0:00 - Introduction to Contradictions
1:37 - The Nature of Monopolies
8:42 - The Role of Social Control
10:44 - Political Behavior and Coalition Loyalty
17:42 - Gender Perspectives in Politics
19:41 - Understanding Contradictory Thoughts
26:21 - The Evolutionary Perspective on Belief
30:07 - Media Analysis and Intellectual Elites
35:35 - Political Violence and Conscience
42:02 - The Importance of Historical Narratives
46:37 - Victimhood and Resource Distribution
48:56 - The Nature of Deception
53:25 - Reality vs. Unreality
54:30 - The Dangers of Truth-Telling
1:01:07 - The Decision to Return to Twitter
The interview begins as Keith Knight reintroduces Stefan Molyneux, touching upon themes of monopoly in the market. Knight points out a paradox within progressive ideology, where monopolies are perceived as detrimental, leading to higher prices and lower quality in the market, yet at the same time, proponents advocate for state monopolies on various services like taxation and compulsory education. He questions why academic elites and politicians are seemingly unbothered by these contradictions.
Molyneux responds with a metaphor, likening contradictions to a splinter that must be removed. He delves into his personal journey in reconciling contradictions, mentioning the prevalence of corruption that accompanies consolidated power. He identifies a tendency for organizations to become corrupt as they grow in complexity, leading to favoritism and inefficiency. He posits that while seeking improvement through the free market is essential, the State's methods often exacerbate the problem, creating larger monopolies that undermine the very freedoms they are supposed to protect.
The dialogue shifts towards the nature of social and economic relationships in small communities. Molyneux elaborates on how human behavior is influenced by social dynamics, arguing that in smaller towns, individuals must maintain positive relationships to thrive socially. This social pressure, he suggests, acts as a form of governance that aligns economic choices with community expectations, a contrast to broader systemic issues driven by government intervention.
Knight and Molyneux explore the behavioral mechanics of political allegiance, referencing Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler's proposition that political behavior often signals loyalty to one’s tribe rather than being a sincere effort to improve societal outcomes. Molyneux describes traditional distinctions between left and right ideology, framing the left’s emphasis on equality of outcome against the right’s focus on equality of opportunity. He attributes these differences to evolutionary perspectives, suggesting that empathy for the underdog on the left responds to a primal need to protect vulnerable offspring, while the right champions meritocratic values.
As the conversation progresses, Knight brings up how people manage to hold contradictory beliefs without discomfort. Molyneux outlines two primary lenses: a corruption argument, where individuals are seduced by power and the allure of effortless gain, and an evolutionary argument, suggesting that the inclination to suppress contradictions may offer survival advantages in competitive environments.
The discussion delves deeper into societal constructs and argues how historical narratives shape contemporary perspectives. Molyneux contends that the importance of historical events, like slavery, is not merely a reflection of the past but serves to inform future resource distribution and societal dynamics. He posits that grievances tied to history are often weaponized for political gain, allowing individuals and groups to leverage past injustices to obtain current advantages.
Knight proposes a case for Molyneux to rejoin Twitter, emphasizing the potential reach and influence he could have in spreading philosophical ideas. Molyneux acknowledges the merit of Knight’s argument, considering the broader implications of social media for philosophical outreach. However, he expresses significant reservations about the potential backlash and echoes feelings of being in an abusive relationship regarding the platform, recalling past hostilities he faced.
Molyneux concludes that while he sees the value in reaching a broader audience, he is cautious. He maintains a stance of waiting for reparations in terms of accountability and communication from platforms to ensure that his work does not lead to further personal harm in the pursuit of philosophical enlightenment. This layered conversation highlights the nuanced interplay of personal principles, societal organization, and the unpredictability of collective human behavior amidst evolving technological discourse.
[0:00] This is part three of my discussion with Mr. Molyneux of Freedomain.com. Stef, one of the most amazing things that I came across in my research was this claim that progressives have where they say monopolies are really bad. They lead to higher prices and lower quality that would otherwise exist under market conditions. They would then explain that the state needs to monopolize taxation, A central bank, compulsory education, have a monopoly on guns, and a long list of other things. How is it that people, especially people in high places, professors, experts, politicians, can hold such blatant contradictions without it totally bugging them or ever getting addressed publicly?
[0:50] Yeah. I mean, contradictions in my mind, they sit there like a splinter, you know, and if you've got a splinter in your finger and it's like you've just got to get it out, you've got to deal with it. Now, I mean, Lord knows it has taken me a long time to deal with some contradictions, but I think they've always kind of been back there in an easy quagmire of my brain saying, needs to be resolved, needs to be resolved. The question of monopoly being frightening to people is something I've never really quite understood. So generally, when power aggregates and coercive power aggregates, corruption follows.
[1:25] We talked about this at the end of the last conversation, that the more complex organizations tend to get kind of corrupt. And it's true. You get nepotism. You get favoritism. You get hire your buddies.
[1:37] You get wink wink nod nod money under the table to contractors where you give them deals and they give you some money back it is an inevitable human desire to get something for nothing, and I have no problem with that I mean we want this conversation without having to fly out and sit in the same room so we do that right when I was a kid you this is going to sound like ancient hieroglyphics to a younger audience when I was a kid you had to get up and change the channel and you did it by spinning a dial tick tick tick tick and they were like i don't know when i grew up as a kid there were like basically two channels in england there was bbc one which was nature documentaries there was bbc two which was people sweating in incredibly intense uh kind of game shows and then there was, james bond on itv and that was it so you'd have to get up now of course you can just point and click you can even voice say go find me some show or whatever and it'll figure out so we like getting something for nothing and that's great when it's in the free market it means things get progressively more efficient and wonderful.
[2:37] But there's a downside to that, of course, which is once you are willing to use force or fraud, then wanting something for nothing turns from efficiency to predation, right? And that's the big problem. So how do we counter the tendency for larger organizations to become more corrupt? Well, we have to do it through the free market.
[3:01] You can't say, well, the problem, as you point out, the problem is monopoly. Boy, you know, if somebody has a monopoly, if there's only one gas station in a small town, boy, they're just going to jack the prices through the roof because, no, it's not worth any other gas station coming there, and they'll just screw all their neighbors with their high gas prices. So a monopoly you see is really really bad when it comes to selling gas in a small town so what we want to do to counter that monopoly is create the most giant semi-fascistic organization with nukes and debt and money printing and and corrupt judges and all kinds of crazy stuff and the way that we deal with a small tiny mostly voluntary monopoly is with a giant predatory.
