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Welcome to the Free Thought Project podcast.
A hub for free thinking conversations about the promotion of liberty
and the daunting task of government accountability.
Here are your hosts, Jason Basler and Matt Agarist.
Hello again, Free Thinkers.
Welcome back to the Free Thought Project podcast.
My name is Jason Basler and joining me is the Free Thought Project editor-in-chief, Matt Agarist.
Thank you all for joining us once again.
Today we're joined by a very special guest,
a guest who's been on the front lines of censorship, the culture wars and of course philosophy.
So it should be an excellent conversation
and I've certainly been looking forward to it for the past few weeks.
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Today we will be diving deep with a guest whose ideas
might just rattle your comfort zone in the best way possible.
Our guest is a man I personally owe a great deal of gratitude to
someone who helped cement much of my own philosophy and political worldview,
whether it was his daily drive home, espousing voluntary principles
on his free domain podcast back in the mid-2000s
or his 14 years of YouTube videos guiding normies towards philosophy
or maybe it was one of his 10 books, such as Everyday Anarchy,
The Art of the Argument or Universally Preferable Behavior
and that last one really reshaped how I think about ethics.
He's also just published a book on peaceful parenting
and I'm hoping we could get into that at some point during the conversation,
but our guest has been a pillar within the Liberty community for nearly two decades.
His contributions have undeniably made the world a more moral,
logical, intellectually courageous place
and he's finally back on Twitter, which I'm happy to see.
So our guest today is Liberty legend, Stefan Malanou.
Steph, welcome to the Free Thought Project podcast and thanks for joining us.
Thank you for those very kind words.
I actually just sailed past 20 years since my first article was published.
I'm about 21st years.
My show can almost drink in every new scale.
I'm very excited about that.
Well, congratulations.
Yeah, that's truly impressive and you've been at this for a long time, Steph,
and definitely really grateful for your time today.
And as I mentioned at the intro there,
your work has been absolutely critical for my own philosophical journey over the years.
And you really did emerge as one of the leading voices within Liberty movement,
a cornerstone of modern anarchist thought on the internet.
And one of the few thinkers online that's really emphasized logic and argumentation.
Now, I don't think there's really a way to quantify the impact your work has had on the world,
but it's clearly significant enough to catch the ire and scorn of the political establishment
who ended up railroading you with several well-coordinated censorship campaigns.
And, you know, here at the Free Thought Project, we're no stranger to censorship ourselves.
You know, we lost over 6 million fans in 2018 when both Facebook and Twitter
colluded to take us down on the same day within hours of each other.
But on a recent podcast with libertarian podcaster Dave Smith and Nick Fuentes,
your name was actually brought up and mentioned as someone's whose voice
was reaching a lot of people and resonating before they caught the crosshairs of the censorship machine.
But it made me think about some of the parallels of you being deplatformed back in 2020
and the current finger-pointing circus that's going on right now,
on the right after Tucker Carlson had Nick Fuentes on a show recently.
There seems to be, you know, pretty serious rift and divide growing, you know,
right now between some of the establishment Republicans and MAGA
and some of these America first-centered perspectives that Nick Fuentes has.
So I know Nick has also been targeted and deplatformed and censored,
and some of his takes, you know, certainly walk the line between the Overton window and controversial.
So I was curious, like, what your take is on Nick Fuentes and the current brouhaha surrounding his rise to popularity
as this, you know, this leading right-wing voice.
And if you do see any overlap with his political persecution,
that kind of seems similar to what you went through a few years back.
Yeah, I mean, obviously a very charismatic and intelligent communicator,
it's hard for older people to understand the edgelord stuff that goes on among the young,
that in my generation, so many sacred cows were erected that have just become untouchable.
That is a very tempting target for the young.
It's sort of, if you think about the 1960s and how they were called the satirical 60s,
of course the sex, drugs, rock and roll, the hedonism,
they were really taking aim at all the sacred cows of the 50s.
And the holy objects of one generation often becomes the objects of scorn
and puncturing for the next generation.
And I suppose Nick Fuentes is an expression of that.
As a philosopher, if there's somebody whose ideas are repellent or negative or horrible for you,
then you have the choice.
And I mean, there's a lot with Nick that I disagree with, of course.
I don't know how much.
And I'm always very careful because I've been taken out of context so many times
that unless I'm willing to really absorb someone's entire over of work,
I'm really hesitant to pass judges on stuff that could be taken out of context.
So, you know, some of the sort of pro-national socialist stuff that he has talked about,
I shouldn't say obviously.
For me, national socialism is as bad as communism.
And even though communism has an even higher death count,
my ancestors, not because they were Jewish, but because they were intellectuals,
were persecuted by the Nazis.
So not a big fan, of course, of Nazism and Hitlerianism.
It's a repellent and vicious collectivist and totalitarian ideology.
But so I don't know if he's edgelording.
I don't know if he's mocking because, again, I haven't taken the time.
I've been working on my...
I just finished actually yesterday recording the audiobook of my new books.
I've been working a lot on that.
So it is sort of a general question.
It's sort of two main points that I wanted to get across.
And I'll try to be brief because I have my own show so I can do my monologues there.
Number one, people who disagree with whoever,
whether it's Nick or other people, if you disagree with him,
engage, prove him wrong, engage, engage,
invite him on and prove him wrong.
If he is egregiously wrong and so morally offensive,
then it should not be that tough to prove him wrong.
I mean, I engage with communists.
I engage with status.
I engage with people who are pro-spanking.
I engage with ideas that I find reprehensible and repellent.
And frankly, personally quite dangerous.
I mean, if the communists win,
people like us are going to have a pretty short span of days.
So the question is always, do you engage with ideas that you hate
or do you suppress them?
Do you censor them?
The arguments against censorship
all the way back to John Milton's area of Pajitica in the 17th century,
one of sort of the founding documents
of what until recently was a pretty British commitment
to free speech in common law.
It was relatively common in the UK and in Canada
until relatively recently and it's still hanging by a thread in the US.
But the fact that you're protected by the First Amendment
doesn't protect you from slander campaigns, of course, right?
So do you suppress and drive out of the public square
people who are reprehensible to your views
or do you engage with them and prove them wrong?
To me, it is always a confession of the weakness of an argument
to not prove someone wrong.
So I think that communism is a horrendous idea.
I've even debated fascists.
I think fascism is a repellent idea
and arguments, statism and collectivism and so on, a totalitarianism.
So I engage with them because what happens if you don't?
Well, you've kind of handed the high ground to the other person
because especially the younger generation having grown up
in such a sensorious social, political and media regime
they assume that whoever is attacked by the establishment
has something important and positive to say.
You know, it's the old Obi-Wan thing and if you strike me down
I shall come back even stronger, blah, blah, blah.
So you want to bring people on to the conversation.
You want to engage with them
if it's a conversation that you want to be engaged in.
I mean, I don't bring everyone on
because there's some conversations
that aren't particularly interesting to me
or I don't find particularly fulfilling.
But if you are going to comment about a topic
and there's somebody whose ideas are appalling to you,
yeah, bring them on.
And if you don't want to bring them on, whatever, fine.
Maybe you're not great at debating.
It's not a natural skill for everyone.
Then at least make arguments, make counterarguments.
Put your presentations together.
I used to use these blue powerpoints with me
in the sort of top left corner, the Truth About series.
Then analyze the arguments,
show where the person is wrong
and to take apart their perspective.
That's how ideas get better.
But if you simply recoil and ban people,
then you are saying it is not possible
to engage with their ideas.
Well, why is it not possible to engage with their ideas
and prove them wrong?
And so you create this group that is outside of discourse
and having groups that are outside of discourse
is usually not a very good idea at all.
