Jan. 10, 2026 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:31
Three HARD Questions! Stefan Molyneux Interviewed
|
Time
Text
Hi everyone, today we have a wonderful guest, Stéphane Moleneux, who I've been listening to for over a decade.
So I'm very, very happy to host him, be able to talk to him.
Stéphane, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much.
Great pleasure to be here.
I remember when I started listening to you, I was really shocked by one of your ideas, one of your opinions.
You discussed, do we need a government?
So I was really surprised about that.
I thought, that's how come?
Of course, we need a government.
Nowadays, of course, I'm not so sure.
So I wanted to ask you, how can we replace its various functions?
And do we really need a government?
Well, to be fair, it's not actually my idea.
I got the idea from my kindergarten teacher.
And we all got the idea from our kindergarten teachers because what did our kindergarten teachers tell us if we used force or stole from other kids?
What did your kindergarten Richard say to you?
What did your teacher say to you?
Yeah, you can maybe take it back or, you know, you have to, depending on the culture, maybe you can take it back or you can apologize.
Sorry.
But was it ever acceptable to initiate the use of force to get rich?
Yeah, of course not.
Of course not, right?
So human progress tends to really take quantum leaps forward when we take simple everyday principles and extend them to everything at all times.
That's really the science of universality.
So, you know, if we have, I have my little lip gloss here, right?
Not lip gloss, sorry, that's my lip balm.
My lip balm is dry in the studio, right?
So I have a lip balm here, right?
So the lip balm goes up and it goes down because there's gravity, right?
We all experience that.
We know that, right?
So what did Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, and so on, what did they say?
Well, they said, huh, what if that's just a universal force?
What if it's not just, you know, my local little ball, but everything?
What if everything's falling?
What if gravity is a universal constant?
And the Earth is falling around the Sun, the Sun is falling around the galaxy, the moon is falling around the Earth, and so on.
And of course, to a small degree, the Sun is wobbling because of the influence of the Earth.
So we take a simple sort of everyday principle and we universalize it.
And suddenly we understand the solar system and we can send probes past Pluto.
In the same way, if we say, hey, here's a crazy idea.
What if the speed of light is just constant?
What if it's just constant at all times?
E equals mc squared.
What if we just take that?
Then we can get rid of the ether.
We understand then unlock the secrets of the atom and so on for good if it's in the free market, for ill if it's in the government hands.
So when you take localized principles and universalize them, you end up with some very great power.
Now, what we've had a great deal of difficulty doing is taking the kindergarten principles of universality.
Thou shalt not initiate the use of force.
Hey, self-defense, no problem.
Some guy's running at you with an axe and you got to shoot him.
It's regrettable, but I've got no problem with that at all.
But it's the initiation of the use of force.
And in the same way, if you were in kindergarten and some kid thwacked you and you pushed him away, and let's say it was on camera, whatever it is, right?
Then no sane kindergarten teacher would get mad at you.
I mean, maybe a liberal, but they would get mad at the kid who initiated it.
So it's just the idea of the ethics that we all accept as universal.
And it is universal because when I was in kindergarten, they didn't say, Steph, you can't whack kids over the head and take their lunch, except on Thursdays.
Thursdays, it's Lord of the Flies.
It's all out war.
It was everywhere at all times, no matter what.
And that's how I was taught morality was.
So if we simply say, gosh, okay, so the initiation of the use of force is immoral, and that's a universal concept or principle, then no human being gets to initiate the use of force.
But what is government other than the initiation of the use of force?
That's how it is defined.
Government does not tax you in self-defense.
Government initiates the use of force.
Say, ah, yes, well, but it's because you've agreed to a social contract.
It's like, that's a fine idea, except nobody has.
And if we say it is the right of some people to impose universal social contracts on others, then the universalization aspect of philosophy says, okay, you're going to impose, Richard, you son of a gun, you're going to impose a $10,000 tax on me because we all get to just impose social contracts on each other.
Then I'm like, I block you.