[3:45] Monopoly that you have no choice to participate in. And that is completely bizarre. Oh, do you have a slight headache? Well, beheading will solve that problem. And it's like, well, I suppose it's technically true. I don't have the headache anymore, but I'm also, you know, fading vision looking up Marie Antoinette style from a basket. So that doesn't seem to be the most productive way to solve things. So frightening you with enemies and pretending to be your friend, Well, that's the good cop, bad cop thing, and that's the statist mentality as a whole. Now, the problem, of course, is that the state is supposed to be there to solve problems like criminality, but the more criminality there is, the more you're willing to surrender your rights to the state. So it really is, it's like expecting mainstream, sorry, mainstream media to be objective about vaccines when brought to you by Pfizer. It's like in every other frame. It's probably subliminally put into Brian Stelter's highly reflective forehead. So it's just not objective. It's not a solution. But if they can frighten you with enemies, pretend to be your friend, you'll give up all the rights in the known universe. And, I mean, historically we know.
[4:55] Complaints about monopolies are never brought by consumers right so so let's say there's some you know you can said uh standard oil which was broken up and i remember explaining to my daughter we could go past an so gas station say why is it called so because that's the acronym for standard oil it was broken up and called so for standard oil so a monopoly let's say that it's voluntarily chosen by consumers well they choose it because it's really good and efficient at what it does us. And that's a plus. So the consumers who are choosing a monopoly are not complaining.
[5:31] Who complains when there's a monopoly? Well, it's all the competitors who suck. The competitors who suck are the ones who complain about the monopoly. They run to the government and they say, there's this evil monopoly. Now, one of the reasons why competitors suck and are inefficient is they bribe politicians a lot of times so if you have a large new company without some some new mammalian style versus the dinosaurs company comes into a marketplace well they don't they're not hooked into all of the bribery networks they're not hooked into all the corruption networks and they don't have to pay all that overhead of bribery and corruption so they just actually sell efficiently to the consumer and so the politicians when some new company comes along are out of the loop they're They're not embedded. They don't have their vampiric proboscis into the arteries of the corporation.
[6:23] So they want their old corporate buddies flinging them money under the table back in power. So they start crippling the new company, promoting the companies that are already corrupted and embedded with the politicians, and complaining that they're price gouging. Price gouging, see, you know, it's really, really important, Keith, to remember that a price gouging, when the government complains that a corporation is price gouging, it's It's really, really important to listen to them. Now, the fact that the corporation can inflate your entire life savings away, raise taxes at will, and send you to war, which is not just price gouging, but shrapnel gouging, well, you really want to hear about them complain about a private corporation lowering prices. So, yeah, it's just generally a shakedown. People are very happy with, quote, monopolies because they're very efficient, and the complaints are brought by other companies that are probably better at bribing the politicians. So, yeah, it's all just corruption and the only way you can solve the inevitable problem of corruption is through the free market. Corruption is inefficient. Corruption is overhead. Corruption makes the corporation produce less and have to charge more. And so, you constantly need this churn. Everything is like the churn of the generations, you know. I remember when I became a father, oh, they're so cute, they're so wonderful, and then when she became better at video games than me, I'm like.
[7:43] Oh, that's right, she's here to replace me. Yes, that's why she's here, because I won't be, and nature needs new bipeds. So you need that constant replenishment. Everything that ages gets corrupt in organizations and corporations, so you constantly need a free market so that new corporations can come along and challenge the ossification and the sclerosis of the older corporation. And without that, well, again, you just look at the Japanese economy that we talked about last time, and you can just see these zombie corporations that kill the birth rate by draining all the resources from society. So, yeah, it's a really, really bad idea. But yeah, the idea that you save yourself from a voluntary monopoly by putting in a massive monopoly that has all the power of violence in the known universe is pretty wild. And the last thing I'll say is, you know, I've had the fortune slash misfortune of spending a fair amount of time in small towns.
[8:42] And let me tell you, let's say that there's only one gas station in a small town. And people always forget this kind of stuff. They think that it's all just dry calculations of mutual utility. But human beings are social as well as economic animals. So if you're in a small town, and you just decide to double the gas prices, right? And let's say, for whatever reason, you're the only gig in town. It's not worth someone setting up a competitor and it's too far to drive to another town. Well, you live in that town.
[9:11] And you've got to socialize in that town. And if people say, well, you're just a complete jerk who has doubled gas prices because you basically want to just rip off your fellow townspeople, well, guess who ain't coming to the next 4th of July barbecue? Or whose kids aren't going to be invited to the pool parties, who's not going to be invited to go hunting, whose wife is not going to be part of the church knitting group, right? So you're just simply going to be ostracized. and ostracism is an incredibly powerful mechanism of social control that entirely conforms with the non-aggression principle it's just freedom of association of course forced association is a violation of freedom of association and we've lost our capacity to ostracize as societies the the price of having a kid out of wedlock in the past was ostracism from polite society and we don't have really the ability to ostracize people from an economic standpoint which is where really really, where it matters, because the government just takes our money and gives it to them anyway. With regards to, you know, what's going on in Springfield, who do you want to live in your community? Well, you have a choice to rent to, to hire, to work with, to economically integrate or not. But when the government does it on your behalf, then the government decides who lives in your community, and people have lost that control. We've lost the social control mechanism of ostracism, which would solve the high gas station prices. Everybody says, well, yeah, you've got to make a fair amount of money. We don't want you going out of business, but if you price gouge us, we just won't associate with you socially.
[10:41] It's a pretty lonely life in a small town if people won't socialize with you.
[10:44] So the problem with the government as well, it just takes away that ostracism ability by force-transferring resources from unwilling people to those they hugely disapprove of, and that just sets the stage for massive amounts of conflict.
[11:00] Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler wrote a book titled The Elephant in the Brain, where they have this interesting quote, political behavior is driven largely by coalition loyalty. Our hypothesis is that the political behavior of ordinary individual citizens is often better explained as an attempt to signal loyalty to our side, whatever side that happens to be in a particular situation, rather than as good faith attempts to improve outcomes. It's also, in many ways, a performance. I'm curious what you think about that when it comes to the concept of what really divides people on the left and people on the right. Is this a fake distinction that's just used to exploit us, or is there a real, genuine principle difference between the mindset of someone on the left and someone on the right?
[11:53] That's quite the star cluster of questions. They're absolutely perfectly reasonable. I'm just trying to sort them in my brain for a moment. So the general distinctions between people on the left and people on the right, let me do that first, and then I'll get to sort of the tribal loyalty, which I think is a fantastic question and really essential to what's going on in the world at the moment. So on the left, they tend to value equality of outcome, and on the right, they tend to value equality of opportunity. On the left they tend to have deep visceral sympathy for the underdog and are willing to use coercion to transfer resources from the successful to the less successful, on the right it's a tend to be a raw meritocracy with some charity but they love the victor, and so these two approaches right equality of opportunity raw meritocracy loving the winner versus equality of outcome, love for the underdog, generally translates into evolutionary male and female perspectives.
