Philosopher Stefan Molyneux engages in a compelling dialogue with Malcolm Collins, who presents a distinctive perspective on a contentious subject: the function of physical discipline in parenting, especially in relation to child development. From the outset, it's clear that the conversation extends beyond a mere exchange of opinions; they are embarking on a profound investigation into morality, societal norms, and the evolving philosophies surrounding parenting.
Stefan initiates the conversation by establishing a framework for a respectful and nuanced debate, recognizing the sensitivity surrounding the topic at hand. Malcolm thoughtfully clarifies that he does not advocate for universal corporal punishment; rather, he invites listeners to reconsider the stigma attached to physical discipline across different cultural contexts. He articulates this position with insight, suggesting that the roots of physical discipline delve deeper into our evolutionary history and cultural evolution than is often acknowledged. His reasoning encourages both of us to explore an alternative narrative, weaving through historical practices and contemporary views on parenting.
As they commence their discussion, Malcolm draws from his observations of discipline across various societies, highlighting that in some hunter-gatherer communities, discipline practices are more flexible, while larger civilizations tend historically to embrace physical discipline as a normative aspect of parenting. This raises critical questions about how societal expectations shape our approaches to discipline. He argues that shielding children from adverse stimuli may hinder their ability to handle life's inevitable difficulties, positing that moderate physical discipline can equip them with resilience, a viewpoint that generates intrigue and provokes deeper analysis from both the audience and myself.
Stefan steers the conversation towards the cognitive aspects of parenting practices, specifically questioning how Malcolm reconciles the potential psychological impacts of corporal punishment with prevailing societal norms. He defends his stance by asserting that an upbringing devoid of any forms of negative reinforcement could lead to susceptibility in children as they navigate real-world experiences. His emphasis on the importance of exposing children to discomfort as a means of building resilience raises eyebrows and deepens the scrutiny of the expansive dialogue.
As they delve further into the nuances of disciplinary methods, Malcolm shares scenarios where immediate discipline becomes crucial, particularly in preventing harm. He illustrates this through real-life examples involving multiple children, drawing a parallel between physical discipline and the practical choices parents must make to ensure safety. He argues that physical discipline could potentially cause less emotional trauma than punitive measures that might harm familial attachment. This discussion opens up avenues for probing the moral implications of his arguments, as Stefan questions whether the shifting societal perspective on discipline reflects a departure from practical parenting needs, influenced by ideology.
The conversation evolves further as they engage with the emotional landscapes surrounding these issues. Malcolm's affirmative approach to discussing traditional practices casts light on the complexities of societal standards, moral philosophy, and the ever-changing dynamics of parenting. Throughout their exchange, there's a palpable resonance with listeners, underlining the necessity for understanding rather than mere judgment on such a divisive topic. They collectively reflect on how this debate not only examines individual beliefs but also encapsulates broader societal challenges regarding family dynamics and future generational values.
As they approach the climax of their dialogue, Stefan takes care to emphasize the interplay between morality and cultural practices. Malcolm exhibits a refreshing openness to discuss physical discipline without dogmatic assertions, sharing insights rooted in his own journey as a father while navigating the turbulent waters of parenting philosophies. This willingness to approach the subject with humility and openness effectively enriches the conversation, allowing for a thorough examination of the impacts various methods have on child development.
Ultimately, the conclusion of the engaging debate transcends a dichotomous view of right and wrong concerning physical discipline. It unfolds as a larger discourse on the complexities of parenting in a rapidly evolving societal landscape. They encourage listeners to ponder the foundations of their beliefs, the implications these hold for individual development, and how they might thoughtfully reshape our understanding of parenting. Through this extensive exchange, they illuminate the intricacies of raising children with love and responsibility in an ever-changing world, leaving the audience inspired to explore their own views on this vital aspect of human experience.
0:07 - Introduction to Physical Discipline Debate
10:55 - Arguments Against Physical Discipline
11:01 - Acknowledging the Debate Format
11:50 - Historical Perspectives on Parenting
20:34 - Responses and Counterarguments
21:12 - The Role of Free Speech in Parenting
27:15 - Addressing Negative Stimuli in Childhood
39:53 - Cultural Practices and Their Impact
45:09 - Changes in Parenting Norms Over Time
49:06 - The Future of Parenting Practices
54:34 - Parenting and Moral Lessons
54:54 - Personal Background and Its Impact
56:13 - Custody Disputes and Childhood Experiences
57:11 - Parental Responsibility and Morality
58:33 - Forgiveness and Punishment
59:10 - The Nature of Suffering and Character
59:41 - Creating Challenges for Children
1:01:18 - The Role of Judgment in Parenting
1:04:14 - The Dilemma of Hitting Children
1:22:15 - Non-Physical Discipline Methods
1:22:46 - Perspectives on Hitting and Discipline
1:25:20 - Morality vs. Practicality in Parenting
1:29:11 - Breaking the Cycle of History
1:31:59 - Building a Future Without Government
1:57:10 - Government and Contractual Relationships
2:09:24 - Child Rearing and Parental Authority
2:20:23 - The Role of Family and Community
2:25:10 - Closing Thoughts and Future Conversations
[0:00] And, uh, first time on the channel here for Malcolm Collins from Based Camp,
[0:04] I've watched some of your guys' videos here and there.
[0:07] You're certainly kind of interesting. Always, you have a unique perspective that makes you, uh, worth checking out. And you're, you're here to bring the unique perspective today, which is the, the pro physical discipline for the children. Uh, I gotta say you're, you're brave. It's not the, it's not the most popular position. I don't think. Well, I'm not even, I'm not like an advocate for it. Like I'm not out there trying to increase the number of people doing it. I just, you know, don't think it should be a stigmatized. So it's a weird position to be in. Okay, great. Well, I look forward to hearing the arguments for that. We agree. This is not a super formal debate, but we agreed on a format where we would do 10 minute opening statements and then go into a open discussion from there. I'll only be involved in that so much as is necessary. But Stef, are you okay with going first for that, since you're kind of taking the proposition here that it's never acceptable?
[1:07] Sure, I'm happy to go first.
[1:10] Okay, I do have a timer thing set up that you'll be able to see on my screen in StreamYard. I'm going to go ahead and hit that right now. And over to you, Stef. You get going.
[1:22] Hi, everybody. This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain. we're here to debate, is spanking ever justified with kids? You can catch me at freedomain.com, and you can also catch the book for free, peacefulparenting.com, where I make the case with theory, practice, and evidence. So in general, I'd sort of like to start out by saying, of course, everybody here wants what's best for kids. It is merely a matter of the best way to get to what is best for kids. So there's nobody who has any malevolent intentions here. We're.
[1:50] In general, the progress of moral reasoning is to include more and more people under the moral protections of what is generally called the NAP or the non-aggression principle. You should not initiate the use of force against others.
[2:04] Force or violence is proscribed to a very small area, which is immediate self-defense. If you're facing grievous death, danger, bodily harm, and so on, then you can use force to eliminate the threat. But outside of that, you should not initiate the use of force. So if we look at a couple of ways in which we've embraced smaller and weaker groups within society or marginalized or excluded groups into the general moral framework, we would look in particular at slaves. Of course, we ended slavery by bringing slaves into the moral framework of the non-aggression principle. We've included women, which were formerly able to be aggressed against into the moral framework of the non-aggression principle. And in general, the non-aggression principle is there to protect those who cannot protect themselves.
[2:54] If you see Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime striding down the street or John Cena or whatever, you don't think that they need a huge amount of protection because they're big burly guys. So, it's really the people who can't protect themselves that we should shield under the umbrella of the protection of the non-aggression principle. So in general, it's considered worse for a man to hit a woman because men have 40% greater upper body strength on average. So that's not a fair fight. We say to our kids, don't bully. And bullying usually means a bigger, stronger kid beating up or threatening or taking the lunch money or giving atomic wedgies or purple nipples to some little kids. So the bigger kids have a responsibility to.
[3:36] The little kids. So in general, we say if you're bigger and stronger, you should have higher moral responsibility and you should restrain from using aggression against those who are smaller and weaker. And of course, parents are much bigger and stronger and children, babies, toddlers are almost infinitely smaller and weaker and certainly less independent. So we want to bring children into that fold of the protection of the non-aggression principle. Now, we also say, well, Well, sometimes you have to smack kids, or I think a bop is the phrase that my opponent uses. You have to bop kids because kids can't reason, or kids won't reason, or kids don't reason. But that's not a rule that we have anywhere else in society. If somebody has, some old person has a brain degenerative disorder and can't reason because they lack the physical equipment because of illness or ailment, we don't say, well, now we can hit them. We just don't do that. if somebody can't reason because they have a mental handicap, some sort of significant deficiency in their cognitive being, they have Down syndrome or something like that, we don't hit them, even though they can't or won't or don't reason. Of course, if we all got hit every time we were irrational or didn't listen to reason, I probably would get at least one a week, maybe more. Most of us would get hit fairly often. So we can't say we hit children because they won't listen to reason because there are lots of people in society who don't listen to reason or can't listen to reason, and we do not listen to reason.
[5:01] Them. We tell children, do not use violence to get what you want, and then we hit them. So we're saying violence is bad, but also violence is good and necessary. And we say to older children, don't use violence against your younger siblings, even though the older siblings are in a more parent-child relationship relative to the younger siblings and so on, right? We also have a general theory or idea or argument that greater power disparity does not lower your moral requirements, but rather raises your moral requirements. So two people can date if they're both 25. Two people in the same company can date if they're not in a power structure with each other. But if you have a boss and a direct underling, you know, the traditional madman scenario of the boss and the secretary, the boss can't date the secretary because he's in a position of power over her. So he has a higher moral responsibility to not abuse that power. If two citizens commit a crime, one is just a private citizen and the other is a cop, we consider the cop worse because he has more power as a cop. Therefore, he has a higher moral responsibility to behave well. So.
[6:12] So parents, of course, have the greatest power disparity of any relationship in the world. And yet somehow we exempt parents from the moral responsibility to not use violence against smaller, dependent, helpless, weak beings, even though in every other situation, every other standard says that we can't use that kind of power.
[6:34] And I suppose last but not least, if you say that hitting children is sometimes okay, maybe you're great at it. Maybe you have superhuman self-control. You never get affected by mood. You never have a bad headache. You never stub your toe and take out your irritation on anyone around you. Maybe you're just a perfect Zen platonic higher ideal being, but that ain't all a humanity folks far from it. And so we can all construct scenarios. And a lot of people do this when asking moral questions. They say, well, if your wife is dying of some illness and doctor has some cure, but you can't afford it, is it justified to steal? And some people will say, yes, if you're dying of salvation, can you steal a piece of bread and so on? And so we can all think of situations wherein you could justify stealing. But nonetheless, we have to say that stealing is wrong. Because the moment we start creating exceptions, we open the gates to people abusing that power. So maybe my good friend here who I'm debating with is fantastic and never loses his temper and never gets upset and never goes too far.
[7:44] He's super smart, and maybe that's fine, but of course, we have a big bell curve of intelligence and self-restraint in the world. Maybe you or me or my opponent is the kind of person who can go to a buffet and never overeat. But of course, if you say everybody should eat at buffets, most people will overeat and gain too much weight. So we have to have these principles, even though we can say, well, I don't abuse that power. I do it only when it's just and right and fair and limited and small and focused and so on. But that's not the case. You know, there are many studies out there. And I talked about one on my show about 15 years ago, they hooked up recording devices just because they wanted to record parent-child interactions.