So that's sort of one aspect.
The second thing I think that what is going on
in American politics at the moment,
and this is from a...
I say this from a sort of rational philosophical perspective.
Sorry.
Look at me seeding the word rational.
It just automatically proves everything.
I'll strive for that nonetheless.
And that is if you look at what's going on
religiously in America, there is a divide, of course,
between the secular left and the conservative right,
particularly with regards to Israel.
So a lot of people who are Christian conservatives
believe that Israel's success
and the defense of the Jewish population
is essential to Christianity,
is essential for the return of Jesus,
and that is driving a lot of the political beliefs.
And you saw this, of course.
I think it was Tucker Carlson who talked to Ted Cruz
about this kind of stuff.
And from a secular atheist rational perspective,
eschatological revelations,
end times prophecies is not necessarily
the best way to make foreign policy
and to assign resources in a society.
So I think there's that effort.
On the left, of course, they generally side
with the underdog.
It's kind of a reflexive thing,
and it comes from a beautiful impulse
in humanity and society.
It generally comes from the female impulse
to protect the younger sibling.
And we can talk about this
with regards to peaceful parenting and so on,
but I myself am a younger sibling.
And if in my family, you know,
food and toys and resources
had been left to the free market,
well, you know, my brother was older
and bigger and stronger
and he would have got the majority of resources.
So a woman's instinct in particular
is to side with the underdog
and to redistribute resources
by force if needed to make sure
that the underdog,
the youngest child or younger children,
have enough to eat, right?
So if there's only one sandwich,
you cut it in two, one for the older brother,
one for the younger sister,
and then the older brother grabs
both halves of the sandwich and runs off, you know,
then the mother has to chase him down
and pry the half of sandwich
and give it to the little girl
because she can't chase him down
and get it herself.
So things need to be equal.
You need to have more sympathy
for the underdog
and you have to use force,
if necessary, to take resources
from the more competent
and the more able
and give them to,
through no fault of their own,
just the birth order,
the less competent and the less able.
So women have a ferocious instinct
to even things out
using force if need be.
That is absolutely fantastic
when they're moms
and there are little kids
or kids involved as a whole.
That's why we're all here,
particularly we've haunted
younger siblings and so on.
It's a beautiful aspect of female nature.
However,
when you combine
coercive redistribution
with the power of the state,
then you get this kind of redistributive
welfare state
and a lot of the foreign aid and so on
and then you have,
it becomes cancerous,
it becomes pathological
because it's not limited by anything
because the government can just print money,
borrow money, sell bonds
and then you just can pour
all the resources into the quote
underprivileged,
which is why that word,
you know,
marginalized, excluded,
minorities, underprivileged,
these are all programming words
to get women to want to use coercion
to redistribute resources,
which is socialism
and communism of course.
And fascism too,
but people don't usually see that as much.
So I think from
a rational empirical standpoint,
basing resource allocations
and foreign policy on
what I would argue is just sort of rank
eschatological end time superstition,
it's not a great,
not a great plan.
On the left, of course,
they sympathize with the underdogs,
with the weaker people
in the whatever conflict there is,
which again comes in the younger sibling thing,
which leaves them to have a lot of sympathy,
of course, towards the Palestinians and so on.
So there's just not a lot of
rational analysis.
There's a lot of feelings.
There's a lot of rather ramped up
faith imperatives as a whole.
And I think that's hard to penetrate
for people from the outside
with sort of a more objective rational perspective.
I think it's hard to penetrate that level
of faith based discourse,
if that makes sense,
or emotional based discourse on the part of the left.
Yeah, it certainly makes sense
and certainly rational.
And I guess we've come to expect
a rational take from you over the years,
so I appreciate your take on that.
And my apologies,
I guess you probably don't spend
every waking moment on Twitter,
like many of us do unfortunately.
It seems to have its hook
and really drags you in sometimes,
but yeah,
I probably shouldn't have expected you to have known
all the ins and outs of Nick Fuentes
and what he's going through,
but there seems to be a pretty coordinated effort as well
to take him down a few ranks.
And yeah, you know,
I agree 100% with what you were saying there
as far as the public square and censorship, right?
And giving people this opportunity
to defend themselves and defend their ideas.
Well, it's a forbidden fruit stuff,
sorry to interrupt.
Go tell young men,
you cannot talk about X.
And it's like, come on,
I mean, does anybody not remember
what it's like to be young and rebellious?
That's just going to drive people.
Bring people in and say, listen,
you've got your perspective.
I think you're misinformed.
Here are the facts.
Here's where I think you went wrong.
Love to hear your perspective, blah, blah, blah.
Bring it in and dismantle it that way.
Sure.
And I myself, again,
I can't speak for Nick.
Of course, Mr. Fuentes,
not like we're on a first syllable basis.
But certainly for me,
with some of the more provocative
or science-based stuff
that people didn't like about me,
I know for a simple fact.
And if you have been
in the challenging position
of bringing volatile truths
to a emotional and reactive population,
you know that it's pretty easy to go to the mob.
We saw this over COVID, right?
It's pretty easy to go to the mob
into grabbing their flaming torches
and their pitchforks
and going to just chase people out of town
and want to string them up.
It's pretty easy to rouse the mob into hatred.
You know, I mean, the Second World War,
where all the boomers base their moral imperatives from,
I mean, the Second World War produced the Nuremberg Code,
which says medical procedures
should never, ever be forced.
Full and informed consent needs to happen,
like the whole list of the Nuremberg Code
that came out of the Second World War after the horrendous...
Well, it wasn't just the Nazis
who did this forced experimentation.
It was the Japanese,
particularly the Australian prisoners.
They did live vivisection.
They tested chemical and biological weapons
using prisoners of war, just horrendous stuff.
And the boomers who seem to base their entire moral outlook
on the Second World War went fairly Nazi
in terms of abandoning the Nuremberg Code,
forcing people, compelling people,
restricting rights
unless they took pretty dicey experimental DNA goop
into their veins.
So if you're going to say to young people,
you can't talk about this.
This is the absolute wrong thing.
And everybody who talks about this is like,
does nobody remember how, you know,
the satanic panic of the heavy metal stuff
in the 80s and 90s?
Well, I guess you guys may be too young.
But it's for the forbidden fruit thing.
If you just tell people that you can't do this,
well, the youth are going to rebel,
particularly if society doesn't have that much
to offer young people these days,
which is kind of the case.
This is the Maldani question in New York.
What does society have to offer young people these days?
Student debt, minimum wage,
which doesn't pay for anything.
Massively expanded immigration,
which is killing job opportunities
for a lot of people.
For a lot of young white men in particular,
they know that there are diversity quotas
that are going to bar them from easy access
to a number of jobs.
They also know that the school is designed
to schools when they're younger,
when they're younger, all designed to facilitate girls
and to please girls and to promote girls
at the expense of boys a lot of times,
because boys and girls generally learn quite differently.
And the boys get drugged
and the girls get gold stars,
and the boys they yell at and the girls are praised.
And so for young men,
if they might listen to society saying,
don't talk about this.
If society seems to be functioning well
for young men and gives them a path to, you know,
the two things that you need in life
to be happy is love and productive work.
And if those are barred for a variety of reasons
because for men, productive work leads to love
because you have to be able to support a family
or you want to be able to support a family.
So if society says to young men,
screw you and you can't talk about X.
Well, those two things are going to fuse together
in people's minds and say, okay, well, the society
is screwing us over and doesn't care about us.
And then society says, we can't talk about X.
They said, well, I bet X has something positive to it
because so it is just a bad combination of things
and just not listening to the youth
and not listening to young males in particular.