[13:04] So in the male perspective, you absolutely have to give the best weapons to the best fighters in a war. You have to give the few spears and arrows that you have, you have to give them to the best spear throwers and archers around. Because otherwise you don't come back with the meat, you don't come back with the kill, and everyone starves to death. So that raw meritocracy really translates into the free market environment. It tends to be a bit more of a male perspective. Um i'm not sure how it was when you were growing up but when i was growing up the phrase you suck was not unknown to guys so they sort of i mean they would encourage you for sure but mockery of failure uh was was rampant and whereas for the girls it's like you got this you can do this it's going to be great you're going to be fine and we know this when i grew up in England in the 70s, and I went to a boarding school, which was a raw meritocracy, and boy, if you made a mistake, you heard about it sometimes for weeks. And the difference is, of course, my friends who have kids in regular old schools, I mean, it's wild, man.
[14:19] When one of my friend's daughters was in a race, that was one of these days where they They do the whole race, the track circuit, right? Like running, jumping and relay races and so on. One of the girls, one of his daughter's friends was sick and still got a participation ribbon. Now, I can't even conceive of that as a guy. It's sort of like when I was in junior high school, we divided the gyms. We put a sort of barrier down the middle. And the men, the boys, we boys did...
[14:54] Wrestling and like hard wrestling you know face accidentally in some kid's groin attempt to pull his arm out from his socket and beat his leg to death with it kind of and i remember uh kids got injured on a regular basis you know elbow to the face and you had some a whiskey voiced groundskeeper who would just ah walk it off kid you know you're fine you're fine and and no sympathy and and i remember being curious about the girls i would walk over to the gym look at the divider and And there's a little bit that you could see through. And the girls were twirling and dancing and learning all of these wonderful things. And then one girl tripped and everyone was like, oh, are you okay? Do you need to go to the nurse? Whereas, you know, this sort of walk it off with bone fragments sticking out of your cheek was the male approach. It's just a different kind of planet. So then the question is, well, why would we evolve these things? Well, of course, women's sympathy for the underdog comes from the need to transfer resources from elder siblings to younger siblings to make sure that the younger siblings don't die, right? So equality of outcome is all my kids need to get food, sometimes the youngest need even more.
[16:00] Love of the underdog is sympathy for the younger kids who can't compete with the older kids. Kids so all of these things are beautiful and and wonderful and fantastic and exactly why we've evolved to be the most successful species in the known universe which i love love women and men for doing that all of the stuff is beautiful but virtue plus force equals evil right i mean the desire to have sex is a good thing it's why we're all here you combine that with force you get sexual assault and rape which is stone evil right and so the desire to um to gain uh property Property is a good thing. It's why people clear forests and go hunting and plant crops. So the desire to get property is great. But you combine that with force and fraud, then you get evil. You get theft, right? So virtues or things that are productive plus force becomes evil.
[16:51] Male nature plus force becomes evil. Female nature plus force becomes evil. So I think that the left and the right, there's lots of overlap. Of course they're not exactly you know they're concentric circles they overlap but in general it's the male female thing which is sort of why as women have gained political power um over uh the past sort of i don't know 100 years or so you've seen the rise of things like the welfare state, and uh alimony and child support and palimony even you've seen old age pensions and all of this is about and health you know socialized health care and massive sympathy for all the people on the known planet. As long as they don't end up in your house, apparently that's totally fine.
[17:32] All of that is just sympathy for the underdog. And you see, of course, the political languages, you know, the excluded, the marginalized.
[17:39] The minorities, the underdogs, we've got to help them and so on.
[17:42] And that's generally the case of single women. Like, just because a woman doesn't have kids doesn't mean she loses her maternal instinct. It just gets manipulated politically into favored classes that vote for the left. And you'll notice, of course, that as women get married and have kids, they become more conservative. They become more skeptical of government power, because single women often are receiving government benefits, whereas for married women, they're either themselves paying or their husbands are paying into government benefits. And of course, the sympathy for the underdog, which is designed for your own children, once you actually have your own children, that's where it goes and it's its proper home. But if a woman is single, she still has all that sympathy for the underdog and easily manipulated into taking resources to help the weaker, which is designed for her children, but you end up having to treat adults like children and political power rises therein. The biggest single constituent for the left is unmarried women and so this is another reason why they you see all this media where women are taught to fear and hate men and there's a patriarchy and they just all rapists and and abusers and what were they called male chauvinist pigs when i was a kid like this just make women afraid of men so they marry the government and totalitarian results is one of the oldest tricks in the book it happened to even in ancient rome with the welfare for a state and the easy divorce accessibility and so on. So I think the left and the right stuff is, broadly speaking, male and female nature plus the state.
[19:06] Contradictions, I want to make sure I get that because we go, when should we talk about how people can hold these contradictions as sort of elephants in the room in their head?
[19:16] I'm happy to go over that now. The only reason I brought up the monopoly thing was to show that the same mind of people in very high places can hold blatant contradictions and not feel uncomfortable at all. So I'm happy to hear your thoughts on that now.
[19:34] So there's two general thoughts as to why people can hold these kinds of contradictions.
[19:41] And there is the corruption argument, and then there's the evolution argument. The corruption argument is people want something for nothing. Often there's Satan or the devil or some nefarious instinct, propaganda, and people get tempted, and they just choose evil, they choose contradiction, and so on. And I'm not going to argue against that from a moral standpoint. My big question is, why do we have this capacity at all?
[20:09] And that to me is really the interesting question. So if we look at the evolutionary question, we would say, what survival purpose does contradictory thoughts or ignoring contradictory thoughts, what evolutionary purpose would that serve? Why are so many people like this? Because if it didn't serve evolution, it wouldn't be here. It's not like some weird appendix that we have, kind of like a leftover monkey tail thing from our hominid phase. It's, I would say, virtually universal, but it's pretty common. So it has to serve some kind of survival purpose. Or, to put it another way, people who didn't hold these contradictions unconsciously and ignore them didn't make it. So we can see that people are not comfortable with blatant contradictions because when you point out these contradictions they get very uneasy so they ignore these contradictions like I saw a video the other day, Where a leftist pro-choice guy was pointed out to him, you know, like in California, if you murder a pregnant woman, you're charged with a double homicide because you've killed the woman and her baby, which would indicate that the baby is a human life that is worthy of legal protection.
[21:30] And, you know, sparks and short circuits and rebooting and era, era 404 NPC response not found stuff was going on. And he just pretended not to understand. But you could really see the discomfort. comfort.
