Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - Are You a Douchebag? Twitter/X Space

Dec. 17, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:41:25

Are You a Douchebag? Twitter/X Space

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	All righty, ready.
	Good evening, everybody.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Stefan Mullen and Viedermain had a wee cancellation tonight of a cold and show.
	So I wanted to talk about a variety of things.
	Now, one of the things I wanted to talk about was the shooting in Bondi Beach in Australia.
	But that having been said, I am very happy, of course.
	To hear your questions or comments.
	Let's start with the caller.
	I can always get to that in a second.
	Yes, radical capitalists, what is on your mind?
	How can I help?
	Hey, can you hear me?
	Yes, go ahead.
	Okay, I wanted to ask in particular where you think you deviate with Ayn Rand on the topic of ethics, like what she got wrong.
	Any proposition like that would be fun to talk about.
	Sure, I'm happy to do that.
	I've got some shows on this.
	You can look up just Ayn Rand at FDRpodcast.com.
	So Ayn Rand's approach to ethics is that which is good for man's survival is the best.
	That which promotes man's survival, that which is good for man's survival and flourishing is the best.
	Reason is the best tool for the flourishing and enhancement of man's survival.
	Therefore, reason is the good, and everyone who acts against reason is acting against that which is best and good for man's survival.
	And that's the basic proposition that Randian ethics is based on.
	Would you agree or disagree?
	Or what do you think?
	There are a few ways I think that you can characterize it.
	And I think that the characterization of it that focuses more on survival, Terry Smith has this really nice quote essentially that says something to the effect of morality, at least concerning the objectivist ethics.
	The test for whether an action is moral isn't whether someone keeps a false or not.
	It's whether they live in a virtuous manner and achieve flourishing.
	So just with the emphasis on the distinction that it's not like a Hobbesian survival at any cost style notion.
	And it's like a holistic account of like Edimonistic instantiation.
	Well, but that's begging the question, though.
	If you say, what is the proof of ethics or what is the basis of ethics?
	You can't say living in an ethical way because that's begging the question.
	You have to establish what the ethics are.
	And I agree that there's like an inductive process that you come to to arrive at a conclusion like that.
	And it's particularly with the recognition of like what man's life is.
	And flourishing is the way that you survive a long term.
	You don't survive long term by being a brute or a parasite.
	Okay, so tell me what you mean by that.
	And, you know, whether you're playing devil's advocate or this is something you believe in, it's totally fine with me either way.
	But tell me what you mean when you say long term you don't survive by being a brute or a parasite.
	Yeah, I think that so with the integration of something like virtue, all virtues in the objectivist system essentially try to recognize an internal and like an external aspect, right?
	So this holistic notion of virtue and value in her system in the descriptive sense is going to be defined as that which you act to gain and or keep.
	So like value can be taken to mean something in, you know, more layman term, like the object of value, like what you're trying to do.
	And then virtue is like the how.
	But there's like a descriptive sense of virtue where you can also employ like vice to achieve something like dishonesty, for example.
	And it seems like the best way for an individual to flourish is going to be in this civilized manner where they don't seek out the destruction of others, use them as means to an end, right?
	And we can look at this from a few perspectives, but that's going to be a particular empirical question, kind of like after we've established the principle.
	So I guess my question would be, do you have like an empirical worry where it's like being a good person in the traditionally conceived of sense doesn't actually get you to flourishing?
	Or do you think that that's like not an adequate base to build a foundation of ethics on?
	Like, yeah, is it like a more of an empirical question or one of principle for you?
	That's quite a wall of words.
	I think I understand what you mean.
	So there's no such thing as mankind in the abstract.
	That's a collectivist concept.
	Would you agree with that?
	Yeah, I'm of the metaphysical belief that only particulars exist.
	Okay, got it.
	All right.
	So let's look at someone like Joe Biden.
	Joe Biden, not particularly smart.
	He didn't graduate very high up in his law class and never showed any particular spasms of brilliance over the course of his life.
	And yet he became the most powerful man in the world.
	And he established a fortune, as did Barack Obama, Barack Obama in particular, you know, tens of millions of dollars and in demand as a speaker and an author who makes a huge amount of money and all of that.
	So in what way was their irrationality causing them to not flourish?
	Yeah, so it's probably going to come down to like what you particularly take flourishing to mean.
	And you can kind of parallel this sense with like the con man, for example, who, you know, your Nigerian prince scammers and whatnot who hit a few licks on some old people, right?
	And they get a lot of money.
	So there are like senses of which we're going to define or have a notion of like what well-being is.
	And like the eudaimonistic notion that like Rand's kind of virtue ethics and, you know, the broader Aristotelian tradition is built on, is this going, it's going to be a more encompassing notion, right, of flourishing.
	So I don't think that any, well, I shouldn't say any objectivist, but I don't think most contend that irrationality doesn't have some isolated benefit.
	When you're looking at your life, life isn't a series of just these weird, disjointed, isolated events.
	And it seems pretty clear to me, and of course we can get into this if you disagree, that you can't achieve the overall like well-being notion of eudaimonia without this commitment, at least in some part to virtue and principle.
	But again, I don't think that it excludes you from any notion of what we would consider to be parts of well-being, if that makes sense, which I think that those people have achieved parts of well-being or like modesty success.
	Okay.
	So it's the argument that Joe Biden is secretly unhappy.
	Unhappy?
	Well, happiness, unhappiness, right?
	It's going to be a particular measure of well-being.
	I think it would be a part.
	But he's not flourishing.
	Yeah, I don't think that he's flourishing.
	I don't think that people who live and conduct themselves in such a way flourish in this broader sense by which we utilize the term.
	Okay, so then help me understand what you mean by flourishing.
	If it's not happiness, it's not wealth, it's not power, it's not satisfaction with achieving the top of your profession.
	It's help me understand what flourishing, and I'm not disagreeing with you.
	I just want to make sure I understand your position or your perspective.
	So what does it mean to flourish then?
	So we can look at like the original notion that Aristotle gave in Nicomachean Ethics, where he kind of walks through the example of like why people, for instance, pursue things like, why do you pursue a job?
	You want money.
	Why do you want money so you can eat, right?
	Why do you want to eat?
	And it just, essentially, the question ultimately is going to terminate in this final value, because if we have a notion of instrumental value, which seems to be what most people are more familiar with, right?
	Like I do X in order to achieve Y.
	And it's like, well, why do you want Y?
	It seems that there's a logical, there's a logical necessity of a flourishing.
	Yeah, the end result is happiness.
	So it seems that you're going to be on a more holistic notion of happiness.
	And I believe Rand defines it as a state of non-contradictory joy, you know, in accordance with like living a life of principle and virtue, right?
	It seems like the overall state of, again, like this eudaimonistic satisfaction, this final value or this final end that all of your other ends are for is not going to be able to be achieved by living as something else other than man.
	And, you know, when people are acting subhuman and they employ force to, you know, get what they want and other dirty and nasty tactics, it seems like they're barred from a holistic notion of flourishing.
	Okay.
	How much do you think you've explained what flourishing is?
	Flourishing can be taken.
	No, no, no, no.
	How much do you answer my question, please?
	How much do you think you've explained what flourishing is?
	Yeah, I think the state of non-contradictory joy and my statement about virtue get to like what the heart of what we think flourishing is.
	Okay.
	So flourishing is non-contradictory joy.
	Yeah, achieved by a certain means.
	Well, it has to be achieved by a certain means.
	So what you're saying is that Joe Biden was secretly unhappy.
	I'm not trying to be a jerk here.
	Like I'm genuinely trying to understand the perspective.
	And I share a lot of it, but I just want to make sure it's clear both for you and I and for the audience.
	So it's the argument that Joe Biden or Barack Obama or George, any of the George Bushes you could throw a stone at or a shoe at, I guess, that they're unhappy.
	Yeah, we're going to take like this broader encompassing notion of happiness to include.
	No, no, I don't, I don't want to, please, please don't give me broader notions.
	I've just, I need to break it down.
	Morality has to be relatively simple.
	Because we try to teach it to three and four year olds, right?
	Yeah, we generally, I think, try to give children a notion of like right and wrong, sure.
	Okay.
	And we can't just say to children what's right and wrong based on fairly lengthy explanations that use ancient Greek terms, right?
	Yeah, so I mean, like two things, right?
	I think that there are going to be different levels of explanation that like suit different particular fields.
	Like imagine a doctor being able to explain a diagnosis to a patient, right?
	They have to like kind of dumb that down or make it like more understandable to the layperson.
	But like when a doctor is learning about the diagnosis or like in medical school, they wouldn't of course get that like watered down terminology.
	So it seems like the context more so depends on the kind of explanation that we want to do.
	No, but the water, sorry, but the watered down, the watered down tech, the watered down description cannot contradict, cannot be contradicted by the more complex description, right?
	No, of course not, but there are different levels of explanatory power given certain ends that seem appropriate or inappropriate.
	Okay.
	Look, we are intelligent people here.
	You don't need to tell me that there are different levels of explanatory power.
	Of course, I understand that.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	So how would you explain to a five-year-old why Joe Biden should not do what Joe Biden does?
	To a five-year-old, I would probably try to make the case that the end result, like the thing, the reason why you do what you do, the particular aim of your action, is not going to be consonant with irrational or suspended or extained or extended, Jesus, extended irrational behavior.
	I think that would be a very simple explanation.
	Okay, extended irrational behavior.
	Come on.
	Kids five.
	Let's give it a thousand yards there.
	Try it again.
	Because we try to explain morality to five-year-olds.
	Now, again, I'm not saying that you'd run through the entire syllogistical proof of virtue and blah, blah, blah.
	But we do need to be able to explain morality to five-year-olds.
	Otherwise, we're just ordering them around, right?
	But I mean, I don't know how I don't really have the maybe the most accurate notion of what explanatory power would be appropriate for a five-year-old.
	In a maybe a more simple way, it seems like the five-year-old, you're a specific kind of thing and the kind of thing by which you are, you only achieve this notion of flourishing.
	The kind of thing by which you are.
	Come on, bro.
	Have you spent any time around children?
	Well, I mean, no, not recently.
	I don't know.
	No, I mean, you were a child, right?
	I mean, we all, I mean, you were a child, right?
	And you tried explaining things to your friends when you were a kid, or maybe you had younger siblings or younger friends or something like that, right?
	And I'm not trying to, you know, give you an impossible challenge, but we do have to be able to explain virtue to kids because we need kids to do the right thing.
	Like a notion of virtue, right?
	Like the how.
	Sorry?
	You can simply explain the particular notion of virtue, which we're trying to utilize, right?
	It's like the how, right?
	Okay, so a kid is stealing.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	Let's say he takes something from another kid.
	Sorry, you know what stealing is.
