 40s, for men tends to be in the 50s.
	Or then what?
	So then you have the pain of regret and there's no do-over, right?
	Because people, video games, I don't want to blame them for much because they're not responsible for much, but the sort of saved game, oh, I'll give it a try.
	I'll go back.
	Life doesn't work that way.
	You can't circle back, particularly when it comes to dating and fertility windows for women.
	Like if you don't have a kid, you can't do it later.
	You can't go back.
	There's no control Z. There's no load a previous saved game and start over.
	And so it really matters the decisions that you make as a young man.
	You know, the first half of your life has to some degree be about preparing for the second half of your life.
	And if you think it's scary and negative to talk to a woman in the coffee shop, which could lead to a wife and kids, boy, regret and how that is one of the worst things at all, because at least the pain of talking to a woman is going to be somewhat transitory.
	But, you know, guys in their 40s and 50s who, you know, again, I've talked to these men quite a bit on my show, that the agony of regret is really tough.
	And you've got a lot of decades of that kind of inner turmoil and negativity.
	So just giving the old guy privilege and saying, your fears as a young man, I understand them, but they're overblown relative, right?
	Oh, this negative thing could happen, but it's overblown relative to regret, which is kind of this permanent marrow rot that sets into people who've made bad decisions.
	And again, I tweeted about this shortly before I got a platform, which is that, ladies, you've, you know, you're largely infertile at 40, what are you, and you're going to live to be 80 or more?
	Like, what are you going to do for close to half a century?
	Like, what are you going to do?
	What are you going to do?
	How are you going to fill your time?
	You know, there's only a certain amount of hobbies that are going to do that.
	At some point, you have to have connection, communication, relationships, love, be surrounded by people who care about you and who you care about.
	Because, you know, when you get old, you're really going to need people around you who care about you.
	And you're not going to get that from your Fortnite buddies when you were 20.
	Let's take a break from the action, folks, for me to remind you, if you like what you're hearing on the Bob Murphy Show, and come on, is there really another podcast like this out there?
	I don't think so.
	If you like what you hear, I encourage you to support it.
	Go to BobMurphyshow.com slash contribute.
	Every little bit helps.
	I really appreciate it.
	BobMurphyshow.com slash contribute.
	All right, let's get back to the show.
	Okay, this next one, I hope this comes off properly.
	I was very pleasantly surprised to see your take on this stuff because I had filed it away.
	I mean, I know I did a response video to you like 15 years ago or something where you, there was some, it wasn't Disney.
	It was like one of their copycat, whatever.
	There was some animated film that came out and you did a review of it and you were pretty upset about the anti-male messaging in the movie.
	And I thought you were overreacting.
	And so I kind of did a response.
	So anyway, given that that's what I thought you were doing, whatever it was, 15, 20 years ago at this point.
	And then now to see you this way, kind of like gently teasing the guys about, yeah, yeah, okay, women might do that.
	But, you know, anyway, I was just very pleasantly surprised.
	So has there been an evolution in your thinking?
	Or is it like, no, I totally stand behind everything I said 15 years ago and that what I'm saying now is consistent with that?
	And what are you talking about?
	Well, help me understand the contradiction that you see from your end.
	I, okay, I'll put it this way.
	I would have thought the guys right now who are like pointing out all the statistics about all the ways things can go wrong, you got to watch out women.
	The way that modern feminism has raised them and this is how they think.
	You got to be real careful.
	I would have thought, and perhaps completely erroneously, that 15 years ago, guys thinking like that might have looked to you as one of their intellectual heroes and that you would have been giving them some ammunition in that respect.
	Is that totally wrong?
	No, I talk about dangers so that people can avoid them.
	Not to paralyze people, right?
	I mean, if you want to start skiing, you don't just push someone off the double diamond and you gear them up.
	You put them on the bunny hills, you give them some training, right?
	So there's dangers to skiing and you, but that doesn't mean don't ski.
	That means deal with these dangers intelligently.
	There's dangers to driving.
	So drive defensively.
	Don't be drunk.
	You know, get some training if you need it and practice and so on.
	Right.
	So yeah, talking about the dangers of single mothers, of family courts and all of that, that is, you know, when you put your kids on a bike, you say, don't go too fast, you know, and don't turn too hard on gravel and maybe wear a helmet.
	And like you, you talk about dangers with people so they can navigate and avoid them, right?
	Not so they don't do anything and just stay home all the time.