[8:25] And they found that the parents were hitting children 18 times a week. You say, oh, no, no, that's too much. It's like, but that's why you need principle because there's a lot of people who can't handle power. I would argue that most people can't handle power or very few people can. So we have to have a principle called don't hit children. And sure, maybe that will shave back some of the more restrained and quote, responsible people, but we have principles for a reason. We say, don't steal without any asterisks, right? We say, don't steal because the moment we say, well, you can steal sometimes, but not other times, then people are just going to start stealing willy-nilly because there's most, most people won't have that sort of refined view of the rules. And the last thing I'll say is that I'm not talking about physical restraint, right? So if a child is running towards traffic, you grab the child, right? That's not hitting, that's restraining. And that's not particular to children though. If you see some blind guy with headphones on about to walk into traffic, you can grab him and restrain him. And that's not assault. You're actually preventing him from getting creamed by traffic. So we're not talking about things like that. I'm certainly not talking about a consequence-free parenting. I'm not talking about what is sometimes called gentle parenting. I'm talking about.
[9:37] Conversations, moral debates. I'm talking about modeling the kind of behavior that you want from your children, which is to talk rather than to hit. And what I'm really, really talking about most foundationally is showing your children how to interact with people without using force. Because either children are too young to understand morals, which I can get into in more detail over the course of the debate. They're too young, in which case you're just hitting them for being quote bad or wrong when they can't even understand what bad or wrong is. Or you're able to reason with them, in which case you should reason with them. But there is no situation wherein violations of the non-aggression principle can be moral and just and we can construct all the scenarios we want in the world. Doesn't really matter. The principle is the principle. Whether it has positive and negative effects, we can certainly debate over the course of the conversation, which would be great. But effects don't change morality. I mean, towards the end of slavery, People were saying, well, 90% of our food and clothing is picked by slaves. We're going to starve to death and freeze to death without slavery. Doesn't matter. Slavery is wrong. Hitting children is wrong. And whatever elaborate scenarios we can construct, wherein there could be some potential benefit, don't change the basic morals that the non-aggression principle applies to the most vulnerable members of
[10:52] society and where there is the greatest power disparity.
[10:55] And nobody fits that description better than children.
[11:02] Great. Uh, sorry. I mean, you said, yeah, great. Thank you, Stef. I owe you an apology. It appears the audio thing was on my end and I, I don't know how it got turned even on that setting, but I turned it off and it instantly fixed you fixed it. So that was my bad. Uh, okay. Malcolm, are you ready to ready?
[11:22] Yes, I am. I'm gonna try to go fast. Get through it.
[11:25] Okay, I will start the clock. There you go, sir.
[11:29] All right. When I talk about relationship patterns, one of the curious trends that we find is while at small-scale hunter-gatherer groups, it is normal for males and females to share partners. Not a single large-scale civilization in human history normalized women having multiple male partners, suggesting that while humans can structure themselves
[11:47] this way, it seems to be incompatible with large-scale thriving.
[11:50] I start with this as we see the exact same phenomenon with corporal punishment of children. While not punishing children happens in about 25% of hunter-gatherer tribes, specifically I mean physical punishment, there is not a single example of parents not using corporal punishment in a large-scale flourishing civilization during its ascent, be that Rome, Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, or the Inca. There have been civilizations that have risen without violence to women. There have been civilizations that have risen without slavery, just not without punishment of children. What is particularly damning about this is that as soon as we dropped the idea of physically punishing children, as soon as that normalized within our civilization, rates of depression in those children as they became teens skyrocket, rates of suicide as they became teens starts to skyrocket. Why do I think that we see this pattern? Well, almost every social mammal that raises their own kids uses light corporal punishment as a form of discipline. So we almost certainly evolved to expect this stimulus as children.
[12:51] Raising some kids without physical discipline is like trying to train a Roomba without letting it hit a wall. It is the way evolution programmed it to learn. Old people are not learning. Those with mental handicaps are not learning. We do, however, restrain them, which you have mentioned in some of your stuff you see as unreasonable as being towards kids, like putting them in timeout. Yet we do do that with other mentally challenged groups.
[13:15] More than that, raising a child shielded from negative stimuli has the potential to hypersensitize them to negative stimuli when they experience them. They simply do not mentally learn how to deal with the negative things that they're going to face in life. And so when they feel those things, they don't have the mental pathways, such as the inhibitory pathway in the prefrontal cortex, to shut them down. This is how we ended up with a generation that in college needed trigger warnings, so they never needed to experience any negative stimuli because they didn't grow up normalizing to negative stimuli.
[13:49] Whether it be sharing partners or raising children in environments without physical punishments, these types of bohemian ideas are widely supported by elites and academics when in reality they are only realistic for people in exceptional circumstances. If I was raising a single female child, I would not even think to use corporal punishment. But when five kids are running towards the road, the reality is that you can't restrain all five at once. You need a way to shut down that dash that is quick and can quickly move you to other kids. The escalation that you can use in that instance can either be physical or emotional. I would argue that the physical escalation is less harmful to the children and less painful to the children than the emotional escalation. escalation. Now, I could go over the studies here, but I actually wanted to skip that because, frankly, I find the whole study thing kind of boring. There's fewer studies on my side, more studies on his side. The studies on my side are newer, and I've.
[14:51] Because you didn't go into it, I don't want to go into it either. If the evidence on the ground does not support corporal punishment, why did a generation of academics attempt to convince us that it did? Because they follow the religion of the urban monoculture that rests on the foundation that things that make a person feel bad are bad. As Stefan has said, our civilization, or rather the civilization of the elites within our society, is built on this idea of...
[15:17] In your case, like don't hit somebody, but don't make somebody feel bad more generally. And you see this within and distributed from the halls of the elites. Would it make somebody to feel bad if you told them that being fat was unhealthy? Well, that's how we get fat studies department and haze departments. Would it make someone feel bad if I told them acting on their preferred arousal patterns might have negative externalities to society, for example, same-sex arousal patterns? God knows, only a bigot would argue that in their research. And so we don't see research arguing that. And I went over in the studies, many of the researchers who have argued this have faced career backlash for arguing it. It's seen as like a bad thing. Like you are promoting, as Stefan laid out, you're promoting a moral negative, even if this was a good thing, even if it did work, it is a moral negative to promote and allow.
[16:09] Now, for that reason, I really don't take studies coming out of scientists who are being paid by academia on this thing, you know, academia, the priest caste of the urban monoculture, any more seriously than I would scientists being paid by a cigarette company about what they think of cigarettes causing cancer. And I think that I come at this from a uniquely interesting perspective because neither my wife or me had significant corporal punishment as we were kids, at least from our parents. I never even began to question this programming that was put into me, corporal punishment bad, everyone knows corporal punishment bad, until we got to kid number three.
[16:49] And as an adult now, I feel a little weird that I didn't begin to question it, because I did have some environments where I faced corporal punishment as a kid. We would sometimes stay with the housekeepers, and they were from cultures where this was more common, and I faced it there. And I always remembered that I vastly preferred it to what my parents did, which always felt like very obnoxious and condescending, like, let's sit down, let's talk about this. And in the other place, we just like, no, physical boundary, you cross the boundary, it's over. Now get on with what you're doing. Um...
[17:19] All that said, I don't think it's best for every family or scenario. Moreover, there are some parents, when they have corporate punishment in their toolbox, they can't help but use it. And I think that Stefan has a very strong argument for that. And my core argument against that or the way I deal with it is just we still have to find a way to make large families work, which I'll get to in a second. Take my kids. And this is what I talk about when we have very different types of kids. Their favorite activity with me is fighting. fighting in the ring. I am much rougher with them. Like we set up like a bouncy castle or like a thing and we use soccer buffers and everything like that. I'm much rougher with them when I fight with them than when I do corporal punishment with them. And yet they show no distress there. Negative stimuli are negative because we contextualize them as negative. And creating a childhood where nothing is contextualized as negative. And I think, you know, an emotional punishing of a child is just as bad as a corporal punishing of a child if it leads to the same negative stimuli was in the child, right? But if you then say, well, we just won't cause any negative stimuli in a child, I think that that leads to really negative things. I'd also note here that the context matters more than the physical action.
[18:33] If it doesn't instill, if an action does not instill fear of parental rejection, it is not negative. So the idea is it's how do you have an action, and this is why I really moved to corporal punishment, is a way for me to punish a child, like immediately be like, you crossed a boundary, and then immediately like give them a hug and be like, I still love you. But like, that's the boundary, right? So I didn't have to emotionally reject them in the moment. And so in a family like mine, where we are regularly physical with each other, and that's one of the key ways we communicate and show affection, using that pathway as a key sort of bimodal pathway, the verbal and the physical, to show both affection and rejection is a useful and natural way to communicate with them.
[19:19] So yeah, all the moral stuff is interesting to me because it's just not the way I've really ever thought of this. I've never really seen this as a moral question, but simply a question of what works. A society that structures itself perfectly morally, but can't motivate above replacement fertility rates isn't really relevant because its morality will not be continued into the future. And one of the main ways, so I'll say the negative. Stefan is absolutely right about the negative. Stefan is absolutely right. If we normalize this, some people will use it to abuse kids. I think that's bad. But if we don't normalize it, it makes it very, very hard to have the type of family sizes that we're going to need if we want our civilization to stabilize when 50% of people plan to have no kids, which is what we've seen in young kid surveys. So that means the rest of us need to be having four or more kids. And I think among like the parts of society that are going to survive, you're going to need a regular like seven, eight, nine kids like we used to have historically. And it's just really not realistic to be raising a batch of eight kids where you have no form of escalation. And I think of the two forms of escalation, emotional/verbal versus physical, physical is the less traumatic for the child.
[20:31] And that's, I got through it without having to go do the studies.
[20:34] So I really appreciate you not going into the studies on your right foot. Oh, we can't hear you or you're muted.
[20:45] Right. I'm not sure if the moderator is coming in or if I'm supposed to respond directly.
[20:49] Sweet. Did you want to respond to Stef? I have kind of like some questions to bounce off you guys.
[20:55] But I'd like to respond to some of the points and then can we do the questions after that?
[21:00] Yeah.
[21:01] Okay. So I'm a little bit surprised that Malcolm is opposed to free speech. So if you express disapproval of your children, that is not abuse.
[21:13] Expressing disapproval. I mean, we each disapprove of each other, maybe to some degree in our perspectives, but that doesn't mean we're going to jail for having a disagreement or saying, I think you're wrong, or I think you've made a mistake, or I think that's not logical, or that's not supported by the evidence. So saying that you disagree with people and saying that's greater violence than hitting them is incomprehensible to me, and it seems very anti-free speech. So I just wanted to sort of point that out. Yeah, you can, if your kids care about you, You know, like, so there's all these people on the internet and Malcolm and his lovely wife, I'm sure, faces it the same as I do, which is lots of people out there on the internet who dislike you, dislike me, think we're the worst people down to mankind or God or whatever, right? I don't care about them because I don't love them. They're not part of my life. I don't respect them. They're just, you know, yapping birds in distant trees. So...
[22:01] If you are loved, if my wife disapproves of something that I do or my close friends or my daughter, if they disapprove of something that I do, that really matters to me in a huge, deep and powerful way. So the closer you are to people, the more their disapproval means to you and the light to touch you need to deal with disagreements, right? So the idea that you can't disapprove of your children without abusing them, or you can't say, I think you're wrong, or I think you're doing something wrong, or I feel annoyed in the moment and let's talk about it. The idea that that's worse than hitting children, kind of incomprehensible to me, but I'm certainly happy to hear more about that because that would make free speech impossible. And the idea that a peaceful parenting has to do with not hurting anyone's feelings? No, because.
[22:47] Honesty is the greatest value. Honesty is the first virtue. Without honesty, there's no other virtues that are possible. So if someone is gaining weight, you say, hey, I think you're gaining weight. And let's talk about it. Let's sort of figure it out. Does it make them feel bad? Well, sure. I guess nobody wants to hear that, but you have to have the virtue called honesty. Honesty is foundational to the non-aggression principle because the non-aggression principle is considered to be a true doctrine and therefore you have to be honest about it. So the idea that you shred honesty and integrity and connection and openness and directness for the sake of not wanting to make people feel bad, I don't quite follow that. As far as the rise of emperors go, fantastic. And there's a very, very interesting thing. And of course, we all have this thought of this, you know, Spartan toughness that empires are built by. And that has a lot to do with.
