Find more of Dr. Bob Murphy at The Bob Murphy Show!
0:22 - Introduction to The Bob Murphy Show
0:44 - Conversation with Stefan Molyneux
9:46 - Social Media and Deplatforming Experiences
15:08 - Insights on Personal Principles and Apologies
15:27 - Discussion on Iran and Israel
30:18 - The Nature of Conspiracy Theories
32:15 - Dating in the Modern World
36:20 - Insults and Empathy
38:19 - Young Men's Vulnerabilities
40:13 - The Complexity of Human Interaction
42:42 - Evaluating Risk in Relationships
46:41 - The Weight of Regret
48:37 - Evolution of Thought
53:24 - Morality and Ethics
57:00 - Atheism vs. Christianity
1:03:42 - The Cost of Faithlessness
1:09:15 - Rallying Support and Community
In this episode of The Bob Murphy Show, I have an insightful discussion with the renowned philosopher and commentator, Stefan Molyneux. Known as a prominent voice in the liberty movement, Stefan’s journey has been extensive, encompassing philosophy, political commentary, and a unique exploration of ethics. We delve into various topics, starting with his recent re-emergence on social media after significant deplatforming experiences. Stefan shares how his comeback to platforms like Twitter has been laden with both expected and unexpected complexities as he navigates the landscape of modern discourse.
We examine key elements surrounding Stefan's thoughts on freedom of speech, censorship, and the challenges faced by individuals who hold controversial views. Stefan discusses the coordinated attempts by certain social media platforms to silence dissenting opinions, reflecting on how this impacts the wider dialogue surrounding contentious social issues. We engage in a compelling conversation about the implications of social media censorship and the subsequent effects it has on rational discourse and society's collective understanding of truth.
As the discussion progresses, we turn to the dynamics between men and women in contemporary society. Stefan has been vocal about the barriers young men face when it comes to dating and forming relationships in this increasingly cautious environment. We explore the fear of rejection and the risk of false accusations that have bred a culture of apprehension among young men. Stefan’s perspective challenges listeners to reassess their understanding of risk and to recognize the importance of building connections despite societal fears.
The conversation then moves towards a reflection on moral philosophy, particularly the intersection of ethics and modern secular thought. Stefan contrasts the ethics derived from Christianity against those proposed by atheistic frameworks, highlighting a notable observation: the moral dilemmas faced by secularists when navigating ethical questions can leave them at a disadvantage in understanding the roots of virtue and real-world morality.
Towards the end, we discuss the evolution of Stefan's thoughts on theology and the role of faith in shaping societal values. He shares his ongoing journey of exploring Christianity, contemplating its implications for morality and community amidst the chaos of modern life. This reflection serves as an opportunity to consider how belief systems shape individual and collective ethics in a rapidly changing world.
Stefan’s insights throughout the episode provide a compelling argument for the value of open dialogue and the need for empathy in understanding one another’s struggles, whether in personal or philosophical realms. This engaging conversation invites listeners to reflect deeply on the themes of freedom, ethics, and human connection in today's society, emphasizing the necessity of genuine discourse in fostering a more thoughtful and empathetic world.
[0:00] Music
[0:20] What you gonna do?
[0:22] Get ready for another episode of The Bob Murphy Show, the podcast promoting free markets, free minds, and grateful souls. It's your source for commentary and interviews, conducted by a Christian and economist. Now here is your host, Bob Murphy.
[0:44] Hey everybody, welcome back to The Bob Murphy Show. Today I am speaking with Stefan Molyneux, who I'm sure many of you have known about for a long time. He was an icon in the liberty movement back in the day. One of the OGs, as we say. Let me read a little bit from his official bio on his website. Stefan Molyneux is the founder and host of Free Domain, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world. With more than 4,500 podcasts, 10 books, and 600 million downloads, Stefan has spread the cause of liberty and philosophy to millions of listeners around the world. Mr. Molyneux holds a master's degree in history from the University of Toronto. His graduate thesis focused on the history of philosophy, detailing the relationship between the metaphysical arguments and the political ethics of major Western philosophers, such as Plato, Kant, Locke, and Hegel. So what we're talking about here is a few things. Let me just give you a teaser.
[1:41] He had been infamously kicked off of major social media platforms, and then once like elon bought twitter restored stefan's account and and he didn't want to come back and so i asked him about that then eventually he did come back and so that's how he was back you know in my consciousness because i follow him on twitter and uh and some of the things he was saying surprised me so his views have definitely evolved since last i was regularly hearing his opinions on things. And so I ask him about a few of those in particular, we'll sort of tease it. It's at the end, we talk about his stance towards Christianity, which is far different now than it was the last I had interacted with him about it. Well, I think that's enough teaser. Let's get right into the conversation. Stefan, welcome to the Bob Murphy Show.
[2:38] Great to be here, Bob. It's been a long time. How are you?
[2:41] I'm doing well, and how are you doing?
[2:44] I'm great. I'm great. I suppose I've been jet-packed in or cannon back from the wilderness, and I am fighting the brain orcs on Twitter and enlightening the masses as best I can, so it's quite a lot of fun.
[2:58] Well, let's unpack even right there. So, yeah, why don't we start with that? Yeah, I mean, what happened? Was it a few years ago that you just got booted from various social media platforms and then you just went private, as it were?
[3:13] Yeah.
[3:13] Can you just
[3:13] Tell us a little bit about that story? And then now the thing, your triumphal return, it wasn't exactly that palms were being laid down, but, you know, somewhat like that, coming back to Twitter slash X.
[3:24] Yeah, so it was the summer of 2020, when I assumed that there were a huge amount of sort of worm-tongue-like backdoor machinations to get me off social media for, I assume, reasons of politics for, you know, I was opposing all the George Floyd riots and so on. And I guess they wanted their summer of love, so they had to step over my face in order to get their burning neighborhoods. So I got kicked off just about everything in a really short span of time. And so, yeah, I mean, I went from playing stadiums to jazz clubs, which has its own charms and was quite enjoyable as well. I turned, of course, to writing books. I narrated some of my old novels, which I've always wanted to do. So it had its pluses for sure. I suppose a tiny bit surprising that like 95% of my audience found typing in a new website to be beyond their mortal span of activity, because I actually registered one website over, because I'm literally, people are like, hey, man, where were you? You were so hard to find. I'm like, it's really not that hard. I'm not a mole. I'm not a ghost. Just one website over.
[4:34] And that actually gave me a certain amount of liberty, because, you know, if you have some reasonable ability to affect people's minds for the better, and then if you go one website over, and they're like, nah, it's too far, man. Come on, man, I'm only mortal. I mean, I'm going to get carpal tunnel syndrome from typing in other websites. So it actually liberates you from a certain level of responsibility, which I suppose I'd hung on to pretty heavily for quite a long time.
[5:01] Well, I wonder if it's like both Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, when they got to be humongous, started writing novels with pseudonyms because they wanted to see, like, do people actually like my stories anymore? Is it just because I'm so big? I don't know if it was something like that, perhaps. So, OK, so that's what happened.
[5:19] Let me just
[5:20] Push that a little bit, because, yeah, it was with you. And there were a few others for it. I don't want to say names and be wrong. I think Alex Jones is probably where it was. It definitely looked coordinated. It was not just that the people who run YouTube independently came to a decision and then on a completely different track, the people who run Facebook, you know what I mean? Like, it was just it certainly seemed like there were those coordinated behind the scenes efforts. So do you I mean, was it the covid stuff or I mean, you were saying there the George Floyd riots. But anyway, what because this was all happening, you know, right when society was being transformed around the world.
[5:55] Yeah, I mean, I'll obviously never know because I never got any indications as to what it specifically was.