I block you.
And I impose a $20,000 tax on you.
And then you can, so it doesn't work if everyone gets to do it.
And morality, just like physics, doesn't work if it's individual and localized.
Nobody says that gravity is this in Sri Lanka and this in Thailand and it's reversed in Vladivostok, like it's a universal constant.
So if we take the idea that the initiation of the use of force is immoral, and I've got a whole book proving why this is the case, I mean, we accept it because it's how we run our localized societies, our families, our workplaces, our schools, our kindergartens, our old age, everywhere we run this, except in the halls of government.
If we just say, okay, so this localized little principle of gravity, what if it's universal?
What if the speed of light is constant?
And what if the non-aggression principle is actually how we should organize society?
Then we have to look at other alternatives than giving a small number of people the near-infinite right to impose violent rules on everyone else.
It's wrong.
It's immoral.
In the same way that slavery was immoral.
And of course, I know it's hard to conceive of like, get this brain circuit ring.
You know, I had the same thing when I was first sort of toying with the idea.
But then I sort of thought, okay, well, slavery ran every single society up until about five minutes ago in human society.
And human beings could never conceive of what life would be like without slavery.
You know, when they wanted to end slavery, they said, but we're all going to starve.
We're going to freeze to death because the slaves pick all the food and the slaves pick all the cotton.
But we got rid of slavery.
And that harbored in the Industrial Revolution because nobody bothers investing in labor-saving devices if they actually have slaves.
And so we got the modern world out of the end of slavery and all the unimaginable wealth simply by saying self-ownership and property rights are universal.
You can't be property and own property.
And so slavery is immoral.
And we got rid of it.
And that was incomprehensible to people.
Nobody could understand how society was going to function.
And nobody was under the onus.
And I don't mind talking about sort of theories about how it might work, but nobody was under the onus or obligation to explain exactly how crops were going to be picked or cotton was going to be picked in the absence of slavery.
And if you tried, like imagine that we're having this debate a couple of hundred years ago, end of slavery, and I say to you, well, Richard, you got to tell me how is all of this stuff going to be picked.
And if you were to say to me, hey, Steph, I got it.
I got it, man.
Here's what we're going to do.
We're going to get giant half acre robots and they're going to suck up distilled dinosaur juice and they're going to move across the landscape with these giant metal arms automatically flinging the crops into their hoppers.
You'd be like, what?
That's a fever dream.
But, you know, that's kind of what happened.
So we can't predict these kinds of things.
We can only base our decisions on universal morality.
And every single time, every single time we have extended and expanded moral principles, we have had huge leaps forward in human functioning.
It's come at the expense of power mongers and the sociopaths who like to point guns at other people.
But, you know, I cannot cry too many tears for those people.
So we just have to keep pushing forward.
Like we're not done.
We're not all finished.
We certainly don't look around and say we live in an ideal or even close to ideal moral universe.
We've just got to keep pushing these kindergarten ethics forward and recognize that there's lots of ways, tons of ways, moral ways, efficient and effective ways we can organize society in the absence of a state.
I have one question because I wanted to clarify, let's say, a little criticism.
Because when you discussed how we would replace the current system, you always mentioned agreements and contracts and you said it would be based on ostracism.
So people who wouldn't fulfill them, wouldn't you know would steal or whatever, cheat, they would be ostracized.
But actually we have that already.
People are being ostracized.
So how?
Why do you think it would work in the future?
But it doesn't.
So by ostracized at the moment, are you referring to deplatforming and things like that?
No, I mean, you said when somebody breaches a contract, then he'll be ostracized.
No one would sign another agreement or insure him and nobody would go into business with him because he would be the one who's cheating and that would be well known.
Okay, so you're saying that happens at the moment.
And just help me understand what you mean by that.
Yeah, we have ostracism, like you shouldn't cheat, you shouldn't steal, and it's well known.
We have different countries at different lists.
If you owe money, if you have a debt, then it's become public knowledge.