	I was trying to think like in, I don't know what the daycare is, right?
	He takes something.
	And why should he not take things?
	Ultimately, the answer, at least positive by the objectivist ethics, is that it's not going to be good for you.
	Okay, okay, good.
	So it's not going to be good for you.
	Okay, so the kid has a candy bar in his hand.
	He's drooling about the candy bar.
	And why should he not eat it if he took it?
	Why should you not eat it?
	I mean, I think that to understand why you shouldn't do things, because I don't contend, and I don't think the objectivist ethics does either, that you couldn't get like a momentary burst or some particular satisfaction from doing a wrong thing in the moment.
	But we really come to understand the wrongness by this long-range consequence, right?
	So I don't know if I can explain in 30 seconds why you shouldn't eat the stolen candy bar.
	It seems like there's just going to be a longer range explanation, right?
	Because I think you can try to justify or could justify any wrong action if you would only consider the consequences that that thing will yield in the next like three to five seconds.
	Okay, so you would say to the kid, you'll enjoy the candy bar now, but it will harm your happiness in the future.
	Maybe with some particular like notion of harm.
	But yeah, I think that would probably be a sufficient explanation for a child of that age.
	No, it wouldn't be.
	I mean, it wouldn't be like, what standard?
	Well, no, it wouldn't be because harm your happiness in the future for a kid who is about to eat a candy bar.
	That's like saying, well, you know, but you could get diabetes when you're 40.
	Like they don't process things that way, right?
	Yeah, it seems like, again, though, that there's going to be a different notion in the explanatory power and the way we explain things.
	So of course, with a younger, like more cognitively limited person, we can't give them a full range of explanation, right?
	I don't, I don't think.
	Okay, that's that's by definition.
	That's, but I mean, of course, you can't give a full range of explanation to a five-year-old.
	Again, you don't need to tell me things that are obvious.
	So your kid has taken something, right?
	He's five years old.
	And if you say, well, it's going to make you unhappy in the long run, then what you have to do is you have to show the kid that everyone who takes things ends up unhappy, which you can't do, right?
	I mean, there's like, there's going to be, I mean, we can invoke like maybe the constant here, some argument that's like, we can't show another person through like a sufficient means someone else's like mental state.
	But I think that they're going to.
	No, no, but you hang on.
	Sorry, but you can say that everyone who shoots themselves in the head gets injured.
	Yeah, but that's going to be empirically demonstrable.
	I don't think we can look inside people's minds in the same way that we can see if they're bleeding or not.
	Well, that's the problem, is that you're going to put a curse on people called unhappiness, which you can't prove.
	And basically, you're appealing to the, hang on.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Can't prove?
	Can't prove.
	You can't prove it.
	I don't know what's because it's mind reading.
	I don't know what standard of like can't like we're employing here.
	I mean, if we're going to- You just told me you can't look inside other people's minds.
	Yeah, but again, like the hat, like that particular like aspect of happiness, right, it's going to be like one aspect of well-being.
	We mean like the entirety, again, of well-being?
	No, no.
	So the entirety of well-being is, I don't know what that means, but I will say this, that aren't you appealing to hedonism?
	You're bribing.
	Well, you see, if you do the right thing, you'll be happy.
	And if you do the wrong thing, you'll be unhappy, which is just a secular version of heaven and hell, isn't it?
	I think there's like normative force that's in alignment with like positive or negative states of hedonic valence.
	That doesn't seem like that.
	Okay, okay.
	Don't, don't, don't get all, don't get all strokey on me, right?
	So don't give me like, help me understand.
	If you're saying to people that if you do the right thing, you respect property rights, you'll end up happier or with this thing called flourishing or euda mania, which is a good thing.
	And if you don't do these things, if you violate property rights, you will end up unhappy.
	Then, first of all, you are mind-reading.
	Second of all, there's tons of people who steal like crazy and seem to be quite happy and would fight like hell, perhaps even to the death to maintain that privilege.
	And third, it's just an appeal to hedonism.
	I mean, yeah.
	So to answer like the first two things, again, I'm not going to take a notion of happiness that is going to be completely mind-dependent and not verifiable.
	If we tie it to a more holistic notion of flourishing, we're able to empirically verify if somebody is living this life in accordance with virtue.
	And there are going to be maybe some more esoteric points for this kind of thing in regard to the ability to integrate things that are clearly a contradiction with regard to your well-being in a more epistemic sense.
	But it seems like...
	Okay, okay, okay, okay, hang on.
	I mean, you got a bunch of words, right?
	A more holistic sense of flourishing in an epistemic sense.
	I mean, do you know the audience?
	Like, you're talking to me, and I know some of these terms, but you're talking to a general audience, right?
	Do you think that's clear?
	Do I think that's clear?
	I think the terms that I'm expressing are clear, and I think the jargon is necessary.
	No, they're not.
	No, they're not.
	They're not clear.
	It's not clear.
	I guarantee you, I've been doing this for 44 years.
	What you're saying is not clear.
	And that doesn't mean that you're wrong, but it means that you're saying that people need a particular level of education or IQ or concentration or reading or something like that.
	So what percentage of the population do you think would be able to follow the sentence you just had?
	And again, I'm not trying to be a nitpicker.
	I'm just trying to help you with the communication, right?
	So what, certainly a five-year-old wouldn't be able to follow it.
	So what percentage of the general population would be able to follow the sentence that you just made?
	What percentage, if I had to guess?
	Yeah.
	Maybe like 10%, but that doesn't, if they can understand something or not now is like trivial or irrelevant if they could, given some amount of like practice.
	Like I don't think that.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Hang on.
	Hang on.
	If they understand what you're saying, that's irrelevant.
	I agree with you about the 10% thing for what that's worth.
	I think that's probably a great guess, which would be my guess.
	So we're both guessing, but we're both guessing with similar amounts.
	So what do you mean when you say it doesn't matter if they understand me or not?
	Yeah, because again, if people are interested in this kind of thing, which I think their happiness, their well-being depends on, right?
	I think there's going to be like some barrier.
	Now, whether that be knowledge or something that you must achieve before you can understand these ideas, right?
	I don't see why we have to present a notion of ethics and give some sort of validation or proof in the least technical way that really strips a lot of the beauty and the rigor out of the position.
	Sorry, hang on, hang on.
	So I apologize for interrupting.
	So do you think that people need to be good for society to function?
	No, I think that's clearly not.
	We have a functioning society now.
	It's just functioning by one.
	No, we don't.
	We have a debt society.
	We don't have a fucking functional society at all.
	It's all debt.
	What do you think function to be?
	I mean, society clearly works.
	I can go from point A to point B.
	The government still collects my money.
	Now they're doing it by force, and it's parasitic and it's terrible.
	Okay, let me ask you this.
	Do you think that, hang on, do you think that our current society is mathematically sustainable?
	No, of course not.
	I'm aware of the math.
	Okay, so it's not functional if it can't be sustained.
	That's like saying a smoker hasn't died of lung cancer yet.
	So smoking isn't bad for you.
	I mean, not functional if it can't be sustained.
	So it's not a functional society.
	But let me just ask you this in general.
	Do you think that society functions better when more people are moral?
	Yeah, probably.
	But again, there's going to be disagreement among the particular amount of debt we can take on.
	There are economists that think that's really no big deal.
	I mean, like the Keynes quote, like we're all dead in the long run, so what does it matter anyway?
	Like there are going to be a big, a big faction, or excuse me, faction of economists who are like professionally trained that don't think there's like a debt problem at all.
	See, it seems like a feeling and debt's going to be.
	Okay, those people are full of shit.
	Not you, but those people are full of shit because every society fucks up after 250 or so years.
	I mean, every society.
	Every single society.
	I don't.
	I don't think that we're going to secure truth by that particular method.
	Okay.
	So every single society fucks up and collapses largely due to economics and currency issues throughout history.
	But you think that's not a good argument?
	Well, I'm good in this sense.
	Like we're having a little bit more rigorous discussion.
	So I think with that particular inductive notion of evidence, right, we would probably want to look and explain like a more causal link between these things instead of pointing at A and B.
	Well, it's theft.
	Societies die from theft and theft is central banking, money printing, control of the interest rates.
	Yeah, but again, there are large factions of people that happen to think that things like these would just be constant conjunctions that have no necessary explanatory power, no necessary connection, right?
	Okay, am I talking to lots of people in the world who have different opinions or am I talking to you?
	Well, it seems like, you know, given that my answers had been staked a lot against what other people would believe or what other people could follow, it seems like if we're going to invoke that notion against my answers, that it wouldn't be unfair to invoke that notion against yours either.
	Sorry, how have I said, how have I invoked other people and their arguments?
	I have said, how many people do you think would understand the argument that you made that you said about 10%?
	So that's not invoking other people's arguments.
	That's just saying that you probably want to make it a little bit more simple if you want people to understand it.
	But if you, because I can only debate with you, right?
	So if I say it is violations of the non-aggression principle, specifically, thou shalt not steal, that causes societies to self-destruct after 100, 200, 300 years, that's an argument.
	If you say, well, there's people in the world who would disagree with you, how much.
	I can't debate that.
	Yeah.
	Because that's not an argument.
	That's just saying there are people who would disagree with you, but you're not proposing a counter-argument or agreeing with the reason and evidence that I put in.
	I mean, I gave the example of a constant conjunction.
	Like, that's a very popular view in philosophy, like stemmed from Hume, right?
	There are going to be, again, and this is not a legitimate.
	Okay, explain.
	Hang on.
	So this is my question.
	Do you think that people who are listening to this understand what you mean when you say constant conjunction?
	Yeah, I think those words are going to be words that the layperson hears and can probably put them together and figure it out.
	Okay, you're wrong.
	So explain to the audience what constant conjunction means.
	And also, do I know what you mean by it?
	I mean, I understand the words, but do I know what you mean by those words?
	So when there's somebody with a notion of causality might be inclined to say something like A causes B, right?
	We all understand that, I would assume, right?
	So they're going to be people that deny that this notion of causality is something real.
	And instead of maybe A causes B, they're just going to, as David Hume and like the neo-Humeans present, they're just going to think that A and B happen to be like conjunctions that occur together by chance.
	Like they deny the causal link.
	So they just state them as constant conjunctions, right?
	Part of their argument is going to be that we can't empirically verify causality.
	Now, of course, I don't agree with that.
	Okay, so why are you bringing up arguments that you don't agree with?
	Yeah, again, it just seems that if we're going to invoke understanding of other people on the other side.
	No, no, why?
	I don't know.
	It's a direct question.
	Why are you bringing up arguments that you don't agree with?
	Yeah, because I think that there's a rigorous sense in which if we posit something and it's like up for disagreement, considering we're bringing in other people in regard to their understanding and things like that, that it seems like this would be appropriate for this situation too.