[23:34] Children's harshness and so on. But I would argue that the collapse of the empires is baked into the parenting style of the rise of empires. So if children in families are hit, and they have to be hit enough to really change behavior, not like just a little bit, little, you know, bop on the nose or whatever, right? So if children are hit a lot, then what they do is they say, oh, okay, so society needs centralized violence from a top hierarchical position. We need oligarchical hierarchical violence for society to run. Okay, great. So as society gets more wealthy, then everybody starts saying, well, we need the government to do this. We need the government to do that. Why? Because children are completely convinced that you need a core level of violence right at the center of your society, just as you need in the family, the state and the parent are two sides of the same coin. And so they say, well, if violence is necessary in the family, violence must be necessary in society. And then you get a bigger and bigger and bigger government. And then the government shoulders aside the fathers out of the family. The women who make bad decisions end up married to the government, wedded to the state, feasting like jackals on the fiat currency and the unfunded liabilities of spendthrift governments.
[24:46] So once you've justified violence in the family, you then justify violence in society. And as society grows, you get bigger and bigger governments. As society gets wealthier, there's more and more taxation. That destroys the family and destroys the society as a whole. Because at the beginning of the society, as society is rising, governments are absolutely tiny. Look at the growth of the British Empire. Governments were tiny compared to now. If you look at the growth of the American Empire or the Roman Empire, governments were tiny compared to where they were later on when they were counterfeiting, running the welfare estate, dissolving marriages left and right and buying votes by adding more and more crap metals to the denarius and other currencies.
[25:29] So the idea that you say, well, violence is needed in the family, therefore violence is needed in society. Well, then the society grows, you get bigger and bigger governments, which then destroy the society. I would argue it's in the actual genesis of the parenting that the destruction of the society as a whole is dealt with. Now, as far as, and I'll stop at this end, you said that peaceful parenting would make children hypersensitized to negative stimuli. Well, you do get negative stimuli as a child all the time, even without being hit by your parents. You get disappointed. You lose games. You fall off your bike. You get the rejection of friends who disagree with you. You get displeasure of parents if they're disagreeing with something that you're doing. So you're constantly facing negative stimuli, and that's the negative stimuli you need to learn how to deal with as an adult.
[26:21] I mean, I don't know the last time Malcolm was like full-on fisticuffs with someone, not like play fighting with his kids, but like a full-on beatdown. I managed to, even though I grew up in a pretty rough neighborhood, I've managed to get through my life without getting engaged in some.
[26:37] Sort of apocalyptic beatdown scenario. And so what do you need to do as an adult? Well, you need to deal with negative stimuli that's not violence. All you're doing with children when you hit them is saying, this feels bad, so don't do it. But that's not how adults deal with their issues. I mean, we can talk about, you know, jail and taxation and all that. But in general, when you're an adult, you have to deal with things like disappointment, stubbing your toes, dealing with, you know, exercise ailments, dealing with rejection, dealing with loss, are dealing with the death of parents and all of this sort of stuff. So you have to deal with negative stimuli as an adult. So children of peaceful
[27:12] parents still have to deal with negative stimuli.
[27:15] You're just training them to deal with the kind of negative stimuli they have to deal with as adults, which is not getting hit in the face if they do something that their boss.
[27:23] Doesn't like. So I don't think that's the case at all. The big issue with the hypersensitivity of children these days has to do with massive leftist propaganda coming in through schools, teaching people, particularly white people, to hate themselves, white boys in particular, you know, boys are just broken girls, the absence of father figures from the home or fathers directly from the home, and of course the psyop that all men who want to work with children are half pedos, right? That's all driven men out of the early childhood education sphere. So you've got an entire, you know, in the black community, 75% of the kids are grown up without fathers. They don't see authority figures in school. They don't see authority figures in the neighborhood. It's all the matriarchal manners, the girlfriend farms of the welfare recipients. And this is not true just in the black community. It's true in Hispanic community, to a smaller degree, to a smaller degree, the white community, to an even smaller degree, the East Asian community. but it's the absence of fathers, the presence of welfare and the collapse of the family and massive amounts of propaganda. Where does that come from? That comes from violations of the non-aggression principle. That's sort of my point, right? The destruction of the family comes around because of the welfare state. The welfare state is a violation of the non-aggression principle, particularly thou shalt not steal.
[28:36] Propaganda comes from where? It comes from government schools. Government schools are a violation of the non-aggression principle, which is that parents are forced to fund it, whether they have kids or agree with it or not. And in many places in Europe in particular, you have to go. You can't even homeschool, even if you get on your knees and beg the pasty-faced bureaucrats for permission. So when people say, well, you know, we need to hit kids because if we don't hit kids, all of these negative effects occur. My point is it's the violation of the non-aggression principle that people learn by being hit as children that fuels all of these violations of the non-aggression principle that destroys the family and childhood hidden late empire. So I need a beep over CB10 over now.
[29:20] All right. Can I sort of go through these? Happy to. Okay. So I think speaking of when I'm talking about negative stimuli, being downstream of me escalating with my children through verbal or emotional means, I do not mean disagreement. And I think the way that you're talking about disagreement, like free speech, I'm meaning like, if all of my kids were running to the road, and this type of thing happens more than you'd think when we're like outside at a park or something where like two or three of them will be running in different directions. I have, you know, two choices, right? I can either escalate physically, you know, either like grab them and roughly pull them back or something like that or bop them, or I can escalate emotionally. And I can get them to stop by escalating emotionally. Like if my kid starts climbing on a bookshelf that I know is going to fall over as they're climbing on it, and I need them to stop immediately, I can do that. I can't like, it's not a disagreement. It's not like I disagree that You're climbing on that bookshelf It's, you know, get off right now You know, before, you know Which is an emotional escalation Versus a physical escalation And I do think that.
[30:29] You can actually, if you don't have more than two kids, I think it's possible because you've got two arms so you can handle the two kids. But once you get above two kids, I think it's very hard. And I also think that there are likely some, because you can ensure with those two kids, if you can basically hover over them all the time, that they have some negative stimuli in their lives and sort of try to massage that. So it's just the perfect amount. But I think more broadly, my job as a parent more than anything else is to raise my children to be robust against all of the negative stimuli they're going to face as an adult. And one of the things that worries me about the types of negative stimuli that I can dole out to them outside of disagreement, I'm talking about like emotional negative stimuli, which is meant to hurt. You know, when you tell your kid, like, I'm really disappointed in you, right? Like that can be extremely hurtful, as you point out, you know, if they have a strong emotional attachment to you. And so I have a choice, you know, do I, you know, lightly bop them, but tell them, you know, I still like, you know, there was a rule. You know you violated the rule. This is the physical sign that you violated the rule. So you experienced something, but at no point did I ever act like I am emotionally or verbally rejecting you. And a note here, I think that this is really only relevant between short age ranges. I think that there's an age range that once they get more intelligent than that, they can get out of it.
[31:50] The thing of, oh, they don't know they're making a mistake. This is where I think, and this This also comes to like society. Like, why do I think we don't see society to become successful? Don't use physical punishment. I think that this is in large part because humans evolved during this stage of our development to expect physical guidance in the form of punishment from our parents. I mean, I think if we just look at other social mammals, it's obvious that we evolved to expect this type of stimuli, which is one of the reasons why we don't use this type of stimuli with like elderly or disabled people because this is they're not like at a stage where this is going to be important in terms of their you know sort of like a development in terms of how they're interacting with the world um and so i don't really see it the same but then this all comes down to the non-aggression principle um which is interesting and i'd actually argue that the, variant of the non-aggression principle is what broke many of the elements of society that we're dealing with broken now.
[32:54] So when I think about my children.
[32:57] Like the reason why I think bopping my children is okay.
[33:01] Yet bopping another person isn't okay, or bopping another family member isn't okay, is the same reason I think it's okay for a Jewish family to circumcise their kids, even though I might not be about circumcision. I think that at a society, the optimal way to structure a society so it leads to the most good in the long term is to give moral autonomy, not completely to the individual, not to a completely individualized society, but give moral autonomy to the clan or to the family. So you're basically giving moral autonomy to the culture. And then if the children don't like the culture they were raised in, they can choose to not continue that culture. They can be like, well, I was raised in this culture, therefore I'm not going to continue it, which is bad because it lets one generation of badness happen potentially, but it prevents a lot of the negative externalities we're dealing with now as a society. For example, if you go fully individualized, like an individual should never have some sort of wrong imposed upon them against their own free will, even if that individual is a child, then you get things like a child saying at 14 or whatever, well, I actually think I'm another gender and I want to start going on like gender transition or something like that. And the parent not being able to say, I'm sorry, I'm shutting that down. Like you're not at an age where you can decide what is culturally normal for you right now. And I think that this is also where we get a lot of, you know, like the, the.
[34:29] Women demanding money from the state and stuff like that, which is to sort of say nobody deserves in our society. People would say nobody deserves to suffer. Nobody deserves to starve. Nobody deserves to not have a job. Nobody deserves to not go homeless because we've created an expectation of both individual autonomy and an individual autonomy overlaid with the core sort of negative in our society is pain, like negative stimuli. And I don't believe that. I think we should structure of society around something other than, than the sort of visceral evolved negative state. Um, but that's why when I think about how I raise my kids, I never really think about it in terms of like a moral larger vision. It's more, what is going to be optimum to help them thrive in a way where, and if I fail, like, and this is for me, I'm not worried about morally failing my kids. I'm...
[35:20] Sorry, you're not worried about what?
[35:22] I'm not worried about morally failing my kids from my perspective. I'm worried about morally failing them from their perspective as adults. So when I act on a kid, like if I do something like BAPA kid or any parenting technique I do, because there's other things that are going to matter more to them than that, like taking them out of public school, right? I have to wonder, and what I'm thinking of, it's not like, does this follow like X principle or Y principle? But when they're an adult, when they're my age, how are they going to judge me for this? and are they going to want to continue the culture that I raised them in? And if they do continue that culture, then it can thrive and spread throughout the future of humanity. And if they don't, then I'm receiving the worst punishment possible, which is to say being sort of removed, my ideas, myself, being removed from the human continuum.
[36:08] And so that's sort of the angle I look at when I'm making these decisions. And I look at the way my kids relate to me now, and it's very clear that this isn't traumatizing them it isn't causing some sort of negative like they love fighting still they love um that they like in the report like there was one report where it went viral that we did this even though we had talked about it before this and she was like well the kid was laughing 30 seconds after that right like the kid had totally gone back to what he was doing 30 seconds after and i'm like wait so why is everybody freaking out of something that caused him 30 seconds of discomfort where there's a million things i could have done to that kid that would have caused an hour of discomfort or days of discomfort. But this one category of thing that causes 30 seconds of discomfort, we categorize as like something you can never do with kids, even though evolutionarily it would have been totally normal for kids, but because we don't do it with adults in the way we've structured society. And I just think it's the wrong way to think about things.
[37:00] So you would not view, genital mutilation as a negative, as a moral negative?
[37:08] I think if it is a moral negative, then the people who were genitally mutilated and decided it was a moral negative, that they didn't pass it on to the next generation, that they would be able to keep that culture alive. But what I think that we often see with genital mutilation is, let's take Jewish genital mutilation, for example here.
[37:28] Sorry, we don't have to say Jewish. I mean, there are many more people who circumcise who were not Jewish than Jewish, but let's just say circumcision as a whole.