And maybe you can get this knowledge.
And before you sign a contract with someone, you can actually check him out.
So we have this, again, people are being ostracized for stealing, for cheating.
They go to jail and still they are in breach of contract all the time.
Okay, so there's two things that you're talking about there.
And I'm sorry if I'm missing something and I certainly don't want to oversimplify it, but I think you're talking about two things.
One is that there's sort of a reputation system like a credit score or something like that.
And so, yes, you are often barred from borrowing money if you have a bad credit score or if you've declared bankruptcy.
I think there's like a seven-year wait before you can get any kind of reasonable credit.
If you haven't paid your bills, you can't get a mortgage.
So there certainly is that level of ostracism, although there's tons of ways around it.
And of course, the 07-08 financial crisis was driven by governments wanting to get home ownership into people's hands who didn't qualify.
So there's tons of ways governments sort of force banks to lend to people who are underqualified.
So that kind of scotches that whole thing.
So that's sort of number one, that there are these situations.
And of course, if you have an eBay account and you violate, you don't ship stuff and this sort of, then you get banned from eBay.
So that sort of stuff really does work.
And eBay, of course, is a huge marketplace that runs almost entirely on reputation because there's people all over the world and you can't exactly go.
You know, if somebody doesn't ship you 40 bucks worth of stuff from Thailand, you're not going to take them to some Thai court, but you complain and there's sort of interventions.
So that's sort of an example of how it kind of does work.
So yeah, there's certainly there's sort of patchwork things, but you can still survive in society.
It's just more difficult.
What I'm talking about in a free society is if somebody does something really egregious, you know, like a rape or theft, assault, murder, the sort of four major pillars of human immorality, then they have to submit to some sort of correction, some sort of punishment.
And then, well, what do you do if they don't?
Everything in a free society is privately owned.
And if somebody is proven to have committed a heinous crime, systems fall into place where nobody's going to sell you food.
Nobody's going to let you be on their sidewalk.
Nobody's going to rent you a house.
Nobody's going to give you electricity.
Nobody's going to power your cell phone.
Nobody's going to process any of your data requests.
Like you are shut out until you submit to some sort of restitution, some sort of punishment, some sort of reconciliation.
Now, you could say, well, but some people wouldn't participate in this, that.
Well, sure, but there's layers to these kinds of things and you would make it kind of work.
Most people who run businesses don't want, you know, thieves, rapists, and murderers floating around in society.
It's destabilizing for everyone.
And so if a company refuses to ostracize, other companies will ostracize them.
And it's really just not worth it to throw your lot in with the criminal.
So that I think would work pretty well.
So that's number one.
The second thing you're talking about is sort of imprisonment, incarceration.
That's not exactly ostracism.
That's sort of taking someone out of society.
Ostracism is when you refuse to deal.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, I only meant the first part.
That we just discussed.
So that was my issue.
Well, I mean, then the two are layered, right?
So if you and I, in a free society, there would be contract rating systems.
And if you and I repeatedly keep our contracts and fulfill our contracts and so on, then we get a very good contract rating system, which means that the price of us doing business goes down.
I don't know if you've done a lot in terms of your entrepreneurial side.
I've been like an entrepreneur for like 30 years or so on, and I operate on handshake deals for the most part because I deal with people I know and I trust.
And so the costs of doing business are very low.
Of course, my studio is not the most exotic thing known to man.
I'm basically in a depressed ping pong ball.
But if you can keep your word and people can trust you to keep your word, doing business is very cheap.
If you break your word, if you cheat people and so on, then that would be noted and your cost of doing business would increase.
In other words, you can sell your products for cheaper if you keep your word because your contract risk is very low.
And the way that it would work is, let's say that I want an iPad or some tablet.
I send you 500 bucks.
You don't send it to me.
Then we would have a third party that would mediate this dispute.
And if they found you hadn't sent it, they would either make you send it or your contract rating would be lowered and it would be much more expensive for you than 500 bucks.