	No, it's not.
	So just the way the debate works is I have to debate you.
	I can't debate other people who aren't here.
	Yeah, then what is the point of the explanatory power or the understanding of a five-year-old or the audience?
	Because there's an audience here.
	There's an audience here who needs to understand what the hell you're talking about.
	I mean, yeah, that seems, again, to mirror.
	Is that fair?
	Is that fair to say that you need to explain things in a way that we have an intelligent audience here, but obviously not as technically they don't use as much technical language or verbiage as you do.
	So I'm not saying that you need to address arguments from people who aren't in the conversation.
	What I am saying is you do need to be able to explain things to an intelligent audience.
	Yeah, I'm more than happy to give a semantic reduction of any term I use.
	Sure.
	Fantastic.
	Okay.
	So let's forget about, because if you say virtue leads to flourishing or eudaimania or some sort of sense of generalized happiness, then you can't say, well, but I'm going to bring in these arguments that there's no such thing as cause and effect because you just made the case that there was a cause called virtue, which had an effect called flourishing.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, but again, I wasn't trying to invoke that argument as a counterpoint.
	Again, it was just more so if we're going, like, right, I feel like we've fulfilled the antecedent, like if we're going to bring in other people, their notions, their understandings, then it seems to follow that this is something we could do, right?
	I don't know.
	I'm sorry.
	I don't know what you're talking about.
	My apologies.
	I'm just, I'm lost.
	So.
	So my point is that we, if you're making the case that virtue leads to flourishing, you can't then make a case that we can never identify cause and effect because you had a course called virtue with an effect called flourishing and you say that the effect is the result of the course.
	Flourishing is the result of virtue.
	So if your entire argument rests on there being cause and effect, I don't know why the hell you'd bring in there are people who don't believe in cause and effect.
	Yeah.
	Because you're not one of them.
	Yeah, I've explained this again.
	It just seems like if we're going to appeal as some sort of like argumentative deficit, that there are going to be other people and their lack of understandings or arguments that don't agree.
	And it seems like it's going to be sufficient to supply that notion for you as well as me, right?
	But if we don't want to do that, we can have a conversation.
	I'm sorry. I still don't know what you're talking about.
	Your argument, would you say that your argument for virtue relies on cause and effect?
	The cause being virtue, the effect being flourishing.
	I mean, in strict sense, I haven't given an argument, but yeah, of course.
	No, no, but it does rely on the cause and effect, right?
	Yeah, I just affirm that.
	Yeah.
	Okay, good, good.
	So then bringing in that there are humeans or other people who deny cause and effect would be to undercut your own argument unless you don't agree with them.
	Now, would you say that there's a near infinity of people who don't agree with you or don't agree with me?
	I actually, I think a near infinite is like a coherent or an incoherent notion.
	So I don't know what that's going to mean propositionally.
	Okay.
	So let's go around the world.
	If you made your case, how many people would nod and say, that's exactly what I believe?
	Made my full case.
	I don't know, but it doesn't seem relevant to whether or not the case is correct.
	It seems like there's going to be some people that perceive it as right or wrong.
	And then like the independent like truth value.
	No, I just didn't say just please just do me a favor.
	Listen to what I'm saying and respond to what I'm saying.
	It's like you've got this whole parallel thing going on that you're responding to.
	What percentage of people, if you make the case for virtue being like flourishing being an effect of virtue, what percentage of people around the world, all over the world, the Australian Aborigines, people in India, people in Russia, people who are part of fundamentalist cults, the black Israelites, what percentage of people would agree with your definition?
	Just with that.
	Well, if we want to explain your argument, I would say maybe between 20 and 30%.
	Okay.
	So you think one out of four people all the world over would agree with your definition of virtue.
	Yeah, I think if I had a conversation with people about virtue and flourishing, I think that's a pretty solid amount, I think, I think, would agree with that.
	Sure.
	Okay.
	I mean, I'd be doing it a lot longer.
	That doesn't mean that I'm right.
	I don't happen to agree with you.
	But even if we say that it's true, then if there's 8 billion people in the world, 6 billion people would disagree with you, right?
	Yeah, sure.
	Okay.
	So if you and I are going to have an argument and we have to take into account the 6 billion people who disagree with us and each one of them would disagree with us in a slightly different way, we'd never get to our argument, right?
	So bringing in people who disagree with both of us is a hole with no bottom because we'll never ever be finished the argument because we'll be bringing in things that neither of us have the capacity to cross-examine, right?
	So one of the foundational principles of common law is you have to be able to cross-examine the person who is accusing you to make sure that they're accurate, that they're right and they don't have any conflict of interest and so on.
	And so if you bring people into the debate who aren't here, we can't cross-examine them.
	It just muddies the water and we would never be finished because there's billions and billions of people who disagree with you and I.
	I mean, even if I granted all that, I think I've given this explanation a few times now.
	I wasn't invoking those particular notions as like argumentative counterparts to you, right?
	It just seems like if, right, it's a conditional, right?
	If we're going to bring up these notions of other people's understanding and their ability to track and think these arguments are true, then it seems like it would also be in line for me to do the same thing.
	But if you want to have a debate where it's your understanding and my understanding and we're like seeking a joint effort of truth, then it seems like maybe it wouldn't be productive to invoke notions of other people and understanding.
	Which is fantastic.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Don't get bitchy with me.
	Okay.
	I did not do that for you.
	You think you asked you to be, hang on.
	No, no, I did no.
	I did not bring in counter arguments at all.
	Yeah, I'll just say.
	What did I do?
	Hang on.
	Hang on.
	What did I do when I brought in other people's perspectives?
	Is that going to be a straightforward question?
	Well, what was my purpose?
	What was I trying to do in bringing in other people's perspectives?
	You were trying to elucidate a percentage of whom would understand and or agree with my points as they were explained.
	No, no, I didn't say agree.
	I said, if you're going to speak to a general audience, please use terms that they can understand.
	I think I'm speaking to you.
	I mean, the audience is just here.
	No, no, the audience is here, and this is a general philosophy show.
	I said it's an open philosophy forum.
	Bring your questions.
	It's kind of rude to talk, like if you and I spoke Croatian, right, and I put out, here's an English language debate, and you and I start debating in Croatian.
	Is that rude?
	Yeah, but I'm interested in particularly what you think, right?
	Like we're trying to independently assess the truth value of these arguments.
	So the understanding of other people or what they think is not going to be very important to me.
	The understanding of other people.
	And I did also say that I'm not sure what you mean by your particular terms.
	So explaining it to the audience and to me is helpful, right?
	Philosophy is about more than happy to give semantic reductions and terms that I use.
	Okay.
	So when I say you need to be clear to the audience and to me, am I bringing in an infinite or am I bringing in six billion potential counter arguments to your specific case?
	No, but I wasn't doing that earlier.
	I've explained this like four times.
	Okay.
	If you do this again, I'm just going to hang up with you because it's really rude.
	I'm striving to get something across to me.
	And if you keep saying, I keep explaining it and you're just not understanding it, that's really rude.
	Because you're assuming that I don't understand something and you're perfectly right.
	I don't.
	That's rude.
	We're trying to establish, we're trying to establish a connection to explain something to each other and to the world.
	So if you keep saying, well, I'm going to explain it for the fourth time, that's just kind of bitchy, right?
	I mean, yeah, if you take like facts to be bitchy, then maybe you could conceive a bit of.
	Oh, boy, you are just a douchebag.
	Oh, God.
	If you take facts to be.
	Oh, my God.
	Oh, please, please go get your testosterone levels checked or hang out with some men or something like that.
	I'm sorry.
	That's just delightful.
	Oh, my gosh.
	Okay.
	Oh, my God.
	And it's a shame, you know, it really is a shame because it was a, I thought, a very interesting and productive conversation.
	But when people just get kind of caddy, passive, aggressive, and bitchy, it just means that they're not interested in the truth.
	They're interested in being superior or being dominant or insulting other people or putting them down, which is not virtuous, obviously, right?
	I mean, I'm striving to understand and I need him to explain things.
	Like, I don't want you guys tuning out.
	I mean, you've come by here on a Sunday night to talk about philosophy.
	And if he's using all of these highly technical and semi-subjective buzzwords, then it's rude to you guys, right?
	I mean, I remember many, many years ago, I went on a business trip to Paris.
	And my neighbor at the time's, oh, I know this great woman in Paris.
	She'd love to show you around and so on.
	And anyway, long story short, she ended up inviting me over to dinner.
	And I said, listen, that's very nice.
	And she's, I got some friends coming over.
	And I said, that's very nice.
	But, you know, you guys are going to be speaking French.
	My French is not that great.
	So I'm going to get kind of excluded.
	And she's like, no, no, no, no.
	My friends all speak English.
	It'll be fun, blah, blah, blah.
	And I went over and they all just spoke French all night.
	Except one of the other guys was also named Defon.
	So they kept using my name.
	And I thought they'd be about to switch to English.
	So it's just kind of rude.
	And I'm not saying this guy is foundationally rude, but you know, if you're going to use a lot of real technical lingo, then you're not explaining things to me particularly clearly and you're not explaining things to the audience particularly clearly.
	And so asking someone to be more clear in their explanations is not the same as saying, well, there are people in the world who disagree with us.
	It's like, I can't, I mean, unless he wants to play devil's advocate position, but he doesn't agree with it either.
	So if we both don't agree with it, let's focus on the areas that we overlap.
	So I have another caller here.
	So I'll circle back to this because this fellow's been waiting patiently or this young lady or other aged lady has been waiting patiently.
	So I'll circle back onto the question of flourishing and Randian ethics.
	But let us talk to our good friend, Justaire.
	Hello, Stefan.
	Hello, how are you doing?
	I'm good.
	How are you?
	I'm having a delightful evening.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, I know.
	I know.
	Don't worry.
	I'm not going to say the holistic flourishing of Eudaimonia.
	I'm not going to say that.
	Okay, so, but before we do that, and you know, I mean, I didn't really follow too much about what he was saying.
	And I have a suspicion that midwits overcomplicate things.
	And midwits can be fine because they can help you to clean up your own arguments and be more efficient.
	But was it just me?
	Did you have trouble following what he was saying?
	I had big trouble, like big trouble mostly because English is not even my first language.
	So, but I mean, I know some of the words like Eudaimonia and all of that, but I mean, I wasn't really following his argument about, well, the main argument I followed because you explained it multiple times, the flourishing being a direct or indirect result of virtue, but then it got stuck there because the guy wouldn't elaborate without using highly technical.
	Well, no, he said that it was hypocritical of me to ban other people's perspectives from the conversation when I said you need to explain things both to me and to the general audience because he thought I was bringing in other people's arguments when I was just saying, no, no, you have to be you have to be clear.