	So I don't want people going out there and getting chewed up by these systems that are not talked about, right?
	There's not a lot of people talking to men at least 15 years ago about the dangers that are out there in the world of, you know, bad courts and bad women and all of that.
	But I didn't talk about these issues so that men could use them as an excuse to not go out and sort of found families and so on.
	And of course, the anti-male stuff, I mean, you know this very well, I'm sure, is that men tend to be pro-free speech absolutists.
	They tend to be smaller government.
	They tend to be more pro-free market.
	That's just our, you know, I don't know, testosterone less competitive nature or whatever you want to call it.
	But men tend to be more for competition rather than coercion, at least in the political sense, because coercion has significantly negative effects for men.
	I mean, we can get killed if you say something wrong and get a duel.
	So the anti-male stuff is just any group that wants smaller government gets attacked.
	And white males tend to be the most pro-free speech and smallest government kind of people for whatever reason.
	And so I think the anti-male stuff has to do with political machinations.
	But I didn't want to warn young men about the dangers because, I mean, I was raised in a single mother household, welfare state kind of environment.
	And I saw a lot of these dangers up front, these women sort of chewing up these men and spitting them out for money.
	So, yeah, you want to talk about things that are of concern and danger to young men.
	And I mean, maybe that's on me.
	I went too far or something like that, but it was never with the intention of, because I always said, look, I'm happily married and here's how you can do it.
	And, you know, when young men would call in, I'd say, well, you know, here's the blocks you probably have to go into talk to girls, but at some point, you just have to will it.
	Like at some point, you know, everybody wants to massage their fears till they're small enough to step over it.
	It's like, nope, you're going to have to make that leap at some point.
	So, yeah, I do think that I certainly did talk about the dangers facing young men and the anti-male bias and so on, but I certainly never meant it with the intention of then, you know, stay home and play video games until you're dead.
	Right.
	Okay.
	And to be clear, I'm not doing a gotcha or something.
	I'm just not just, I mean, maybe it was wrong.
	Yeah, I'm fine.
	I was pleasantly surprised to see when you were back on my radar that the fights you were picking were with the guys saying that, no, no, no, you can't say hi to a woman in a coffee shop.
	That's a bad idea.
	You know, so it was okay.
	One other big, and this is my fault, folks, that I have a hard stop coming up soon.
	So in case it looks like this is being truncated, it's on my end.
	Have your views moved on theological matters in the last decade?
	Yeah.
	I mean, I've done a whole I Was Wrong About series of videos.
	Yeah, it's a big topic.
	So I first spoke to the atheist community.
	I mean, long before I became sort of a public dude, I was in the atheist community and talking to the atheist community and had great hopes for the atheist community in terms of morals.
	Morals are the key to everything.
	And morals are the key to happiness.
	And reason equals virtue equals happiness, that famous equation from Socrates.
	So morals are the key to everything good and positive.
	You can't have love without morals.
	You can't have trust.
	You can't have a high trust society.
	You can't have an efficient economy.
	You have to have bars on your window and get tested for SEDs all the time.
	So I am a big fan of ethics.
	And of course, as a moral philosopher, philosophy is really centered on ethics because it's the one thing that philosophy does that no other discipline really encapsulates.
	So I was in the atheist community and the atheist community was very much like, oh, Christian morals, you know, it's based on fallacious metaphysics and epistemology and it's not rational.
	And I'm like, okay, so what's your answer?
	And they're like, Darwinism.
	No, no, the one place you don't want to go to ethics is evolution because it's all about falsehood and violence, so to speak, because, you know, you deceive and then you eat things.
	So, and I went to Dawkins and I went to Sam Harris, went to other people, read a lot about this question of secular ethics.
	And the atheists got, not only do they not have anything, but even when I put forward a very robust proof of secular ethics, my book, University Preferable Behavior, I got contempt and scorn, hostility and hatred from the and not any particularly rational rebuttals.
	And I did a whole bunch of debates with atheists and secularists and so on.
	And I was like, hmm, as an empiricist, this troubles me.
	And so Christianity, of course, kept their ethics.
	And then one thing I noticed, of course, was that over the attacks that came at me from, you know, I'm a large number of different novelists.
	My picture was three times on the cover of the New York Times, Sunday edition, no less.
	So when the sort of attacks came in, it was the Christians in my life who were magnificent.
	And they say, we know that good people get persecuted.
	Whereas the atheists are like, oh, where there's smoke, there's fire.