[6:03] I am such a urinator on third rails, I suppose, that it could have been any one of a half dozen to a dozen topics that wiser men than me choose to eschew, which I foolishly ran in, whatever it is. I mean, I feel it was necessary. I feel it was important. And of course, you know, philosophers, particularly moral philosophers, you have to have at least a couple of centuries in your business plan because you're generally reviled in the here and now, but you are recognized as being right down the road. That's sort of the goal, right? So you just have to be willing to have, you know, that sort of CCP half a millennia business plan to make it. But yeah, it could have been the George Floyd stuff. It could have been group differences in IQ. It could have been stuff I was doing between males and females. It could have been the stuff I was doing about China being the source of the virus. It could have been any number of things that would have been a hot topic. But I think it probably had something to do with the 2016. So 2016, as you know, the election of Trump was a seismic shock to the ruling classes because they'd never had to deal with anything like that before in the glorious days of internet that freedom, the decade of 06 to 2016, was unprecedented.
[7:16] You know, it's fine to let the masses have free speech as long as you're the gatekeeper and it doesn't really achieve anything. And the best you can do is sort of photocopy something and stuff it in people's mailboxes. But when you have people out there who are actively pushing against mainstream narratives and gaining significant traction, like my untruths about Donald Trump got millions and millions of views,
[7:35] You know, and the perception is, I suppose, that that may have had a tiny effect on the election. Who knows, right? But I think it was like, oh, this guy's free speech might actually be changing things. Well, we really can't have that. We just need to give people the illusion of free speech rather than free speech that actually might change something. So I assume it had something to do with that.
[7:55] Oh, yeah. So just to be clear, in terms of my earlier remarks, when I was saying, like, what was it? And then you were listing. Yeah, I think it was, as you say, the ruling class, for lack of a better term, realized that, oh, this Internet thing is really picking up steam. And now lots of people are turning to it to get news and just to figure out what the heck is going on with the world. And they realize for our agenda to continue being fulfilled, we have to nip this in the bud. So, of course, at the beginning, at the outset, they're not just going to start kicking off people and saying, oh, it's because we disagree with them politically. Like, that's not going to work. So instead, they go for, quote, the low-hanging fruit, the people who have said shocking things, because then, you know, a lot of people aren't going to go to the barricades over. It's like, oh, yeah, well, that guy, yeah, he's got a bad reputation.
[8:44] I'm not going to defend him. And I think also, I mean, as an economist, I'm sure you're aware of this, whether you agree or not, of course. But I remember when my daughter was little, showing her my tweets, say, versus mainstream media tweets. And boy, there's just no comparison, right? I mean, if you have a knack for this kind of stuff and you have interesting things to say, I was getting hundreds of times more views, likes, and retweets than huge mainstream media platforms. Now, of course, they have other ways of getting their information out, but there is just a certain amount of this guy's taking our eyeballs, this guy's taking our readers, this guy's disrupting our narrative. So if we just write negative articles about the guy and paint him as like the worst guy in the universe, then this can be used as evidence to get him deplatformed. And then hopefully some of those eyeballs will come back to us. It's, you know, standard say that the competing restaurant has rat feces in the soup, a kind of economic sabotage, I think.
[9:46] And also a chilling effect on everybody else to know like oh so that where you want to try to figure out what line is there so that i can still stay on the platform and then they can see well whatever the line is stuff and obviously must have been over it and so therefore let me you know dial down okay so that's what happened in the past and then you know i people who knew you and stuff okay well yep stuff and went into his own thing and he's got his hardcore fans that are you know with him and okay and i'm gonna go throw down because i'm still on twitter and then you came back recently so can you just explain and i know people had asked you when you had principled reasons for why you weren't going to come back even after elon bought it so can you just explain what what your old thinking was and then what made you change your mind
[10:28] well of.
[10:28] Course bob it just turned out that those principles were quite inconvenient so naturally i just had to jettison them you know like when you're on a ship and it's like really low in the water you just jettison any excess baggage people old ladies uh so no i mean my basic argument which was overthrown by a surprising uh person my basic argument was you know they did me dirty they did me wrong and in my view they were not uh upfront and honest about the reasons that they gave for my de-platforming at least from twitter so when you i bought and sold corporations uh well sold i mean i co-founded a software company, grew it, and actually ended up selling it twice. And so, I know that when you buy a corporation, you inherit the liabilities and the assets, right? You don't just get to reboot it and erase all the debt. So, I felt that, as Elon Musk said, he didn't buy a company, he bought a crime scene. So, my feeling was, okay, so if somebody wrongs me, or if I've wronged someone, what do they owe them? I mean, I was raised a Christian, so I owe them apologies, I owe them restitution and some reasonable certainty that it's not going to happen again, right? So if I'm really angry and I scream and throw things, you know, I'll apologize. I will, you know, fix whatever I broke. And then I'll enter into anger management classes so that there's some decent chance it's not going to happen again. And that's sort of a bare minimum for me of apologies and restitution. So that was sort of my standard with Twitter.
[11:57] And of course, I wasn't getting that. So I held off. But then, kids, man. So my daughter then made a very compelling case, which was she said, can Elon Musk or can Twitter apologize without –
[12:16] Incurring legal liability, right? Because, you know, in America in particular, right, you can't apologize for anything because, you know, people are, oh, okay, then he's admitting fault. And so she said, well, wouldn't he just have to run it past legal? And wouldn't legal get to say whether he got to, because it wouldn't just be me, right? There were lots of people who were, right? So would that have a negative effect on the value of the company if he apologized for stuff and then open himself up to legal action or whatever it is, right? So, is it possible in a practical sense for him to apologize? Again, you're a consultant in business, you know this probably better than I do, but fiduciary responsibility is kind of a big thing for people on the board, especially the CEO. If you act in a way that harms the value of the company, you can yourself get sued and it can be a big sort of ugly drawn out process. So, she basically said, do you have a standard which cannot be achieved now having a standard which can't be achieved well i'll apologize when you're nine feet tall it's like okay so just say you're not going to accept an apology and don't have this obstacle course that no mortal being can can surmount and so i was like oh that's a well that's a good point and then i sort of did some research and uh well she's right and so i you know if you have a standard of apology that can't be reached and she also said look the guy's been committed to free speech for a couple of years now. I think I got my account restored a couple of years ago.
[13:42] And she said, look, is it not apology enough that he has remained committed to free speech for a couple of years? In other words, if somebody, even if they don't apologize directly, which could be for legal reasons, if they've gone to anger management, if they haven't gotten angry in a couple of years, is there not an apology by implication based upon better and consistently better behavior? Again, that's a, uh,
[14:04] It's a pretty good argument. So given that she made these arguments, I couldn't really push back against them. And I'd always, you know, you're a dad, you say to your kids, we live by reason and evidence. And if you make a good case, you know, then that's great. So she made a good case. And I had to, well, I didn't have to come back, but she made a case that I really couldn't resist. I couldn't overturn. And again, it's the empathy thing. If I was in Elon Musk's position, would i would i kind of do the same thing uh well yeah because you know when you're a ceo you kind of got to do what legal tells you in those kinds of situations so sorry for the long answer but that's
[14:41] That's
[14:41] no that's great i i had seen you mentioned to people you know very briefly on, you know twitter slash there was a period when i thought i will i would sooner give up my left arm than call it x but now i'm slowly moving towards there um the yeah i had seen you say to people oh my daughter convinced me but i didn't know what that but that that's really interesting
[15:02] um so how are you allowed to tell us roughly how old she is just so to us to appreciate her.
[15:08] Oh sure yeah she'll be uh 17 this year she's 16 at the
[15:12] Moment
[15:12] okay wow yeah that's so that's really good yeah i'm trying to think of i suppose an analogy would be like when these world leaders and i want to, actually why don't we just jump right into it i'm curious in your thoughts about
[15:25] iran and Israel and all what's been going on over there.