[21:42] I'm sure you've seen the videos where people have done it in Sweden, they've done it in other places, where they say, should Sweden take in more refugees? And people are like, absolutely, you know, sure, yes, we should take in more refugees. And then they say, ah, well, I have Abdul over here, and he's looking for a place to stay, so tell me where you live, and he'll come and live with you. No, no, no, no, no, no, my place is too small. I have roommates. mates uh i have weird rituals i'm a furry i'm going out of town like people are just like, rather than live like have someone live so then it's all abstract right it's all abstract or people who say uh should america send reparations to the descendants of slavery yes absolutely okay well i have this guy here he's a descendant of slavery how much money you're going to give him and suddenly it goes from the abstract virtue signaling to direct action and people get very uncomfortable with that so how is it that people have evolved to be so comfortable with abstract virtues that cost them nothing and then so uncomfortable when they have to pay even a slight price for the virtues that they signal that's a tough question so let me give you tribe a and tribe b i was trying to think of cooler names but then i wasn't sure i'd remember them So let's say tribe A and tribe B.
[23:04] Now, we're going to talk about a state of nature where we evolved, where there's, you know, lots of violence and people are competing for hunting grounds. They, you know, even if they don't kill people directly, they can drive them away from the hunting grounds to where their survival chances go down and so on. So you have tribe A and tribe B. Now, tribe A are collectivists. So they have a king and a witch doctor.
[23:26] A chieftain, let's say a chieftain. King might be a bit too advanced for this sort of nation state concept. They have a chieftain and they have a witch doctor. Now, the witch doctor says the chieftain is placed there by God and has divine providence, and also says that if you fight for the chief, you get eternal paradise after you die. So the chief is infallible because of the stamp of approval of the witch doctor, and if you fight even to the death for the chief, you get paradise forever, and your children will be honored, and your wife will be elevated, and all these kinds of wonderful things. So then you have people whose delusions serve them admirably in the competition for resources. Because if you say Tribe B, they're just a bunch of hyper-rationalists who don't believe any of this nonsense. They fear death more because there's no paradise on the other side. They don't have a central, infallible, organizing guy called the chieftain who's got a divine stamp of authority because an omniscient god whispers in his ear and tells him everything that's right. So who's going to win?
[24:30] In a fight? Who's going to win in a combat? Who's going to win in a conflict? Well, I would argue, and this is, we know this because men are expendable, right? Because, you know, one man can repopulate the tribe, but not one woman can't, right? So, the tribe with the chieftain and the witch doctor, who are collectivists and anti-rational, who can hold two simultaneous beliefs. A, the chief is just a guy, and B, he's surrounded by this penumbra of the divine, or the witch doctor is just some crazy guy who smokes a lot of peyote and makes up a whole bunch of crazy stuff. It's a good storyteller, but he also has a direct channel to the divine.
[25:11] They can overcome their general fear of death to some degree. They still don't want death, but on the other side, or all of this is paradise of milk and honey and so on. So you have a very tightly organized fighting force that is going to battle to the death. And then on the other side, you have a bunch of people who are right technically they're absolutely right chieftain's just some big guy who's good at killing and the warlord is just a guy who's drug addled and really good at story and the sorry the the um the witch doctor is just a drug addled guy who's really good at telling stories and they don't believe any of it so they can't be organized into a central fighting force that's willing to fight to the death so who wins the people who are willing to believe two things at the same time that the chieftain and the witch doctor are just two guys and that they're also holy warriors divinely ordained by x y and z right and we see this even playing out now that uh you know the the religions that tend to be more aggressive and promise and less in love with life and willing to die they tend to spread fairly fairly efficiently and the rationalist cultures tend to sort of fade away so i think that's just a lot of evolutionary pressure.
[26:21] That if you believe things that are opposite to the evidence of your senses, you become a much more efficient battle force. And of course, when force was the deciding factor, whenever tribes had sort of any interactions, those who were collectivists, those who were anti-rational, just they do really well. And we can't see tribes around the world and i'm no expert on this so i'm maybe there are i've never heard of them i think i would by now but that's you know obviously not not any kind of objective proof but i've never heard of a tribe that hasn't evolved in this kind of fashion with a warlord with a witch doctor and with promises of life after death and eternal ancestry worship and like that makes it incredibly powerful and efficient fighting forces and now with technology individualists can do better because you have a kill ratio with technology far better but of course throughout our evolution it was just a numbers game numbers and dedication numbers and willingness to die and so i think that why are people willing to accept these contradictions because i think those people who didn't accept these contradictions a didn't make it and b the tribes that they convinced to think more rationally also probably didn't make it because we don't see that happening anywhere in the world. It's like the matriarch, like the Amazon warriors, it's just a made-up bit of nonsense.
[27:46] So I think that it's just an evolutionary survival mechanism and that's why people get so uneasy when these things are contradicted because all those who said, yeah, you know, that is a contradiction.
[27:59] Maybe that guy is just a guy, not a king, and maybe that is just a witch doctor, not a witch doctor, just a guy who tells good stories. Well, If they convinced the tribe, maybe the tribe lost more battles. And it doesn't even need to be many. It only has to be 5%. Fewer battles they win, they're still going to get taken over. Maybe they're less good at defending their hunting territory or their farming lands and so on. So, I don't know. It's a tough call because, of course, I'm a big reason and evidence guy.
[28:31] But violence wins against reason. It's an old quote. the last sort of thing I'll say here is an old quote, which is, why are you quoting laws to men with swords? It's sort of a very sort of important question. I had a big speaking career. I'd go out and do all of this public speaking. And of course, I've been studying rhetoric since my mid-teens. I was on the debating team in high school. I traveled all across the country in university. I was the sixth best debater in Canada. When I first, the very first year I tried, I was only to get better from that. Of course, negotiation in business is just another kind of debating, and I was a negotiator in business for many, many years. So I have like 40 years of experience in rhetoric, debate, negotiation, philosophy, and so on, which is a lot of work to try and accumulate, and it's a difficult skill to master, and so on. And how was I, and other people, it's obviously not just me, the cancel culture as a whole, well, somebody just phones in a bunch of bomb threats and death threats that tells a bunch of lies and then you can't speak. So who's winning, right? Who wins in terms of cost benefit? Who wins the people who study rhetoric and reason and evidence and thought and debate and so on, or the people who are willing to use or threaten violence?
[29:48] I mean, sadly, it is just a fact of life that the people who run the cancel culture metrics are winning against those who are really good at public speaking, really funny, really engaging, and the more good, the better you are at it, the more you're worth cancelling. So it is not just a theory, it is sort of a real thing.