[37:37] Right, right, right. So the reason I was using that is because what I wanted to point out is I think a religion is like a cultural technology that is meant to sort of keep a family or clan around. And while many people who might be raised in a culture where circumcision was normalized might decide that it was the wrong thing for their parents to do to them, if the people who decide it was the wrong thing for their parents to do to them and do not do it to their own kids have fewer children than the people who didn't think it was a bad thing for their parents to do to them and end up having many more kids, which is what we actually see in these communities, then it turns out that that circumcision was serving some purpose that the people who decided to not carry on the tradition didn't fully understand.
[38:23] So then a rapist or Genghis Khan would be very successful because they would be spreading their genes the most.
[38:28] Well, their children then decided not to go on and have children through raping, then it would be irrelevant because their children then do not carry on their culture. Genghis Khan's children, because he didn't raise them, didn't really carry on his culture.
[38:41] Okay, so it's not just genetics, it's culture, although the genetics matter, but the culture is also part of the equation.
[38:47] The culture is a much bigger part of the equation. When I'm talking about something like circumcision, I mean, circumcision, I don't think is playing a role genetically, but I do think it plays a role culturally to help affirm an individual's identity and sort of loyalty to a larger clan-based system, which can be useful in their adulthood, right?
[39:03] Okay, what about child sacrifice? The Aztecs and the Bayans practiced child sacrifice for thousands and thousands of years, and that created a very strong cultural continuity. And that's good for you if it has them have enough children to sustain their society?
[39:20] Well yeah if if so you got to keep in mind it's not just about how many children you have in a society if a cultural practice reduces your technological or economic productivity then you're going to be susceptible to outsiders wiping you out which is what happened to the aztecs they were generally what we find is that when cultures that do not practice child sacrifice encounter cultures that do practice child sacrifice they wipe out the cultures that practice child sacrifice that's one of the main ways that uh christianity actually spread Because Christianity, when contrasted with the pagan cultures of Rome, didn't practice child exposure.
[39:53] And that had a lot of positive externalities for Christianity.
[39:58] Okay, so there's nothing innately wrong with child sacrifice. It's just the effects on the culture.
[40:06] Hold on, Estef, hold on. Malcolm, you said that the Jews who circumcise end up, like those kids go on to have more kids and the ones who don't get circumcised, they go on to have less kids. Is that what you said?
[40:20] No, what I'm saying is, of Jewish children who were circumcised, the ones who become adults and then decide to not circumcise their own children, those ones typically have fewer children than the ones who go up to become adults and do circumcise their children. And I'm just saying this because I assume that the data on more conservative Jews have more children than less conservative Jews, more conservative Jews are more likely to circumcise their children.
[40:45] Got it. Okay. Okay, thank you. Sorry, go ahead, Stef, with what you were going to say.
[40:48] Right. So there's nothing innately wrong with something like child sacrifice. It is only dependent upon cultural transmission and birth rates that determines whether it's good or bad. Is that right?
[40:58] Well, it determines what cultures end up surviving. So if it turns out that like any, suppose there's something that you can do that is just like obviously moral, but everybody who does it has almost no kids, which is what we're basically dealing with civilizationally right now. It's irrelevant that those people are moral in 200 years because nobody like them will exist anymore. And so I think you need to find a way to be optimally moral, but also at least from your own cultural perspective, but also continue to thrive. And if your way to be moral prevents your continued existence, then it's not particularly relevant.
[41:34] Okay. So what would you say, and I appreciate that explanation, what would you say are the biggest barriers to fecundity or pronatalist big families and so on? What do you think are the biggest barriers, facing the West at the moment.
[41:50] I think the absolutely biggest barrier for individuals in our society is the way that we have normalized to raising kids is not sustainable for a large number of kids. You cannot have every kid go on every sports team and go on every afterschool activity and expect to never experience punishment or hardship or go without or not sleep in the same room. We've had people freak out. All your kids sleep in one room. That must be horrifying, right? You've got to find out how to normalize this the way we did historically.
[42:18] Okay. So why do you think the culture has changed from free roaming children, which is how I was raised? You just go out and don't come back in until the streetlights go down and you've got no money and you just go and make your friends and you make your games and all of that. That's how I was raised. Why do you think it has changed to this hovering parenting style where you've got to take him to Chuck E. Cheese, which is expensive. You've got to drive him everywhere. We don't just have free-run children anymore?
[42:45] I think it's because when we're looking at the individual children and we're deciding, am I a good parent? You see parents say this all the time. I just want my children to be happy rather than thrive as an adult. And what you're trying to do is to make your children maximally happy and protect them from potentially negative scenarios. And this is what you see with a lot of people when they complain. Because the reason you can't have your kids play outside, I don't know if you have this to you, but we'll get CPS called on us if the kids are out walking alone or whatever. Is because people are like, something bad could happen to them. And historically, we understood that something bad happening to kids was just part of being a family of like nine kids.
[43:25] Okay. So, but why has that changed? I mean, I get that people are more nervous to have their kids play outside, but hang on, let me finish asking the question. So I understand that there's change, but the question is why? Describing, you know, oh, a rock is bouncing down a hill. It's not science. You've got to do gravity and all of that, right? So why do you think people are more nervous to have their children play unattended these days?
[43:49] I think it's the religion of the urban monoculture. I think that historically, you know, our society was under a different dominant culture. When I was growing up, or a bit before when I was growing up, the dominant culture in the United States was this Judeo-Christian system, right? And what your goal was for your kid was to raise them to be a good member of this larger Christian cultural framework, right? But today, it's to raise them to seek self-affirmation and pleasure, which are the core tenets of the urban monoculture, and that lends itself to these sorts of cultural norms.
[44:24] So you're telling me that there's a change. My question is, why has it changed?
[44:28] Well, I think it's changed because this culture basically beat the other culture. It first won the halls of power, the academics, and it used the academics and the media organizations to become sort of the cultural norm, whereas the old culture, I think it wasn't prepared. It was a culture that had evolved in a pre-media landscape, oftentimes in a pre-printing press landscape, and it just wasn't ready for the world that it entered. And so when I look at my family and the way I raise my kids, that's why I don't just go back to old ways of doing things. I try to come up with new ways of doing things because I don't think the old ways of doing things have already lost to the urban monoculture. So what's a way to raise my kids that can work within this context?
[45:10] Okay, let's go across the pond to England. Can you imagine why British parents are more frightened of having their children roam the neighborhood in the way that I did when I grew in England.
[45:23] Oh, absolutely. So obviously, you are in a multicultural system now where you weren't when you were younger. And when I talk about a cultural system outcompeting another cultural system, a cultural system can develop norms where kids go outside and play when you know that everyone they're going to interact with is from a similar cultural system. But you begin to get more societal breakdown when you have multiple cultural systems competing under a single socialized economy because then every group wants to get the maximum amount for themselves.
[45:56] Sure. So we could say that it's diversity and multiculturalism. This goes all the way back to the Putnam studies from the nineties, I think it was. And he sat on these results for five years because they went so much against political correctness that diversity and multiculturalism decays and destroys social trust to the point where you can't just let, you don't feel like you could just let your kids roam. And multiculturalism and diversity are largely driven by government programs. I mean, people have asked for less and less immigration, but it doesn't really seem to be provided. And of course, a lot of immigrants end up on social assistance or other kinds of things, and they go into schools and they take health care and so on, which is paid for by the taxpayers or rather by the taxpayers, great, great, great grandchildren or whatever the plan is these days.
[46:42] So I would argue that one of the reasons why birth rates are dropping is because of prior violations of the non-aggression principle. So we come right back to the non-aggression principle. And so as far as managing kids, you wouldn't know this. And there's, you know, I'm not saying this is some particular gotcha or cure-all, but I spent many years working in a daycare where I was, me and one other person were in charge of 25 to 30 kids of a wide variety of ethnicities and so on. And I would take them all day in the summers and we worked together all day. I was never, of course, allowed to use a force against them, never allowed to, as you say, bop them or hit them or anything like that. And I found them actually pretty easy to manage. They flocked around me. I enjoyed telling them stories. I enjoyed some of the playtime that you have with your kids. So I do have, it's true, I have one child and I understand that. And I understand why there's skepticism about that. But I did spend many years wrangling 25 to 30 kids with only one other person in a wide variety. We weren't just in, school or in the playground. I took them on entire trips and journeys to parks, to playgrounds. We went to Centre Island in Toronto, lots of different places.
[47:53] And it was fine. It was easy to manage them as long as they liked me. If they didn't like me, and there was sometimes teachers would come in, not that I was a teacher's aide, but teachers would come in that the kids didn't like and they wouldn't listen. And then she'd get really angry or frustrated and I'd be like, okay, but they would sort of flock to me because I'm pretty good with kids. And I found it actually very easy to manage kids that weren't even mine. Sometimes I've had 15 kids, 20 kids in a park, and we've got to keep them safe and protected and all of that. And honestly, and I was just a teenager. I didn't find it to be that tough. Of course, I myself have a small family, but I know people who've got, you know, five, six, seven, one family even of eight kids. One family has three boys and a new girl. They're all peacefully parenting and it's fine. So the idea that you need this violence, because, of course, as you know, hitting children lasts for many families up into the teenage years.
[48:54] There are, you know, 30, 40 percent of parents are still hitting children into their children's teens. A lot of times it only sort of slows down when the children get the same size
[49:06] or bigger than the parents.
[49:07] Then the parents magically discover reason when the blowback is important. So if something works...
[49:13] Why do you have to keep doing it? If something works, if hitting children works, why do you have to do it from the age of two until the age of 12, 13, 14, you know, 10, 12 years, hundreds and hundreds of times you're hitting children? It's because the children aren't internalizing or learning any moral lessons. All they're learning is pain avoidance and you will get, and the studies show, I won't get into them in detail here, I'm sure you've read them too, but you get temporary compliance and long-term rebellion, right? So you'll get the kids to comply right away if you whack them or hit them or bop them.
[49:49] And then over time, they'll just try and find ways around it because they haven't internalized any lessons. All they've said is, okay, well, the problem with whatever I'm doing is not because I'm doing something quote wrong or bad or dysfunctional or dangerous. I haven't internalized that. The problem is that I got caught. And so kids just get more sneaky. They get more avoidant. You know, you're grounded. And then they just wait till one in the morning and they climb out the window or whatever it is, right? So, of course, what we want our children to do is to internalize moral lessons, moral ideas, you know, some empathy, but also some toughness, right? Knowing when to have empathy and knowing when to not have empathy is really a very delicate and important balance in life. And I just don't think that you can transmit complex concepts like empathy and a lack of empathy, how to have sympathy for people without being exploited, how to be tough without being abusive, how to be assertive without being in danger. These are all very complicated sort of Aristotelian mean things. I just don't think that whack, whack, whack is going to get these complex lessons learned by kids because all they're doing is avoiding pain and they'll just end up trying to avoid punishment by not getting caught.
[50:58] Yeah. So I think that this, it's funny when you talk about this, oh, it causes long-term rebellion and stuff like this. This is not antithetical to our parenting strategy. So when I talk with my wife around our goals for our children...
[51:14] Um, the maximal goal we have is to stoke the fire of their individual wills. When it comes to showing them you've encountered some sort of societal barrier and I want you to stop this. Uh, one of the reasons why we especially want to be able to have a way to say you have crossed a line, but that doesn't mean I am withdrawing affection from you is because, um, we want them to cross lines. I think one of the biggest problems we have in society today is kids go to school and they learn, oh, never get in a fight with another kid. Like if two kids start fighting, go call teacher, go tell him an authority, right? Like everything is externalized to an authority, which is very different. This was something that actually came from my own child rearing, where you talked about never getting in fights as a kid. I got in fights very frequently as a kid. And I remember one time, you know, my mom, a teacher came to her and she praised me because I had gone to tell her because some other kid was picking on a kid. And my mom was like, what, what are you doing? Like, that's what you have fists for. And I'd be like, I'd get in trouble. And she's like, snitches get stitches, right? She's like, this is your responsibility to resolve this. Don't externalize the problems in society to an arbitrary authority, which is, I think, where cancel mobs and stuff like that have come from.