[15:28] And one of the things that I think is intriguing about this is how like it's, you know uh oh well we bombed them they obviously have to send some missiles at our bases but they warned us ahead of you know what i mean it's sort of like you gotta you know they have people they gotta placate over there they got hardliners they gotta show their pop you know what i mean i always thought it was kind of interesting how at some level there is a sense of just you know getting in the other person's shoes and realizing yeah we got to give them a face saving thing it's like you're saying with elon that i i know exactly what you mean the various corporate let legal won't let you do anything you know i when i was younger i i came up with what i thought was a great script, to use the transformers characters and something and i wrote to i don't know if it's hasbro i forget who owns them and they just gave me a blank you know or not blank a form letter response no absolutely not and i just realized because they're legal team like they just can't you know what i mean they're they get all kinds of requests and just no no no you can't do it so anyway i was mad at the time and the suits don't get it my story would be awesome but blocking my creativity right i understand it would cost them too much to have like whole teams devoted to like parsing all the fan mail and so anyway
[16:35] I think it's the same thing sorry to interrupt but i think it's the same thing of the the simpsons writing team they get scads and scads of mail of people saying i wrote a simpsons script you should really use this and they literally have to keep it sealed in a box to prove they never opened it because they just they just happen to make the same joke or they have the same plot you know because it's a sony set number of stories right and so the guy's going to say hey man i sent that into you you stole it and they're like no no it's sealed we never opened it it's documented like this is the amount of defensiveness you have to do because of this crazy ip stuff but uh which i'm not a fan of of course because i like classical music and as you know classical music arose the most in the places with the least ip so um yeah that's that the legal legal rules that's that's what you gotta march behind
[17:18] Okay so since i opened up the can of worms i'm curious what do you have any thoughts on what's been going on the last two months with Iran and Israel?
[17:29] Yeah, I mean, it is. I'm not doing too much politics. I'm sort of skirting the general information. Of course, as you know, Iran is to some degree a result of intense American meddling, and all the way back to the 1950s with the Shah, and then of course Khomeini. So, you build the enemies, and then you fight the enemies, and then because the enemies fight back, you then get to expand your power over the population as a whole. So it is a horrendous situation. Of course, foreign policy is almost universally corrupt beyond words. So I think it would be kind of nice if America, I don't know, was interested in its own borders rather than laying money all over the universe for everyone else to have borders and security. But that's not quite as profitable, I think, for the military-industrial complex, and it doesn't give the politicians as much excuse to expand their powers.
[18:22] Well, I'm curious if you had any take, because I know, you know, like you say, when Trump first came on the scene politically, you know, you were people, you know, one of the first people to really get in, you know, in his head, as it were, and make analyses. Let me just throw this theory out. And again, if this is something that like, it's not been something you've been paying too much attention to, you know, fair enough. But I have no dog in the fight. I didn't vote for him. Um i but it looking at the various you know press conferences he was giving and especially you know him dropping the f-bomb and stuff when he was getting on the plane my take was that behind the scenes he was you know he and his people were telling the israelis give us time for the negotiation where you know we're making assurances to the iranians that were you know were the adults at the table and they're we're working with them blah blah blah and then israel's just doing the game theory and realize, no, we can hit them. And then what's Trump going to throw us under the bus and take their side over? No, he can't. And then we're going to say he was in on it. And what's he going to do? He's going to have to go along with that. And they just, and I think Trump was just outraged and shocked the first couple of times. I can't believe they just did that. And so I think he got, you know, again, I'm not saying that to try to make excuses for him or whatever, but that was my read in terms of his body language and stuff with the few occasions where they asked him, you know, did you tell Netanyahu to hold off? And he said, yes, I did. yes i did and then when he was saying you know they both don't know what the f they're doing or something that to me that looked like i don't think that was acting i mean that was like al pacino level acting if he was acting there i think he was pissed off well.
[19:51] Politics is presenting moral platitudes to the masses while pursuing cold terminator style calculations behind the scenes and so most of politics is pretend to be good and then act in at least what you perceive to be your own naked self-interest. And I think that's the best way to... So for me to sort of, I try not to lecture too much on certain foreign policy or politics, because as a moral philosopher, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense for me, at least, to lay a whole bunch of moral rules at the feet of people who, as a whole, are acting in only a moral pretense way and pursuing naked and fairly brutal self-interest. It would be like a nutritionist talking about astronomy in some sort of passionate way. It's like, well, the stars don't need anything, so your skills don't really apply. And that's how I sort of view this kind of stuff. And it's one of the reasons why the deplatforming was clear for me in that, of course, as a free speech absolutist, the goal is, of course, to have words, not swords, right? We want to keep that S out front to stop attaching itself to the beginning of words. And when...
[20:59] Speech is significantly suppressed, then it goes to real politic. It goes to group brute power, goes to force manipulation, lies, money printing, funding, debt, all of that sort of stuff. It goes to anything but the argument, the debate. And so for me, at least, the Overton window, which I was working to push, you know, kind of slammed back and took half my nose off. And that means that people are choosing coercion or force or manipulation over reasoned and argumentative debate. And it's one of the things, you posted a picture of yourself on X when you were, I think, slightly younger. Did I have that? Just a smidge, a tad, a tad younger. Yes, I was 24.
[21:46] Back when I was a young bern, back when I believed, hey, I'll just talk about the free market reason and evidence with people and we'll sort it all out. And, I mean, I think we all have that optimism and that's a good fuel. It has to be tempered by what's possible in the situation, of course, as you well know.
[22:03] Yeah yeah why don't we just i'm curious to get some more elaboration for you on that so for context folks what happened was uh i recently was interviewing dave howden of the mises institute he's a research fellow with them and and he he had he with parabylon he had co-edited a volume of essays in honor of joe salerno who for a long period now has been kind of running the the summer fellowship program and then dave kind of just you know as an aside said yeah bob you you were in that program right and i said oh yeah yeah and he said and i don't know and and so then the the guys like you know uh the tech guys doing the podcast went and dug up a photo of me from the year 2000 i think it was like the second year i was a fellow there and i i looked much younger and, probably a tad thinner as well and and so anyway some people were getting a good chuckle out of that and i tweeted that out and said something like oh this was a period in my life when i thought if i just write essays explaining how a free society will work everyone will get on board And so there is that. And, you know, I, I will confess stuff. I mean, I, this is embarrassing to say, but I don't know if you remember the, there was this website, antistate.com and I was a, you know, a regular there and we had this forum and there were a bunch of anarcho-capitalists that kept joining. I feel like an idiot just even telling you this stuff, but this is what happened. Like I would sit there and do the extrapolation and figure out at what date would 10% of humanity be anarcho-capitalist because I was just looking at the numbers.
[23:29] So that didn't happen. And the thing is, it's not that I was wrong with my views. It's just I can't believe talking to people how much they are like just they know what they want the answer to be and they'll backfill and figure out a rationale to get there. And I just, I've been, I mean, I'm not surprised anymore about it because I've just seen it for 20 years now, but I do remember just being shocked at, but no, I just showed you logically that that's not, how can you, you know.
[24:00] Well, you know, that's a big enough topic that you can't possibly leave in 45 minutes. I'm going to have to, you know, do the, what Scott Adams fears the most, which is watching somebody in a show get tied to a chair because he says that happens in every movie and it's so predictable. So, yeah, that big question of why don't people listen to reason and evidence?