[30:08] The solution, of course, is peaceful parenting, but that's a slow process.
[30:14] I was always curious how you could watch something like CNN or MSNBC or Fox for 24 hours straight and not really learn anything that was really productive. You wouldn't really be surprised by new primary sources or research they've done. This was summarized by Matt Taibbi in his book Hate Incorporated. He says, have you ever noticed that the most famous people in the media, The people with the most influential slots in top newspapers, primetime shows of their own, voices first heard by senators and CEOs and other key decision makers, tend not to be all that bright. They almost never say or write surprising things. They don't dazzle or amaze. Do you have a general theory as to why so many elites are so intellectually unimpressive?
[31:05] Well it's the question is this is always the case with propaganda is it a pull market or is it a push market right so there's an economic law says sometimes supply creates its own demand which is nobody knew they needed an ipad until there was an ipad out there so the supply creates its own demand for other things of course it's not like you don't need food until somebody offers you food, right? Other times you need food, so that's a pull economy where people supply stuff that's already there. So the question is, what are the media personalities selling? Why do people tune in? Well, they're not tuning in for the truth. They're not tuning in for rigorous analysis. They're not tuning in for anything surprising. They're tuning in for what? Well.
[31:52] I think a fundamental aspect of the mind is if you believe things that are true, you don't need reinforcement, right? I don't need to listen to a lecture about how important gravity is every morning because I get up and gravity is just a fact of life. I accept it. I accept that sometimes it bends you to your will a little bit more when you get older. I accept all of that, right? So because I accept things that are true, I don't need constant reminders. I don't need this drip, drip. It's like if you have genuine happiness as a whole in your life.
[32:26] That's just a self-sustaining thing based upon virtue and love and all these kinds of good, juicy things. But if you have your happiness based upon a drug, well, then you have a problem. So when your happiness is based not on things that are natural and organic, like good eating, good loving, good exercise and sunshine and all these kinds of things, if your happiness is based on a drug, then you need a drug dealer because you cannot sustain that happiness without that dealer if the source of your self-esteem your security your sense of virtue does not come from your adherence to moral values that are objective but rather because you're being told pat pat on the head you're such a good person then you constantly have to go back to the dealer because the dealer is telling you something or is giving you something that is necessary for your happiness that is not real. Cocaine happiness is not real. Drug happiness is not real. The happiness that somebody gets from gambling and winning once in a while is not real. We know that because it comes at a long-term cost that is horrendous to see. A woman who gets lots of sexual attention because she shows a lot of skin is going to get excited and thrilled in the short run, but it's going to lead to a lot of unhappiness in the long run. So if you believe things that are false, you constantly need to go back to be convinced that they're true. Because reality is constantly undermining.
[33:51] Are a falseness, right? So I think that their purpose is to act as drug dealers, in a sense, to maintain people's sense of virtue when they're actually quite corrupt and immoral. And so I view evil as a kind of addiction, and propaganda is a drug that covers up the discomfort comfort of evil by telling you that you're right and you're good, which actually makes the corruption go deeper. The analogy that I think is quite powerful is, you know, if you have a sore tooth, right? And tooth pain is like most godforsaken things in the known universe, right? So if you have tooth pain, you have, I mean, three choices. One, you can ignore it, which generally is not really possible because it just gets worse. Or you can go and, you know, get your root canal or your extraction or whatever you need to do because the tooth is rotten. Or you can just take a bunch of drugs to cover up the pain now if you take a bunch of drugs to cover up the pain.
[34:52] Things get very bad and often quite quickly because you know you swallow all of those bacteria they can go to your heart and they can kill your heart and it's really really bad you could have part of your jaw has to get removed like things just get really really bad right like it's the old chiropractic statement yeah it's one one thing that i saw hanging uh in a masseuse's office where there was a chiropractor and it was like the most common Common sentence the chiropractor will ever hear is, I thought it would just go away on its own. And we have all of that. I thought it would go away. And, you know, if you're right about that, good, you save some money. But often it doesn't. So when people are, say, cheering on violence against their political opponents, which absolutely happens, and it comes at this time.
[35:35] It's happened the other way for sure, but it happens more from the left to the right. They are cheering on political violence, which is defined as terrorism. Violence against their political opponents.
[35:47] Now, there's got to be a little part of their conscience that is like, ooh, you know, that meme of the Nazi soldier, are we the bad guys? You know, this dawning thing that, you know, maybe, just maybe, you're not a good person for wishing violence to be against people you disagree with, and so on. And so, the conscience is trying to rise up and say, this is not right. Like, wherever you've landed, wherever you've ended up, you've taken a wrong path. Like, this is not a good path. You're cheering on violence.
[36:22] You are, you know, baying for people making different medical decisions to lose their rights of travel and work. Like, something has gone really awry. And that conscience that's kind of bubbling up is at war with the propaganda. Because the propaganda is no no no they are bad guys no no trump is an existential threat to whatever and he is hitler and right so that the um propaganda is constantly trying to beat down the unease of the conscience that you might be in fact the bad guy and so because the conscience is constantly making people uncomfortable you know that everybody has this i mean everybody's had this have got any kind of conscience and most people do of course right that 3 a.m thing where you wake up and you're like oh i'm suddenly getting this perspective on my life that's really kind of uncomfortable because you know the day is kind of kind of hypnotic there's a little bit of groundhog copy paste the days are kind of hypnotic you got a bunch of stuff to do you got things errands and and people and and women to woo and and money to earn and so on.
[37:25] But every now and then you get the zoom out where it's like oh am i am i doing well in life what's Rather than the daily grind, what's my general arc? What's the big picture? What's the view? I'm sure you had this when you, I'd love to talk about this another time, but when you went full carnivore and went to Springfield for the pets and lost all of that weight.
[37:47] That's good for you, man. Good for you. I'd rather, because I couldn't do this interview with a cat. It would seem kind of awkward. So if I have to choose. But no, you have to zoom out and that conscious just, it haunts you. It just kind of gets at you and so and of course all addicts have this right and addicts to propaganda are to me at least pretty indistinguishable from other forms of addicts, where you're like oh god i am drinking too much i gotta quit oh my god this gambling is gonna gonna destroy my family or like whatever addiction you have a sex addict you know like i'm some gonna get some stalker i'm gonna get an std i'm gonna have an unwanted pregnancy like some Some boyfriend is going to find out about me and beat the crap out of me. Like, bad things are going to happen. No good woman or man is ever going to want to be with, like, these rats of, and then what do you do? Well, you have to run back to the drug. Either you listen to your conscience and start to reform for the better, or you run back to the drug.