[52:29] This idea of if something's going wrong, I need to go get the authority figure. And I understand that people can be like, oh, this isn't a good way to have a society, especially if you're in a cultural group, which you probably are in the UK.
[52:45] Where physical violence is not normal whereas if you come from cultural groups closer to my own, physical violence is more normal for kids and this is the other thing that I wanted to get to which with a lot of this I think we're also looking at one of the reasons why I don't think the same parenting style is relevant to all kids is if you come from like I'm from like redneck culture basically if you come from a cultural environment, where this or a way of parenting or a convert could, conveying values to children or disciplining children has been practiced for generations, you're going to have both children who sort of work with that more and will be even more dysfunctional without it. Whereas if you try to apply it to children who are from a culture where this isn't normalized, you're likely going to end up with really negative effects, which is why I'm so hesitant around just broadly pushing for corporal punishment or something like that. It's something that I think works for my family because I have a very, very, very rambunctious family, and that's what I'm raising them to be. I want my kids to be the type of people who, when they are teenagers and they say, hey, dad, what do you think about X? I need to logically convince them of a rule that I have for them to obey that rule. And if they don't see the logic in that rule, they won't obey it just because an authority is telling them that rule.
[54:06] And I think the final thing I'd say on all of this is, and you talked a lot about this in regards to the non-aggression principle and what's been happening to society, and I can agree with a lot of that, right? However, my sort of a side is, but it's happening. So how do I make it work? Like in a society that's breaking down, how do I create a family culture that can survive that society?
[54:34] And that's why I focus on things like training will, training an internal sort of sense of identity and separation from the wider society, training a clan-based self-framing.
[54:49] Sorry, was that the end?
[54:51] Yeah, it was just sort of.
[54:52] Okay, sorry, I wasn't sure if it cut off.
[54:54] I'm trying to remember all the points you're making and address as many as I can remember.
[54:58] No, I appreciate that. So Malcolm, I'm sort of trying to understand and this is meant when, you know, open sincerity and real sympathy. Your parents divorced when you were around 11 and the custody dispute or some circumstance was so brutal that you were ordered into a youth prison. At what age and what circumstances.
[55:21] I'm trying to look at the backstory of what might have conditioned your thinking on this yeah i never lived with my parents again after yeah it's funny most of the fights i got in were after i left my parents um i got in almost no fights when i was living with my parents uh but yeah after the age of like 13 i think like right when i turned 13 i started living first with a government appointed like a judge appointed prison system um which is like an outdoor prison system sort of like holes if people have seen that
[55:48] and i'm sorry to interrupt But why?
[55:49] Because custody disputes is you go with one parent or the other, not you go to child jail.
[55:54] Well, both parents... With a bad custody dispute. So both parents tried to convince the judge. You can actually find this in public records that the other parent was unfit to be a parent. They were both fine. They just, you know, normal.
[56:06] No, they weren't fine if this is what they're doing in a custody dispute.
[56:10] They as humans were fine. But my mom got into all of that feminism nonsense or whatever.
[56:14] Anyway so they had a divorce and they both convinced the judge that the other parent wasn't good enough to be a parent and that i was better to be in the system so then i end up in the system um and i lived there i never lived with my parents again after that but this was like after i was um like functionally an adult and i'm really glad that i was i experienced this one of my biggest fears
[56:32] okay hang on hang on, sorry i'm sorry to interrupt.
[56:34] Yeah so
[56:36] your parents were... hated each other so much or were so destructive in their divorce that they would rather you go to child prison than live with the other.
[56:47] Yeah, sometimes people are like that. They're not a reason to hate them. I think my parents are great people. You know, I think that we live in a society that looks for reasons to build trauma narratives around our youth and to dissect us from our parents, to cut us off from our ancestors. And I think everyone's childhood is traumatic in some way or another. They were who they were, and I don't hate who they were.
[57:10] So they didn't do anything wrong?
[57:12] I don't think they, whether they did anything, they didn't do anything out of line with their character.
[57:17] Well, no, I'm not talking about that. That's by definition, people do who they are, but did they do anything wrong?
[57:23] They made, they, did they do anything I wouldn't do? So I think my mom probably did things I wouldn't do. I don't know if my dad did anything that I wouldn't do.
[57:35] No, no, not what you, you are not the standard of morality, Malcolm, much though I love you. You're not the standard of morality. So I'm asking, did they do anything wrong?
[57:43] I don't believe in objective wrong. I think our wrongness and our worth is determined by our children. And therefore, I will not condemn my parents because I like who I am as an adult.
[57:54] I didn't ask you to condemn them. I just asked if I've done wrong things as a parent. Do you think you've ever done anything wrong as a parent?
[57:59] I, I, I, I, okay, I'll word this differently. Um, my relationship with my parents is the relationship of a child to their parents. And my parents had a single responsibility to me, which was to raise somebody who could thrive in the world as it exists and who would like themselves thriving in that world. They achieved the only duty that they had to me because I like who I am. I like what I'm doing. And I wouldn't be this person if not for them.
[58:29] But you didn't internalize any moral standards because you don't believe in morality.
[58:33] I believe that you can have a personal morality, but I don't believe...
[58:39] No, no, there's no such thing as... that's like personal physics, or personal logic. Morality is objective and universal, and what we judge people's actions by. And I'm not gonna argue about objective versus subjective morality, although that would be a good debate, but I just wanted to be clear that the suffering that you went through as a child, which was extreme and terrifying in many ways, that you say suffering builds character, but you don't have moral judgments.
[59:07] And the funny thing is, is that you forgive your parents, but you hit your children.
[59:11] I think those two things are related, frankly.
[59:13] No, I have, I guess I'd word this differently. I believe my morality is objective, but nobody else would believe my morality is objective. So I don't need to approach them from that framework. If I'm having a conversation with people from different cultural backgrounds than myself, I need to act as if morality is subjective or I'm not going to be able to have an effective conversation with them. It's not even that I forgive my parents. I really like who I am,
[59:39] so I'm glad for the choices they made.
[59:42] I think the biggest risk I have with my kids, and I think the biggest risk most parents have with their kids within this generation, is they raised them without enough challenges in life and was too cush and comfortable a life. Because I think that's what's leading to a lot of the negatives we have in our society.
[59:58] Sorry, how old were you when you went to the child prison?
[1:00:01] Thirteen.
[1:00:03] Do you feel that that's a reasonable amount of suffering to inflict upon a child to build character?
[1:00:08] I think that there are ways that I can rein that in. And I've been thinking about how I can create enough challenges for my kids, but still have them be safe. So like one of the things I've thought about doing is buying some land like in Canada or something and set up a thing where they can learn to live on their own for a few months, you know, when they hit like 13 or 14, to build sorts of things that they can do for themselves that that are genuinely trying because so few young people get to experience that anymore. And I think it was a privilege that I did.
[1:00:38] You think it was a privilege that your parents put you in prison?
[1:00:43] They didn't put me. They I mostly went because they had other things that they were working on.
[1:00:47] No, no. Come on, man. Their actions, both attacking each other and tearing each other down, resulted in you being put into a child prison at the age of 13.
[1:00:56] Yeah, I I think it is a privilege that many people don't get, because I've seen the way that many people relate to the world today and bad things happen to them and they crash out or people criticize them and they crash out, you know? And this, I guess, shows sort of the way when I talk about kids where I say, my kids get to judge me, right?
[1:01:19] And I'll judge my parent and I want them to normalize to that as well as a moral standard.
[1:01:24] Sorry, can you say that last part again? I apologize. I misunderstood or didn't get it.
[1:01:28] What I mean to say is, if my kids see the way that I relate to my parents, and I relate to their choices and decisions as being something that's related to how those affected me, like who I became as an adult, am I satisfied with that, right? Then they will judge me by the same standards. The urban monoculture spreads more than anything else by turning children against their parents. It tells them that your parents abused you. It tells them that your parents are monsters, that your ancestors are monsters. And this is what cults do. Cults break your ties to your most important caregiving network so that you have no one to return to. And that's usually your parents, your birth culture, your birth religion. And the weaker I allow those threads to be, either between me and my parents or my kids and me, the more likely it is that they will be parasitized because the urban monoculture doesn't have children. It can only survive by taking the children of other cultural groups.
[1:02:29] Okay. So if you were to judge your parents as morally deficient in some, I'm not saying in their foundation or as a whole, but I mean, personally, I think that, you know, we're all shades of gray to some degree, but if you were to judge anything about your parents as negative or morally wanting, you'd be part of a cult. Is that, is that right?
[1:02:48] Um, no, I think that there are ways that I can judge, like I would have done X or Y differently, but I'm at different time than that. I have to judge my parents with the knowledge that they had growing up, with the environments that they were raised in. They were not given the privileges I was given. Frankly, I think if my dad had gone through something like I went through or my mom did, that they wouldn't have raised me that way. So I can't judge them based on my own experiences and this time. I have to look at how they were raised and say, was the way that they raised me incrementally better than the way they themselves were raised? And upon that metric, I think astronomically, they did a fantastic job.
[1:03:28] So their childhoods were much worse than yours?
[1:03:31] Yes. Okay. Well, maybe not worse, but they didn't prepare them to be good adults as well as mine did.
[1:03:38] So people are to a large, and I'm just trying to follow your thinking here, and I'm not judging. I'm just trying to understand. So people are largely a product of their environment. We don't really have the free will to morally improve. It's all dependent upon what we go through or don't go through as children. Is that right?
[1:03:56] Well, we can morally improve intergenerationally by attempting to improve the system which we use to raise our kids.
[1:04:02] So your parents should have done that, right?
[1:04:05] Yeah, they did. They made me significantly better than they are. But I don't judge myself as strictly better because they were coming from a lower starting position.
[1:04:15] Sorry, they made you better by handing you over to the government jail.
[1:04:21] Yeah, they, in their own way, I think had, well, in one case, too little stability, in another case, maybe too much stability growing up. And I think that this caused sort of negative world framings for them as adults that were overly focused. And keep in mind, they grew up in the 70s and the 60s and stuff like that. So they had the world framing of the hippie movement and everything like that.
[1:04:45] I grew up, I was born in the 60s. I grew up in the 70s. I'm not like that. So, no, it's not circumstance.
[1:04:53] No, well, I guess it's just the way I see things.
[1:04:58] No, no, you had a theory, which is it's the 60s and 70s. And for that theory to work, then people in the 60s and 70s would have to have, in general, the same mindset, which is not true. So I'm just giving you a counterweight to your theory.
[1:05:11] I don't know you well enough. If you were talking to one of my parents on this show and you didn't do research on things they had done in their past, you wouldn't have known that they had made these decisions. And if you didn't have these positions seen through the eyes of their child, you would have seen these decisions as they would have had some good excuse in the moment on the show or something. They would have been like, oh, that was his fault in some way, or that was my other, that was actually my wife's fault because she was just so unreasonable. Or that was, what I'm saying is that I don't know. What I've noticed is a lot of people who grew up in this generation, they have a totally individualist framing of reality, which you seem to as well, which is to say that the core unit of morality is the individual rather than the client.
[1:05:52] No, no, no, no, no, no, come on. No, don't straw man me in real time. That's not good. When did I say I have not used the word individual at all? So I'm not sure. I mean, maybe you're bringing some prior understanding of somebody else, but I haven't used the word individual, have I?
[1:06:07] Well, no, but the framing of morality that you are using, because you would disagree with a separate culturally normal way of treating a kid, you're saying that the core unit that morality acts upon is the individual rather than the family.
[1:06:23] I don't follow this argument. Maybe you can break it down a little for me.
[1:06:27] Okay, so I'll word it differently. So when you say something like genital mutilation is bad, like just pure stop, right? Because of what it does to the person who had it done to them.