You're just going to lose them
and they're going to be scooped up by someone
and that's the price you pay for.
You know, it's like if you keep yelling at your girlfriend
at some point, she's going to go and get another boyfriend.
You know, if you keep treating her badly,
she's going to go somewhere else.
And the best way for society,
let's say that they look at people like Nick
and say, oh, you know, you shouldn't listen to Nick.
It's like, okay, well, then go talk to the young men
in particular and ask them what the issues are,
ask them what the problems are,
really work to try and address their concerns
and then maybe you'll diffuse whatever is going on
that people dislike, right?
But if you just keep yelling and screaming at them
and calling them, you know, racist and white supremacists
and Nazis and this and that and the other,
at some point it's just like, you know,
if you keep verbally abusing your girlfriend,
she's going to go to some other guy
and then don't cry to me if you don't have her love anymore, right?
Agreed, yeah, 100%.
I think a part of the reason Nick is drawing so much fire right now
is because he's kind of struck this balance
between, you know, he's rhetorically sharp,
he's ideologically committed.
He also has this like pragmatic America first messaging
and it feels like it's that combination
that's made him kind of effective
and also threatening to the establishment
because he does seem to be cutting through
some of the party politics noise
and even challenging some pretty prominent MAGA figures
and it seems like it's kind of based upon this
America at first ethos
and so it's kind of put a position in him
in this like thought leader place,
but he's also this like perceived kind of bellwether
of honesty of America centered politics, you know?
So it does feel like his rise seems to be signaling
a shift away from these like sanitized talking points.
People seem to want something a little more raw
or a little more based, I guess as a kid say.
Let's behold into like these legacy gatekeepers.
So do you think like his popularity kind of reflects
like a coming of age within American politics?
Maybe for like the Gen Z political class
who ultimately will demand more authenticity
from politics as far as just the political realm.
Yeah, again, I don't want to focus particularly
on Nick Fuentes because again,
I'm not up to on what he's talking about,
but I certainly know the edge lord stuff
because it shows up on my Twitter feed
and replies and so on to the provocative edge lord stuff.
So I think that in American politics
it's the meme that everyone has seen is like,
okay, so you call yourself conservatives,
what have you conserved?
What have you won? What have you conserved?
What have you made?
So people look at Reagan and you know the amnesty
that switched the votes and demographics of California
and they look at Reagan and say,
oh, he defined the, he signed in the defense,
sorry, he signed in basically no fault,
divorce and of course I think it was under Reagan
in 86 that the Vaccine Liability Immunity Act
or whatever it was called was passed,
which has at least at the base of a lot of health issues
and again, causal or correlational,
I'm not an expert enough to say,
but excluding companies from liability
for medical products,
a lot of which have not been double-blind tested,
that's not very free market, that's not very responsible,
that's not very good.
So I think people look at the left and say,
okay, so if we go with the left then there's all this money
that goes from the productive people
to the less productive people that harms the economy
as a whole, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
and there's problems and issues with all of that
and then they look at the right and they say,
okay, well they seem to be pretty keen on wars
and they pretty much are trailing the left
by five to 10 years and so on
and they don't get done what they say they need to get done.
I mean the left, you know,
I'm not a fan of the left of course, right,
but they kind of do what they say,
hey, open borders, hey look at you get open borders,
hey, we're going to pass Obamacare,
well they get to pass Obamacare
and the right makes all of these promises
and really don't fulfill that many.
I mean for how long has Obamacare been
in the sights of the Republican leadership
and they don't even seem to have much of a plan
to replace these, you know, these absolutely appalling,
like I see these bills posted for, you know,
the monthly, family of four monthly health insurance
like $3,000, $4,000, $5,000
with these crazy deductibles, like $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 deductibles.
I mean that's just a straight up shakedown,
I read a, there's a great professor, Dr. Roderick Long,
and I read one of his articles many years ago
about these friendly societies that young,
particularly young families and so on
and workers would join and you could get an entire year's
access to a doctor for two days wages,
like you would just go for free to the doctor
to get whatever treatment you needed
and it would cost you two days wages for that
and how cheap it used to be is wild
and of course as things get better, they should get cheaper.
I mean just computers and TVs and tablets and so on.
That's where the free market generally works the most
because you don't even need a license to go into those fields.
You can go be a programmer.
I was a programmer, I have a history degree.
So I do think that people look,
the young people look and say,
okay, what has the, what have the conservatives conserved
and has there been any reckoning?
Dick Cheney just died a couple of days ago,
a genuinely evil dude in so many ways.
If you don't pay your taxes, you go to jail.
If you, I mean, if you speed, you get a fine
and if you don't pay it, you can have problems.
But you can start a war under false pretenses
that kills half a million people
and nothing happens to you and that's so strange.
Particularly for young males,
maybe a little bit more for young white males having grown up.
Well, you're responsible for colonialism.
You're responsible for slavery.
You're responsible for oppressing the poor.
You're responsible for the third world being poor
and you've got to suffer for it
and you've got to be excluded for it
and you've got to be shamed for it.
And it's like, this guy started a war
and nothing, nothing.
George W. Bush, he's doing his little paintings.
Oh, look at my iPad.
I've done these paintings.
It's like, bro, you used depleted uranium weapons
and destroyed the genetic integrity
and there's still birth defects coming out of Fallujah.
Like it looks like an asylum from the outside.
Like in the inside, you get normed up
and it just feels like it's just life
and you know, blah, blah, blah.
But from the outside,
and I think this is where sort of philosophy comes in.
The philosophy denormalizes what you're used to
and applies principles
and that's like what physics does, right?
So physics says, oh, by the way,
you're not on the earth that's fixed.
It feels fixed, but you're actually spinning around the globe
and you're going around the sun
and the sun's going around the Milky Way
and you're traveling hundreds of thousands of kilometers a second.
You just don't know it, right?
And the sun and the moon look the same size
but the sun is 100 times bigger than earth
and it looks like the sun is going around you
but you're actually going around the sun.
Like it just messes with your perspective
and gives you facts outside of what comes
through the senses and we generally conclude.
And philosophy does that with politics too
and you say, okay, okay,
so the people who've done great evil in this world
get positive reviews, get pensions
and get to walk off into the sunset
in sort of Norman Rockwell sunset golden hues
of acceptability.
And you know, people crap at them or whatever it is
but it doesn't really, they die.
People who cause half a million people to get vaporized
and then poison hundreds of thousands of people
with depleted uranium weapons,
they get to die peacefully in their beds
but I get deplatformed and you guys get deplatformed.
And when you take that sort of objective,
moral view of society,
it's a sort of vicious, scaldingly corrupt,
vetted asylum of corruption and immorality
and then when you have that view of society
which is not super uncommon
and again, there's lots of ways you can look at it
but it's very disorienting when you try to apply
objective moral values to society as a whole
and you look at that and you say,
okay, so when I was a kid,
if I didn't do my homework, I was punished
and I could actually lose a year of my life
because they could hold you back a year and so on
so when I was a kid, if I didn't do my homework,
you know, when I was a kid,
I was in boarding school and I climbed over this fence
to get a soccer ball back that we were playing with
and I got knocked on by some prefect
and I got dragged up to the headmaster's office
and I got caned.
So I get punished for climbing a fence to get a ball.
Okay, so society's really ended up,
you gotta be punished if you do wrong,
if you do bad, you gotta be punished.
It's like, well, unless you start a war
or unless you don't follow the Constitution
or unless you pardon a whole bunch of people
without even knowing their cases
or, you know, like then you just,
you know, no problem.
And so when people get a sense
that the law is the strangest fisherman's net-known demand
in that it catches all of the tiny fish
but lets all the big fish swim free,
then society loses its credibility.