[24:20] And, you know, one of my big tweets when I got back was talking about, you know, like 30 to 50% of people don't have an inner dialogue, don't have an inner voice. And it's not specifically related to intelligence. I mean, you can have very smart people, engineers and so on. They think more in terms of images and relationships rather than actual language. But those of us who are sort of machine language hamsters, we sort of think in terms of those things. And then, of course, I just tweeted out last night about the sort of famous Milgram experiment that just about everyone will torture if told to, and two-thirds of people will kill you if they're told to. And so, and I remember when I first read about that, I was like, well, didn't this provoke a massive social panic? Didn't this, like, oh, my gosh, something's entirely wrong with the way we raise children, with the way we educate people. Like, the fact that you end up with this soulless, easily programmed murder husks instead of people, isn't that something we should really panic about? And people are like, no, it didn't really change much, because I suppose, again, it's kind of convenient to have willing executioners for the powers that be. But yeah, why people don't listen to reason? I think, individually, they kind of want to, but we are social animals, and we only survive with the approval of those around us. At least that's how we evolved. And I think it's not so much people's individual beliefs that resist reason. I think what people do is a calculation and say, okay, and if I believe this, if I believe this,
[25:42] And I tell people that I believe this, then what? And I think that aspect of things, people who just willfully defied the tribe or the group or the nation or the king in the past, well, let's just say those genes were not enormously positively selected for continuation. So I think this process of not, is this true, but what will happen to me if I repeat this to people? And you could see this with the Trump phenomenon. Like Trump went from like the most popular guy, never accused of racism or sexism or anything like that to like, you know, orange Hitler reincarnated with a windstorm hairdo. And people didn't know why. It's just that if you said to people, I think that there's positive things about Trump. I think he really cares about America. I think he's outside the system. I think, you know, and the media certainly lied about him pathologically.
[26:36] So the question is what do people think other people are going to think of them if they hold a particular position i mean i was obviously skeptical about the the covid vaccine um for reasons we can go into if you're interested but i mean reasons to be skeptical right so but but then the anti-vaxxer and you you want granny to die and you know all of you're just a bad person you're crazy and and so then people are like okay well if i show skepticism to the vaccine how do people perceive me? And I think it's really the sort of social networks that prevent the transmission of sort of reason and evidence. Because, you know, if you talk to people individually, you know, like Saul Junison used to say about the Soviet Union, that you can only tell the truth with your wife under the covers at night when you're sure there's nobody listening. So individually, people are like, yeah, that kind of makes sense. But then they sort of pop out in their social circle, and they don't want to be ostracized. As you know, like, social ostracism
[27:34] Stimulates the same parts of the human brain as physical torture. And that's for reasons of what we need people to guard us as we sleep, we can't hunt alone, we need to reproduce. So we need some approval from the females or their clan or whatever. So I think that this torture mechanism of rejection, which I actually think is very positive for anarchism, I think that social rejection, economic rejection is how we enforce social rules in the absence of a state. But it It really is a double-edged sword because it really cuts through people's capacity to stand tall with reason in their social circles.
[28:07] Okay. Yeah. A lot there. Um, I definitely, I have seen that for example, even to, to go earlier, the, uh.
[28:15] Like the nine 11 truth stuff, there, there was a period where even among pretty radical libertarian groups, you could tell like, that was just like, oh, we're not gonna, we're not gonna go there right now. Like it's, it's enough that we're already opposing the U S government's retaliation and blah, blah, blah. And we're looking at blowback and things that we're just not going to go there. that that's going to give our enemies something on a silver or what i mean no one told me what the rationale was but i just i for sure observed there was a period and then it was just eventually like it became more and more acceptable to talk like that but even there like like tucker carlson recently had some guy and i forget the guy's name where you know they were tiptoeing up to it and like all this weird stuff about you know what the government knew and the cover-ups but but you know what i mean so that was just one example where it clearly people were thinking things themselves but they were kind of like well what are we you know what's going to happen to my career what you know what's going to happen if i cross that line uh on that element um i suppose the moon landing is another one that i know there's some people that are really whereas like the flat earth stuff, that's so you know out there that somebody could you know they wouldn't worry about their job being hurt if they were tweeting out you know these flat earth people make some sense because it's like you would think they were kidding whereas somebody said no i'm i really don't think that we went to the moon like i think a lot of people would be afraid to say that because they would be concerned that their employer might say what are you doing like your hr would call you in or something so anyway that i i definitely have seen that element at play you know with with.
[29:45] Things that are you know relevant well.
[29:47] I mean jfk of course uh the assassination
[29:49] Yeah that's another good one yeah
[29:51] gulf of tonkin i mean we could sort of go through the list uh whether the nukes were necessary to win world war ii like there's a whole bunch of stuff that uh formerly was, I don't know, you know, this is sort of an old trope that there was alphabet agencies that came up with the term conspiracy theory, which is a magic wand to just dismiss anybody whose arguments you don't particularly like. You know, I mean, I'm still quite shocked that the term McCarthyism is used
[30:14] to mean an irrational witch hunt, when, of course, McCarthy was even more right than he knew.
[30:18] And this is known from the declassification of the Soviet papers after the Cold War,
[30:24] But it's funny to me. I mean, people say, oh, it's just a conspiracy theory. It's like, you know, conspiracy is an actual term in law, right? Like, you know that there is a conspiracy to commit murder. There's a conspiracy to defraud. So any group of criminals that acts together, this is a term in law. It's not made up by wacky people with tinfoil helmets. Like, it's an actual term of law. And, of course, you can see conspiracies playing out all the time. Again, the COVID messaging was so bang and on point that it was definitely coming from some sort of planned arena. and whether it was pre-planned or not is sort of another question, but coordinated attacks. I mean, these are all things that are going on behind the scenes. Of course, the real conspiracy theory, which didn't turn out to be true, was that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. And so apparently it's a bad conspiracy theory if it's information you don't like. But if it's a totally false conspiracy theory, you could just repeat that ad infinitum as if it's true. So there's one of these NPC words. I did a tweet asking for people for their favorite NPC phrases. And yeah conspiracy theory dismissing something by calling it a conspiracy theory is uh i mean history historically and legally illiterate and uh it is just a way it's a magic wand to make bad scary facts go into the ether
[31:34] Yeah the way i try to use that approach is to say like how was julius caesar killed and that oh that's a conspiracy theory you just gave and also the official 9-11 report is a conspiracy theory it says that there were 19 hijackers who conspired, I actually did a search there. I don't think it was in the report, but I did see some official narrative where it did say these guys conspired. So it didn't have the word conspiracy, but it did have the verb. And I thought, hey, look at this. It's openly, how can you be pointing to the official report? You believe in a conspiracy theory. Okay, so why don't we jump to one of the things you've been doing lately that's been causing me all sorts of amusement is poking the guys who are very much
[32:14] about you can't date nowadays.
[32:16] So can you just give us a flavor of what that debate's been like recently?
[32:21] Sure. Not controversial, not upsetting people. You know, my usual gentle foot massage.
[32:27] Trying not to rock the boat.
[32:28] Yeah, my gentle foot massage of truth infusion through the souls. Well- I did start tweeting about this stuff as a whole, because the women that I know who were younger, it's funny, because there's this, here's a conspiracy theory, nobody over 50 can know anybody under 50. So people are like, well, you're an out of touch boomer. It's like, maybe out of touch, not quite a boomer. But I do actually know some younger people. And of course, I talk to people all the time. I've done thousands of these conversations over the last 20 years on my show, mostly people talking about sort of personal issues, dating issues, marriage issues, and so on. And I've talked to a lot of young men who are in their 20s and sometimes even into their 30s who've never really talked to a woman. And the reason why they haven't talked to a woman is that fork in the road. You either talk to women or you don't talk to women, and it tends to harden. If you get used to talking to women, you're comfortable with it. If you avoid talking to women, you tend to get more comfortable with that and get kind of settled. And then, of course, a lot of people come along and say, well, it's a wise decision you don't talk to women because the family courts are terrible and you could get divorced and women are crazy and like all the ideological divide and so on. So then you justify people's kind of bad decisions and it tends to seal them up in a social and obviously genetic dead end. So, you know, one of the great curses of studying a lot of history, as my graduate degree is in history, particularly the history of philosophy, but one of the curses of studying history and blessings is that
[33:56] People who claim to have it hard in the modern world are fighting from their mouth and talking out of their armpit. Like, it's absolutely crazed and ridiculous. I did a graduate degree course on the history of the Middle Ages, and not a lot of fun to be alive back then. And people still reproduced, even though you had to kiss a woman who'd never brushed her teeth and who probably had bathed about a year ago, who had a smallpox ravaged face and tooth decay. And, you know, and still, you know, half the babies died in childbirth and you had almost no political freedom. You could be strung up and killed for taking one rabbit from the king's lands or the lord's land. So, that was a pretty, pretty rough time.