Or they would send me the iPad and stop doing business with you.
You'd have to go somewhere else.
And they would be like, well, why are you looking for a new aisle?
The last guy, I didn't keep the contract.
So it just becomes negative as a whole.
And the nice thing about all of that is it works fairly automatically and fairly invisibly to the consumer.
I mean, it's funny because people say, well, how are you going to resolve disputes without the government?
And I'm like, the only people who say that, Richard, are people who've never actually tried to resolve disputes with the government.
I had a business dispute many decades ago that was fairly significant.
And I talked to a lawyer and he said, five to 10 years, quarter million dollars.
And I'm like, what?
What do you mean, five to ten years?
And he said, and I can't guarantee any kind of outcome.
And you could get hit with the other side.
And I remember, so we went, instead of going to the court, we went to mediation and that was capped at a fairly low amount, but it was better than nothing.
And we actually had statements from the other side that admitted culpability.
And I said, okay, well, we can go for the maximum.
And he's like, don't.
They're making an offer.
And I said, but we have, he said, you never know what's going to happen when you step inside that room.
And I'm like, so the people who are like, well, we have the government to help you resolve disputes.
It's like, tell me how I know you've never tried to use the government to resolve a dispute because, you know, it's not an efficient system.
It's designed for the lawyers.
It's designed often for the quite corrupt and the politically connected and so on.
So what I want, of course, is dispute resolution systems that are cheap, efficient.
And I don't know, of course, exactly how they would operate.
This is the dinosaur juice theory of crop gathering, but I do know that it's going to be cheap, efficient, effective.
And I also know that there will be very few.
And I know we're going to talk about parenting near the end.
Let me just sort of stitch it in here at the beginning.
So why do people cheat others?
Well, they cheat others because they lack empathy.
They cheat others because they're greedy.
They cheat others because they don't process the long-term consequences of cruelty.
And why do people have that experience or those thoughts?
Because they've been horribly treated as children.
It's not like everyone who's abused as a child becomes a criminal, but almost everyone who is a criminal was abused as a child, which is why I sort of push for peaceful parenting.
With peaceful parenting, the amount of criminality will drop at least 95%.
I mean, there'll still be brain tumors or somebody has a head injury and like there's still going to be the occasional things.
But the vast majority of criminal behavior, both public and private, at the top and at the bottom, so to speak, comes from child abuse.
And so this is one of the reasons why we cannot have a free society before we have, at least to some degree, solved the problem of child abuse.
And once we have solved the problem of child abuse, we need very little oversight in society because if you've been around people who are raised with loving, happy, healthy parents, they don't become thieves, rapists, murderers, and they don't go around punching people in the face for no particular reason.
That all comes from bad parenting.
So this is one of the things that I think I've brought to bear in the political conversation that's fairly novel, which is very few political philosophers talk about childhood as the source of political dysfunction and economic dysfunction.
But once we can start to, and that's just another expansion of the non-aggression principle, which means you shouldn't hit children.
You shouldn't use force to control children.
You should reason with children.
And if you reason with them and you empathize with them and you look for win-win situations, they'll grow up to be very productive and helpful members of society and not criminal.
To finish this first topic, the first part, last question.
How can we then make people understand the destructive nature of the government?
Because most people are still unaware of it.
They just really think, as you just said, yeah, the government can handle it.
Well, unfortunately, the government teaches you about all of this on its own.
I mean, I wish it didn't.
But right now, we're in a downward cycle of history that is fairly significant and is getting increasingly dangerous.
I mean, we just have to look at what happened recently in America, in Minnesota, where a local YouTuber, I think now has one of the top five tweets of all time at 120 million plus, 42 minutes of, you know, rampant exploitation and fraud and outright theft in the Somali community in Minnesota.
You know, that's absolutely wretched.
It's horrible.
It's appalling.
It's corrupt beyond words to say, I'm a refugee.
I need your sympathy.
I need your help.
And then to rob you blind.
This is like les mis levels of corruption.