This is why the Epstein files stuff was so powerful for people.
People are desperate to get the Epstein files
because they're desperate to believe in their society again.
They're desperate to say,
is this all just some horrible shite storm of corruption
and the pretense of virtue?
Is it just an exercise of power
with no moral content whatsoever?
And the Epstein files stuff again,
nobly a champion by the Miami Herald
and Mike Cernovich and we did shows on this back of the day.
And of course everybody knows
that when Epstein houses were broken into,
particularly I think the Brownstone in New York they found,
massive amounts of video material,
the rooms were all wired up.
And so of course there's tons of blackmail material
all over the place there.
And people are desperate to be like,
please, please, please Lord above,
let me retain some moral respect for my society.
Let the bad guys be exposed and hopefully punished.
And this is sort of part of the issue that's going on.
You cannot shield the powerful from moral consequences
and then yell and humiliate and attack young men
for listening to edgy shows.
I mean you can do it,
but nobody with any common sense is going to believe you.
So all of the people who are looking at cancelling other people
and so on is like, okay, where are you demanding,
say the Epstein files get released?
And of course if, I doubt that, I mean, it's all long gone.
I don't mean deleted, it's just long transported somewhere else.
But those are very real issues.
They're very real issues.
And when America or other Western countries being broke,
but they have tons of money for migrant-buying benefits,
they have tons of money for the war in Ukraine,
they have tons of money for foreign aid.
Of course not just to Israel,
but to countless countries around the world.
This was sort of the doge thing, right?
Where it was a big ball, sorry, I'll shut up for a second.
But the doge thing was really fascinating
because you look at the amount of corruption,
money laundering going to obviously a lot of leftist causes,
but other things as well.
You say, okay, so that's really corrupt
and nobody did anything about it.
And everyone's complaining that the funding is being cut down
or cut off, but nobody cared.
And yet I can't even,
so all of this corrupt money moving, money laundering,
borrowing, printing, counterfeiting, you name it,
that's all perfectly approved of.
But in America, of course,
and I think in other places too bad,
you can't even discharge student loan debt in a bankruptcy.
Like it will.
It's like, hope he's mad.
He'll never, never leaves you.
And so it is, oh, financial responsibility for the poor.
Like bailouts for the rich.
And then people think communists
are going to solve the comments
that's going to make it worse
because it's communist principles
allowing for it to happen in the first place.
But so, yeah, I just, if you want to lure people away,
let's say you think people like Nia Kuwaito
is just the worst, okay, fine.
Then lure them back, right?
Just coming down with the ban hammer on people
is just going to radicalize people further.
You've got to engage or find a way to lure them back.
And society compels, or I shouldn't say compels,
society elicits obedience from young males
by bribing them with jobs,
houses, benefits, healthcare, wives, children.
And of course, because men have a lot of testosterone,
they've got a lot of punchiness
when they're younger in particular,
and what lowers testosterone
and gets you more into the productive middle-class,
middle-aged male lifestyle.
Marriage and kids.
Your testosterone goes down
when you get married.
It goes down even further when you have kids.
You are tamed by a job and a family.
And if you can't give young men a job and a family,
they stay pissed, and they stay energetic,
and you lose credibility.
So people who aren't talking about how to help the young
in particular, you know,
they're just driving people more towards,
I don't know, whoever they...
Oh, unacceptable.
It's like, what's unacceptable
is to have an entire generation of young people
who can't start a family, who can't get and keep jobs,
who have no financial stability,
who rely on the gig economy and come buy a house.
Sorry.
End of speech.
Thank you for your patience.
No, man, that was well said.
And I tend to agree wholeheartedly with that.
I recently wrote an article that kind of addresses some of that.
It actually published this morning about how,
like you just mentioned the Epstein files.
This is all in our faces.
All these conspiracy theories, air quotes, right?
Like government surveillance, censorship,
media manipulation, pharmaceutical company corruption,
an elite cabal of child traffickers running our world, right?
That's all real.
And these people put it out there
and these limited hangout types of ways
and then people pick up on it.
And no one applies any critical thought to it
because everybody's stuck in these tribes of us versus them.
And so everybody views all this stuff through their tribal filter.
And I mean, this is the basic mechanics
of modern propaganda in my opinion.
We recently had a podcast guest on it.
We go really deep into that.
Well, then let me just mention as well,
I was raised in the UK, in England, in London.
Well, I went to school near Wales.
But in England, since the 1950s,
there have been these immigrant rape gangs.
Everybody knows about it.
I talked about it even when I was younger.
And the numbers are beyond staggering.
The numbers of little girls,
primarily white girls,
which makes it, of course, racist, racial attacks,
but also seek girls and boys.
And this has been covered up and suppressed
for well north of 50 or 60 years.
50 or 60 years.
You've got Jimmy Saville at the BBC,
one of the most horrendously evil pedophile
and rapists and necrophiliacs
and promoted to the highest level
of media and society.
And you have governments that covered up
the mass rape of children.
That is so hard for people to process.
Because of course, what's the traditional argument
with the Hobbesian argument like,
well, you've got to give up some rights
so that you get protected by the government.
And the government not only brings people in
and covers up their crimes,
but will actually arrest you
for trying to arrest you, your own children.
There were times when British fathers,
it's a horrible, it's such a horrible topic.
There were times when British fathers
were trying to get their children back
from these rape gangs
and they were arrested,
the fathers were arrested for disturbing the peace.
And this stuff is so horrendous
that to ask young people to have respect for this,
because it's not being ripped out to the root and branch.
It's not like, oh my God, we've found out about this,
we've got to fix this,
we've got to find the people who are responsible for it
and prosecute them for covering up a crime
for being complicit in the mass rape of children.
No one is ripping this out to the root and branch.
And then to say to people,
ah, well, you said herty words on the internet,
so we're going to come out and get you
or after this cover up of this mass rape of children,
which is, it's so beyond comprehension for anyone
with any basic morals, virtues or love of children
or protection of culture,
it's so incomprehensible.
You know, I feel bad if I get a fact wrong in a podcast.
Oh, I'm sorry.
And for then the British establishment to say,
oh, the problem is white supremacy and Tommy Robinson.
That's the problem.
And it's like, again, if you're inside that matrix,
if you're inside that Truman Show,
maybe that all makes sense in some bizarro.
But if you're outside looking at the actual morals of society,
you have governments after governments
and both the labor and the conservatives in England, right?
So the left and the right in Margaret Thatcher
suppressed inquiries into pedophilia at the highest levels.
So you have governments covering up the mass rape of children.
And then those governments say,
we represent law, virtue, goodness and order.
And we're going to tell you who the bad guys are.
And I'm like, are you killing me?
Are you kidding me?
It's almost beyond comprehension
how skeptical young people are of the societies they live in.
I mean, in America and in most places,
resistance to mass immigration has been extraordinarily high
for many, many, many decades.
Everybody says less immigration to no immigration,
less immigration, does anybody listen?
No.
And you cannot listen to the people.
You cannot listen to the people, for sure.
And you can support and protect warmongers.
And you can support and protect those who cover up
the rape and grooming of children.
And you can support all those people.
But if you do that, I guarantee you,
your big problem isn't Nick Fuentes.
Your big problem is the moral rotten corruption
at the center of your own institutions.
And if you can't reform that, yelling about, you know,
and he's, look, he's rude, he's aggressive.
He's divisive.
At times, I'd, again, I can't judge the guy as a whole.
And he's an edgelord and he says stuff that, you know,
I mean, anyone clipped can be made to look like a lunatic.
But yeah, he's edgy and so on.
And that's that is part of the culture and so on.
And that stuff he says that I significantly disagree with.