[34:35] But at least there weren't factories oppressing them.
[34:37] Right, right, right. So, history, and of course, if you went back, people like the Roman Empire, yeah, but if you went back to the Roman Empire, odds are highly likely you'd just be a slave. You wouldn't be a senator, right? So, most people had no freedom. Ancient Greece, same thing. So when people say it's too scary, it's too negative, it's too difficult to date right now, you know, just older guy, trained in history, good perspective is like, yeah, but your ancestors, you know, human beings got down to 10,000 souls during the last ice age. Like we were this close to like despawning. And, you know, people fought their way back and people have babies during war and plagues and famines and all other kinds of natural disasters. And it is possible. And oh people are propagandized women are propagandized it's like well people and women have always been propagandized i mean it's but at least you have the internet now so you have access to both better and worse information right that's the fork in the road of the internet it's like if you take the sunny side of the street you get a beautiful tan uh if you take the dark side of the street your nads freeze off and you your genetic line is dead so uh just reminding people about that uh is is really important so then i did sort of an experiment which i talked about uh last friday so I did an experiment where I pushed pretty hard back against these things and
[35:53] And basically, the young men, some of them, were ferocious and angry and hurling all kinds of insults. And, you know, I mean, insults work on the young, but, you know, I'm pushing 60. If you don't know who the hell you are and what you're about by the time you're pushing 60, you've kind of missed the boat. So they don't really have any effect. I just find them sort of interesting because they reveal more about the person who's insulting you than, you know, if somebody said, Stef, I hate your haircut, I'd be like, yeah, may not particularly apply to me.
[36:21] So i i sort of pushed back hard and
[36:23] Can i stop you real fast on that the when you know when i tweeted out that the picture of me from the year 2000 there was you know i got like a thousand hearts on it or something most people were you know whatever i thought it was great and then a few people were like wow you were even bald back then and it was just like it dug it hurt my feelings was like what's the point of you saying that it's just shocking to me like why would you think that would be you know anyway so go ahead.
[36:47] I have no idea why people think the bold thing means anything. I get to live an extra six months because I don't have to take care of my hair. Because, you know, people spend a lot of it. You spend two months shaving and six months taking care of your hair. So, I guess you're fine. I'm going to get an extra year almost. So, I sort of did an experiment where I was pushing fairly hard and then people were like, well, you don't have empathy for the young. You don't have empathy for me. You don't understand. You don't, right? And they were so angry and it's like,
[37:12] But you're also not displaying any empathy for me, because one of the things I talked about, and this went pretty viral, and I try not to be too aggressive, but every now and then I think it's fine to show a bit of sword play. And basically, it was like, somebody was like, oh, you had to suffer nothing. You got three houses for 12 strawberries, and everything was great back when you were a kid. And I'm like, well, we – and basically, I said, shut up. I grew up under the shadow of nuclear war and the destruction of all life on Earth. You face some fat feminists right now that was fairly blunt of course it's not entirely true i we certainly did grow up under the shadow of nuclear war but they faced more than fat feminists there's a bit of hyperbole and you know this thermonuclear people get really mad and they just had no empathy for what i suffered as a young man through the propaganda that we faced and it wasn't just of course war the environmental stuff peak oil we were all going to starve to death by 1980 and the environment the ozone layer the uh the acid rain it was just constant right and you didn't have access to the internet to counter information that people have now. So you really didn't, you couldn't
[38:16] really push back against the narrative much. So it had a big effect.
[38:19] So then I did a show on Friday basically saying, okay, so you want me to have empathy with you as a young man, but you don't have any empathy for me as a young man. And that's why you can't get laid because you just don't have any compassion. You don't have any empathy. You don't have any human sensitivity. And so it was a really interesting experiment to see if I put myself forward about the vulnerabilities that I had as a young man, would they say, yeah, that must have been tough.
[38:42] And then I'd be like, yeah, well, what you're going through is tough as well. But as I've always said, I treat people the best I can the first time I meet them. And after that, I treat them as they treat me. So I showed compassion. Then when I got endless insults, yeah, let the cannons fly. I mean, it's a principle of self-defense in verbal altercations.
[38:59] Well, the thing about some of the reactions to your tweets that I saw that was just amazing to me that, you know, I wonder if some of these people are just trolling and they're just making a joke or something. But it would just for the listeners here, Stefan, it was stuff. They weren't merely saying, you know, all things considered, a young guy who wants to get married. I don't know if that's the right thing to do because of the divorce. They weren't just saying that. They were saying stuff like stuff. I said, well, why don't you go say hi to a woman that you see in the coffee shop? And they were sitting there trying to tell you why you would probably end up in jail that night if you did that, because she would accuse you of rape. And it was just like.
[39:35] What?
[39:36] And again, they're saying with a straight face and, you know, not all men, you know, I'm not saying every guy's doing that, obviously, in terms of. But there were a lot pushing back against you with the most ludicrous arguments I've ever seen. And it was like, this is not healthy. You know what I mean? Like, I get that. Yeah. You know, I'm being cliched here, but the pendulum swung too far. Yeah, there was a period where no matter what show you watch, the male was always the buffoon. The husband was through through through and the wife was the super, you know, and I get that. And that's why people are pushing back. And yet divorce court is very unfair to the men and blah, blah, blah.
[40:10] I totally get that. I even get the men going their own way and why that's a thing.
[40:14] And OK, but the people pushing back against you are coming up with the most ludicrous warnings about. no, you absolutely cannot even go say hi to a woman because somehow the law will come down upon you if you do that. And it was just, what are you, dude?
[40:29] Right, right, and- That is brutal. And I think that's being fed by people who are preying on and furthering people's insecurities and fears. And I think those people can look back and I just, I just want to give people a choice. If you don't get counter information, you functionally don't have a choice. Free will is about accessing counter information. So I just want to give people counter arguments. And look, again, I know you, you do fantastic consultations for business.
[40:54] So if someone said to you, oh, Dr. Murphy, I got this great business idea, but the business that I want to get involved in, the sector has a 50% failure rate. I can go bankrupt, lose my house, everything, right? Now, if you as a consultant were able to get that risk of bankruptcy down to 5% or below, boy, you would have earned your government cheese that day, right? I mean, that would be a fantastic, that's a tenfold reduction in risk. If you had some horrible disease that had a 50% mortality rate, and then some healer came along and said, I can get your mortality rate down to 5% or below, you'd be absolutely thrilled. You'd probably name your dog and firstborn after that person because they would have completely changed your life for the better. So when people are like, 50% divorce rate, 50% divorce rate, I mean, I've done this research years ago, and I laid out step by step, here's how you get your risk of divorce to 5% or lower. right?
[41:51] Compatible values, have the conversations ahead of time, choose someone who's got morals and integrity, have decent rules for conflict, no yelling, no name calling, no, right? Just basic rules and standards of virtues and values and your divorce rate. And, you know, a woman who's either well-educated or well-read, you can be an autodidact that way as well, and your odds of divorce virtually vanish. Now, if these guys wanted to get married but were too scared of the divorce rate and I showed them, boy, here's a tenfold reduction in your risk of divorce. Wouldn't they be incredible? Oh my gosh, finally, I can go talk to girls. This is fantastic. Blah, blah, blah. But no, it doesn't matter. They just ignore it and then continue to say, but you get jailed for saying hi to a woman at Starbucks. And it's like,
[42:35] But, you know, hopefully for some people, it sort of sinks into their head.
[42:39] They kind of figure this stuff out. And I think one of the things, sorry, long answer.