[38:46] To the drug dealers. And the drug dealers and the media have a lot to do with justifying violence.
[38:51] Let's be frank about it, right? That this person is so bad that violence is justified against them, and that is the initiation of the use of force, particularly in American culture that was founded on free speech, that is really appalling. And it is a way to say, your violence is actually self-defense. And that's the big thing that propaganda does, is they say, but your violence is self-defense. Because if this person is allowed to speak, their words will create violence in the world. And therefore, by preventing that person from speaking, you are preventing violence in the world. It is a form of self-defense against the helpless, the underdogs, the this, the that, he's inciting hatred. And we saw this recently, of course, where Trump was talking about eating cats and dogs. And then the media said, oh, but there have been all these threats because of that and that makes you a bad person it turns out most of the threats came from overseas which seems a little dubious but so that's what they do is they get you to say well if this person.
[39:51] Gets their way gets to say what they say violence will result and therefore shutting them up is a form of preventing violence it is a form of rational self-defense you are acting in defense of other people against imminent violence and therefore you're the good guy when you're not i mean you're just initiating the use of force against people who are saying things you don't like which is obviously not right and not fair and not good uh but of course and the last thing i'll say is back among the male female divide you know there's this um.
[40:24] Uh general meme about you know men trash-talking each other and women being blindly encouraging you know yay good job and you suck right and so uh women tend to fight with language and men tend to fight with fists which is why men tend to say let's not like let's have laws against assault, because that's how men have their conflicts whereas women who are mean and bad or whatever right and they tend to spread rumors and lie and oh she's got an std or you know she's real slut But, you know, like they tend to spread rumors and lie. So because for women, words tend to be weaponized, whereas for men, it's physical violence is the weapon. Men are more opposed to physical violence. But women end up coming up with these concepts of hate speech and so on. And words are going to lead to big problems. And therefore, we have to stop it at the source because women tend to fight through language. And therefore, they view language as something that needs to be controlled, whereas men tend to fight through violence. Therefore, they view violence as something to be tightly controlled. And again, none of this is wrong. It's just when you combine it with the state, it gets pretty toxic.
[41:34] Second one of the responses i've gotten to my work at the libertarian institute is something to the extent of if i had to summarize it so what if only america had slavery or everyone did who cares what really caused the first world war the great depression the past is the past just move on why do you think that historical narratives or prevailing interpretations of past events are important for us to understand today.
[42:03] Well, because the past is never about the past. The past is always and forever about the future. The past, nobody philosophically examines the past for the sake of the past because the past can't be changed. I mean, if you are a doctor and somebody fell out of a plane onto concrete and it's just like a bucket of smudge on the ground, you don't start doing CPR, right? Right. You don't like, hey, I'm not going to call it. You know, I could revive this goo like they're dead. They're dead. And, you know, there's always this cliched scene in every medical drama known to man. You know, the guy really cares about the patient and the patient is flatlined and he keeps trying. And finally, the nurse has to pull him. He's dead, Jim. Call it, you know, and then there's so the past is never about the past. I mean, let's say that you could figure out the exact causes of World War One. That's not going to save any of the 10 million people who were slaughtered in World War I. The purpose is not the past. The purpose is always and forever the future. People go back into the past in order to change the future. And so the idea, well, it's the past and the past, move on. It's like to where based on what?
[43:18] To where? Based on what? We have to accumulate the wisdom of the past. One of the brilliant things about language and writing is we don't have to reinvent the wheel every generation or just rely on verbal transmission. So we can learn from the past in order to improve the future. So, I mean, the question of slavery in America is important. Now, the question is, why is it still so important? Well, because resentment plus the state is highly profitable.
[43:49] Because if I can convince my neighbor that his father stole an acre from me, then he's going to be much more likely to give me that acre voluntarily back.
[44:03] Because if someone stole something from you, then you have the right to get it back. When I was a kid, if somebody took my bike and I saw them riding about, I'd get the bike back, even if I had to push them off the bike. And if people came to complain, I'd say, nope, it's my bike. He took it and I'm just, I'm taking it back, right? So if I can convince people that that bike is mine, then I get the bike back. So convincing people about something that happened in the past, he took my bike, gets me a bike. Now, if I lie about it and it's not my bike, but I can convince people that it was my bike, I get a free bike and it's not even theft. It's just justice, right? So, the reason why people muck about with the past so much is it changes the resource distribution in the future, right? So, why is it that women always claim to be victims when they end up as single mothers? Because we have sympathy for victims and we have less sympathy for people who make really obvious bad decisions, you know? Like, so, you know, well, this guy had a swastika Dicker carved in his forehead, he had five other baby mamas, he was on welfare and a drug addict, but there was no way to know at all that he wasn't going to be a great dad. There was just no way. I mean, I'm not psychic, I can't see the future, it's just impossible to know, right?
[45:30] Whereas all women, I don't know, they have this belief that their sons and daughters will never be hit by a false accusation of sexual assault or rape or bad behavior because Because they'll just teach their men how to avoid bad women. And it's like, okay, so if you can teach people to avoid bad people, then aren't women responsible for having children out of wedlock, right? Right? Well, so what women have to do is to convince society that they're victims, that the guy just changed, there was no way for them to know, it was an accident, it wasn't my fault, and so on. Because then we view them as victims, and then we have sympathy for victims, we have less sympathy for people who make really obvious bad decisions. And the reason we do that, of course, is...
[46:17] For conservation of resources and maximization of resources. Because if we give resources to people who make bad decisions, all we're doing is subsidizing bad decisions and we'll get more of them, as we can see, of course, happening with the decline of marriage. Whereas people can be legitimate victims and need our sympathy, help, and support for sure.
[46:38] So the reason you would change your story about what happened in the past is so that you can get more resources So if you made a bad decision, but you can recast that decision as being a helpless victim of a bad guy you could never foresee him doing wrong, then you get the resources normally reserved for victims and withheld often from people who just make really obvious bad choices.
[47:06] So that way, by rewriting the past, you gain more resources in the future. Now, the reason why this has become so widespread, again, you know, charity is virtue, charity plus estate is corrupt, is because if you can as a whole say that, you know, single moms are, you know, heroic victims of bad men and they're just noble and doing the best they can and so on, well, then you can get a lot of resources for single moms and you can justify massive transfers of wealth to single moms. And you know the the welfare state is pretty much the single mother state and it is the transfer of resources from more responsible men and to some degree women to less responsible women and to some degree men so if you can convince people that you're a victim you get the charity normally reserved for uh victims uh to you know to to pretend to be something else is foundational to nature i mean how falsehood and lying in nature is everywhere all the time no matter what right? I mean, the tiger stripes so it can pretend to be grass, right? I mean, the zebra stripes so it can pretend to be grass. Cookies will lay their eggs in some other bird's nest.