	That's all.
	Yes, yes.
	And not only that, but even like he put in like a, when I mean, I would consider it like a mini barb when you say, when you said, can you explain your argument in a more straightforward manner?
	And he goes, oh, yeah, absolutely.
	I can present a semantic reduction in the term.
	Semantic.
	It's funny because even saying semantic reduction rather than I'll strive to be more clear is semantic.
	It's a semantic extrapolation.
	It's a little barb there.
	I can dumb it down for you and your pitiful little audience.
	Yeah, it's not great.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	But I mean, it was interesting.
	I wanted to go where the argument was not go for because I remember you, I don't know how long ago this was when you were talking about lying.
	And I thought maybe the conversation was going to go in that direction about how atheists don't have like a moral system that is objective that they can explain to say that lying is objectively wrong without appealing to hedonism.
	And I wanted to see like what would be the, you'd be the answer for that.
	I read the book and I remember that you said lying is just falls into the aesthetically preferable actions.
	So I wanted to see how that would go.
	But we didn't get there.
	We got into the six billion people that might not agree with him.
	Yeah, I don't tend to, you know, people disagree with this perspective.
	It's like, yeah, but they're not here.
	So let's, you and I debate because otherwise you could just go on forever and ever.
	Now, I've done the whole lying thing before.
	Is there another question?
	And I could run over the arguments again, but let's focus on what's most beneficial to you in this call.
	Oh, yes.
	I just had a quick, well, maybe two questions, but the first question is, I remember reading a tweet from you a few days back that really changed the way I saw Bill Gates.
	You were saying that Bill basically turned on society as revenge for because society persecuted him for being successful.
	And that really was super interesting to me because it made me reframe some of the things he's doing as a whole with his resources and the way he's investing them.
	And it really makes a lot of sense when instead of me thinking about it as investing, I think about it as the most possible harm and revenge.
	So I wanted to ask you, like, and I think I know a little bit how he was persecuted, but I just wanted to ask you, like, what ways or what forces persecuted him back then?
	Sure.
	Yeah, I can, I'm not an expert on this, so everyone double-checked, but that's sort of my general understanding is that there was a browser.
	When the internet first came along, there was a browser.
	I mean, I remember using the internet with basically just infinite DOS.
	You had to do all of these typed commands and so on.
	But when the browser came along, I think it was Netscape Navigator or something like that.
	Browser came along and people invested a lot into this browser.
	I think it was 20 bucks or something like that.
	And people needed the browser to access the internet and so on.
	And then what happened was Microsoft built a browser.
	I think it was Internet Explorer.
	Microsoft built a browser into Windows 95 or something like that.
	Again, I'm not too down on the details, but basically what happened was Netscape Navigator started tanked and a whole bunch of wealthy and powerful people lost a whole bunch of money.
	And I don't know if the cause is direct, but what happened was the Department of Justice began investigating Microsoft for antitrust violations.
	And they said, look, it's too powerful.
	If you include a browser with your operating system, then nobody's going to install any other browser.
	Nobody else is going to be able to compete.
	And it is a violation of.
	A monopoly basically.
	Yeah, it's a monopoly.
	It's a violation of antitrust statutes, right?
	And this had gone on, by the way, this had gone on.
	It's a horror story in tech circles.
	And because Bill Gates worked very closely with IBM with the operating system that he bought for, what, 75K or something from the developer, he worked very closely with IBM, the IBM compatible machines and so on.
	So he would have known all about the absolute hellscape.
	I think it was 13 years, the investigation that the DOJ had into IBM for its supposed monopolistic practices.
	And what happened was it absolutely crippled IBM and really destroyed IBM as an innovative company.
	Because once an investigation gets launched into a company, and again, this one dragged on for 13 years, cost them ungodly amounts of money and was pretty unpleasant for working there.
	Like if you worked high up at IBM and the DOJ is coming in, like you got to, you get, I mean, again, I'm not a lawyer, but you know, you're going to get subpoenaed.
	You're going to have to testify under oath.
	And if you get something wrong, you can be in serious trouble.
	And so it's, you know, not, it's not fun.
	And creative types of which you need the most, right?
	Creative types like IBM used to have the stable of just absolute geniuses.
	And they would pay them outrageous salaries and never tell them what to do.
	And they would just be these incredibly, you know, these absolute coding and process and to some degree business geniuses.
	And they were constantly, these guys were constantly sniffing around for problems they could solve and they'd come in and solve the problems and so on.
	And they were all just absolutely brilliant.
	And it was just this stable of people who just solved problems because they enjoyed the challenge and it was like crosswords to them, if you like crosswords.
	And those creative people tend to be quite sensitive.
	And the more creative you are, generally, the more intelligent you are.
	The more intelligent you are, the more you're concerned about long-term negative consequences.
	And so one of the reasons why IBM died and Apple and Microsoft and other companies began to flourish is because the really smart people didn't want to work for IBM because they didn't want to get dragged into some investigation.
	In other words, the more creative and productive they were, the more they might end up having to surround themselves with lawyers and be under subpoena for months, which is, you know, I imagine not a lot of fun.
	So he would have known all about this.
	So then when he bundled a browser into his operating system, he got into trouble.
	And you can see the videos online of Bill Gates being cross-examined.
	He's under oath.
	He's subpoenaed.
	And, you know, it's all, you know, you've got hostile actors combing through every single one of your emails looking for anything untoward.
	You know, people use a lot of punchy language in.
	business because men tend to respond to martial language.
	You know, we're going to destroy the competition.
	We're going to conquer them.
	We're going to take them down.
	We're going to run them out of town.
	You know, this kind of stuff, right?
	Which is pretty harmless, of course, when it comes to just motivating people.
	But if you have the DOJ looking for evidence of aggressive business practices, you know, suddenly it's not too much fun.
	So, you know, I think fairly soon after that, he left.
	And he would actually, I think, if he just sat on his Microsoft stock and stayed there, he would be like a trillionaire or something now.
	Like a trillionaire.
	Yeah, I saw that.
	It's crazy.
	Yeah.
	So he ended up, you know, there's something interesting about super villains, right?
	Supervillains tend to have a lot of money and they have a grudge against society.
	Now, let's just look at the very rich.
	And I'm not talking about the people who get it through political bullshit.
	I'm talking about the people who, at least to some degree, are providing value.
	Yeah, businessman.
	Of course, you know, everybody's touched by the government.
	You know, we're talking on an internet that was developed under government money.
	So blah, blah, blah.
	But in general, people who are in the business world, I'm not talking like arms dealers and stuff like that, but people in the business world.
	So what happens, of course, is that politicians keep riling up the average and the poor against the wealthy.
	I mean, you see it all over the place on social media and it's all over the place everywhere you go.
	It's like the richest 10 people in America have more money than the bottom 50%.
	So like every day.
	Yeah, yeah, every day, every day, every day.
	And of course, the rich have to pay their fair share.
	It's like, man, if the rich were paying their fair share, their taxes would collapse because wealthy people pay the vast majority of taxes.
	I mean, the bottom 50% are just takers at least.
	And it breaks even, you know, around 70, 80%, the top 10% are paying most of the taxes and the super rich are paying huge amounts of taxes.
	And then, of course, they say, oh, he didn't pay any tax at all.
	And it's like, well, because he didn't sell his shares or he's got some sort of LLCs and so on.
	Anyway, so what happens is the rich people are very smart and the rich people are very productive and the rich people become wealthy because they can see long-term consequences.
	And so if you're constantly riling up the population and rich people tend to study history, I mean, certainly people like Elon Musk do.
	So if you're riling up the general population and you're saying to the general population, the rich are parasites, the richer evil, the richer exploiters.
	I mean, they know their fucking history, man.
	They know what happened in Cambodia.
	They know what happened in Cuba.
	They know what happened in Russia.
	They know what happened in China.
	They know what happened in North Korea.
	What happened?
	All the rich people were fucking killed.
	And all of their property was taken.
	And maybe they could escape with their lives and a pair of gym shorts.
	So they know that the general population is easily roused into resentment and hatred towards the wealthy.
	And they know what the general population and the sophists and the populist politicians, they know exactly what they have planned for the wealthy people, which is to kick in their doors, take all of their shit and kill them all.
	Yeah.
	They know that.
	I mean, there's a reason why they're all building fucking bunkers in New Zealand.
	Oof, yeah.
	I mean, they're not stupid people.
	They're long-term consequences people.
	They understand the business world and they understand marketing.
	I mean, to be the top in a corporation means an incredible talent stack, right?
	You've got to know sales, marketing, business, technical, financial accounting, government, regulatory.
	I mean, you got to know law.
	You've got to know a whole bunch of stuff.
	So they know they know every time they see that.
	Can you imagine?
	Can you imagine if it was you?
	I mean, this is just a basic empathy thing, right?
	So imagine if it was you or me, and oh, this guy, he's rich and he's evil and he's exploiting people and we gotta make him pay his fair share.
	And all these angry, bitter people who were failures or maybe couldn't succeed that much at all are getting all itchy in their trigger fingers to come and take all your stuff and kill you.
	I mean, imagine if you were, I mean, I had this a little bit, right?
	But imagine if you were on the cover of the newspapers and every second social media post was about wanting to take all of the stuff from you and force you to give over so many of your possessions.
	Sorry, you were going to say?
	I was going to say that I actually saw that with you.
	I think it was in the, I'm not sure if, correct me if I'm wrong, when you were in the Australian tour with Learn Southern, I saw a view of you getting screamed at, speaked at with a guy that had like a sign in a protest.
	Like he was so close to your face, screaming like crazy.
	You were wearing the sunglasses and you were so collected and calm.
	And I was like, this is insane.
	Like they are rabid.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And Jack Pesopic has done the same thing with Antifa and so on.
	And so my sort of point is that rich people, you can take their stuff.
	You can threaten them.
	You can start going down that path that gets a whole bunch of people killed themselves, the Romanovs and all of that, right?
	So you can go down that path.
	And then don't be fucking surprised when rich people hate you back.
	Uh-huh.
	That's what I was thinking exactly that.
	That's what they're revenge for.
	Well, it's to some degree revenge, but it's also just self-protection.
	Like if a lion is charging at me and I shoot the lion, it's not like, oh, I revenge.
	And it's like, no, it's like this person was a danger to me.
	So when I'm sorry, and I'm not, obviously, I'm not speaking for any rich people.
	This is just a pure abstract theory that doesn't apply to any individual.
	But, you know, if I was some, I don't know, trillionaire or, I don't know, multi-billionaire or something like that, I'd be like, okay, so this is pretty dangerous.
	These people are being ginned up, right?
	I mean, if you're the only black person in town and everyone's saying that the woman who got raped, it's a black guy and everyone's like running around, we're going to get the black guy, right?