[42:42] Last thing I want to mention, I think young men in particular, maybe young women, but I'm talking more to the young men, lost their ability to assess risk almost completely. I don't know if this is staying indoors. When I was a kid, we'd be just out all the time and, you know, climbing trees, building tree houses and forts. And, you know, you'd fall, you'd ride on your bike, no helmets. You'd fall and you'd learn how to assess risk at a sort of physical level. And so people are talking about false accusations it's like okay but you're many many many more times likely to die in a car crash than experience a false accusation from a woman but you still drive you say okay i'll accept that risk and so not talking to women because there are a couple of crazies out there who make false accusations which you can filter for by looking for shared values and virtues i mean they don't know how to assess risk and of course the internet does that because you see some crazy story where a false accusation destroyed some student's career. Maybe he didn't go to jail, but destroyed his academic career. Terrible, awful, absolutely, but so rare. If all you did was stare at car crashes all day, you wouldn't get in a car, but that's not assessing risk at a numerical level. And math illiteracy is really tough for people because if you can't assess relative risk, again, you don't have free will. You're just programmed by negative stimuli.
[43:53] Well, also I liked, I'm paraphrasing here, But I took one of the points I think I saw you make was along the lines of, OK, let's just stipulate for the sake of argument that, you know, you really are this concern. And yet there are like you say, they're not inventing things out of whole cloth. There are horrifying, you know, individual case. OK. And then you said, OK, so if you're that afraid of women because there's a chance down the road, you know, they could take half your stuff or whatever. And you don't get to see the kids. okay but then why was there this huge freak out over the women saying i'd rather encounter a bear in the woods than a man because it's not like there are no examples of men brutalizing women for them to draw upon and you know what i mean so it was like pick one like if you want to say no i'm terrified of women because you know there's a slight chance something horrible could have okay but then you can't be outraged when women say you know i'm afraid of men because well duh, but yet a lot of these guys they do both they're on the one hand like not all men how you can't believe oh my god you know statistically how low it is that you're you know the man will be there to help you and you know and then at the same time you can't say hi to a woman a coffee shop because basically she's going to have half your stuff by next thursday
[45:01] and you'll be in jail and the other thing too is that and this is just again this is older guy i have older guy privilege uh which is uh i i've seen the arc of people's lives right i mean it's all theoretical you know you get it from movies, maybe great novels and things like that. Like, what are the arc of people's lives? The little decisions you make at the beginning have massive domino effects down the road. Like, if you're sailing from you know, London to New York, and you're off by two degrees, it doesn't matter much at the beginning, but you're going to end up in Mexico by the end, right? So, these little decisions at the beginning. So, I have the privilege of having seen the arc of people's lives, having known them as a child, having known them as teenagers, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and it's really clear, I'm sure you've, I mean, if you haven't had the same experience, I'm sure you have, but it's really clear that the little decisions that people make at the beginning have huge ramifications down the road. So, you know, you see some woman, you want to talk to her. And you're like, okay, it's done. I'm going to go to jail, right? So, okay, but then what happens is you don't get married, you don't have kids, you don't have a community. And, you know, as you sort of age out of the dating market, which, you know, happens to men too, right? I mean, it happens to men as well. For women in the 40s, men tends to be in the 50s.
[46:11] Or then what? So then you have the pain of regret and there's no do-over, right? Because people, video games, I don't want to blame them for much because they're not responsible for much, but the sort of save game, Oh, I'll give it a try. I'll go back. Life doesn't work that way. You can't circle back, particularly when it comes to dating and fertility windows for women. If you don't have a kid, you can't do it later. You can't go back. There's no control Z. There's no load of previous saved game and start over.
[46:38] And so it really matters the decisions that you make as a young man.
[46:41] The first half of your life has to some degree be about preparing for the second half of your life. And if you think it's scary and negative to talk to a woman in a coffee shop, which could lead to a wife and kids, boy, regret.
[46:56] And now that is one of the worst things at all, because at least the pain of talking to a woman is going to be somewhat transitory. But, you know, guys in their 40s and 50s who, you know, again, I've talked to these men quite a bit on my show, that the agony of regret is really tough. And you've got a lot of decades of that kind of inner turmoil and negativity. So just giving the old guy privilege and saying, your fears as a young man, I understand them, but they're overblown relative, right? Oh, this negative thing could happen, but it's overblown relative to regret, which is kind of this permanent marrow rot that sets into people who've made bad decisions. And again I tweeted about this shortly before I got platform which is that ladies you you know you're you're largely infertile at 40 what are you and you can live to be 80 or more like what are you going to do for close to half a century like what are you going to do what are you going to do how are you going to fill your time you know there's only a certain amount of hobbies that are going to do that at some point you have to have connection communication relationships love be surrounded by people who care about you and who you care about because you know when you get old you're really going to need people around you who care about you, and you're not going to get that from your Fortnite buddies when you were 20.
[48:07] Yeah. Let's take a break from the action, folks, for me to remind you, if you like what you're hearing on The Bob Murphy Show, and come on, is there really another podcast like this out there? I don't think so. If you like what you hear, I encourage you to support it. Go to bobmurphyshow.com slash contribute. Every little bit helps. I really appreciate it. Bobmurphyshow.com slash contribute. All right, let's get back to the show.
[48:33] Okay, this next one. I hope this comes off properly.
[48:37] I was very pleasantly surprised to see your take on this stuff because i had filed it away i mean i know i did a response video to you like 15 years ago or something where you there was some it wasn't disney it was like one of their copycat whatever there was some animated film that came out and you did a review of it and you were pretty upset about the anti-male messaging in the movie and i thought you were overreacting and so i kind of did a response so anyway given that that's what i thought you were doing whatever it was 15 20 years ago at this point and then now to see you this way kind of like gently teasing the guys about yeah yeah okay women might do that but you know anyway i was just very pleasantly surprised so has there been an evolution you're thinking or is it like no i totally stand behind everything i said 15 years ago and then what i'm saying now is consistent with that and what are you talking about um.
[49:27] Help me understand the contradiction that you see from your end
[49:32] I okay i'll put it this way um i would have thought the guys right now who are like pointing out all the statistics about all the ways things can go wrong you got to watch out women are you know they're the way that modern feminism has raised them and they're this is how they think you gotta be real careful i would have thought and perhaps completely erroneously that 15 years ago guys thinking like that might have looked to you as one of their intellectual heroes, and that you would have been giving them some ammunition in that respect is that totally wrong
[50:01] No, I talk about danger so that people can avoid them, right? Not to paralyze people, right? I mean, if you want to start skiing, you don't just push someone off the double diamond and, you know, you gear them up, you put them on the bunny hills, you give them some training, right? So, there's dangers to skiing and you – but that doesn't mean don't ski, that means deal with these dangers intelligently. There's dangers to driving.
[50:24] So, you know, drive defensively, don't be drunk, you know, get some training if you need it and practice and so on, right? So, yeah, talking about the dangers of your single mothers, of family courts and all of that, that is, you know, when you put your kids on a bike, you say, don't go too fast, you know, and don't turn too hard on gravel and maybe wear a helmet. And, like, you talk about dangers with people so they can navigate and avoid them, right? Not so they don't do anything and just stay home all the time. So, I don't want people going out there and getting chewed up by these systems that are not talked about, right? There's not a lot of people talking to men at least 15 years ago about the dangers that are out there in the world of, you know, bad courts and bad women and all of that. But I didn't talk about these issues so that men could use them as an excuse to not go out and sort of found families and so on. And of course, the anti-male stuff, I mean, you know this very well, I'm sure, is that men tend to be pro-free speech absolutists. They tend to be smaller government. They tend to be more pro-free market. That's just our, you know, I don't know, testosterone-laced competitive nature or whatever you want to call it. But men tend to be more for...