[1:06:38] Well, it's a violation of the non-aggression principle because it's the use of violence, not an immediate self-defense. It's not like the foreskin is going to leap off and strangle you.
[1:06:45] Right. So this framework of morality requires you to say that the core unit of society that can have a negative acted against them is the individual, i.e. The child. Where somebody who saw the unit as a clan, they would see a circumcision as no different than circumcision.
[1:07:08] Sorry to interrupt. But didn't you hear me say about how statism and the forced redistribution of trillions of dollars has wrecked and destroyed the family?
[1:07:17] Right. Okay, I'll word this differently. To me, an individual circumcising their child is no different than them circumcising themselves, because the core unit of society is not the individual, it's the family or the clan or the culture. Whereas to you, circumcising a child is violence against that child, even if it's done from parent to child.
[1:07:38] Sure. Because the child is a separate entity.
[1:07:42] Well, that's exactly what I'm saying. I don't think the child is a separate entity.
[1:07:44] Yeah. To take an extreme example, if you say that doing to the child is the same as doing to yourself, then having sex with the child is the same as masturbating, right? But they're a separate entity, so we have to treat them as such. And they're a potential entity which we are given care, custody, and control over and need to act in their long-term best interest. And I understand that you believe that good parenting is being so selfish in a divorce that your child ends up being taken into a government jail. I don't agree with that in ways that I would probably spend another six days trying to explain. I do not agree that that is good behavior. Look, you can get good things out of it, for sure. You know, if somebody breaks your legs so badly, you spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair, you get more upper body strength out of it, right? So you can get good things out of terrible events. And listen, brother, I'm very, very glad that you did get good things out of terrible events. Doesn't make the terrible events good. It doesn't make the choices your parents made good, but it means you've done the best judo move with those negative events. But it's just wild to me that you... Forgive your parents and will not judge them negatively, but you want to punish your children for doing wrong. Your children are infinitely more innocent than your parents.
[1:09:05] But by children doing interpret it as punishment in the way that you're thinking of it. And this might be due to your, you know, you underwent, from what I understand, fairly severe, like, physical punishment as a kid. And so when you hear, like, me physically punishing my kid, as I point out very clearly, when I'm playing with my kids, And I mean this at a multitude of like four X the amount of force. I am much more violent with them than when I am actually.
[1:09:28] No, you're not. That's not violent. Play is not violence. That's like saying that boxing is assault. It's not. It's sport.
[1:09:36] Well, yes, because it's the contextualization of the violence that changes it. So what I'm saying.
[1:09:41] It's not violence to play with your kids, man.
[1:09:46] Um, I mean, I, I'm confused. I like, it's the same action. It's just that one is done as a punitive action and the other is done as an affectionate action. So I, I understand that you can say, well, okay, you're categorizing them as so potentially different. But the point I'm making is you, you, you seem to be like, when you talk about like punishing your kid, it's this idea of like, my kids are like traumatized from this when even from the, the very reporting.
[1:10:13] No, no, don't straw man me, bro. Don't strawman me. You've got to just focus on what it is that I'm saying, right? Did I ever say you're traumatizing your kids?
[1:10:24] No, but the way that you're talking about it is like the kids are experiencing something.
[1:10:28] This is just pure projection. And it's rude in a debate, to be frank. I mean, I'm going to give you my disapproval now. It seems like this follows from, it's like, no, no, deal with the words that I'm using. Otherwise, we're completely talking past each other and not having a debate. I never once said that it's only about the individual. I never once said you've traumatized your children, but you do punish them.
[1:10:50] Yes. And I think that children need to be punished. Of course, children need to be punished, whether it is physically or through talking to them or through something. Raising a child was no punishment. Is that what you're arguing for?
[1:11:02] Yeah, I've never punished my child.
[1:11:07] That may work. I think few people would think that that's a good way to be raised.
[1:11:17] That's not an argument, though. That's just an argument from popularity, right?
[1:11:21] Well, no, no, I understand. I just when I talk about never experiencing negative stimuli.
[1:11:27] No, no, that's not that's not... Me punishing my child is not the same as her never experiencing negative stimuli. What it means is that I don't use my size and strength and power to overpower and physically harm my child. Any more than I would use my size and strength and power to physically overpower and hurt my wife. I don't hurt the people I care about. If there's a problem with my parenting, I have to look in the mirror first and not take it out of my child.
[1:11:55] Do you see how you're being manipulative in the debate right here? You called me out for conflating the word punishment with injury, trauma. And now you're saying I did mean to conflate the word punishment with causing trauma to a kid. You are admitting that that's what you meant when you just called me out for calling you out for that.
[1:12:16] I didn't follow. Sorry, I don't follow.
[1:12:17] Kind of cheesy.
[1:12:19] Yeah, I don't follow. Sorry, can you explain?
[1:12:21] You just said, when you say punishment, what you mean is using your size to tyrannize somebody smaller than you.
[1:12:31] I didn't say tyrannize.
[1:12:32] You just got mad at me for saying that that's what you meant when you said the word punishment. Because I was saying, of course kids need some form of punishment. The question is, is what that punishment looks like. And the point I was making is that the way that I physically punish my kids is not tyrannizing over them as a big stronger entity it is the same type of a fictional affectionate physical contact that i have when i'm playing with them i'm pointing out to you that these are analogous forms of physical contact whereas you're trying to analyzing them to analogizing them into something like actually beating a child which is not what's happening.
[1:13:10] When did I say beating?
[1:13:13] You literally just described like being big and stronger in the same way you wouldn't do that to your wife. You're creating this analog. And I think the audience can see that you're trying to create this analog.
[1:13:24] I don't know what creating this analog means. Analogy, maybe. So let me ask you this. How tall are you?
[1:13:33] Around six foot.
[1:13:34] Around six foot. And how much do you weigh?
[1:13:37] I don't know. I want to say 165.
[1:13:40] 165. Okay. So do you think that you could use physical aggression against your son if he was six foot six and 250 pounds, let's say at the age of 16, because he ate his Wheaties or something like that? Do you think that your size and strength relative to your child makes it possible for you to use this kind of aggression or bopping against your child? Is your size and strength a factor in that?
[1:14:07] Remember, the core reason I believe this is a good thing to do is because they evolved to expect this at this developmental stage. I do not think 16-year-olds evolved to expect that at that developmental stage. If my child was a four-year-old and my size, yes, I would think that it developmentally would be the right thing to do. If my child was a 16-year-old, I think it's a completely different scenario.
[1:14:33] Okay. Let's say he has a real big growth spurt and he's much bigger than you, outweighs you by 20% or whatever, and he's 13 or 14. Do you think that you would be using the same kind of aggression with him or is your size a significant factor in why you're able to do this?
[1:14:52] So our oldest is six. We've already largely phased out of bopping him. So I don't think that this is something that's relevant at those ages. I understand some people do it at those ages, and I don't advocate for that.
[1:15:06] Okay, so when do you think hitting children should stop?
[1:15:10] I think that hitting children should stop when you can logically explain something in a way that they can internalize and consistently act on. Like, for example, I can explain to my six-year-old, don't run into the road. I don't need to bop my six-year-old to know to not run into a road when there's traffic in the road. He knows that, he's internalized that, and he understands why. But when my kid is three, no, he doesn't understand that. And he requires, because evolution programmed him to expect this, multiple types of sensory stimuli to understand when he's crossing that type of a boundary.
[1:15:46] Okay, so if there was a way, let me just ask you this. If there was a way for you to get what you wanted from your children in terms of keeping them safe without hitting them, would that be better or worse?
[1:16:00] Um, I mean, I, the question is, is if there was a way to just ignore millions of years of evolution.
[1:16:07] Okay. Don't, don't reframe, don't reframe my question.
[1:16:10] Well, no, because what you're saying is if my children were not biologically human, would I act with them in a way that's different? Yes. If they were not biologically.
[1:16:19] Okay. That's such a straw man. I guess you're not a fucking Klingon, bro. I understand that. I understand that you're not a Vulcan. You're not a Klingon. You're not a dwarf. You're not an elf. I get that we're dealing with human beings here. So let's go on with that.
[1:16:31] No, no, but that's what I'm saying. When you say if there was a way to communicate with them, the reason why I communicate with them in this way is because they are human children. To say that you could communicate with them in a different way is to say they would not be human children. They would be some other kind of entity that didn't go through the evolutionary pathway that humanity went through.
[1:16:51] Okay, so you're saying that there's no way that you can reason with children under the age of six, or that you can provide feedback to change their behavior without hitting them.
[1:17:02] No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying there's no way that I can have a human child that doesn't have the millions of years of evolution where social mammals communicate with their kids at this stage of their development through physical contact.
[1:17:16] I'm sorry, I'm not sure how that's different from what I just said.
[1:17:19] Well, because you're acting as if I could come up with some logical alternative system, it would deny the evolutionary legacy that is programmed into my children. And the reason I keep reframing that this is who they are as humans is to reframe the debate and remind the debate that when I'm interacting with my children and I do not give them this sort of stimuli, I am denying them a stimuli that has been in their ancestors and has been among their ancestors as they were growing up for millions of years and expecting that to have no effect.
[1:17:57] Okay, so maybe I won't get this through to you, but I want to put it forward to the audience as a whole. So I did quite a bit of research on this. So here are the evidence-based non-physical methods that work best before ages of around three and a half to four when real reasoning isn't possible. Yet these are strategies that large longitudinal studies and daily diary research from 2023 to 2025, I just did this yesterday to get the latest, that show actually reduced misbehavior in one to three-year-olds more effectively than spanking does without the long-term risks, which we get into in more detail if we want. So age zero to 18 months, obviously zero is a little bit at the low end, but we don't hit babies, right?
[1:18:41] So what can the child's brain do up to about 18 months? Respond to tone, facial expression, immediate consequences, and routine. So redirection or distraction works about 90% of the time. Positive attention for good behavior, praise, smiles, and cuddles, and so on. Environmental control, which is to remove the temptation. A calm, firm, no, plus physical removal to pick up and move. So how do you do it? Well, the baby reaches for the outlet or something, you immediately say, no, touch. In a low, serious voice, you pick up, the child hand out a toy and smile when he plays with it. And this tends to bring grooves into the child's mind, and it works 90% of the time, which is really good. From 18 to From 18 to 30 months, toddlers understand simple one-step commands, they remember routines, and they imitate everything. We've gone through this phase, I'm sure you have with kids. So if you do a positive opposite do instead of don't, d equals 0.8 to 1.0 effect.
[1:19:41] First then statements, first shoes on, then we go outside, planned ignoring of mild attention seeking behavior and huge praise when calm, natural logical consequences delivered instantly and calmly. So child throws food, calmly end the meal, all done, wipe up together, next meal, praise sitting nicely, that works very well. And the last, it's not a huge thing here, but the last thing is two and a half to three and a half years can wait briefly, they understand simple cause an effect and they want to feel sort of big. So if you give choices, do you want the red cup or the blue cup? That reduces defiance by about 70%. When then, first, then routines, visual timers or pictures work great and so on. And so if there's a tantrum in the store, I mean, my daughter never had a tantrum, but I've certainly seen them. You kneel down, you label the feeling, you're mad we can't buy candy, give choice, hold my hand or write in the cart, follow through instantly. And of course, empathy. You know, when my daughter wanted to buy candy in the store, I'm like, I would eat all of the candy in the store. I would scoop it up. I would love to take it home. I'd love to boil it in a bathtub and dive in and swim in it, you know, that kind of stuff. So, you know, we all, but you know, I have to say no because teeth and fat and blah, blah, blah. Right.
[1:20:53] So, um, positive reinforcement works really well, uh, visual and song routines, uh, and so on, teaching them, um.