But I look at the moral problems in the world right now,
the war, debt, enslavement, mass, child rape, rising crime rates,
and the disintegration of any central ethos in society.
And I say, is a podcaster the big issue?
It's a little hard to follow that logic.
Because when corrupt people get upset, and I think,
and again, I can't speak for people as a whole,
but I just wonder if people look at,
maybe, I mean, I watched the Sopranos finally.
And in the Sopranos, of course, there's a guy
who's going to inform on the mob, right?
I can't remember his name, whatever.
Although it's funny because he's reading Nozick's
Anarchy State in Utopia.
I remember that very significantly from the series.
I don't know what that means, but it was in the series.
And so there's a guy who's going to inform on the mob.
He witnessed a crime.
And the mob wants to de-platform him, right?
They want to find out who he is so they can kill him, right?
As they do with Adriana and some of the other characters
who they feel might inform on them.
Pussy, whatever his name is, right?
So if the mob wants to wipe you out,
it's because you have something harmful to the mob.
In other words, you're probably on the side of the good guys.
And again, without going into details about Nick
or anything like that, which I can't really speak to,
but I think that there's a lot of young people
who are like, okay, well, if the system is really corrupt,
the system is really corrupt,
then corrupt people only go after honest people.
Corrupt people only go after other people.
If they view society as kind of a pretty corrupt semi-
whatever, like negative institution,
or full of negative institutions or corrupt institutions,
okay, so if it's like the mob, right?
It's like, well, the mob is targeting this guy.
It's like, well, it's either because he's a competitor to the mob
and they want to wipe him out
because he's a criminal who's going to muscle him into territory
or he's an informant who's going to try and put the mob in jail.
Now, obviously, people with podcasts are not vying
for the very centers of political power
or anything that run the judiciary or anything like that.
So it's probably not competitors,
and so it's a lot easier to attack outsiders
than clean up your own conscience.
And I think that a lot of that is happening,
and I think it's a real shame.
I think that people should try to address...
I'm a big root cause guy.
If you can't address root causes,
you're just playing whack-a-mole with all of the effects
and it doesn't solve anything.
Sorry, again, I got to tell you when it's the end of the speech
because I can go on and I appreciate your patience.
I mean, it's all good, man. I like that.
It's no surprise that these people in power
don't go after the child predators
when they're the child predators themselves,
especially in the UK, I remember a few years ago,
the UK had to stop naming streets after politicians
because later investigations would reveal eventually
that those politicians were pedophiles
and they would have to go back and re-change the streets again.
Sir Edward Heath was one of the recent ones,
former prime minister, you know.
We also covered the mass rapes that were not being reported
by police and they were all getting let go.
It's like what...
this open-air corruption that these...
like you mentioned, that these kids are...
the younger kids are watching.
It's almost hard not to become a nihilist, right?
They're falling right into this,
I believe that this is deliberate, right?
And it's the...
when they do censor people,
the censorship drives these voices
into more polarized sides, if you will.
Even when they aren't polarized,
they're still viewed as polarized by so many people.
And we saw a perfect example of that with Charlie Kirk.
The media, the online outrage mob,
you know, they took so many of this man's sentences.
Now, I don't agree with Charlie Kirk
on a whole bunch of shit that he said,
but he was right in his DEI practices,
speeches and stuff like that,
but so many of his... of these sentences that he said
were like chopped up and then posted...
pasted to memes and he was sold as a racist.
You know, it's like...
it's a classic disinformation tactic,
like to edit the reality to fit the smear.
And of course, you know, everybody lapped it up
like good little sheep that they are.
And you know, it's like a tactic of decontextualization.
It's not new.
And it kind of brings me to your own private
or public profile.
Sorry.
You know, anyone who Googles your name
is immediately hit with your Wikipedia page
and which reads like a laundry list of isms, right?
I know I'm sure you've looked at it like
racism, misogynism, white nationalism.
It's a rap sheet designed to end all discussion
before it starts.
I said something at the beginning of the podcast
that that's exactly how you get to a situation
where we are right now.
And it's dangerous because this does lead
to polarizing voices that aren't the best ones
to be representing the ideas that, you know,
represent like non-aggression principle
and libertarianism, peaceful parenting.
It represents extremism.
And people, they lift these extremists up
to the, you know, to the podiums.
And I believe that gets dangerous.
And that's what leads to civil war.
And that's how society degrades into something
that's not salvageable, in my opinion, you know.
But from your perspective, you know,
as a man who's, you know, had his own words
analyzed and clipped and used by the mob
for years, like how much of that, like,
public rap sheet is deliberate, bad faith,
decontextualization, like the same tactic
we saw against Kirk, you know.
And how do you even begin to fight that narrative
when the official record is controlled
by the very people who profit from that smear?
Yeah, I mean, all of it, all of it.
I mean, I remember my picture was on the
front cover of the New York Saturday Times
three times, three times, right?
And sort of the lie was that I said
that the different races are different species.
And of course, I wasn't talking about that at all.
I was talking about, I was basically saying
that you could, and it's not even,
it wasn't even anything original that I did.
I said, you can kind of look at criminals and their victims
in a predator-prey relationship, right?
Like they're different species.
I said, I know they're not different species,
but it's an analogous way of looking at it.
So simply talking about predators and criminals
and victims, not anything to do with ethnicity,
but anyway, so that's all just nonsense in the lie.
But the funny thing is that you can,
you can see all the way back to the 1940s,
all the leftists and communists were saying,
they gave their whole game plan.
They said, look, if somebody becomes annoying to us,
we will simply call them a white supremacist,
a white nationalist.
We will call them a Nazi and a racist
until we can erase them from public discourse.
So even when, like for 70 years ago, right?
70 years ago, maybe years ago,
they said, this is what we're going to do.
It doesn't matter.
It still works.
It's funny, you know, like if Rommel in North Africa
would have published his entire battle plans
three months before he did them, he'd be defeated.
And these guys have openly said,
this is our plan.
This is what we're going to do.
And it still works.
It still works.
It's amazing.
So, but I mean, that's the deal, right?
If you're going to tell the truth,
you're going to piss off liars.
If you're going to tell the truth,
if you're going to promote virtue,
you're going to thwart the intentions of evil doers.
And that's the gig.
That's the deal.
It's like when I was in the business world,
if I never annoyed my competitors,
I would go out of business
because you have to win contracts
that your competitors want.
And you have to get the business your competitors want
and you have to get the employees
your competitors want to hire.
So, to do good in the world
means to be targeted by those
whose evil intentions you're thwarting.
And that is the gig.
That is the deal.
It comes with great honor.
Not in the present, right?
I mean, Socrates was put to death
by the majority vote in the present.
So in the present, or Jesus, of course,
in the present, you're viewed as a villain.
And then down the road, down the road,
you know, long after you're dead,
maybe your grandchildren enjoy the renewed,
the renewed praise of your foresight and intellect.
But yeah, that is just the deal.
You know, like China has these 500 year plans.
I mean, I think half a millennium for philosophy
is pretty good.
It's pretty good.
It takes about, well, maybe with the internet,
it will go down to something shorter,
but it takes at least two or three generations
for people to catch up with an innovator,
particularly a moral innovator.
Like it took centuries before,
it took centuries to end slavery,
which was a white Western Christian mission,
which England only finished paying off
for a couple of years ago,
the debt for freeing the slaves in the 19th century.
But it took centuries from the first people to say,
hey, maybe slavery is not particularly moral
to actually being able to end slavery.
It just, it takes a long time.
People don't think they're just programmed.
They're NPCs.
And what you can do is you can adjust things a little bit,
right?
So you can move people to some small degree
and then their children are raised
with a little bit more latitude
and get exposure to more information.