[51:35] competition rather than coercion, at least in the political sense, because coercion has significantly negative effects for men. I mean, we can get killed if you say something wrong and get a duel. So the anti-male stuff is just any group that wants smaller government gets attacked and white males tend to be the most pro-free speech and smallest government kind of people for whatever reason. And so I think the anti-male stuff has to do with political machinations, but I, and I didn't want to warn young men about the dangers because, I mean, I was raised in a single mother household, welfare state kind of environment. And I saw a lot of these dangers up front, these women sort of chewing up these men and spitting them out for money. So yeah, you want to talk about things that are of concern and danger to young men. And I mean, maybe that's on me. I went too far or something like that, but it was never with the intention of, because I always said, look, I'm happily married and here's how you can do it. And, you know, when young men would call in, I'd say, well, you know, here's the blocks you probably have to go in to talk to girls, but at some point you just have to will it. Like at some point, you know, everybody wants to massage their fears till they're small enough to step over it it's like nope you're gonna have to make that leap at some point uh so uh yeah i i do think that i certainly did talk about the dangers facing young men and the anti-male anti-male bias and so on but i certainly never meant it with the intention of uh then you know stay home and play video games until you're dead
[52:51] right Okay and to be clear i'm not doing a gotcha or something i'm.
[52:55] Just saying maybe it was i mean okay maybe it was wrong something so
[52:59] yeah i'm fine
[52:59] i was pleasantly yeah i was pleasantly surprised to see when you were back on my radar that the fights you were picking were with the guys saying that no no no you can't say hi to a woman in a coffee shop that's a bad idea you know so it was okay one other big and i and this is my fault folks that i have a hard stop coming up soon so in case it looks like this is
[53:18] being truncated it's on my end have your views moved on theological matters in the last decade.
[53:24] Yeah i mean i've done um a whole i was wrong about series of videos yeah that's a big topic so
[53:35] Uh, I first spoke to the atheist community, I mean, long before I became sort of a public dude, I was in the atheist community and talking to the atheist community and had great hopes for the atheist community in terms of morals. Morals are the key to everything, and morals are the key to happiness, and reason equals virtue equals happiness, that famous equation from Socrates. So, morals are the key to everything good and positive. You can't have love without morals, you can't have trust, you can't have a high-trust society, you can't have an efficient economy, you can't, you have to have bars on your window and get tested for STDs all the time. So, I am a big fan of ethics, and of course, as a moral philosopher, philosophy is really centered on ethics, because it's the one thing that philosophy does that no other discipline really encapsulates. So, I was in the atheist community, and the atheist community was very much like, oh, Christian morals, you know, it's based on fallacious metaphysics and epistemology, and it's not rational. And I'm like, okay, so what's your answer? And they're like, um, Darwinism. No, no, there's one place you don't want to go to ethics is evolution, because it's all about falsehood and violence, so to speak, because, you know, you deceive and then you eat things. So, um, and I went to Dawkins and I went to Sam Harris, went to other people, read a lot about this question of secular ethics. And,
[54:59] The atheists got, not only do they not have anything, but even when I put forward a very robust proof of secular ethics in my book, University Preferable Behavior, I got contempt and scorn, hostility and hatred from the, and not any particularly rational rebuttals. And I did a whole bunch of debates with atheists and secularists and so on. And I was like, as an empiricist, this troubles me. And so Christianity, of course, kept their ethics. And then one thing I noticed, of course, was that over the attacks that came at me from, you know, a large number of different, my picture was three times on the cover of the New York Times, Sunday edition, no less. So, when the sort of attacks came in, it was the Christians in my life who were magnificent.
[55:45] And they say, we know that good people get persecuted. Whereas the atheists are like, oh, where there's smoke, there's fire. Got to run. And they absolutely went to the back rooms. They just vanished, and Christians were there. And again, as an empiricist, it's like, you've got to have something right about this. Again, the pandemic reinforced this as well, in that Christians tended to be more skeptical of the vaccine and of the whole process. And the atheists were running around bleating like brainless sheep. Trust the science. Trust the science. It's like, you know, science is the exact opposite of trust, right? And so, when it comes to sort of practical matters in the world, atheists believe in the superstition called government and vote for things that take my rights away. Christians believing in God promote really great, rational, acted-out virtues and don't vote for governments, tend to vote for governments that don't want to take my rights away and obviously sometimes want to restore them. So, from a practical standpoint, and as an empiricist, you know, I can never, ever, as an empiricist, deny accumulated consistent evidence, and Christians were better people than the atheists, were more interested in morality, and understood the world a whole lot better.
[57:00] So, that's kind of hard to ignore, at least I don't want to ignore it. And so, my position on Christianity, given not just the positive behaviors of Christians, but the generally appalling and virulent behavior of atheists, is like, that's not what i expected and when things don't play out as i expected it's because i've got something wrong at the essence so hopefully that's some sort of answer that makes sense
[57:26] Oh absolutely um i don't know if you know this about me so i was raised catholic i spent a long stretch where i called myself a devout atheist i thought that was clever i would i would i read uh like george smith's book on atheism uh hl menken's treatise on the gods uh thomas pain's the age of reason i thought these are good but i was gonna write the definitive refutation of christianity and then i had some stuff happen in grad school and i spent a period it sounds like maybe that's where i called myself christian with a small c meaning i'm on board with like the culture and like the political economy of it and everything you know western europe blah blah blah it's just come on some guy didn't walk on water and he's give me a break you know that and then and then even some stuff happened that pushed me further so if you don't mind me asking like where are you on that level of, like, do you believe in God or you're not there?
[58:16] I am going to church. I am listening to Christians. I am open to the experience. I cannot will it because I am an empiricist. So, the empirical evidence is that there's a virtue that comes through Christianity that secularism and atheism not only can't compete with, but seems to virulently oppose, which is kind of demonic, in a way, right? And, of course, it's, as a persecuted person myself, not to make it too dramatic, I have sympathy with those who are persecuted, and there is really no more persecuted group in the world at the moment than Christians, and so we have that to some degree. In common. So, yeah, I'm going to church. I can't will it as an empiricist, but I am certainly open to the experience, and my heart is open, and I'm listening a lot, and boy, I would love it. I mean, honestly, if something happens that is convincing to me, and I'd love to hear these grad stories at yours maybe the next time we talk, but if something happens that shows it to me, my gosh, to live forever and to spend eternity with best friends, family, I mean, to be able to cross-examine Socrates back. I mean, that would be glorious beyond words. So I am wide open and just waiting for the sign.
[59:40] Okay, well, I mean, I'm obviously very glad to hear that. And also what you just said there to me, because when I didn't believe, that was my stance. I said, oh yeah, that would be great if it were true. I just, I don't believe it. I'm not going to believe in fairy tale. Like just like, yeah, if Santa Claus were real, that would be awesome. I never understood like the, was it Christopher Hitchens and the strain of the, like the God of the Bible doesn't exist and thank goodness, you know, in other words that we're glad. And it's like, that never made sense to me. So anyway, I'm heartened to hear you say it that way. Well, let me just, and again, folks, I know that was a big thing for me to bring up. And you're like, well, Bob, why? It's again, because of the time constraints.
[1:00:20] I am never resistant to questions. You can ask me anything you want. Yeah.
[1:00:25] Okay. So it's, well, I think...
[1:00:30] For example, like here, let me just pull up. You've got your book Against the Gods, A Concise Guide to Atheism and Agnosticism. So it looks like in terms of you, like I was planning on writing this book and you actually did write it. So there's no judgment coming from me, but I'm just curious as to like you say here, Stefan Molyneux's seminal book Against the Gods makes a powerful case against agnosticism for the positive acceptance of the non-existence of supernatural beings. It's not rational to even entertain the possibility of the existence of irrational entities. Um and so okay it ends here uh it provides essential ammunition to those fighting the virus of faith and clears the mental fog of the irrational middle ground between atheism and theism so i'm curious just you know you think is is it like because because this is how i think i can remember all this stuff for example oh okay so there's adam eve in the garden and god says don't eat from that tree they do he's mad he kicks him out there's this this schism between man and god he says you know what i'm going to send my son we torture and murder him and then god says okay now we're cool that doesn't make any sense right so i still understand the validity of that argument it's just now as a christian i could say that's not the right way to frame it and let me tell you and i can say some other true statements also that put that in you know what i mean so is that how you think of the of that book that you understand the you know any particular argument you made in there is yeah valid it's just now you're seeing a bigger picture
[1:01:58] So.