	And they're getting ready for a lynching.
	I mean, you're going to get pretty nervous, right?
	I mean, anybody would, right?
	And you're going to want to hightail it out of there or defend yourself in some manner.
	And so you can keep getting mad at all the rich people and saying how much you want to take all their stuff and that they're evil and they should be put in their place and made to pay their fair share.
	And, you know, basically just ginning up a bunch of violence.
	But the rich people, you know, it's a thing in war.
	The enemy gets his turn, right?
	Chess is not just a one-sided game.
	You make your move and the enemy makes their move.
	And if the media is able to convince people that the rich productive capitalists are the enemy, well, they get to make their moves as well.
	Yeah, definitely.
	Like, you hate me so much, I'm going to put you to sleep with this little jab.
	Well, or I'm certainly not going to particularly care if bad things happen to you.
	Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
	And now that brings me to my second question, which is like, as soon as I read that tweet, it really made me recontextualize you think specifically with Elon.
	So the same forces, and I would say even more bloodthirsty, are attaching Elon.
	Do you think Elon might turn as well?
	Like, is there a high chance?
	Because the way I'm seeing it, I think Elon is just trying to escape the planet because it's easier to leave Earth than fight the bureaucracy.
	But is that also a high risk, Elon taking the same kind of stance?
	I don't think so because Elon has a particular set of principles, which, I mean, he said that free speech is essential to, because Elon has seen the sort of end result of this sort of stuff in South Africa because he's from South Africa, right?
	And so he's got these particular principles.
	He says, you know, we have to have free speech.
	If we don't have free speech, we're just led like lambs to the slaughter or something like that.
	So he's got some real oomph when it comes to his principles.
	I think for a lot of the other, I think Peter Thiel does as well for what that's worth.
	But I think, of course, a lot of the wealthy people, they, and there are those who are compromised.
	I mean, God knows what they've got on Bill Gates regarding his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, which as far as I understand it cost him his marriage to some degree or to a large degree.
	I think that's what Melinda Gates said.
	But so I think that they've got, you know, they've got some stuff on some rich people in there.
	But I think certainly for a lot of people, it's like, okay, so you all hate the rich.
	What are the rich going to do in return?
	And do they have more resources and do they have more intelligence?
	And if you're going to make an enemy of the rich people, what kind of resources and control and brilliance are they going to have?
	Like I'm not going to get into a sell-my-soul chess match with Bobby Fisher in his prime, right?
	Because he's just going to kick my ass.
	He's a brilliant chess player.
	So, I mean, people can get all kinds of hostile and mad.
	And this is sort of the At and Shrugged thing.
	It's like, okay, well, what if the wealthy people go on strike?
	What if there is an answer?
	And of course, Bill Gates has gone on strike.
	And he also has acted in ways that are, in my view, extremely detrimental to humanity.
	And of course, if some of his, you know, human lives at the moment are sustained on two things, like literally billions of human lives are sustained on two things.
	Number one is energy.
	And number two is debt.
	Now, Bill Gates, of course, doesn't have much to do with national debts of governments and so on, but he can go on endlessly talking about global warming and cow farts and things like that, the need to reduce global warming.
	And what that means is that you go into an energy deficit.
	And if you go into an energy deficit, a lot of the people's lives who threaten wealthy people are going to be, well, they're going to be made kind of challenging.
	And maybe they won't have as much time to complain about the rich people.
	And the ironic part or the funny part is that the poor in the West are like, oh, yeah, Bill, give us your money.
	Like you have too much.
	You need to pay your fair share and build counters with, oh, absolutely.
	I'm giving away all of my money to Sudan, to the Congo, but you're not going to get it, though.
	Right.
	I'm going to just, the most famous DOJ antitrust case against Microsoft with US versus Microsoft 98 to 2001, which accused the company of monopolizing the PC operating system market by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.
	It resulted in a 2001 settlement requiring Microsoft to share APIs with competitors and undergo oversight.
	APIs are application programming interfaces and their ways of hooking into the raw horsepower of Windows, that a lot of which was kept kind of secretive by Microsoft to undermine competition and so on.
	So, yeah.
	So sorry, that was my sort of the first thing that you wanted to talk about.
	Yes.
	That was the second question.
	Yeah.
	No, this is a mini, like a side note that the riling up of the poor, like that kind of resentment, uh, propaganda, it really works.
	Like, for example, at my workplace, three or four of the women I work with actually went to a Tesla protest.
	And I was thinking, damn, if this is affecting mild manner liberal women, I can only imagine the effect this is having on the unstable bottom quintile of the population, the one that the people that are on pills and things like that, looking at this stuff.
	Yeah, I mean, the bottom quintile, it's really, it's a tough, it's a tough situation.
	Some people are in the bottom quintile, bottom, sorry, bottom 20%, but some people are in the bottom quintile because they're just not very smart.
	And we should have great sympathy for that.
	It's not their fault.
	It's just the way that the dice roll as far as a lot of genetics go.
	So, you know, full human beings, we have sympathy and so on.
	And other people are down there because they've made bad decisions.
	Some people are not particularly capable of making good decisions, you know, people with IQ 75 or whatever.
	But some people are down there.
	And I've known some who because they have great potential, but they just make really, really bad decisions.
	And those people are the most dangerous because they can do better, but instead they kind of turn to evil, right?
	They turn to reproducing this sort of propaganda.
	So the people who are most likely to be socialists are those who grow up wealthy and become poor.
	But the people most likely to be capitalists, like myself, are the people who grew up poor and then did reasonably well.
	So they're down there, they're riling things up, and they have the rhetorical skill and the corruption combination.
	Not a lot of great propaganda is coming out of people with an IQ of 70 or 75 or whatever, but the people who have their regression to the mean, right?
	Their fathers did well, they're not doing well.
	Their mothers did well, they're not doing well.
	And again, some of it's their fault, some of it's not.
	They're still usually ahead.
	You know, somebody with an IQ of two couples with an IQ of 130, they're not likely to produce a kid with an IQ of 130.
	It's going to be less than their own IQ, but still above the norm, maybe 120, 115 or something like that.
	But maybe that's a cutoff where the young kids can't do as much.
	They're kind of frustrated.
	But it's the old thing.
	Like you, you, you look at the rich guy with the beautiful wife and the beautiful kids and the big house and the super cool car, and you just rage and resent.
	You rage and resent.
	And you're like, why can't I have that stuff?
	It should be mine.
	He's stolen from.
	And then people come along and say, well, he doesn't have that stuff because he made anything.
	He just stole everything.
	Well, you're poor.
	He's rich because you're poor.
	And you're poor because he's rich.
	And people just eat that shit up in the same way that they dive into SSRIs rather than figuring out their own life's corruption issues.
	They just love to go to wealthy people and say, you stole everything from my ancestors.
	And this is how they worked.
	I talk about this in my documentary on Hong Kong, freedomain.com slash documentary.
	So yeah, it is very tough for people to resist that devilish lure.
	It is satanic to say, I mean, it's like if some guy's having sex with his wife, he didn't steal that sex from you or me.
	Exactly.
	I mean, he just did something right or whatever, right?
	So yeah, it is tough.
	And of course, in the Marvel universe, in the DC Comics universe, you have these brilliant, highly technological villains, and they always lose.
	But the villains don't always lose.
	And sometimes you need to look into the backstory of the villain and say, well, what happened to make him this way?
	And if you, I mean, it's just really important for people to understand.
	You have to empathize with everyone in this world in order to understand it.
	Now, that doesn't mean sympathize, but you have to empathize with people in this world.
	If somebody stole your life savings and they were down the street and you could go and get it back, well, you probably would.
	And so, if you genuinely believe that, you know, the West is wealthy because it stole from Africa and India and other things, do you genuinely believe that you're only poor because this asshole stole everything from you?
	Well, the next logical result is to go and take it back from him by force and then punish him for stealing from you to that degree.
	And that level of resentment is foundational to the Russian Revolution.
	It's foundational to the French Revolution and not so much to the American Revolution for a variety of reasons, but it is serious.
	It only is really, tragically, the envy is kept at bay by Christianity, right?
	Because Christianity says envy is a sin.
	The meek shall inherit the earth.
	He who was last on earth will be first in heaven.
	And that you should accept a lower status or station because it raises you in the eyes of God.
	And it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
	And he's this praise of meekness and this praise of anti-materialism and so on is one of the reasons why people were able to accumulate capital in Christian, particularly Protestant free market economies.
	The only reason we became wealthy is we allowed people to accumulate capital who were really good at increasing the value of their capital.
	And in other societies where they were not able to tame this resentment, like in the third world, if you come into any money, like every relative and their dog just comes swarming on you, hanging off your neck, demanding that you give the money.
	Yeah.
	If you win the lottery, right?
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Oh, yeah, I have personal experience with that.
	We just try to keep everything secret, everything you're doing in general, even if it's a normal job.
	Right.
	So you, because the moment that you show any wealth, you've got to hire like 15 security guards and then your wealth is gone, right?
	So it's they did poorer societies, less wise societies, they don't let smart people accumulate capital because they get too resentful and then you just everybody stays poor forever.
	The only way that you could become wealthy is respect property rights, let the really productive people, you know, if you gave me the microphone at Live Aid, nobody would remember it for anything other than really bad singing, even worse than Robert Platt.
	So yeah, you give Freddie Mercury the microphone and you get that kind of magic, right?
	So yeah, you have to just let people accumulate, but that level of resentment post-Christianity, it's all just Darwinian.
	And in Darwin, you don't let people accumulate.
	And so, yeah, it is, it's rough.
	It's rough.
	All right.
	So anything else you wanted to mention?
	Yes, one more thing so I can leave the show and let you continue with other members of the audience.
	I watched your entire analysis of the sopranos and it was so good, like how you came up with this angle about the women and the gender dynamics.
	So I wanted to, I requested this before, but I have no idea if you did it.
	I've been like crazy busy with work, but would you consider doing an analysis of breaking bad?
	That's the second crime show.
	You know, we have the sopranos, we have breaking bad.
	So basically doing the same trivia to see like if you find an interesting angle that no one has discussed before.
	That's one of my favorite shows.
	I just wanted to put that out there.
	All right.
	I mean, I'm certain.
	Look, if the audience wants it, I'm happy to do it.
	I'm a big service guy.
	Just my personal experience, of course, I heard about the show and I started watching it.
	I think I got to a basement guy tied to the chair torture scene.
	And I was just like, oh, this is kind of repulsive.
	Now, of course, you can say the sopranos and so on, but the sopranos didn't really torture people too much, other than that there was a Jewish guy.
	They threatened to cut his balls off and stuff.
	But is it that way for much of it?
	Is that the really sadistic violence?
	No.
	Let me see.