It really is like trying to change society
is like trying to turn around some giant super tanker.
You know, you can spin the wheel
and then your grandchildren get to see the other direction.
It works like that.
I mean, so yeah, we feel like Nick Fuentes,
well, a lot we disagree on.
A lot we disagree on.
I don't like the single answer of society's problems.
I don't like he's a Christian.
I'm not.
He's a nationalist.
I'm not.
He's a statist.
I'm not.
In fact, I consider those pretty negative
and appalling positions.
But I had a conversation with this as many years ago.
I think it was like 18 or something like that.
We did a show.
So there's a lot I disagree with him.
You've got to find common ground
so that you can bring people
to a better perspective or position hopefully
in the long run.
But yeah, the slander tool works very well.
It works very well because
not because people believe it
or they know about it or they think about it.
But what they do is they say,
powerful people are pissed with this guy.
I don't want to get any splash damage.
I mean, that's the same thing with you guys.
Those are powerful people are pissed at this guy.
They're going to go after him.
I don't want to get caught up in the mix.
And you know, and again,
you know, most people don't have any relationship
to the truth.
They only have a relationship to approval,
you know, that old meme of like,
if particularly if you don't lift,
like for a man, if you're not physically fit,
if you don't lift, you don't know what you think
because you're just a low T week conformist
and you're just going with the flow,
social metaphysician stuff that
I and Wren talked about.
So yeah, I don't,
I don't have much respect for people who don't lift.
I don't have much respect for people who don't,
who've never worked a manual job,
a manual labor job
because they don't have much of a direct connection to reality.
Everything's open to manipulation.
Oh, I forgot about the test.
Can I retake it?
It's like, but if you make a mistake
with some physical implement,
you could lose an arm, right?
You can't negotiate with that.
So you've got to really surrender
to objective reality if you work.
I don't generally respect people
who have never ventured much
out of their high trust societies.
You know, I was reading some academic this morning.
Hey, let's go.
Let's go current, shall we?
Let's go.
Let's go live.
Karen, what did I read this morning?
It was pretty funny.
It sort of conforms to this,
this meme as an expert,
you know, and it always is followed
by the worst conceivable,
conceivable take that you could have.
And I think I'm going to be fine.
But as an expert, right?
So Elon Musk has been criticizing pathological altruism, right?
And he said, as an expert,
you know, empathy is really good for society
because it allows for, you know,
lists all these positive things, right?
And it's like, so this is a guy,
he grew up in a high trust neighborhood.
He is an academic, I assume.
And so he's in a fairly high trust environment
called academia, you know,
there's not a lot of cultural predation
and violence that goes on in academia.
I mean, it's bitchy,
but that's only because the stakes are so small.
But this is a guy who doesn't understand
that there are cultures out there
wherein it's perfectly permissible to lie to
and steal from outsiders.
So he's like, empathy is really good.
And it's like, how could you be studying this stuff
for decades and not know that there are predatory
in-group preference cultures out there?
I mean, that level of ignorance is almost staggering.
So people who've never ventured out
of their high trust environments
to actually understand about the world,
I view them as, it's like a chihuahua
trying to give advice to a wolf.
It's like, you know, just whack your tail
and you'll get food.
Just bark in a cute way
and you'll be put in Paris Hilton's head back.
Why would I listen to anyone like that?
I'm sorry, again, a bit of a side read,
but go ahead.
No, I think you made some great points there.
And I think there is some overlap
with one of my questions that I had
about cultural preservation.
But to be honest, stuff,
we're getting a little low on time.
I think we probably only have time
for maybe two more questions.
And I know generally at the end of the podcast,
Matt does the white pill question
where we try to leave on a positive note.
And it's my fault.
It's my fault that we were low on questions.
I take full ownership.
Sorry.
No, it's great.
I mean, you're feeding us everything that we want.
You know, we're hoping to get some opinions
and truth and philosophy out of you.
So I think so far this has been great.
But do you have any preference?
I can't quite decide if we talked about pragmatism
versus principle or my other questions,
divide and conquer versus cultural preservation.
Do you have any preference?
Oh, yeah.
Let's go with the first one if that's all right.
So obviously it's a big one.
You know, the pragmatism versus principle debate.
And we've wrestled with this for years on the podcast.
It's come up in multiple conversations with a bunch
of different guests.
And I'm not sure we've really gotten any closer.
So you do seem like the guy to ask the question to,
but you know, obviously at the heart of libertarian
philosophy is principle, the non-aggression principle,
self-ownership, property rights.
They're not just subjective preferences, right?
They're moral commitments.
And of course, not all libertarians hold a line equally,
right?
Some of them treat the principles a little bit more sacred.
Some of them are a little more flexible.
With the rise of Trump, and even through the COVID years,
we saw this different direction emerge.
Rhetoric in the Liberty circles about pragmatism
kind of became a little more prevalent.
COVID in particular, you know, we saw the left
who dominated a lot of state and local positions
really tighten the chains with like the lockdowns
and the mandates and all the draconian policies
and everything, which seemed like it was a big wake-up call
to a lot of people, not just libertarians.
But it did feel like at that time,
the libertarians realized that standing by their principles
had these real-life consequences,
and it didn't do a lot to really stop the onslaught of tyranny.
So some people even, you know, back Trump
not because he was libertarian,
but because he seemed like he was this person
against the system, right?
So I think most of us naturally want to live by our principles,
but there seems to be an adoption process,
like a critical mass, like a scaling of sorts
to really resonate on a social level.
So I guess the question that I've been asking
is if our principles don't immediately stop tyranny,
then like, you know, what's the utility there?
And if pragmatism does help push the needle towards liberty
even slightly, are they worth compromising?
So like, you know, when does pragmatic engagement
become kind of the necessary resistance?
And is there a point when preserving libertarian purity
actually kind of undermines liberty itself?
Yeah, I mean, this is...
I don't want to speak for Mike Cernovich,
but he's very much on the pragmatist side.
So the way that I view this question
is that you need a bell curve.
So if you don't have the principled people,
the pragmatic people become amoral.
If you don't have the pragmatic people,
the principled people remain easily victimized ideologues
or utopians, if that makes sense.
So not everyone has to sit in the middle, right?
So we don't want just pure pragmatism
because that just means compromising
and telling the voters whatever they want
in order to gain power, which is going to corrupt everyone.
At the same time, we don't want people who just
talk about ideals and ideas
because that is not going to change
or move the needle much in practical society.
Does that sort of make sense?
Yeah.
So you have a bell curve.
So you need people in the middle
who can translate the ideals into the pragmatic action.
You need the pragmatists
who are going to be able to implement that stuff.
You know, the sort of Scott Pressler pounding on the doors
and signing up the voters and all that kind of stuff.
And you need the idealists to steer the ship,
to make sure that you're not over-compromising in pragmatism
to the point where, like, a lot of the Republican Party,
you end up just chasing dollars and donations
and minor, well, wins,
but without fundamentally reversing the course
or direction of the country.
Now, myself, I'm very pragmatic
and that sort of comes out of growing up poor
and running businesses and so on,
like you have a very...
I've been working with my hands for quite some time
as a manual laborer.
Skilled manual laborer, but manual laborer, nonetheless.
And so I...
An idealist, I want to put out the principles and the virtues.
I do want them to be brought into action.
So this is where the libertarian movement
and I, many, many years ago, kind of parted ways.
And so I'm a business guy.
So SWAT analysis, Six Sigma stuff.
As a business guy, what you do is you say,
what is the biggest market I could enter?
What is the biggest market?
The biggest market that I can't enter who cares, right?
If it's a small market, then I could enter
and I can sell three widgets who cares.