And so the government is massively in debt in America and all over the West, most of the world.
Governments have hundreds of trillions, not billions, hundreds of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities.
Governments have stolen 97, 98% of the wealth of the country through inflation, through control of the currency.
Governments regularly enrich themselves at the expense of the general population.
Governments have facilitated through lax laws and funding the largest slaughter in the modern world and indeed throughout human history, which is the tens of millions of babies killed under Roe v. Wade, which was largely brought about in fraudulent circumstances.
And government funds wars.
Government indoctrinates children in schools relentlessly and horrendously.
Government turns the sexes against each other.
It is just a plaything of sadistic manipulation for the most part coming from governments.
And government changes demographics against the will of the people using their own money, which is hard to make a case that that's of benefit to any of the local population.
I mean, you can ask people in Minnesota how much they've been enriched and they've, in fact, been impoverished.
So governments will always demonstrate over the cycle of history how bad they are.
And if you just look, I mean, just look at the last, you know, 110 years.
You had a First World War, you know, 10 million dead.
You have hyperinflation throughout the 20s.
You have a 14-year Great Depression.
Then you have the Second World War, 40 to 50 million dead.
And then you have the Korean War.
And then you have communism.
And then you have the Vietnam War.
And then you have hyper-staged, well, you have stagflation in the 70s.
And then you have the war on terror, Iran, Iraq.
I mean, it's just absolutely endless.
And all of this is funded through ungodly amounts of debt and predation upon the next generation.
And now you have a situation where people are graduating from, you know, 15, 20 years of government education with no job skills and no prospects, horrendously in debt when they didn't even really understand what they signed up for and how much it is, a chain around their neck.
We have collapsing birth rates.
We have gain of function research, which produces horrible viruses.
And then we have even more sketchy and enforced vaccines or therapeutics or whatever you want to call that DNA mystery juice that is inflicted upon the population largely by force and funded by intergenerational debt.
So I don't want to take up your whole show, but how do we convince people that governments are bad?
It's like, just look at them, look at what they do.
And if we can't find any kind of alternative, then we deserve what's coming.
And the 250-year cycle of every single civilization that has a relatively small government, which gives a relatively free market, which generates a massive amount of wealth, which then is grabbed by the government to fuel its own growth and debt, success is failure in a state of society.
The more successful and free you are, the more money you generate, which is the more collateral governments use to run up debts and enrich themselves and kill people all over the world and enslave the next generation.
So there's no way to break this cycle if we accept this institution as the permanent moral center of society.
Okay.
Second topic that really shocked me when I heard it the first time, you also talked a lot, and it costs you probably a lot in terms of your public career, were the IQ differences.
And your opponents used to say, oh, these are just your opinions and that's just what you think.
And I liked your argument.
You said, no, that's what my guests said, researchers, scientists, scholars, and they have a lot of research and books to back it up.
So my question here would be, where do those differences come from?
Why do races differ in terms of IQ?
Right.
So I, you know, when people say, why did you get de-platformed?
It's like, well, because I chose to.
I chose to be a martyr for this cause and I have no particular regrets about it.
It was a worthwhile cause to be a martyr of.
And if the alternative is to not tell the truth, I'd rather not be a public figure at all.
I have no particular taste for fame or prominence or notoriety or any of those sorts of things.
I don't thirst to be recognized.
I don't get groupies.
I don't play stadiums.
You know, I just want to get the truth out of there, out there.
And this is an important truth.
So ethnicities differ by IQ.
To be clear, on average, you never judge any particular individual by group averages, but group averages are nonetheless important.
Women tend to be shorter than men, although in my 20s, I dated a woman who was six foot two.
So I'm only 5'11 and changed.
So we don't judge individuals, but when you zoom out enough, it becomes important at a societal level.
So I knew that this was a freighted topic.
Of course, Charles Murray, who came on the show once, faced a lot of blowback in the 90s when he and Dick Hernstein published The Bell Curve.