	Got to run.
	And they absolutely went to the back rooms.
	They just vanished.
	And Christians were there.
	And again, as an empiricist, it's like, you got to have something right about this.
	Again, the pandemic reinforced this as well in that Christians tended to be more skeptical of the vaccine and of the whole process.
	And the atheists were running around bleating like brainless sheep.
	Trust the science.
	Trust the science.
	It's like, you know, science is the exact opposite of trust, right?
	And so when it comes to sort of practical matters in the world, atheists believe in the superstition called government and vote for things that take my rights away.
	Christians, believing in God, promote really great rational, acted-out virtues and don't vote for governments, tend to vote for governments that don't want to take my rights away and obviously sometimes want to restore them.
	So from a practical standpoint, and as an empiricist, you know, I can never, ever, as an empiricist, deny accumulated consistent evidence and the Christians were better people than the atheists, were more interested in morality and understood the world a whole lot better.
	So that's kind of hard to ignore.
	At least I don't want to ignore it.
	And so my position on Christianity, given not just the positive behaviors of Christians, but the generally appalling and virulent behavior of atheists, is like, that's not what I expected.
	And when things don't play out as I expected, it's because I've got something wrong at the essence.
	So hopefully that's some sort of answer that makes sense.
	Oh, absolutely.
	I don't know if you know this about me.
	So I was raised Catholic.
	I spent a long stretch where I called myself a devout atheist.
	I thought that was clever.
	I read like George Smith's book on atheism, H.L. Mencken's Treatise on the Gods, Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason.
	I thought these are good, but I was going to write the definitive refutation of Christianity.
	And then I had some stuff happen in grad school and I spent a period, it sounds like maybe that's where, where I called myself Christian with a small C, meaning I'm on board with like the culture and like the political economy of it and everything, you know, Western Europe, blah, blah, blah.
	It's just, come on, some guy didn't walk on water and give me a break, you know, that.
	And then, and then even some stuff happened to push me further.
	So if you don't mind me asking, like, where are you on that level of like, do you believe in God or you're not there yet?
	I am going to church.
	I am listening to Christians.
	I am open to the experience.
	I cannot will it because I am an empiricist.
	So the empirical evidence Is that there's a virtue that comes through Christianity that secularism and atheism not only can't compete with, but seems to virulently oppose, which is kind of demonic in a way, right?
	And of course, it's as a persecuted person myself, not to make it too dramatic, I have sympathy with those who are persecuted.
	And there is really no more persecuted group in the world at the moment than Christians.
	And so we have that to some degree in common.
	So, yeah, I am going to church.
	I can't will it as an empiricist, but I am certainly open to the experience.
	And my heart is open, and I'm listening a lot.
	And boy, I would love it.
	I mean, honestly, if something happens that is convincing to me, and I'd love to hear these grad stories of yours, maybe the next time we talk.
	But if something happens that shows it to me, my gosh, to live forever and to spend eternity with best friends, family, I mean, to be able to cross-examine Socrates back, I mean, that would be glorious beyond words.
	So I am wide open and just waiting for the sign.
	Okay.
	Well, I mean, I'm obviously very glad to hear that.
	And also what you just said there to me, because when I didn't believe that, that was my stance.
	I said, oh, yeah, that would be great if it were true.
	I just, I don't believe it.
	I'm not going to believe in fairy tale.
	Like, just like, yeah, if Santa Claus were real, that would be awesome.
	I never understood like the, was it Christopher Hitchens and, you know, that this, the strain of that, like, the God of the Bible doesn't exist and thank goodness.
	You know, in other words, that we're glad.
	And then it's like, that never made sense to me.
	So anyway, I'm, I'm heartened to hear you say it that way.
	Well, let me just, and again, folks, I know that was a big thing for me to bring up.
	And you're like, well, Bob, why?
	It's again, because of the time constraints.
	I'm never resistant to questions.
	You can ask me anything you want.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So it's, well, I think, for example, like here, let me just pull up.
	You've got your book, Against the Gods, A Concise Guide to Atheism and Agnosticism.
	So it looks like in terms of you and like, I was planning on writing this book and you actually did write it.
	So there's no judgment coming from me.
	But I'm just curious as to, like, you say here, Stephan Molyneux's seminal book Against the Gods makes a powerful case against agnosticism for the positive acceptance of the non-existence of supernatural beings.
	It's not rational to even entertain the possibility of the existence of irrational entities.