What is the biggest market I could actually sell into?
That's sort of the question.
So having been an entrepreneur for a long time
before I got into the sort of libertarian circles,
when I said, okay, so we've got the non-aggression principle.
That's a really good thing, man.
That's the wonderful thing.
Now, what is the biggest violation
of the non-aggression principle that we can do the most about?
Now you could say, well, the biggest violation
of the non-aggression principle is war and fiat currency.
A lot of the two sides of the same coin that Bitcoin
is trying to take on, right?
You say, okay, biggest violation in the moment
is unjust imprisonment, totalitarianism, war,
and fiat currency.
Okay, though those are big, what can we do about them?
Nothing.
As individuals, we can't stop war.
We can't knock on the door of the Fed and say,
oh, I made, you got a license for that money.
Right, so we can't go and stop that.
And if we did try to stop that,
and let's say you could turn off fiat currency tomorrow
and it would be a basket of commodities
or gold-backed currency or Bitcoin-backed currency
or something like that.
I mean, there would just be massive amounts of suffering
which would be blamed upon whoever did that
and it would lose legitimacy for generations,
all that kind of stuff, right?
So what I did is I said, okay,
what's the biggest violation of the non-aggression principle
in society that we can do the most about?
I said, okay, well, spanking.
Circumcision, spanking, child abuse, like whatever.
That's the biggest violation of the non-aggression principle
that we can do the most about, right?
Those overlapping circles.
It's big and we can do something about it.
And we don't have to win elections.
We don't have to raise a billion dollars.
Plus, we don't have to become experts.
We don't have to have abs.
I can tell you that for sure.
So the biggest violation of the non-aggression principle
that we can do the most about is child abuse.
Now, I also have a whole theory which I won't get into here.
People can find it at fdrpodcast.com,
the family in the state,
that child abuse leads to a belief in the government
because if it's children, we believe that
you need violence to manage your behavior.
Otherwise, you're going to run wild.
Then when you grow up and the government says,
well, we need the government to manage your behavior.
Otherwise, society runs wild.
You just believe it because it's how you grew up, right?
You believe it like you speak English.
If you grow up speaking English, it's just the way that it is.
So I focused very heavily on that.
I interviewed Jordan Riyak and other experts on spanking.
I put forward all the data.
I got the truth about spanking.
And I said, if you are a libertarian,
the first place you should be looking for is child abuse.
Because also people who abuse as children
have a very tough time reasoning as adults
because of trauma and dark spots within the brain.
So we have to focus on child abuse
because we want to show the value of the non-aggression principle.
If we can show how beautiful and powerful
the non-aggression principle is,
people will start to accept it and understand it, right?
I mean, if you can't convince people
that your diet and exercise regime is good,
then go get you and your friends to follow it.
And then you'll be this bunch of people
that look like the cast members of 300,
which is 300 abs per person,
and will believe you.
And so the pragmatism for me, it's funny,
because as a philosopher and as a moral idealist,
I'm called abstract and idealistic
and non-pragmatic or what's the pragmatic solution.
And I'm like, no, no, no.
I gave everyone exactly the best way
to oppose violations of the non-aggression principle,
child abuse, that they can do the most about.
They can raise children peacefully themselves.
They can promote peaceful parenting among friends,
extended family.
They can talk about the evils of spanking.
And I did a back of the napkin calculation
about a year ago.
1.5 billion assaults on children
have been stopped by what it is I've done.
1.5, not million, billion.
Of course, I arguably believe also
because I get emails of people who are like,
oh, I wasn't going to have kids,
and I saw how much fun you were having with your daughter,
and I now can apply the non-aggression principle
to my parenting, so I had kids,
at least half a million people.
I mean, I've got one tweet made 60,000 people
on my Taylor Swift tweet,
but at least half a million people have come into existence
because of what it is that I've done.
I'm like the Mr. Chips.
I only had one child of my own,
but I got a lot of kids in a way.
And a billion and a half assaults against children
prevented, you know,
hundreds and hundreds of thousands of circumcisions
prevented by what?
So as far as actually
preventing violations
or stopping violations of the non-aggression principle,
I think I'm pretty fracking pragmatic.
I mean, it actually has
happened to me. I say, yes, but politics
is like, okay, libertarian parties
support all this effort into politics
rather than preventing child abuse.
What's that done?
I mean, I've got pragmatic
things.
That's a terrible way of putting it.
Things. I have had
virtuous pragmatic measurable effects
in preventing the non-aggression principle.
Everybody who's poured heart and soul
into nagging politicians and so on.
What have you got?
And, you know, if libertarians had listened to me,
we'd have a whole generation of people
nearing their teens
and late teens that would be
amazing and wonderful
and
passionate and self-express, you know,
all the things that my daughter, who's peacefully parented,
I stayed home with her,
can show
and people would then have a tough time dismissing
the non-aggression principle if they saw
its effects on actual human beings
rather than, well, but Milton Friedman
said, you know, which is a little tough
to convince people if that makes sense.
Yeah, man. That's the perfect answer
to Jason's question, which provides
the best segue into the white pill question
that we give our guests
at the end of the podcast, man.
But before I get to that, Stefan,
I want to thank you for coming on.
This has been a very fascinating discussion.
As you know, like as Jason mentioned
at the beginning, we've been censored,
de-platformed, at our words, constantly
twisted and taken out of context.
But, you know, what happened to you
was like on another level, man.
You know, seriously.
And it says a lot about a man's character
to be able to keep the fight up
and continue to produce work in the face
of this shit that you're facing, man.
Well, and to be fair,
I caused my own de-platforming.
I knew that the topics were volatile
and, you know, I'm not going to complain
about a head wound when I was literally playing Russian roulette.
I mean, I know that most people
are NPCs, I know they're easily programmed
and I was just willing to
burn and sacrifice my own income and reputation
just to get essential truths out into the world.
I mean, that's the deal.
Again, that says a lot, man.
And it proves
the point that we're discussing.
And you can't be afraid, even if you disagree
with these ideas, like to have these full
context, often difficult, you know,
conversations, even with people
that you might disagree with.
But if you do that, if you don't do that,
rather, you end up in a world where everyone
just believes the establishment's nonsense.
You know, you get this toxic culture
of what we have right now that is
easily witnessed on any social media platform
where it's this culture of censorship
and outrage and it creates this
vacuum for these polarizing caricatures
to become beacons for entire generations.
You know, of these
young kids who have nowhere else to put their anger
and rage, but into these people that are
filled with hate so often, you know.
But I mean, all this, go back
to what your previous answer to that
question, it feels like a symptom of a deeper problem.
And it certainly
is, you know, that problem you've
dedicated, you know, decades of your life to addressing
and it's peaceful parenting.
We had, I'm sure you're familiar with, Dana Martin
on the podcast, talk about this
very solution and
your work, like your book, you know, Peaceful Parenting
is the philosophical foundation for it.
I know Jason and I both stay at home with our kids
and we also practice peaceful parenting.
No circumcisions.
Yes, no circumcisions, exactly.
I had to put together
a PowerPoint show to convince my family
that we weren't going to circumcise my son's 16.
Yeah, you don't want to say to your sons, hey, I don't
mean to cut you off. Anyway, sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, funny story.
I was on, I was watching Mark Norman
at a comedy show and he has
at the end of the show, he allows people to yell
out, like different
subjects to, to like
to do comedy bits on and I yelled out circumcision
and he said, oh
hey, Dick
how nice of you to cut me off.
He posted it
to his Instagram and it was absolutely hilarious.
Anyway, I digress.
I'm making those jokes about female
circumcision and you're having a whole different life.