And Dick Hernstein, unfortunately, died right before it was published, leaving Charles Murray to deal with the whole thing alone.
And there is generalized differences in IQ between various ethnicities and races.
It really depends how you slice and dice it.
And I knew that.
I knew that based upon my own research.
I knew that based upon books that I'd read.
And so I went to, and they're very kind of them to do that because it's not always fun for them to do that either.
But I went to 17 world-renowned experts in human intelligence and interviewed each one of them from various places in the political spectrum.
Some liberal, some conservative, some, I don't know, unknown mystery politics.
And so the data is incontrovertible.
The data has been studied for, I mean, 100 years plus, and it is reproduced all over the world.
There's no particular question about the data.
Data regarding IQ and differences in ethnicities is just about the most robust finding in all of social sciences, including its relationship to generalized outcomes in society.
And what troubles people even more, and if it's any consolation, troubles me and troubles you and troubles every thinking person, is that IQ is significantly genetic.
The estimates are 80 to 85% by your late teens.
Some estimates put it even higher going forward over the case in life.
And these are troubling things.
They are difficult things.
They are unpleasant things.
But, you know, if you're a doctor, you don't just see healthy people.
You see the people who are not particularly healthy.
And that's kind of the job.
And as an intellectual dealing with politics and economics and outcomes in society, we do have to talk about these things.
So, yeah, I was, I was very, I won't say careful, but I was very methodical in getting this information out.
I sourced everything.
I talked to the experts.
And, you know, for some people, that matters.
For a lot of people, they're just, they don't have any place in social discourse because they're just emotional and hysterical.
And it's just not something, you know, I don't want a doctor who faints at the sight of blood.
And I don't want debate partners or people who oppose me who faint at the sight of data.
Like that's just not where you need to be.
So yeah, these are important differences.
They're important to understanding the world.
And if you don't understand them, then you pursue the leftist thing.
So if we look at sort of the typical thing in America, East Asians have higher IQs than whites, certainly with regards to verbal abilities.
Ashkenazi Jews are sort of the top of the heap.
And then East Asians and then whites and then Hispanics and then blacks and so on.
So if you look at the difference between, say, East Asians and blacks, there's a significant difference in terms of generalized income and educational attainment and everything, marital stability, body mass index, like all of these kinds of things.
And a lot of it has to do with IQ.
And the sort of up to 20 point gap between East Asians and blacks is pretty decisive in explaining the differences in outcome.
In other words, everybody with an IQ of 105 has about the same income.
It doesn't matter whether you're white, black, orange, polka dotted, whether you're a space alien or a giant brain frog, right?
Everybody, if the free market is quite fair, it rewards IQ, but IQ is unevenly distributed between ethnicities.
The leftist argument, of course, is that, well, the only reason that certain ethnicities do worse is because racism and hatred and so on, which economically, I'm sorry?
Colonialism says.
Colonialism, whatever.
And that doesn't even make sense from a Marxist standpoint because Marxism says, ooh, these evil capitalists, they'll exploit everyone.
They'll pay whatever it takes to exploit people.
And so why would a capitalist not bid up the wages of people who could make as much or were as productive as like, why do they pay an East Asian $100,000 a year and then pay a Hispanic like $60,000 a year or whatever it is?
Like they would just bid them up because they'd get more money.
They'd seek out profit and it would all end up equalizing.
But it doesn't really work.
Even from a Marxist standpoint, it doesn't work from an analytical standpoint.
And of course, the problem is that if you say, as the leftists do, that all inequalities in outcome, since we're all just copy-paste, generic blobs, all differences in outcome must be the result of seething racism, hatred, prejudice, sexism, you name it, right?
Well, that sows a huge amount of hostility, hatred, fear, suspicion, aggression, and outright violence in society, which communists and experts and fascists too, but they're not quite as big an issue in the modern world, particularly in the media and in academia.
I don't like the fact that people say, well, the only reason one group is doing better is they stole from everyone else and they ripped off your ancestors and they pillaged your society and they're sitting there fat on their golden thrones, you know, chewing the gristle of your ancestors' souls.