[1:21:03] Uh, emotion words so that they can speak out their feelings rather than act out their feelings. And, uh, so parents trained in these positive methods at 18 to 36 months. This is from 2023 to 2025 studies. And I can give all of the sources, um, when, uh, we can put them in the show notes. So parents trained in these positive methods at 18 to 36 months had 50 to 70% fewer tantrums and lower aggression at age five than parents who used spanking, right? So you say, well, my kids are so aggressive. Well, you're hitting them and that's not unrelated. And the last thing I'll say, and then I'll turn it over to your rebuttal, is that there's a program called, I'm a big one of these sort of programs could be very helpful. There's one called PCIT, Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, Triple P Positive Parenting, and Incredible Years Toddler. If you use these programs, I'm a big one for parent effectiveness training as well. I had somebody who's an expert on that on my show some years ago. They eliminate the need for spanking in more than 90% of families by the age of three. So yeah, kids can reason. You can change behavior by managing the environment, give positive attention to good moments, use immediate natural consequences in teaching the skill directly, all of which work better and last longer than
[1:22:14] spanking even in the short term.
[1:22:15] So again, I'll turn it back over to you. My question was, if there's ways to get the desired behavior without hitting your children, isn't that better?
[1:22:25] So two notes here. Sometimes when you're looking at these studies, they assume that I want something for my children that I don't want for my children, which as I mentioned, my goal was my child is to spoke, uh, uh, smoke the flame of their wills as much as possible. And so when it's something
[1:22:42] like reduces aggression in them, that's not necessarily a good thing from my perspective.
[1:22:46] You know, I want my kids to be maximally willful. But also if we're just talking like quoting studies at each other, I could say an update on scientific evidence for and against the legal banning of disciplinary spanking 2024, limited to ages 18 to 11 months, customary spanking matches non-physical alternatives and neutrality, but conditional spanking outperforms 10 to 13 tactics in reducing antisocial behavior.
[1:23:08] Lazarie et Kahn, 2005, randomized trials throw larger benefits for deviant preschoolers, G, anyway, like, it doesn't matter. Like, the reason I didn't want to go into studies is because you can just quote different numbers at each other. And at the end of the day, I don't really care about the numbers one way or the other, because I believe that the field of academics has a huge bias to try to argue from a moral perspective. And I think that this is where I and you were really coming at this differently, which is to say, you believe that hitting a child is wrong. And for that reason, you build a logical structure for why spanking, which I don't even really support. I think it's ritualized and delayed punishment and it causes problems. I believe in in the moment, physical punishment, but anyway, that spanking is wrong. Whereas I come at this as somebody who believed all of this stuff, then had a large family, then wanted to look at the research again because COVID happened. And I realized that scientists in the academic infrastructure had lied about a lot of things. So I was like, okay, what are the things that I'm doing as a parent that they've lied about? I need to review this. I need to maybe rethink who I'm parenting. And I chose this not from the perspective of, I think hitting kids is a good thing, but I wanted to give my kids the best shot possible in life. And I think that this is where the differences in our logic are, is your logic starts with hitting kids is wrong, whereas I don't care if hitting kids is wrong or right. I care what's in the long-term best interest of my kids.
[1:24:36] And you think that morality and practicality don't share the same space?
[1:24:42] I think that morality is irrelevant if it practically leads to its own self-extinction.
[1:24:51] Well, but that's not an argument, right?
[1:24:54] For example, not participating in war, not fighting, being completely like, I won't do that, is the moral thing to do. But your people will eventually be wiped out if you do that.
[1:25:07] But the West is being wiped out by violations of the non-aggression principle. Exactly.
[1:25:12] Because we acted with more morality. They said our people are suffering. So we took them in. We did the moral thing and it's leading to self-extinction.
[1:25:19] No.
[1:25:21] No, absolutely, absolutely not. So, the problem is not, empathy is not morality.
[1:25:26] Empathy is just a feeling. And as I said earlier, it needs to be conditioned by not being taken advantage of. So, the West is being slaughtered slowly by violations of the non-aggression principle, by taxation, by redistribution, by government programs, by free stuff for everyone, by vote buying, by that level of corruption. So, violations of the non-aggression principle are taking down our entire society. And I think then saying, well, we need to hit children because violations of the non-aggression principle are good. Well, no, what's taking us down is the decadence of people who wish to escape the consequences of their actions. Now, I do not let my daughter escape the consequences of her actions. Of course not. If she loses something when she got of a certain age, if she lost something, she lost it. And she had to work to buy to get it back. If She wants to buy something. She has to spend her money. So because we're trying to raise them, or I'm trying to raise my daughter to be functional in the world of adults. And we don't want, you know, in the world of adults, if you don't run to the government for every problem, then you do end up with violations of non-aggression principle that allow you to avoid consequences. But I think that violations of non-aggression principle are foundational as to why we're failing. It's why every single society in the world fails. And I gotta tell you, Malcolm, or just ask you, it's not a rhetorical question. Aren't you a little sick and tired of this fucking cycle of history where you do well as a society and then there's all this shitty decadence that takes you down? But that's because we accept.
[1:26:56] Violations of the non-aggression principle. And what is it that conditions people to accept violations of the non-aggression principle is parents who say it's required, it's functional, it's practical, it's moral, it's good. And then people say, oh, well, violations of the non-aggression principle, it's how we run families. Let's run our entire society like that. And then everything goes to fucking hell. It just goes to shit because we accept violations. The one thing we haven't done ever in the history of the world is to say, let's have the non-aggression principle be the foundation upon which we build our systems, voluntary, non-aggression. And yes, I'm fine with self-defense. I'm not a pacifist, blah, blah, blah. And so what you're saying is more of the same. And even if we somehow were to wrestle our way through hitting children out of this current situation, all you're doing is training your children to accept that force is needed to run society, which means a bigger government again, and the stupid cycle starts all over again. I'm obviously not holding you personally responsible for the entire cycles of history, But I'm a little tired of this cycle of history. And when we have this cycle of history that's been going on for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, oh, things are good. Oh, but we still accept violence. Oh, then the government gets more and more violent. Oh, then society collapses. Oh, then there are hard times. Oh, then it's good.
[1:28:11] We got to try something different. Hitting children, as you say, well, it's how we evolved. It's what we all do. And if you keep doing what human beings always did throughout their evolution, you keep getting the same shitty cycle of violence where we're just going to collapse again. We're hopefully going to rise like some phoenix and the whole thing's going to start all over again. But if like the Malthusian thing, right, when we didn't have a free market in agriculture, people kept starving to death every couple of generations. Now we have a free market in agriculture. In other words, we stopped violating the non-aggression principle through slavery and serfdom and aristocratic lands, then we broke out of that cycle. But it's going to take morality to break the cycle and the morality has to start in the home with a rejection of the non-aggression principle. That's the only way we can break this cycle of history. I understand that you're like freaking out about the cycle of history. We all are because we don't want this happening at the moment, but it's happened so many times in the past. I've done tons of presentations on how many times it's happened in the past. We have to do something foundationally different. Otherwise,
[1:29:08] we're just going to keep with this same horrifying cycle.
[1:29:12] And with the technology now, we might never get out of it if it gets really bad. Sorry, that's my big rant, but go for it.
[1:29:18] My response to that would be, I understand that the non-aggression principle from your perspective is very important to how we structure society. But when I have a debate with you versus I'm having a debate with a progressive, it feels very similar to me. They say, look, we want to help the people who are starving, shouldn't we be giving them food? And I can say, well, that should be the choice of the individual. And then they'd say, well, that's not realistic at all. We have to do that at the level of the society because we need to, you know, you can't at an individual level always solve these problems. And these people are just literally going to starve to death. And what about foreign wars? Look, this country was attacked unjustly by this country. And look at all the pictures of the children dying under that rubble. Don't you want to do something about those children dying? And I say, no, I don't. Care about those children dying from a pragmatic perspective because I want my country to stay strong and continue to work. And they go, you monster. And I'm like, look, it may be moral to attempt to save those children, but it is not practical and it will lead to more negative externalities in the long term. And so every one of the violations that happened to us that got to this point where things are beginning to break apart, whether it was taking in too many immigrants, whether it was the welfare, whether it was trying to make divorce better for women.
[1:30:41] Whether it was every single one of them in the moment was a person who is saying we need to be practical against a person saying we need to be moral. And then there can be the other person who comes in and is like, well, you know, at the end of the day, you're taking money from the individual, which is a form of thievery. But like that argument never really hits. I don't think it works. And I think that both of this is shown by our individual lifestyles. I'm trying to raise, I'm at five kids right now, the oldest is six. I'm just popping them out at this rate. I'm actually trying to win this game. I'm not trying to win the moral framing of the game. I understand that my state may collapse. I understand that Western civilization may fall. I'm trying to build the seed of what could ever rise from that, because I know that those are things that I can't affect. I can't affect them with moral arguments. I can't affect them by talking about, you know, non-aggression or whatever. All I can do is try to build the seed of whatever is going to work next. So that's what I've dedicated my life to. And when I hear you like, oh, moral this, moral that, it doesn't sound that different than when I tell a progressive, yes, I too emotionally feel when I see a child dying under rubble, that doesn't mean that it's our country's responsibility to interfere.
[1:31:59] Yeah, I don't mean that. You're just talking to yourself at this point. I don't even know if you've got an earphone in because you're not even addressing, oh, Stef, you're like a leftist. It's like, that's not an argument. Oh, I have a lot of kids. That's not an argument. So let me ask you this, Malcolm. Let me ask you this. Intervention in foreign wars, is that made possible by violations of the non-aggression principle?
[1:32:21] Nobody effing cares about the violation of the non-aggression principle.
[1:32:24] No, no, no. Don't get hysterical. Calm your tits, bro. So just take a deep breath, maybe cut back on the estrogen. Just something. Just try not to get hysterical. We're trying to reason like men here. Okay, so just try, calm your tits a little. Let's just have a call, a talk. Is intervention in foreign wars? Hang on, let me ask this question. Let me ask this question. I get an answer, then I'll shut up. Is intervention in foreign wars driven by violations of the non-aggression principle?
[1:32:54] I i do not think you could interfere in any war or defend your own country in a war without violating the non-aggression principle therefore it's a pointless concept because i can't defend my own country when attacked unless the government is willing to violate this principle therefore it's a silly principle.
[1:33:11] Well that's not what i asked, what i asked was
[1:33:14] No but that's the point i'm making it's i couldn't defend my own country
[1:33:17] OK so you can just reframe what i asked
[1:33:18] violate this
[1:33:19] you can just reframe what I ask and call yourself an intellectual champion.
[1:33:24] Well, no, but it's the point I'm making if you can't have a government that doesn't violate this because you wouldn't have a government that stayed stable for more than a four years.
[1:33:32] Governments are violations of the non-aggression principle. And therefore, we should be looking to free ourselves from governments in the same way that we freed the slaves. It's the final barrier to human freedom. Is it tough? Yes, it is.
[1:33:44] And if we did, then the governments around us would come to our country and kill us and take our land and stuff.
[1:33:49] Sorry, this is an argument from terror and anxiety and a lack of historical knowledge, right?
[1:33:54] It's an argument from the real world that we all live in.
[1:33:57] Okay, let me...
[1:33:57] There are horror... hostile governments out there.
[1:33:58] The real world we live in is governments paying people to come to our country, using our money and our children's money, okay? So let's not talk about how, oh my gosh, without the government, we'd have no way to defend ourselves. How are borders working at the moment with these governments?
[1:34:13] No, but are you saying that a government that lived in your utopia and had this non-aggression principle could defend itself against the government?
[1:34:19] Listen, just stop insulting me. It's so hysterical and girly.
[1:34:23] No, answer the question. You demanded I answer the question. Could a government that had this principle as a foundation of its society defend itself against a government that didn't?
[1:34:31] Absolutely.
[1:34:32] How?
[1:34:33] A society can absolutely defend itself against an invading society, and it can only really do it without a government.