	So, when it comes to torture scenes, I mean, we have Crazy Eight in the basement with the bike lock.
	That's at the beginning of the show.
	And no, there are not many torture scenes.
	Now, Jesse gets tortured like at the last season, but it's not that way.
	If it's occasional, yeah, if it's occasional, I mean, there were a couple of torture scenes in the Sopranos, and of course, quite a lot of violence.
	But so, if it's occasional, I don't mind.
	And if people would like it, I'm sure.
	How many seasons was it?
	Because Sophranos was like 80 hours.
	It was quite a lot of time.
	It's five seasons and it's like maybe seven to 12 episodes per season.
	And the last season was split.
	So it's even shorter.
	Okay.
	Well, I will put it out to the audience.
	And I started watching Severance.
	I don't know if you've ever.
	Yes, I actually watched it.
	I watched it.
	You mean the whole thing?
	Yeah, I watched Severance both seasons.
	Okay.
	It's a little slow.
	It's a little slow to begin with and so on.
	Nothing happens in Severance.
	Like, it's just one of those shows you can put as background stimulating visuals.
	So there's not much going on.
	It's like Severance is like, you've severed my spine.
	I can't feel anything.
	Yeah.
	There's no emotions.
	I was watching it with my girlfriend and I was explaining to her, listen, nothing has happened in the last five set in the last five episodes.
	We just are running along.
	Maybe there's like a teaser.
	Oh, something mysterious is going to happen in the next episode, but nothing happens.
	Like it's just that constant dull when it comes to storytelling, but like visually appealing.
	And the characters are kind of fun.
	Like watching their interactions are like the innies and the outies, like the whole thing is interesting in the lore sense.
	But when it comes to the things that happen, the philosophy, like the rich characterizations, there's not much going on.
	Yeah, because I mean, I recognized John Tuturo in the first episode, and I'd watch that guy do dubstep or break dancing or read from the phone book.
	But okay, maybe I'll give that a little bit.
	All right.
	A little bit more.
	And if you like, if you want to watch Breaking Bad and you think there's a material for an epic show like The Sopranos, Better Call Soul is way less violent.
	It's more like a character study.
	So maybe that's another possibility.
	That's my second favorite show.
	So that's just putting that out there for the show.
	But I really appreciate your taking your time to speak with me.
	Another thing I wanted to say is that I really appreciate these shows like Saturday, 7 p.m. or Sunday, 7 p.m., because in my case, during the week, I have zero time to catch on with philosophy.
	So this is really epic.
	So thank you, Stefan.
	You are very welcome.
	And I thank you very much for calling in.
	All right.
	So we've had somebody come and go, but now we have Kip's Labyrinth.
	What is on your mind?
	I haven't forgotten about the issue of Rand's ethics, which I'll close off the show with, but I'm certainly happy to chat with you.
	If you have thoughts, please to share.
	Going once, going twice.
	You need to unmute.
	Was that me, Stefan?
	Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
	Oh, okay.
	I'll tell you how out of it I am on cultural stuff.
	I still think the Rockford Fauhouse is the best show.
	Oh, James Garner.
	Wow, that's back in the day.
	Do you remember that one?
	I didn't watch it much, but I remember James Gonner.
	I think he showed up.
	Gosh, here's a stupid bit of sitcom lore that I know for some reason or another.
	There was a show with John Ritter called 10 Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter with the girl from Big Bang Theory.
	And John Ritter had a fatal heart attack during the shooting.
	And they brought in James Garner and tried to keep the show going.
	I think it was his last role.
	But yeah, a solid sort of 50-star Rockhouse an actor.
	But I've never really watched the show, but I certainly remember the theme music because I think I was all switching to WKRP back in the day.
	But anyway, go ahead.
	Yeah, they had the best character actors on that show.
	But, you know, back then when there was only three networks, you know, you had 20 million sets of eyeballs watching a good TV show.
	So they could really break it down really good.
	But, you know, I was just thinking about you.
	And I used to have a friend, I guess before you were canceled many, many moons ago.
	And he used to really like you a lot.
	And you were able to feed his, I guess you would call it his little atheist gnome, his internet atheist gnome.
	But also he had a bad alcoholic gnome.
	And I was kind of hoping you would be able to work on that.
	But unfortunately, they took you off the air.
	And I bet that was a well, not off the air.
	I was just one website over.
	But anyway, go on.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Well, can you remind me what that timeframe was when?
	Sure.
	It was summer 2020 when the cancellations came in obviously a very well-coordinated series of waves.
	And I would tell you all of the places I was canceled from, but we wouldn't want to be here through midnight.
	But yes, it was definitely a challenge, but it was give or take around the summer of 2020.
	Did that particular time have you searching like none other before in your life, or had you been through something commensurate to that?
	No, I hadn't been canceled before.
	I suppose I'd been somewhat displaced.
	I was the co-founder of a software company, grew up.
	We sold it twice, and other people started to take over.
	So I was a little bit elbowed aside, though still considered a valuable member of the team.
	But no, I'd never gone through anything.
	Well, I shouldn't say.
	So in theater school, they liked me a lot.
	They thought I was a really good actor.
	I went there for playwriting, but I had to do the first year as an actor.
	And they said, oh, you should just stay as an actor.
	You're great.
	And then when they found out about my politics, well, they didn't like me anymore.
	And it became progressively more difficult to be there.
	And I eventually just left of my own accord shortly before the end of the second year.
	I suppose there was something that would have been something like it.
	But yeah, nothing quite as big as the stripping of like 97% of the audience and massive amounts of income and all of that.
	So yeah, no, that was a scramble for sure.
	I can imagine.
	And it happened after you had gotten used to it.
	You had had just enough time to get used to the trappings, I imagine from what you're saying, right?
	Well, and I, frankly, I wouldn't have had it any other way in hindsight.
	I mean, I'm not going to lie and say, oh, I was totally above it all in Zen.
	No, it was definitely a struggle for a while.
	But I was so pleased with what I did with that glorious 10 years of free speech, you know, 2006 to 2016, until Trump got elected.
	I did a huge amount of good.
	And the suppression started, of course, before the deplatforming.
	And I was seeing fewer and fewer numbers.
	I used to do, you know, 150 to 200,000 for an average video on YouTube.
	And then it was down to 8,000, 10,000, 15,000.
	Every time I would get close to a million subscribers, they would all, well, a bunch of them would mysteriously vanish.
	So they didn't have to give me that plaque and all of that.
	So there was a fair amount of suppression and so on going ahead of time.
	And it was a very sort of carefully laid out and orchestrated campaign with a year or two of negative media coverage and so on.
	So then they could wave the media in front of people who were in these companies and say, oh, look, what a terrible guy.
	And then the Wikipedia page.
	And it was a very well, you know, well done, well-coordinated, good, good on you kind of campaign to get me off the airwaves.
	So, but, and the only way to not have been canceled would have been to lie about things that I knew were both true and moral and essential.
	And so I'm glad to have told the truth.
	You know, your enemies always get their reply.
	They have their right of reply.
	And so I was pleased at the way I did things and I was pleased to have gotten the ideas and arguments out.
	And then, of course, the funny thing is that I spent, you know, half a decade in the wilderness.
	And, you know, to those who are part of that wilderness, I'm not sort of saying that it was terrible.
	It was actually pretty cool.
	And what happened was when I came back on X a couple of months ago, when I came back on X, A lot of the topics that were absolutely shocking and appalling when I first talked about them 10, 15 years ago seem to be fairly common knowledge.
	Now, again, that's partly Elon having a commitment to free speech, but it's pretty wild to see how much the Overton window has shifted since I was on social media in the past.
	Sorry, you were going to say?
	Yeah, I was just going to say, could you speak to the resolve that you gained from going through those tribulations there?
	Because I'm sure it gave you a strength that you maybe didn't even think you had.
	I would say I feel I'm pretty robust.
	So it actually turned out to be a lovely thing in many ways.
	I was liberated from the sort of salvation of the world mission that I had been on really since my teens, which was, you know, exciting, but also a little difficult at times.
	So I was released from that.
	And what I did was I said, okay, so I have received to some degree the inevitable blowback of telling the truth and interfering with the designs and purposes of evildoers, right?
	I mean, if you're not getting blowback, you're not doing any good.
	It would be like saying, well, I want an antibiotic that doesn't harm any viruses or bacteria.
	It's like, well, I guess an antiviral, right?
	So what I said was, look, politics, there's not really much point now with such a small audience.
	But what I can do is turn from the brutal moral necessity of truth to the soul repairing beauty of art.
	So what I did was I read my novel almost as an audiobook.
	I started writing new stuff.
	Certainly under COVID, I took a month or two off and wrote a novel, which I hadn't written novels in like 20 years.
	So it was great to get back into that.
	And I've since written three novels, The Future, The Present, and the recently completed novel, Dissolution.
	So I got to do beautiful stuff.
	I did more call-in shows, a dream analyses, and other great things.
	So I got to write.
	I got to do some acting by reading my own works of fiction and got back into some really soul-nourishing stuff of beauty and depth and emotional power rather than political power.
	And that was a real rest in the oasis and a real recharge for me.
	So there was real pluses to it.
	Yeah, it sounds like you were able to maybe flex some muscles that otherwise atrophied as your first brush with stardom or whatever you want to call that.
	Oh, no, definitely stardom.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I was a huge podcaster.
	But anyway, go ahead.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I didn't want to, you know, make you blush or anything.
	Not that we could say that.
	That's hard.
	That's pretty hard to do.
	But anyway, go on.
	But I was just saying, to the best of my recollection, you were an atheist.
	And that basically, to my definition, just means you believed that there was no one thing that runs everything.
	And you still believe that, right?
	That you're still.
	There's no one thing that runs everything.
	Do you mean, was there an immaterial consciousness, this all-powerful, all-knowing that created and runs the universe?
	Yeah, there's no omni thing that kicked it off and keeps tabs or, you know.
	Hey, I'm absolutely open to the case.
	I am open to the case.
	Now, just so you understand, and this is, I guess, lifting the kimodo in terms of psychology, which may or may not be helpful.
	But just so you understand, in order not to go insane, I had to become super skeptical because both my parents had pretty massive mental health issues.
	My mother in particular, I didn't live with my father really, so my mother in particular was quite mad, like literally institutionalized.
	And she had one of those insistent madnesses that kind of wants to rip off your head and take a long insane dump into your brain's innards.
	So my mother was very insistent in her madness.
	She wouldn't just leave you alone.
	She'd like sort of follow you around the apartment constantly pouring crazy stuff into your ears.
	And so the only way that I could possibly survive mentally was to be super skeptical.
	Yeah.
	And so, yeah, so that muscle.
	So, hey, I'm open to the case.
	I'm open to the case.