And like that is a recipe for, I mean, civil wars, for social violence, for outright genocide at times.
And that's not a theory.
I did a whole documentary on China and Hong Kong right before COVID, coincidentally, where I went into the history of how the communists, they come in and they start sowing these seeds of division and hatred.
And oh, that guy on the hill with the pretty wife and the big house, he only has that because he stole from all your ancestors and just whip people into this hatred and this frenzy.
And then they go and they string up the guy on the hill and then they string up everyone who supported him and then they string up the guy making five bucks an hour more than they are.
And then everybody ends up broke and starving.
And, you know, communism killed 100 million people.
That's like two to two and a half World War IIs.
And that is, you know, that's 10 to 15 Holocaust.
It's absolutely vile.
And we don't want that to happen again, which means we have to find some other rational explanation to differences in outcomes.
Why do women get paid less than men?
Is it because men just wake up in the morning and say, I hate women, and even though I could profit from paying them a little bit more, I'm just going to forego all those profits because of my hatred.
That's not how the human brain works.
That's not how society works.
And that's not how capitalism works at all.
Capitalism is always trying to seek out comparative advantage and arbitrage into better outcomes.
No, it's because, well, women have children and God love them for that.
You know, you're alive, I'm alive, because women chose to have children and raise them.
So maybe we could achieve perfect equality between men and women, but only for one generation, then everyone's gone because there are no children.
Women prefer working with people rather than things.
And in the modern economy, things tend to be more productive and profitable over the long run than people.
And for a variety of reasons, women make less than men over the course of their lifetimes.
It's not true for unmarried women who are childless and in competing with men, they actually make a little bit more, largely due to HR and government mandates and so on.
But women make less money than men because we have children and we can choose not to have children, but then we don't have a society at all.
And that just seems like a bit, you know, it seems like a tiny bit of a high price to pay for equality is for there to be no human beings on the planet.
Perfection should not be followed by the complete extinction of the human race.
So, yeah, we're just looking for explanations that cool ethnic hatreds, that cool hatred between men and women.
I mean, science can do that.
You know, science was able to cool a lot of religious warfare.
You know, I mean, we don't remember this as much anymore, but for like 300 years, a lot of Europe was wracked by endless sort of post-Protestant Reformation warfare between various religious sects.
Science came along and sort of cooled some of that sort of stuff and gave alternative explanations about differences and so on.
And we could do the same thing with ethnic tensions as we did with religious tensions and tensions between the sexes and hostility and hatred.
You know, there has to be a path other than hatred and rage forward in humanity.
I mean, it was costly enough in the past.
Now with the weapons that we have and the communications devices that we have now, we simply cannot afford irrational hatreds.
And my entire goal has been to cool hatreds between ethnicities, races and sexes.
And of course, those who want to increase and exacerbate and exploit those tensions wanted to get rid of me because blessed are the peacemakers does not apply to those who want war.
Thank you.
The last topic.
You mentioned is parenthood.
The last topic is parenthood.
You mentioned before the abuse and violence.
I would like to discuss a little bit different angle, namely finances, because most parents nowadays are so busy.
They are struggling financially.
They're in debt.
You know, they have so much pressure and so little time.
Especially here, I see it in Asia, a lot of very competitive societies.
So how could we help parents maybe to find more time for the children, to have a better family life?
Because they are exposed really to a very competitive economy and, you know, fiat money keeps losing purchasing power.
So how could we help parents to be better parents?
And you would like this a little bit more specific to Asian parents, is that right?
Okay, maybe.
Let me do a tiny Asian flex here.
Here is less social welfare state.
So I think the issue is a bit harsher.
Right, right.
So for Asian parents in particular, this is true for all races, but I would say for Asian parents in particular, the big bugaboo is status.
The big challenge is status.
You know, there's no point having status if your population collapses.
And everyone has to give up something to be good and to be moral and to have sustainability in your life.