[48:23] It's constant, like lying, falsed. The rabbit says, I'm going this way when being chased by a fox. Nope, just kidding. Going this way, going this way, going like they constantly, hey, choose a direction, man. It's like, I can't because then you're going to eat my ass, right? So even the foxes, they creep up and they pretend to not be there just lying i mean the fox doesn't go hey hey hey hey all the rabbits i'm coming in i'm hungry uh if you could just you know raise your little paws or your ears or whatever it'd be a lot easier like they just don't everything in nature is deception for the sake of gaining resources there's nothing wrong with that again it's why we're all here.
[48:57] But when you combine that with the state, you get this pathological lying society where everybody is pretending to be a victim. Everybody's lying about everything that happened.
[49:09] And unfortunately, this pathological falsehood becomes pretty much the most efficient way to get resources. Resources and when pathological falsehood becomes the best way to gain resources whether that's through propaganda or fake victimhood or just about anything else oof man you know like bad money drives out good money and lies drive out the truth and then all the truth tellers are considered to be insane because you know we are uh very much standing against a reality that you know it's the last thing i'll say about the media too so normally when you're told a bunch of lies in history those lies are kind of intermittent right so you're told lies about the king being divinely blah blah blah well but you don't meet the king really you're just out there so so reality is just constantly reasserting itself but you know with this glue to the screen stuff and you say the sort of 24-hour meadow and stelter show it's like people can now spend more time in unreality than they can in reality and that's a what we've never had that before except for people who were schizophrenic or psychotic like we've never had this is a wild experiment that we're doing in a way which is in the past propaganda was very intermittent let's say that you went to some i don't know voodoo witch doctor or sermon uh once a week for an hour okay so you spend an hour in unreality but then the rest of the time you got to deal with reality because you got to.
[50:37] Hunt or harvest crops or find berries or build a hut or what so you deal with reality and then there's this intermittent unreality but now oh my gosh the echo chambers the social media the 24-7 stuff you can dive into unreality and spend more time there and we can include the pornography video games like all these other stuff that's unreal it's unreal and you're training yourself to adapt to unreality and not deal in particular with reality.
[51:08] And you get the propaganda in schools and in the media and not just the news media, but all of the other media, which is constantly portraying reversals of the truth as an absolute. And so it's a wild thing that we are immersing people in unreality to a degree that has never existed before in human history. Anti-reality really and i think that there is a real danger that people are gonna just lose touch with reality and you can see that then when people have immersed themselves in this drug from which there is no particular withdrawal you can just flip it on and get a new dose and there's no down there's no hangover you just keep drinking there's no crash there's like well eventually there's a a social crash which we want to avoid but we've immersed people in unreality with no crash and that is just wild so people who you know in the past they would say well uh they tell me to pray for a good thing so i'm not going to plant any crops i'm just going to pray for good things.
[52:14] Well um god helps those who help themselves right the food is not going to fall from the sky if you You just pray for it. You actually have to plant. So people who had bad beliefs faced a kind of brutal reality, you know, like all kids think that all animals can be their friends. And I really, really dislike all of these kids shows that like, oh, the lion, the tiger, the dragon, they're just going to love you. And it's like, what are you just feeding everyone to the predators? That's crazy, right? But, but then kids, you know, maybe they try petting some dog. It's like, okay, okay, okay. Disney was lying to me. It's like, well, yes, yes, they are. So...
[52:51] You get you used to get these shocks of reality right everybody thinks that they're the greatest thing since sliced bread and then you go out into reality and you try to compete with others and you find out if you're any good or not you got to have confidence but you've got to be tempered by reality but we got this thing now where we are putting people in a matrix of unreality from which they barely ever need to emerge they get the same propaganda that the tv's always on or they're scrolling through the same feeds or listening to the same shows their friends are all the same they don't meet counter narratives and it makes people insane.
[53:25] The mental health of adapting to lies, you really can't overestimate how much damage that is doing to society. Because then what happens is when people have adapted to insanity, they view truth as an assault. They view truth as something that is driving them crazy. They view truth as a violation of the non-aggression principle because they founded their entire personality and worldview on falsehoods. They're addicts and don't even know it. Their relationships, as we talked about before, are just shared delusions. Somebody comes along with the truth and the longer you keep people away from the truth, the more hostile they are to it when it emerges. And this is why being a truth teller in an age of delusion is so dangerous and frankly quite exciting. Like it's the most extreme sport known to men because the same technology that allows us to have these conversations also allows people to be drawn into the psychosis of propaganda and deny reality to the point where their immune system of the mind fights almost to the death and sometimes to the death against any kind of truth in the vicinity.
[54:30] And that's a wild, wild, I love this ninja experience as a whole, but it can be challenging from time to time, as I think everybody who's listening and watching this has experienced.
[54:42] I wanted to put together my 92nd case or so on something that you and I do not see eye-to-eye on, and you could give me a propaganda analysis or logic analysis and grade my argument. Here is the case for the return of Stefan Molyneux to Twitter.
[55:03] Assume the human race has existed for 10,000 years. For 99.9% of human history, the opportunity cost and monetary cost of communicating information has been extraordinarily high. Today, thanks to Elon Musk, you, Mr. Molyneux, the most important philosopher in the English-speaking language, have been reinstated to Twitter, now X. Meaning, the site's 611 million monthly visitors could have access to free domain content. My small account with 14,000 followers received 73,000 impressions in the last three months. With your account at 380,000 followers, consider how many thirsty horses can be brought to the free domain well of truth. Even your most recent tweet has 520 likes. Considering my college history course had only 50 students in total, it's reasonable to believe that you're at least 10 times as influential as an Arizona State university professor.
[56:00] Yes, it's better to have 20 dedicated students than 10,000 uninterested students. The problem is, you don't know who these dedicated people are in advance. You could drastically increase your capacity to bring the very free education progressives pretend to offer and out-compete the psychopathic sophists, politicians, journalists, academics, and media elites. As Socrates was enlightening the common man in the Agora, X is the marketplace of today where you can extend your global reach at a microscopic opportunity cost and zero monetary cost. I can see your return tweet now.
[56:38] Not sure if Taylor Swift has had any kids yet. If so, Taylor, along with all parents and future parents, can enjoy a free PDF of my new book at peaceful peacefulparenting.com the most important topics communicated to millions of people at your fingertips yes the evil bastards of old twitter owe you a sincere apology i ask that you do not let jack dorsey being a prick stop you from communicating the importance of truth and voluntarism to your hundreds of thousands of ex-followers they committed fraud by banning you you never violated the terms of service but x could possibly be the best bulwark philosophers have against the psychopath class who is unapologetically provoking nuclear wars and inflating our currency, wiping away our savings. I ask that you take advantage of this technology, something kings and queens of the past never could have imagined anyone would ever have access to, and increase your unique capacity to improve the lives of millions of ex-users as you have mine.