	But I don't think it's just, I don't think my super skepticism is just PTSD, although there certainly is that aspect to it.
	But I'm open to the case.
	No, but that's where I'm getting at.
	That's where I was kind of picking out before when I was asked you if that has been the biggest trial you had been through.
	Because I do see, you know, you're plenty.
	If there's something there, you're plenty smart enough to see it.
	You know what I'm saying?
	And although.
	Well, I'm sorry.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	It's not that I have to see it.
	I mean, I don't see quantum physics.
	I don't see atoms.
	Nobody can.
	But I accept because the proof is robust.
	And of course, I wasn't there to see things like evolution, but I sort of accept the evidence for it.
	I haven't seen the far side of the moon.
	So I'm sorry to be reductionist.
	But I don't necessarily need to see it.
	It just needs to be proven in a rational context for at least something to at least be even possible.
	When I envisioned you and me rapping one day about this, the thing that went through my mind is the guys at South Park put together a cartoon called Prickles and Goo, where they had, I guess, taken an Alan Watts talk.
	And basically they were saying, there's some people that are prickly and some people that are gooey, but life is really gooey prickles and prickly goo.
	You get what I'm saying?
	So basically they were sort of in a way speaking to the occlusion that maybe some people have towards life or whatever.
	Well, they were making fun of a guy who was a multiple addict, right?
	I mean, he had cigarettes, alcohol, sex.
	Alan Watts was a relentless addict who died if his addictions didn't cure them or anything.
	I mean, I've never really watched South Park.
	I think I watched the movie with Blaine Canada in it.
	But the South Park guys are just trash cowards, aren't they?
	I mean, they mysteriously vanish from making fun of politicians all throughout the Obama realm and the Biden realm.
	And then the moment Trump gets back in, oh, look at them.
	Tough guys picking on the unpopular politician.
	But they don't touch Democrats, really.
	I think they're just a bunch of propagandists, as far as I could tell.
	You're right, Stephan.
	You know, people are complicated.
	On one hand, Alan.
	No, that's not, that's not.
	Sorry.
	You mean the South Park people?
	They're not complicated.
	No, no, no.
	I'm saying Alan Watts.
	Oh, Alan Watts.
	Yeah, sorry.
	Go ahead.
	I was saying he's complicated because on one hand, I heard his son, Mark Watts, talk about what a rotten father he was.
	But on the other hand, I could find myself wishing I was there on his houseboat, the Viejo, discussing some, you know, philosophical topics.
	So, you know, people, you get what I'm saying?
	There's different, there's different levels to everybody's personality, and we have to take them in totality, I guess, as well.
	Well, and of course, Ayn Rand was like seduced or, I don't know, you could say somewhat sexually exploited.
	The late Nathaniel Brandon, when he was just a kid, and she was like many years, many, many years older than he was, and she wrecked the whole movement.
	The whole objective objectivist movement was wrecked because of her sexual lusts.
	And this is a woman who, you know, talked about rationality and self-control.
	And she kind of broke her vows to her husband and caused Nathaniel Brandon to break his vows to Barbara Brandon, who actually saw give a speech in Toronto once.
	Actually, as I saw Nathaniel Brandon give a speech in Toronto once.
	But so, yes, I get that.
	Listen, people, people are not perfect.
	I'm not perfect.
	I haven't seduced a young devotee and wrecked my entire marriage.
	And I haven't been largely unproductive for the 40 years she lived or 35 years she lived after that.
	So, you know, maybe slightly better.
	But yeah, no, I get that.
	People are complicated and we can't expect or demand perfection from the wise people, but we do expect a little bit more wisdom than the general population.
	Yeah, yeah, she wasn't much of a looker.
	So imagine how dramatizing that must have been for him.
	Well, and the age thing, too, because she was, she was old as hell compared to him.
	But veering back to you, you slippery little fish, I was going to talk to you about, like, you know, just thinking back to, say, Dante's Canto one of the Inferno, midway upon the journey of my life, I found myself lost within a dark wood for the straight way had been lost.
	And that's why I was just wondering, where were you 35 and 40?
	Where new is 35 or 40?
	Because I was captured by something that the same kind of something that they talk about in Plato's Cave, the same kind of something that the Delgones in Buddhists are trying to get with their form of ultimate reality, you know, the same.
	And I was just wondering, I bet something, I'm just wondering there was never a point at 35 or 40-year-old Stefan's life where you didn't come across something that was bigger than you, bigger than you, where you sat weeks or maybe days underneath the shower every morning, well, what I'm going to do, and you were just looking for answers.
	There was never that moment, Mr. Stefan.
	What do you mean by because you make it?
	I don't want to be overly sensitive here, but it seems to me, or I experienced that, as you saying that I'm sort of narcissistic and don't recognize anything bigger than myself.
	No, I agree with you.
	No, no, no.
	I'm just saying, going back to what Dante said.
	No, no, okay.
	Tell me what you mean.
	You mean God?
	Sorry.
	You mean God?
	Yeah.
	Well, I'm just saying, I'm saying this occlusion that I'm speaking of is I think a lot of times guys.
	Sorry, what do you mean by occlusion?
	I'm saying a lot of times people will have what comes upon as like a midlife crisis and they'll buy a convertible or a oh, I had that.
	Yeah, I definitely had a midlife crisis for sure.
	You know, you got what I'm saying?
	They'll have something where the thing, what they were supposed to do was like journey back in.
	All the, I would say, the philosophical or spiritual message of, say, Plato's Republic, where he speaks of, say, the divided line.
	And then he goes in to say, he talks about the divine luminosity being the most brilliant light of being.
	And then he also talks about the allegory of the cave.
	And I see that allegory of cave is basically being that persona that say you had your father and your mother that you had to pile all this, you know, all this stuff, this crust that you had to live with, and it creates this mask that wasn't really Stefan.
	You get what I'm saying?
	It wasn't really Stefan.
	And okay, so you got to, this is a philosophy show.
	This isn't like Fortune Cookie Show.
	So let me talk.
	Let me talk.
	Right.
	So listen, I appreciate the interest.
	I appreciate the curiosity.
	I'll certainly try to answer your question, but you got to build this stuff up from first principles because it's just a lot of stuff that is really hard to piece together.
	So yeah, I certainly went through a midlife crisis, and it's because I was mostly a raging hypocrite when I was in my 20s and my early 30s.
	I was a raging hypocrite in that I had all of these values and I was not living them in my personal life.
	I was living them in my business life.
	I was living them in my artistic life.
	I was living them in my academic life.
	I just wasn't living my values or virtues in my personal life.
	And I didn't, I wasn't even aware of it.
	And the only way that I became aware of it was insomnia plus therapy.
	And that was the shedding of old stuff and towards new stuff.
	And it was a very essential transformation that needed to occur before I was able to get married to my wife and do what it is that I do now.
	Philosophy was abstract.
	And again, I wasn't not living it at all, but in really the most important elements of my life, I was not living it in my personal relationships with my family, with my friends, with girlfriends, and so on.
	I was not demanding or requiring or even valuing the kind of rationality that I said was the highest value.
	So I went through a whole process of, I mean, really just feel like absolute foundational death and rebirth, the death of illusion, like shedding a skin that is your entire identity and becoming a different species almost entirely, like the Übermensch kind of thing.
	And really, it was just basically accepting the need for integrity in every aspect in my life.
	And in particular, in my personal relationships.
	So as far as things bigger than myself, yeah, absolutely.
	Philosophy is infinitely bigger than me.
	Reason, evidence, reality, physical laws, matter and energy, all infinitely bigger than me.
	And the degree to which I have value to others is specifically to the degree that I accept things larger than myself, the definition of words, which is one of the reasons I was kind of crabbing at the first caller because he just was, I think he was trying to appear smarter than he was by using a bunch of terminology that's kind of opaque or obscure.
	So yeah, things bigger than myself, absolutely.
	The requirement for integrity at any price was a necessary process.
	And, you know, but I didn't know anyone who I believe lived with integrity.
	I didn't know anyone who put moral values first and foremost in their personal life.
	And this is true of the Christians I grew up with.
	It's true of the people I knew who were non-Christian, as well as atheists and agnostics, as well as Buddhists, as well as other people who just did not live their values with integrity.
	So I hope that makes sense.
	Is there anything else that I could help you with?
	All right.
	I think he may be gone.
	All right.
	No worries.
	So I'll tell you what.
	I will just finish up with a few minutes.
	I really do appreciate you guys dropping by tonight.
	I hope it's been a helpful conversation.
	I love these chats and I really do appreciate everyone who drops by.
	I would also appreciate, of course, freedomain.com slash donate.
	If it's been a while since you donated, tis the season to thank your friendly neighborhood philosopher.
	And I hope that you will drop by freedomain.com slash donate to help out.
	So yeah, with regards to the first question where Ayn Rand and I differentiate, well, flourishing occurs at a biological level prior to a moral level.
	Human beings had to flourish as a species in order to develop the giant brains that we have.
	We had to have significant excesses of calories, which meant we had to very much dominate the planet, our surroundings, the creatures around us.
	We had to be able to build safety.
	We had to be able to extend the protection we gave to our children so they could grow these giant brains.
	That was not due to morality.
	That was due to violence, to dominance.
	We evolved out of a situation of violent win-lose dominance, which is why it took so long to get any kind of wealth accruing to human society.
	So when it comes to flourishing, we can't just say, well, that which is best for man's flourishing is the good.
	And reason is best for man's flourishing.
	Nope.
	Reason is not best for man's flourishing.
	Genghis Khan was one of the most violent people who ever lived.
	And he spread his genetics among countless women.
	He dominated.
	He ruled.
	Joe Biden had infinitely more money and power and influence and so on than he would have been able to get a hold of in a free society.
	He flourished in that environment.
	Sophists flourish, liars flourish.
	And we can say, well, there's con men and so on, but I'm talking about like central bankers, counterfeiters are the wealthiest, the most powerful people on the planet, and they're flourishing.
	They are flourishing.
	So, oh, yes, but society as a whole, but there is, that's why I said at the beginning of the conversation with the fellow who came out first, there is no such thing as society as a whole.
	There are only individuals, right?
	I mean, humanity evolves not for the good of humanity in the abstract, but the survivability of each individual pairs of genetics.
	That is what causes.
	Like your little toe only gives you balance so that you'll make another little toe.
	That's its whole purpose.
	So the idea that there is a happiness, well-being, flourishing, eudaimania as a result of reason and virtue is not true for almost all human evolution.
	And there's almost no people who achieve high levels of political power and say, well, this is terrible.
	This is wrong.
	I'm miserable.
	I was much happier before I had political power.
	So I'm going to walk away.
	I mean, it happens, right?
	But it's extraordinarily rare.
	And so people get power and they love having power.
	They love having power.
	And they get to benefit their friends.