	And so, okay, it ends here.
	It provides essential ammunition to those fighting the virus of faith and clears the mental fog of the irrational middle ground between atheism and theism.
	So I'm curious, just, you know, you think, is it like, because this is how I think I can remember all this stuff, for example, oh, okay.
	So there's Adam and Eve in the garden, and God says, don't eat from that tree.
	They do.
	He's mad.
	He kicks them out.
	There's this schism between man and God.
	He says, you know what?
	I'm going to send my son.
	We torture and murder him.
	And then God says, okay, now we're cool.
	That doesn't make any sense.
	Right.
	So I still understand the validity of that argument.
	It's just now as a Christian, I could say, that's not the right way to frame it.
	And let me tell you, and I can say some other true statements also that put that in the, you know what I mean?
	So is that how you think of that book that you understand that, you know, any particular argument you made in there is valid?
	It's just now you're seeing a bigger picture?
	So, I mean, I've done a whole series recently on Bible verses and it's sort of exploring that.
	For me, it's like if, let's say that I'm some expert doctor, but every cure that I think works kills the patient.
	And let's say there's some guy I call a crazy holistic doctor and he says, well, you need these herbs, you need these plants.
	And every time he applies this non-scientific medicine, the patient gets cured.
	And it's like, wouldn't that give you some pause as to your principles?
	All the stuff that science validates kills everyone.
	And all the stuff that's supposedly superstitious stuff cures people.
	And it's like, you got to look at that stuff.
	You got to examine it.
	Now, I don't know where you stand with agnostics, but they bother me more than just about anybody else because taking pride in not making decisions about essential matters in the world is a kind of smoke superiority on a lack of intellectual throughput and rigor and consistency.
	So this really, the book was very much against agnosticism as a place to avoid making good decisions.
	It's like, you know, like on the Zoom call, you know, the guy who sits there for an hour and a half and then says, well, nothing really from my end.
	It's like, why are we paying you?
	What is your value?
	So I definitely.
	Yeah, my take in my period of devout atheism, my take was when people, because I had some Christian friends in undergrad that were like, no, no, Bob, you're an agnostic.
	Like they didn't want me to tell people I was an atheist.
	And I said, well, are you agnostic about Zeus?
	You know what I mean?
	And I was like, yeah, I can't prove Zeus doesn't exist.
	But if you say, do you believe in Zeus?
	I'm going to say no.
	I'm not going to say, well, I don't know.
	So that was my take that I thought that was just being wishy-washy.
	Give me a break.
	You don't believe in Zeus.
	I don't believe in Jehovah.
	Come on.
	Well, and as I use this analogy in a book I wrote recently about how the atheists during a time of terrible storms and hails and frozen frogs falling from the sky came and destroyed the church.
	And people were then pushed out into a brutal wilderness where a lot of them got sick and died.
	And the problem is, of course, if you want to say to the West, lose your Christianity, it's not rational.
	It's not empirical.
	It's not logical.
	Then, okay, let's say you tear down the church, but that's the only home we have in the wilderness.
	And the coldness and the callousness of atheists in removing from people's hearts and minds religious faith without providing a system of secular ethics to me is one of the greatest and grandest and most appalling acts of sabotage that has been committed in the world throughout human history.
	And so, you know, to at least solve my own conscience with regards to that, one of the first things that I worked on was a proof of secular ethics, because if you're going to say to people, I'm going to tear down your church, and you don't give them any other place to go, they just die in the wilderness.
	And I'm really concerned about the atheist motives with regards to that.
	Well, and that dovetails, I think, that, you know, that famous Nietzsche quote, God is dead and we killed him thing.
	That in context, that's kind of what he's getting at, right?
	That he's saying, like, you know, we took God out of public civil life or whatever, and there's going to be some ramifications, right?
	I mean, so I think sometimes people misinterpret, you know, what he meant by that statement.
	Yeah, and people without primary source access to universal ethics have only practical considerations to make when resisting tyranny.
	They do not have moral, absolute reasons to act in resistance to tyranny.
	Then it just becomes a cost-benefit calculation, as we talked about at the beginning.
	And when people are making cost-benefit calculations on resistance to tyranny or falsehood or corruption, then all that tyranny, falsehood, and corruption has to do is escalate the punishments to get compliance.
	Whereas if you have a principle, I mean, for me, what I did, Bob, over the 15 years before I was deplatformed was not a cost-benefit calculation.