[57:41] Well, I would add to that beautiful case to say that if I'm not tweeting on X about peaceful parenting, how many hundreds of thousands of children are going to continue to experience violence because of what I don't do? And do I not have some responsibility for that? So, listen, man, I think that's a great case. And I'm just going to pretend I'm having internet difficulties because it's a hard one to answer. So, glitch, glitch, glitch.
[58:09] So, no, it's a great case. And in fact, I happened to see somebody shared with me that people were tweeting about me and, I mean, combined the tweets got like, I don't know, like two tweets about me got like 8 million views, which was, I mean, it's nice to see. It's nice to see that people still remember me. It's also not quite so nice to see. I actually got the website called one website over because that's sort of been my my case that people are like hey what ever happened to that guy is he still alive is he still what's he doing and it's like you know I I'm just one website over right so uh so listen I I hear what you're saying and and you are you are whispering sweet worm tongue sounds into my my ear because it is very uh very tempting it is it is very tempting I wrestle with this I wouldn't say quite on a daily basis, but I will certainly say that the temptation is real. The temptation is real.
[59:12] So, the counter-arguments go something like this. So, if I do have a fairly unique capacity to explain philosophy in practical ways to the world, and I think that's fairly safe to say, then what I should do is aim for maximum philosophy. Now, the question is, do you do maximum philosophy in the here and now, or do you do maximum philosophy in the future? Now, if you do maximum philosophy in the here and now, you just get killed. Like, historically, this is sort of what happens, right?
[59:51] Or disabled in some manner, right? Right. So if I the more traction I have in the present, the more risk there is, obviously, we can we can see that and we can see that all over the world. In the present, we can look at tons of examples in the past, and that would minimize philosophy in the future. Right. So if I'm aiming for maximum philosophy, the question is a bird in the hand versus two in the bush. Right. So if I achieve maximum philosophy now, the blowback is obviously high and I've experienced it to some degree. But more so if i'm aiming for maximum philosophy then i would put more of my thoughts down to help the future as a whole rather than have a big series of changes towards philosophy in the present because of the blowback associated with that so that's sort of one argument the second is of Of course, what you're asking or what you're suggesting, which, again, I really appreciate you bringing up, is something that I have already done. And I've done that for 40 years, which is to go out with as much charm and positivity and facts and reason and evidence into the public square to talk.
[1:01:07] And the result of that was, you know, the destruction of significant portions of my life's work, lots of falsehoods around me, violence and so on. and.
[1:01:21] What would prevent that from reoccurring you say ah yes well but you know there's this new guy at the helm and you know i think elon is doing fantastic service to to the world and obviously he's a very uh a very principled man when it comes to free speech and boy talk about putting where your money where your mouth is that's that's something and a half and so i also recognize that i don't even believe it was jack dorsey in particular we can sort of go back into the sort actors behind this kind of stuff. But I don't think that, obviously, Elon Musk is not personally responsible for what people did prior. But the organization is the organization. And just as it inherits the users, and it inherits the assets, and it inherits the debt, it also inherits the moral choices made by those beforehand. So if I were to go back on Twitter without any apologies, without any restitution, without any certainties that it wasn't going to happen, again then i would be re-entering into a abusive relationship with promises of change, but with no promises of change so what i do is i say to myself if somebody called into one of my shows and said you know i was in this really abusive relationship and um the guy has said he'll take me back you know he's gone to therapy let's say whatever analogy you want to use about the new ownership.
[1:02:45] So I was in this relationship with this guy who set fire to half my life's work or whatever, but he said he'll take me back. Well, he hasn't said so, but I've heard through some friends that I can contact him. Why would I be in pursuit of that relationship? Well, he's changed.
[1:03:04] Well, okay. But if he's changed, there would be evidence of that in the form of apologies and restitution. Now, I understand the legal system, I understand the complications involved with all of that, but nonetheless, would you counsel someone to go back into an abusive relationship with somebody who signaled that they were open to resuming that relationship, but who'd made no public apologies or withdrawal of prior insults?
[1:03:31] No.
[1:03:33] So, I can't, and listen, I, again, your temptation is great, and I really appreciate you bringing it up. But I can't, you know, and I'm not suggesting, you're suggesting this, of course, but just in my own mind, if I wouldn't give the advice, I can't take it. And the idea that I could do more in the here and now, of course, absolutely, there is. Would that cost me more in the future? Possibly. Possibly. I mean, we can see that we don't have to go through the list, but everybody knows them. The truth tellers who both in the past and in the present have come to very bad ends. It's not a very short list. Unfortunately, it's a very long list. So I'm aiming for maximum philosophy. I have a standard of resuming relationships that does require restitution and apologies and some commitment as to it not happening again. And those are not forthcoming for reasons that I can vaguely understand from a legal standpoint, but still are important. And so I just have to follow the advice that I've given others. I have to aim in a practical sense for maximum philosophy. And...
[1:04:56] I can't resume a relationship where there has been extreme levels of mistreatment without apologies, restitution, and certainties to a large degree that it's not going to happen again.
[1:05:10] This is not even anything negative towards Elon Musk.
[1:05:15] I mean, I think that there are lots of pressures put on businesses regarding free speech that are hard to figure out and hard to know where they're originating from. On but i don't think it's just internal so they can't make that guarantee right because if it's just a purely internal matter that's one thing but if there are other factors involved in these kinds of censorship things then they can't make those guarantees so uh i will continue to do maximum philosophy for the future you know i have like all philosophers should have a 500 year your business plan because if you don't um i think it keeps you away from the core truths that most influence the future it is you know there's the old saying no no profit is respected in his own country well philosophers are attacked by the culture that is and define positively the culture the culture to come and uh so recognizing that as a pattern if i the more i focus on the present The less I influence the future, the more I focus on the future, the less I need to influence in the present, and the more I can change the future, I think it's just a matter of patience for me. So again, it's a great case that you brought up, and I am tempted by it on a regular basis, but I do have to sort of grit my teeth and focus on those aspects.
[1:06:40] Thank you to everyone for watching. Keith Knight, don't tread on anyone in the Libertarian Institute. This has been part three of my discussion with Stefan Molyneux of freedomain.com. Mr. Molyneux, thank you as always.
[1:06:52] Great pleasure. Thanks, man.
Support the show, using a variety of donation methods
Support the show