	They get to punish their enemies and they love it.
	Sadists love hurting people.
	For them, flourishing is violations of the non-aggression principle.
	There are people who are gathering together to laugh and giggle and rub their hands in glee over the destruction of the West and say, well, there's nothing you could do.
	You're just going to have to watch it.
	They take great, deep, savage joy in the destruction of the West, and they're flourishing.
	They're happy.
	And you say, oh, yes, but it's not real happiness.
	It's like, well, but how do you know?
	I mean, I am not a sadistic person.
	I don't know the happiness that sadists get from hiring people, but I assume it's pretty significant.
	And there are people who take great joy in destruction.
	There are people who take great joy in violence.
	There are people who take great joy in taking, right?
	I mean, you go to people on welfare, go to people on welfare and say, yes, but you know, the money is printed.
	It's on the backs of the children and the unborn and it's, you know, forced redistribution, blah, blah, blah.
	And are they going to say, well, that's it.
	I'm getting off welfare, right?
	I mean, I've used this analogy before, of course, but some guy picks up a lottery ticket off the ground and it's $10 million, $10 million.
	And you say, well, but the government doesn't really have that money.
	It just prints it.
	It just borrows it and all of that.
	So it's bad.
	Is he going to say, he's going to tear that ticket up?
	Nope.
	Nope.
	And you say, oh, yes, but you won't be happy, blah, blah, blah.
	But that's like a voodoo curse.
	You'll be unhappy if you're not rational.
	Well, then why are so many people who are doing immoral or anti-rational things?
	Why are they flourishing?
	Why are they happy?
	Why you say, ah, but there's a secret misery that you can't, but that's a ghost.
	That's a voodoo curse.
	That's like, well, there's a secret misery that doesn't appear anywhere.
	You know, I mean, George W. Bush started this war in Iraq, killed half a million people plus.
	genetically destroyed entire regions with the depleted uranium shells.
	Does he wake up anxious and sad and terrified and horrified?
	No.
	He's happy.
	He does his little paintings and shows them off on his iPad and he's content.
	He's, you know, say, oh, no, but he's cursed with the secret unhappiness.
	It's like, well, what if he's not?
	What if he's not?
	You can't say that happiness is the result of virtue.
	I mean, go tell Socrates, go tell Plato, go tell Galileo, go tell Jesus, go tell Aristotle, go tell me, you.
	I mean, sorry to put myself in such illustrious company as a sort of minor example, but yeah.
	I mean, a lot of people empirically, I'm an empiricist, right?
	Say, ah, but the people who are corrupt and immoral are miserable.
	Well, only if they have a very strong conscience, and we know that's not evenly, we know that factually and scientifically, that that's not evenly distributed among the population.
	There are sociopaths and psychopaths and narcissists and so on that don't have any particular functional conscience.
	And you can see this on scans.
	It's not just like him just making, I'm just making this up.
	You show a sadist pictures, videos of people being tortured, and the sadist will, his happiness centers, his orgasm centers will light up.
	He's thrilled.
	BDSM people, they get extreme sexual pleasure from what I would consider pretty horrendous actions.
	And I've even talked to them on the show, and it's just very, very different.
	People are tribal, right?
	So one tribe wins, the other tribe has to lose, and there's conquering and so on.
	Human beings enslaved other human beings.
	Korea, 1500 years, the longest unbroken line of slavery in human history, according to the jokes.
	And so human beings were either slaves or a master.
	And you'd much rather be a master, which meant you had to oppress the slave.
	And Rome flourished to some degree, as did Greece and China, based upon serfdom and slavery.
	You say, now, listen, I agree.
	I agree that there's a particularly rare form of joy that happens if you don't get killed or maimed or completely ostracized.
	I mean, I'm a happy guy, and I think a lot of that has to do with reason equals virtue equals happiness.
	I get that.
	But if you're going to try and bribe people to stay away from power by selling this ill-defined, abstract flourishing, then you are going to somebody.
	The government is about to offer them $10 million for free.
	And you're going to convince them, don't take the money.
	Well, why wouldn't I take the money?
	Because you'll be happier in an abstract way.
	I can't really prove later on.
	You say, well, but there are people who get windfalls who are quite happy.
	Say, ah, yes, but that's voluntary.
	That's some insurance policy maybe you didn't know about or some relative dies and leaves you some money or something like that.
	But hedonism doesn't work.
	Hedonism, you cannot bribe people into being good.
	And I know this for an absolute fact.
	And it's not even a doubtful thing.
	You cannot bribe because the biggest bribe and the biggest threat in the world is heaven and hell.
	If you do good, if you do right, you spend an eternity in perfect bliss.
	And if you do wrong or don't believe, then you spend an eternity in the most horrifying torments and torture.
	So that is what is put forward to, say, Christians.
	Absolute bliss, absolute torment.
	And this isn't even doubted.
	If you believe this is inflicted by God or tempted by Satan or something like that.
	So for sure, we have among Christians and other religions talk about Christianity to want to know the best.
	But among Christians, you have the ultimate flourishing, which is heaven, and you have the ultimate agony, which is hell.
	See, somebody can start wars like George W. Bush can start wars, and they seem pretty content, right?
	They come out and they do their little speeches and they sit there with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama arm in arm to get people to shoot DNA mystery juice into their veins and they're fine, right?
	George, you know, people who start wars, they don't just jump up.
	Oh, Mike, I'm so depressed.
	They don't just jump off bridges.
	They're fine.
	You know, you see the pictures of them playing with their grandchildren, like that terrifying guy in the movie Brazil.
	You see, blood-soaked people are fine.
	They're happy.
	They're not plagued with anxiety or depression and chugging along and smiling and picking up their grandkids, taking them to the park, getting some ice cream, not knowing how to open PDFs, all that kind of stuff.
	They're fine.
	Say, oh, no, but there's a secret, blah, blah, blah curse.
	And it's like, well, but we can't just make things up.
	We have to go empirically.
	They're fine.
	I wouldn't be.
	You wouldn't be.
	But they're fine.
	There are people who hunt other people for fun and sport.
	There are pedophiles who get great joy and pleasure out of sexually assaulting and raping children, molesting children.
	Ah, but they're tormented.
	Oh, hey, okay, let's say that they are.
	It's still not enough to change their behavior.
	And even if you were to dial up to infinite well-being and infinite torment, it's still not enough because I have not once in my life known a Christian who lives that way.
	Right?
	Jesus says, sell everything you own, give everything to the poor and follow me.
	People don't do that.
	Jesus says, you must forgive those who show repentance.
	And I have never seen this happen live.
	I've seen a lot of performative forgiveness, like Erika Kirk, where the murderer has not shown any repentance.
	I have seen people who've genuinely apologized to Christians who don't get forgiveness at all.
	And they don't even seem to notice.
	So even if you dial up the carrot and the stick, the reward and the punishment to eternal bliss and eternal torture, it's not enough to change people's behavior.
	So how do you explain why you don't steal to a five-year-old?
	Well, there's a couple of ways.
	First of all, you take the candy from him.
	Well, first of all, you explain, because your kid could be taking something because they don't understand property rights.
	Like I remember my daughter, when she was very little, she walked out of a convenience store clutching a starburst because she liked starbursts or she liked the colors or whatever it is.
	So, you know, you just say, no, we didn't pay for that.
	We have to pay for it.
	Like, we have to trade, right?
	Like, you know, you have Halloween candy and you trade.
	You wouldn't like it if some kid just took your candy without trading anything, right?
	You have to trade, right?
	You're starburst for my Swedish berries or whatever, right?
	And trade is win-win, right?
	So, you know, you play Monopoly, you play trading games or whatever it is, right?
	So you understand these things.
	And so you say, well, we can't take it.
	It's not ours, right?
	It's not ours.
	And if the kid doesn't get it or understand it from that standpoint, and of course, the way that you teach kids to respect property rights is you respect the property rights of the kid.
	I still remember my first Winnie the Poop book had my name in it.
	I loved it.
	I loved the fact that it was mine.
	So you respect the kid's property rights.
	Then the kid will usually respect other people's property rights.
	If for some reason the kid doesn't respect property rights, then the kid takes candy from another kid.
	You wait until the candy is momentarily unattended and you take it.
	Kid says, where's my candy?
	So, what do you mean?
	It wasn't your candy.
	It belonged to Bob there.
	Right?
	And then kid cries and you say, so you're upset that I took it from you, right?
	Okay.
	So that's how Bob feels.
	So don't, you don't want me to make you feel that way.
	So you shouldn't want to make Bob feel that way.
	Like you're crying because I took your candy and Bob was upset because you took his candy.
	So that's how you would start.
	I know that's not exactly UPB, but it's certainly universalizing it, right?
	If you don't care that you took Bob's candy, you don't care that Bob's upset, then I don't have to care that you're upset.
	Well, you should care that I'm upset, but I don't want to care that Bob's upset.
	It's like, well, that's not, that's not how it works.
	That's not, that's not reasonable.
	That's not rational.
	It doesn't make sense.
	Is Bob a person?
	Yes.
	Am I a person?
	Yes.
	Are you a person?
	Yes.
	So what is the rule for taking?
	Well, I don't care that another human being is upset that I've stolen from them.
	Okay, then somebody should be able to steal from you.
	No, no, no, that upsets me.
	It's like, okay, well, then we have to pick a rule.
	Either we should not take things in part because it upsets other people, in which case you shouldn't take from Bob, or we should, in which case it should be totally fine that I take from you, or at least I shouldn't care if you're upset.
	So again, I'm not saying that's pure UPB, but what it is, is universalizing the rule.
	And that's how you explain why stealing is wrong to a five-year-old.
	He takes candy from Bob, you take candy from kid.
	Kid says, I'm sad you took my candy.
	It's like, yeah, right.
	Sorry, isn't that?
	That's the rule, though.
	You took from Bob.
	He cried.
	You didn't care.
	I'm taking from you.
	You cry.
	I don't care.
	Well, you should care.
	Okay.
	So you should care about.
	I mean, that's how you would start the discussion.
	You model the right behavior.
	You respect the kids' property rights.
	You recognize that when they're very young, they wouldn't understand these things.
	When they get older, you universalize the rule that they've applied to Bob and you apply it to them.
	And if they don't like it being applied to them, then they shouldn't apply it to Bob.
	And then you look into yourself and say, why did I raise a kid who doesn't care that another kid is upset?
	And you look at your marriage, you look at your parenting, you look at your family, you look at their siblings, your environment, and figure that out.
	All right.
	I hope that makes sense.
	I really do appreciate everyone's time tonight.
	What a lovely, delightful conversation.
	And freedomain.com slash denate.
	Have yourselves a glorious, beautiful, wonderful evening, my friends.
	I will talk to you Wednesday night.

▲