[1:01:59] I mean, I've done a whole series recently on Bible verses, and it's sort of exploring that. For me, it's like, let's say that I'm some expert doctor, but every cure that I think works kills the patient. And let's say there's some guy I call a crazy holistic doctor, and he says, well, you need these herbs, you need these plants, and every time he applies this non-scientific medicine, the patient gets cured. Right. And it's like, wouldn't that give you some pause as to your principles? All the stuff that science validates kills everyone, and all the stuff that's supposedly superstitious stuff cures people, and it's like, you gotta look at that stuff, you gotta examine it. Now, I don't know where you stand with agnostics, but they bother me more than just about anybody else, because taking pride in not making decisions about essential matters in the world is a kind of smoke superiority on a lack of intellectual throughput and rigor and consistency. So this really, the book was very much against agnosticism as a place to avoid making good decisions. It's like, you know, like on the Zoom call, you know, the guy who sits there for an hour and a half and then says, well, nothing really from my end. It's like, why are we paying you? What is your value here? So I definitely...
[1:03:14] Yeah, my take, in my period of devout atheism, my take was when people, because i had some christian friends in undergrad that were like no no bob you're you're agnostic like they didn't want me to tell people i was an atheist and i said well are you agnostic about zeus you know what i mean and i would say yeah i can't prove zeus doesn't exist but if you say do you believe in zeus i'm gonna say no i'm not gonna say well i don't know like so that was my take that i thought that was just being wishy-washy
[1:03:38] give me a break you don't believe in zeus i don't believe in jehovah come on
[1:03:42] well.
[1:03:42] And as i use this analogy in a book i wrote recently about how the atheists, during a time of terrible storms and hails and frozen frogs falling from the sky, came and destroyed the church. And people were then pushed out into a brutal wilderness where a lot of them got sick and died. And the problem is, of course, if you want to say to the West, lose your Christianity, it's not rational, it's not empirical, it's not logical. Then, okay, let's say you tear down the church, but that's the only home we have in the wilderness. And the coldness and the callousness of atheists in removing from people's hearts and minds religious faith without providing a system of secular ethics, to me, is one of the greatest and grandest and most appalling acts of sabotage that has been committed in the world throughout human history. And so, you know, to at least solve my own conscience with regards to that, one of the first things that I worked on was a proof of secular ethics. Because if you're going to say to people, I'm going to tear down your church, and you don't give them any other place to go, they just die in the wilderness. And I'm really concerned about the atheist motives with regards to that.
[1:05:00] Well, and that dovetails, I think, that, you know, that famous Nietzsche quote, God is dead and we killed him thing, that in context, that's kind of what he's getting at, right? He's saying, like, you know, we took God out of public civil life or whatever, and there's going to be some ramifications, right? I mean, so I think sometimes people misinterpret, you know, what he meant by that statement.
[1:05:22] Yeah, and people without primary source access to universal ethics have only practical considerations to make when resisting tyranny. They do not have moral, absolute reasons to act in resistance to tyranny. Then it just becomes a cost-benefit calculation, as we talked about at the beginning. And when people are making cost-benefit calculations on resistance to tyranny or falsehood or corruption, then all that tyranny, falsehood, and corruption has to do is escalate the punishments to get compliance.
[1:05:57] Whereas if you have a principle, I mean, for me, what I did, Bob, over the 15 years before I was deplatformed was not a cost-benefit calculation. I mean, given my skills in business and rhetoric and public speaking and so on, I mean, I could have made a ton of money in politics or the media or in sales or whatever it was, right? And I know that because I was in an entrepreneurial sphere where I did fairly well. It's not a cost-benefit calculation. And Darwinism and this sort of reciprocal altruism nonsense that passes for ethics in the secular community fundamentally comes down to a cost-benefit calculation, and that always fuels the rise of tyranny because all tyranny has to do is escalate punishments such as deplatforming. And as you say, the splash damage of, okay, well, we're not going to talk about this, as opposed to how I was raised, which was thou shalt not bear false witness. and tell the truth. Though the sky is full and tell the truth and shame the devil. And I did not want to have my commitment to reason, evidence, and the truth and virtue. To be constrained by a cost-benefit calculation because then you really have no integrity you're just navigating sticks and carrots.
[1:07:13] I think related to that is um there was a guy that, uh that would hang out on my blog like i used to blog imagine that uh years ago and he was just strident militant atheist like he he loved my economic stuff you know so he was polite about it but it was just very you know it was kind of like bob you're great six days of the weekend and you're out to lunch on sunday but you know i will forgive you for that and uh and he came around so he i don't think he became like an actual christian or something but more recently like the last i heard from him it was something along the lines of he had come to realize that the people running the world in terms of this governments or whatever genuinely believed they were serving satan and he realized the only people that could possibly stand up to this group are those who think they're serving a god that like secularist like it's just not and i've made that point elsewhere that to me like the rational scientific atheists who think like no we're just gonna write some more books and whatever and it's like you don't know what you're up against like no the only reason that i would you know that i haven't tried to work for the fed or something is because i you know i would you know well god would would be disappointed or something you know what i mean so if i just thought this was me we got the time on the earth and then that's it and you're done And like, yeah, what I'm doing right now would be stupid. So anyway.
[1:08:28] That makes sense. Yeah. And when you're in trouble in life and when enemies are circling and the arrows are raining down, it really matters. Who's coming in the room and who's going out who's picking up some weapon metaphorically to fight alongside you and who is despawning and pretending like you never existed and uh this didn't do the atheists did not rally around even though i was an atheist and and had fought strongly for atheist causes the wild thing was that the christians who i had attacked rallied around me and the atheists who I defended in a sense either despawned or joined the enemy. And again, as an empiricist, that's kind of important to notice.
[1:09:16] Okay. Well, let me end with just praising. I don't know if I ever told you this. This is one of the pivotal moments. I'm not trying to be overly dramatic of my life in terms of me understanding how the world works and what type of people exist. You and I were doing an event in New York City years ago. It was like you had to walk downstairs in the basement. It was under there. And it was you know you gave your talk and i you know i think this is the first time i'd seen you live like i knew i knew of you or whatever and then you're sitting there with the mic and it's this intimate setting and there's i don't know 50 people just all around you and you were like in the middle of this circle almost fielding questions just people were asking you all kinds of stuff and you were just like running shop and i was just watching this and like you know you were funny and everything and i was like i can't believe someone like that exists i was just, So anyway, that was, in terms of me just knowing what kind of people exist, that was very impressive to me. And so I don't know what you did to get to that level of confidence and just glibness and seeming to be, you know, know all sorts of stuff about everything and being able to field questions and be funny. But that was, that gave me something like, oh, I want to, you know, in that realm of my public persona, I want to be more like that guy. So thanks for being a role model in that respect.
[1:10:28] Very kind. I really, really appreciate that. Thank you.
[1:10:31] So, folks, my guest has been Stefan Molyneux. Where should they go? Freedomain.com? Is that the...
[1:10:36] Yeah, Freedomain.com. I have, of course, a spastic mouthful of Polish syllables in my name. So, I think Freedomain.com is probably the easiest place to find me.
[1:10:45] Okay. So, thanks, Stefan, for coming here. And, yeah, we'll have to continue this conversation at a future date.
[1:10:51] Anytime, man. Thanks a mill.
[1:10:53] Okay. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. We'll see you next time.
[1:10:58] Music
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