You know, if you want to live a long, healthy life, you have to give up just sitting on the couch.
You got to go exercise.
You know, if you want to not have to buy new pants every six weeks, you've got to give up.
You know, my particular joy in life is to face plant into cheesecake or carrot cake.
And I have to like, I'm over 50.
I can't have that stuff anymore.
So you have to give up some stuff in order to have a happy and productive life.
And the funny thing, of course, is that Asian parents in particular are saying to the kids, well, you have to give up dating and you have to give up socializing and you might even have to give up exercising because you've got to get those marks.
You've got to get into that school.
You've got to pass that exam.
You've got to get flying colors and so on.
And okay, so sacrifice is very important.
So can you sacrifice status in order to save your society?
Because if the Asian kids, and I've talked to quite a number of them over the years of doing my show, I have this sort of generalized call-in show.
Yes.
And if the pressure is so high on Asian children to succeed at all costs, why?
So their parents can brag.
Let's be honest about it.
Like, I mean, so it's a certain amount of social cachet that your kid is doing this, that, and the other.
And if that results in the death of your society, you're going to have nothing left to brag about and no one left to brag to.
So what you have to do to sustain your society is you have to make childhood more enjoyable for the children.
And you have to make parenthood more enjoyable for the parents.
One of the reasons why the birth rate is collapsing, I mean, the big one, of course, is that women are delaying having children until their late 20s and their 30s.
And that just means you're likely with fertility issues and geriatric pregnancy kicking in at 35, you're just going to have a lower birth rate as a whole.
But one of the reasons why people don't want to have kids is that it really doesn't look like a lot of fun.
They think of their own parents in this Karoshi and in Japan and other places where there's death by overwork and you know, you're doing karaoke till two in the morning for the foreign businesses and so on.
And people can only handle so much bad John Bon Jovi before they lose the will to live.
And it just doesn't look that much fun.
You're going to work for 10 hours a day.
You're commuting and then you're yelling at your kids to study and you're hiring tutors and the kids are tense and stressed and can't go out and play.
And it's like, who wants that?
Nobody.
Nobody wants that.
Nobody.
I mean, I remember one of the guys I worked with when I first was an entrepreneur in the 90s.
He had two kids at home.
We traveled two to three weeks a month.
He barely saw his kids.
And when he did see his kids, his wife was tense because he was traveling.
And it's just like, what's the fun in that?
Where's the enjoyment?
I'm not saying to everyone be hedonistic, but there has to be some upside to life.
And if he's just like, well, it's all about status and you have to do this and you have to do that and you have to get high marks and you can't enjoy yourself.
It's like, well, when their kids grow up, why would they want to become the parents they kind of hated and feared as being tiger mom uber bosses, you know, parent Waffen, you know, forcing their kids to.
So you have to find a way to make parenthood enjoyable and childhood enjoyable.
Otherwise, the next generation is going to be like, I don't want that.
Like, what I did not enjoy my childhood.
My parents did not enjoy being parents.
Why would I want to do that?
I mean, there's a lot of sacrifice, there's a lot of cost, a lot of sleepless nights just by being a parent no matter what.
And so in Asia, the big challenge with parenting is if you're going to say to your kids, you have to sacrifice for the greater good, that often being parents' bragging rights, the parents have to sacrifice status in order for their children to be happier.
And that's a tough thing to do, to give up status.
I mean, this is my whole deplatforming thing, right?
Like I used to be very prominent, speak all over the world, and had like 10 million views and downloads a month.
And then I had to give up 90% or 95% of that in order to tell the truth.
And I don't want to have any status other than honesty.
Like the status with my own conscience, status with the people who love me, my own self-regard is the only thing that really matters.
So you have to have status not with the frowns and nods of other people, largely strangers.
You have to have status with your own conscience.
And if you are making family life so unpleasant that none of your kids really want to bother having kids, then you got status at the expense of the entire continuity of your 100,000 year long civilization.