Right, it's the same exact
thing in my opinion. But, you know
anyway, it seems like this
culture of coercion, this cancel culture
this addiction
to punishing people for wrong
thing, it's the exact same mindset
that's molded in these coercive families, man.
And, you know, reading over
your book, I haven't read the whole thing, but I looked over the
abridged version of it, man.
It's this cycle of justification,
you know, and but it applies
to the entire public square and it's
dangerous. So, for the white pill
I want to bring it back to that foundation
for the parents listening right now
who are trying to guide their current
children through this insane
polarized world that
like is basically post
truth. What's the most important
advice you can give them and
also for the new generation, like
the young people who you mentioned
just a second ago who don't have
kids yet but, you know, are trying
to find their way to it and build their own families.
What are the most critical tools
they need to start owning now,
you know, to bring new sovereign
and resilient children into this world
and to try to break this vicious cycle, man?
That's a great question.
So, the first thing you need
to do is to lower your expectation.
So, a lot of people who grew up in
McMansions in the suburbs
or whatever, they say, well, that's what I got to have
to have children. It's like, no, you don't.
You really, really don't. Most of
their ancestors lived on
a dollar a day by modern
economics, right, by sort of modern
dollar value and
throughout the entire sort of
multi-billion march of
evolution, human beings for the last
million years lived on virtually nothing
and half their children died. You don't need
a mansion, you don't need a car,
you know, to raise
your kids in an apartment, I grew up in
an apartment, not a big problem, not a big
issue. It's got to lower your standards. The standard
of living is down. The boomers
were the peak of wealth.
Gen X and then the
millennials or Gen Y, you just
have to settle for less. You're not going to get what your parents had.
You're just not going to get what your parents had.
But don't let that stop you from having
children. Children don't care about stuff.
They care about their parents.
You know, the most fun that my daughter and
I had was in conversation
and made up verbal gameplay
and so on, right? It was not
in going to Chuck E. Cheese
and spending a lot of money and so on.
So, the kids care about
you, they care about conversation, they care
about good humor, they care about great games,
they care that you love them and
want to spend
a time with them and so on.
You just
give of your heart and of your soul
and of your passion and of your connection
to your family,
to your children and don't
worry so much about the money.
Don't worry, you don't have to buy love.
I mean, obviously you need some minimum and so on.
Don't be afraid to ask your parents.
Your parents are almost, I mean, certainly
wealthier than you and there's no point
waiting until you're dead to hand money to your
kids. Have your parents help you out.
Don't be afraid to ask for help and
just recognize that what
seems like tragedy at the time
can often be
some of the best times of your life.
I'm nearing the end of my parenting journey.
My daughter is almost 17 and
at least the sort of direct parenting
and looking back
at some of the tougher times of the show
or money or whatever it is
and it's like it's sort of like
there are people who men, lots of men
who come back from war and who later
on in their life say that war was the greatest
time they ever had. They had a mission, they had
companionship, they had
danger and excitement and if
people can learn to love war, you can love
privation, you can love being short of
things and
if you have the right people
in your life, if you have people who align
with you morally and who are rational
you can negotiate with and your children
you can negotiate with. I got a show
called the ABCs of UPB
on my website which is
how to explain ethics to a kid
who's two or three. I did a show yesterday
with a guy who says my three-year-old
and my six-year-old are picky eaters, what do I do
and we went through a whole conversation.
You can reason with kids, they want to
reason, they want to connect with you, they
want to respect you, hitting them destroys
all of that. Childhood is like
a glass, tremulous
Tennessee Williams Cathedral
of fragility and it's so easy to
break and to smash but it becomes so
incredibly strong if you love
and reason with
your children and by reasoning
with them by teaching them how to negotiate
to look for win-win situations, to understand
somebody else's point of view and trying to figure out
the best way that both the people's needs
can be met. You are giving them
advantages, staggering advantages
in the business world, in the romantic world
online, among friends
and so on. They will be the peacemaker, they will
be the person who leads other people to
reason and
negotiation and all you have
to do, all you have to do
is not use force. It's a miracle, right?
With the free
market, the whole free market, what is it? Well just don't
use force, don't have serfs, don't have slaves,
don't have historical
land going to the best killers of the previous
generation called the aristocracy, just don't
use force. If you don't use force
in the allocation of goods you get, the
free market you get, the von Mises
price calculation problem is solved, you get
efficiency, you get growth, all that had to
happen for the industrial revolution to occur was for slavery
and serfdom to end. Just stop using
force, stop treating people as
property and livestock and you get
all of this amazing stuff, all of this amazing
stuff. It's the same thing in families, it's the same
thing in all of your relationships. Just
stop using force, by force can be threats,
intimidation, blackmail, pouting, slamming
doors, slamming cupboards, withdrawing
affection, all of that is just force, manipulation
fraud, don't lie to people, be
honest and open with them, cling to your
heart those who are virtuous and
through that entire
society you create a virtuous people, you
create this immunity to corrupt
people, because corrupt people will not
want to spend time with you if you're
virtuous, so you bring the best people closer
to you, you automatically drive
the bad guys away and through that
process you can have an absolutely wonderful life
because that's what you can control,
that's what you can control,
you can't control what other people
eat, you can't control what you put in your
mouth, you can't control what other people
think, you can't control whether you
think or not and to take that
approach as close to paradise as you
can possibly get and we have such an
opportunity, I would rather live now
than any other time in history, we have
such an opportunity to teach and learn
from each other, to even have conversations
you guys and I would never have met
in the past you never would have heard of me
I would still be a business entrepreneur
doing my executive
board stuff or whatever right, so
the fact that we have these kinds of conversations
we have an absolutely unprecedented
ability to learn how to reason
with each other, to cross-pollinate
ideas and to
learn how to better communicate
them to other people, it is the
greatest time in human history, the internet
as I said like 20 years ago is the new Gutenberg
press and that you can
finally, finally we can communicate
to each other, you and I can talk to each other
without gatekeepers, without having to go through
some central agency, we can get this
information out to the world, people can promote it
as much as they want without
having to get licenses or get the approval
of a rubber stamp or some bureaucrat
absolutely unprecedented
in human history and
to take advantage of this kind of
communications technology, to
take advantage of the capacity
to have the non-aggression principle at the center
of all of your relationships, honesty
directness, assertiveness
and peace
yeah, the world is a bit of a shite show
I mean of course, it always has been
but at least now you can create a corner of paradise
and perhaps, perhaps
if that corner of paradise is vivid
and compelling enough for you and you share
the beauty and glory of it, I've been married
23 years, I have a great relationship with friends
and family and people
have been interested not knowing anything about
my show, they say you and your wife
are so much fun together, what's your secret
you and your kid get along so well, what's your secret
and you can then spread it
that way and that's never
happened before in human history and
we've really got to put our muscles
behind this wheel and get it
moving because most people
are going to learn empirically not through abstractions
and if you bring the non-aggression principle
to bear in your own life
people see the glories of
acting in alignment with p3s and the virtue
that's going to be a beautiful thing
if all you do is beat your head against the frustrating
wall of infinite physics
of infinite political pain
then you just look like a frustrated guy
who never gets anything done, he's never content
he's never happy and never enjoys his life
and people ain't going to buy
diet books from a fat guy
well said dude, very well said
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again thank you so much for coming on
and before we go how about you
tell people where they can finance it before you work
step on this was a great one man
if you want to find me look deep into your conscience
there's a bald speckled forehead down there somewhere
so yeah freedomain.com
for
the main sites at
StefanMolonyu, S-T-E-F-A-N-M-O-L-Y-N-E-U-X
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description folks
man thank you it was awesome
thank you guys so much I hope we get to talk again
thank you Saf
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