	I mean, you know, given my skills in business and rhetoric and public speaking and so on, I mean, I could have made a ton of money in politics or the media or in sales or whatever it was, right?
	And I know that because I was in an entrepreneurial sphere where I did fairly well.
	It's not a cost-benefit calculation.
	And Darwinism and this sort of reciprocal altruism nonsense that passes for ethics in the secular community fundamentally comes down to a cost-benefit calculation.
	And that always fuels the rise of tyranny because all tyranny has to do is escalate punishments such as deplatforming.
	And as you say, the splash damage of, okay, well, we're not going to talk about this as opposed to how I was raised, which was thou shalt not bear false witness and tell the truth, though the sky is full and tell the truth and shame the devil.
	And I did not want to have my commitment to reason, evidence, and the truth and virtue to be constrained by a cost-benefit calculation.
	Because then you really have no integrity.
	You're just navigating sticks and carrots.
	I think related to that is there was a guy that would hang out on my blogs, like I used to blog, imagine that, years ago.
	And he was just strident militant atheist.
	Like he loved my economic stuff, you know, so he was polite about it, but it was just very, you know, it was kind of like, Bob, you're great six days of the week and then you're out to lunch on Sunday, but we'll forgive you for that.
	And he came around.
	So he, I don't think he became like an actual Christian or something, but more recently, like the last I heard from him, it was something along the lines of he had come to realize that the people running the world in terms of the governments or whatever genuinely believed they were serving Satan.
	And he realized the only people that could possibly stand up to this group are those who think they're serving a God, that like secularists, like it's just not.
	And I've made that point elsewhere that to me, like the rational scientific atheists who think like, no, we're just going to write some more books and whatever.
	And it's like, you don't know what you're up against.
	Like, no, the only reason that I would, you know, that I haven't tried to work for the Fed or something is because I, you know, I would, you know, get, well, God would be disappointed or something.
	You know what I mean?
	So if I just thought this was me, we got the time on the earth and then that's it and you're done.
	Like this, yeah, what I'm doing right now would be stupid.
	So anyway.
	That makes sense.
	Yeah.
	And I when you're in trouble in life and when enemies are circling and the arrows are raining down, it really matters who's coming in the room and who's going out, who's picking up some weapon metaphorically to fight alongside you and who is despawning and pretending like you never existed.
	And this didn't, the atheists did not rally around.
	Even though I was an atheist and had fought strongly for atheist causes, the wild thing was that the Christians who I had attacked rallied around me and the atheists who I had defended, in a sense, either despawned or joined the enemy.
	And again, as an empiricist, that's kind of important to notice.
	Okay, well, let me end with just praising you.
	I don't know if I ever told you this.
	This is one of the pivotal moments.
	I'm not trying to be overly dramatic of my life in terms of me understanding how the world works and what type of people exist.
	You and I were doing an event in New York City years ago.
	It was like you had to walk downstairs in the basement.
	It was under there.
	And it was, you know, you gave your talk.
	And I think this is the first time I had seen you live.
	Like I knew of you or whatever.
	And then you're just sitting there with the mic.
	And it's this intimate setting.
	And there's, I don't know, 50 people just all around you.
	And you were like in the middle of this circle almost fielding questions.
	Just people were asking you all kinds of stuff.
	And you were just like running shop.
	And I was just watching this.
	And like you, you know, you were funny and everything.
	And I was like, I can't believe someone like that exists.
	I was just.
	So anyway, that was in terms of me just knowing what kind of people exist, that was very impressive to me.
	And so I don't know what you did to get to that level of confidence and just glibness and seeming to be, you know, know all sorts of stuff about everything and being able to field questions and be funny.
	But that was, that gave me something like, oh, I want to, you know, in that realm of my public persona, I want to be more like that guy.
	So thanks for being a role model in that respect.
	That's very kind.
	I really, really appreciate that.
	Thank you.
	So folks, my guest has been Stefan Malio.
	Where should they go?
	freedomain.com.
	I have, of course, a spastic mouthful of Polish syllables in my name.
	So I think freedomain.com is probably the easiest place to find me.
	Okay.
	So thanks, Stefan, for coming here.
	And yeah, we'll have to continue this conversation in the future date.
	Anytime, man.
	Thanks, Mel.
	Okay.
	Thanks, everybody, for tuning in.
	See you next time.
	You've just experienced another episode of the Bob Murphy Show.
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