[1:34:41] But the other society would have a military and jets and tanks, and you wouldn't have any of that unless individuals decided to buy it and operate it themselves.
[1:34:50] Sorry. So you don't know the answer. Therefore, there is no answer. Have you ever studied this stuff before?
[1:34:56] Yes. I've talked about it a lot on my podcast. This is why anarcho-communism doesn't work. This is why anarcho-capitalism doesn't work.
[1:35:04] Okay. Sorry. So you're saying that individuals who are not a state have no capacity to act against a state and win.
[1:35:12] They have no capacity to operate a semiconductor plant, which they need to create most of the technology you would need to defend yourself.
[1:35:20] Why can't they run a semiconductor plant?
[1:35:22] Because a semiconductor plant requires billions of dollars in capital investment, and you cannot do that on an individual pooling basis.
[1:35:30] Sorry, but why can't people work together in the absence of a government?
[1:35:36] Do you really think you could get individuals to pool the money needed to make and operate a semiconductor plant? Like the billions, the tens of billions of dollars needed, that you could just get people to voluntarily pool that and make that plant operate in this society?
[1:35:53] Sorry, is that a rhetorical question? I'm not sure.
[1:35:56] You do. Okay, I'm sorry. I didn't realize that you did. To me, it seems like...
[1:36:01] So just asking a question with incredulity is not an argument. Do you really think--?? That that's not an argument, right?
[1:36:07] No, don't say, you say, yes, I believe that that could happen.
[1:36:10] I know that it can happen.
[1:36:13] Why? Like, I'm wondering, like, where are you getting there? I'm actually interested.
[1:36:17] Sure. Okay, so let's say you and I want to go into business in a stateless society. Now, by the by, you've obviously not read any of this, which is fine. You don't have to read all my books. But for those who are interested, I've got a couple of books available free on my website, freedomain.com/books. One is called Everyday Anarchy. one is called practical anarchy. But yeah, so let's say that you and I want to go into business in a stateless society, okay? We need a way to resolve disputes that we're going to have if one of us doesn't pay or one of us doesn't do the work or something like that, right? So, what you and I would do is we would go to a third-party organization. I happen to call them DROs or DROs, dispute resolution organizations. So, these are free market entities that guarantee that people are going to uphold their contracts. It's similar to a court system, but something that's actually usable because you can't use government court systems unless you happen to be very rich and powerful, and then And you usually use it to oppress people. So you and I, in coming up with an organizational goal where we have to both work together, we sign a contract and we have it guaranteed by a third party.
[1:37:20] Now, if, let's say, but take a really simple one. You want me to send you an iPad. I say it's 500 bucks, right? So then you send me the 500 bucks and I don't send you the iPad. Then you go to the company that is managing our contracts and you say, hey, Stef didn't send that that bald headed goose forehead jerk didn't send me the ipad and they say they come check with it and then they say oh well he did send you uh malcolm did send you the 500 bucks you didn't send him the ipad so you got to send him the ipad and let's say i say no get lost i'm suddenly i have a cockney accent now get lost i'm not sending you i'm gonna run off into the sunset with this 500 okay well then the company says okay so stef doesn't keep his word so we're going to downgrade his contract rating it's like the way it works on ebay ebay has contract ratings You rate your seller. And if you have a good way of doing business, then people want to do business with you. If you get marked down, people stop doing business with you. EBay is a worldwide, massive operation that runs in the absence of governments. People do not go to governments to deal with eBay disputes. So you have a way of having a reputation like a credit score, but it would be your contract score. And the better you do and the more honest you are, the lower your cost of doing business, the worse you are, the less you fulfill your contracts, the more expensive becomes the cost of doing business. So there is a need. I agree with you. There's a need for people to have dispute resolution organizations of some kind.
[1:38:42] Why it has to be the government? Well, that's just history. Who cares? That's just like slavery. Slavery was the norm throughout all of human history until it wasn't. And the government is the norm. It's a way of people pretending they can resolve the disputes until it's not. So wherever there's a demand, the market rushes in to fill that demand. I've been an entrepreneur. You've been an entrepreneur. You've invested. You know how that works. So yeah, human beings need a way to resolve disputes. The government is ineffective and the free market will provide far better solutions. Sorry, go ahead.
[1:39:09] So these organizations, they presumably would have their own militaries. And how would they forcibly withdraw cash from people when they defaulted on tens of millions or just decided to run away with billions of dollars? How does that work? I guess like a private military network between tons of companies?
[1:39:28] No, listen, I hear what you're saying. But because you're a spanker, you think that force is the default way to deal with problems. The default way to deal with human problems is ostracism. It is not force. Now, I get that the geographical area will need military, it would need weaponry. I get all of that. And we can talk about that in a sec, if you like. Again, I've written a whole book about a free society called The Future. I wrote a science fiction book and I called it The.
[1:39:58] So what you do is, if somebody doesn't obey the rules, like they're a rapist, they're a murderer, then they are disconnected from society, right? So you're not allowed, because everything's privately owned, right? So it's like debanking or, hey, deplatforming, which can be quite effective, as I've sort of found out a couple of years ago. So you have a way of ostracizing people from society so that they can't be part of your society. They can't buy groceries, they can't buy gas, They can't drive on the road. They can't get electricity. They can't get water. Think of the amount of people you have to interact with in society just to get anything done in any given day. If you highly offend that society, you go through ostracism until you make amends, right? You make amends, you go to prison, you provide restitution. I don't know whatever the solution would be. I have no idea what the solution would be because when the government's done everything, it's done everything wrong and who knows what the real answer would be. But the way that you deal with people who act in a destructive or negative or violent or criminal way in a free society is you ostracize them.
[1:41:01] And through that ostracism, they can't function in that society. They either have to leave the society or they have to make a restitution to restore themselves. So ostracism is a much cheaper and more effective way of dealing with criminal elements and so on. With regards to geographical defense, yeah, everyone knows that there are bad actors in society, but it's very hard to take over a society that doesn't have a government. So if you look at the Germans invading.
[1:41:33] France, May 1940, right? So what did they invade to take over? Well, they invade to take over the government, the tax system, right? So when you take over the French government, you now get all of the French taxes. Well, there is no government, there are no taxes. So what is there to take over?
[1:41:48] There's no central structure that you can take over and it be profitable. Now, people might still want to invade for shits and giggles or whatever, so you're going to need some sort of counter measure. But who is to say that giant aircraft carriers and endless amounts of nuclear weapons. First of all, no nuclear power has ever been invaded. So all you need is a couple of nukes in order to stay safe. You can have biological weapons that simply target the leaders of a foreign country. But yeah, whatever you would need to defend against your potential invaders would be done through the free market. And of course, everyone is aware that if you have, you know, Bob's defense agency in a free society, everyone's aware that Bob might wake up one day with a malignant spirit in his heart and say, ah, I'm going to use now my military power to take over this whole society and impose a new government. So everyone's aware of that as a risk. So they would put steps in place to make sure that wouldn't happen. They'd have him externally audited to make sure that he wasn't building a giant robot army or something like that. And he would have be very circumscribed in what he could do. And there would also be competitors and the competitors would be looking at each other and saying, ah, no, that guy's getting way too strong, you know, you got to cut back on him. And right. So, you know, how it would work, who knows, right? I mean, after you stop using slaves to pick. Sorry, go ahead.
[1:43:07] No, the reason I ask the question is my concern and the reason why I think that society's, could attempt to structure themselves this way, which when you lay it out sounds very safe, probably wouldn't work the way that you would expect them to, is that the optimal way for a super large organization to work within the society, when you're talking about any of the bobs that eventually end up with hundreds of billions of capital or tens of billions of capital under themselves, is to be super trustworthy for other large capital holders, because the core unit of power in the society is a unit of capital, and fairly untrustworthy to smaller individuals as it accumulated more and more of their stuff.
[1:43:53] Sorry, that's very abstract, and I apologize for not knowing what you mean in more precision. Do you mean shareholders?
[1:44:00] Okay, well, you're going to have something like a shareholder in this, right? Yeah, that's what I mean. What I mean is, suppose you have a company that just always F's over the individual, but is always doing what's best on behalf of the other companies, which make up the shareholders and large individuals.
[1:44:16] Sorry, hang on a sec. Sorry. So you've got, let's take company ABC. Okay. So company ABC, do you have any, does it matter what service they provide? I just want to.
[1:44:23] I'm just thinking about this in the context of our own capitalistic system, because you do see this at times where you will have companies like, let's say, health insurance companies where they might say something like, I turns out I don't actually need to do that much to service the individual. If I can create certain contracts where everyone at X company needs to buy my health insurance versus another health insurance. Even though they're not actually doing what they say they need to do, you or you would have companies like some giant military contractor which moves into a town and then says, well, we actually own X amount of shops in the town and we won't do business with you unless you do business in the way we want to do business. And then they use that to acquire more and more shops on predatory terms until they're functionally a government within a particular region.
[1:45:10] So the worst case scenario that you're putting forward is that we end up with a government. So you're saying governments are terrible.
[1:45:17] Well, no, so we end up with a, and this is a point that I often make on my podcast, is that libertarianism is at an extreme, ends up in the same state as communism is at an extreme, which is one government operating under a company.
[1:45:32] What? No, there's no, what are you talking about?
[1:45:35] That's what I'm saying, you end up with a government, a government, but it's a government that's a company, like a single.
[1:45:38] Okay, so ABC Company is offering its services in the free market with no state to bribe and buy and to externalize the cost of enforcement for monopolies and things like that. So you've got ABC Company that is operating in a stateless society, in a free society, and then they can't force anyone to give them money, right? Because there's no government that they can use. The government can force you to give it money, just raise your taxes. So it cannot force people to give it money. So how does it end up as a government?
[1:46:10] So it can, okay, imagine you have a large military contractor-focused company in a town. And it begins to say, nobody in this town who doesn't deal with our company on favorable terms, you know, can deal with our company, right? And so it uses this to create an unfavorable environment for everyone else in this local region.
[1:46:28] So you're saying these things like they're inevitable, right? So it's a company in a town that says you have to do business our way or what?
[1:46:37] Yes, or we that own the majority of, say, land or assets or people, like we'd say, people who work for our company and who are making money from our company as part of their contract, they can't do business with anyone they say they can't do business with. We say they can't do business with. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to put into a contract. They can use that to easily starve out anyone they wanted to in the town and buy more assets at below market costs and continue to operate like this until they control the whole ecosystem.
[1:47:06] Okay, so hang on. Um, so a company moves into a town and starts buying things, right?
[1:47:14] Well, no, obviously they have to buy things to function normally at first. Yes.
[1:47:19] Okay. So what are they buying? I'm sorry if I'm not following. What are they buying to give them all this control?
[1:47:28] So, first, they could be the primary, let's say, industry of that town, which you saw in a lot of company towns historically, right?
[1:47:35] Okay, so hang on, hang on, hang on. So, why would people move to that town or stay in that town if the company was acting in an evil fashion?
[1:47:45] I think all around the world we see people move to towns where companies are acting in an evil fashion because they need to support the family.
[1:47:51] I'm talking about a free society.
[1:47:54] Well i i think in even fairly free not perfectly free because we don't have this utopian society yet but even in fairly free societies there's still people who like want to do do not have access to the resources they need to feed their family and choose we saw this in the um uh great example is in the dust bowl right like we saw lots of people go to company towns they knew these towns were evil i mean that's what the grapes of wrath is about
[1:48:17] Okay but that's a... the the entire Dust Bowl was a government program created by the massive policies of FDR that wrecked the economy. And right. So so that's that's a statist society. You can't you can't take situations from a statist society and say that they would apply. That's like saying the economics of slavery is the same as the economics of the free market. That's just not how it works. So I'm still trying to understand a company comes to a town and starts, what, underpaying people?
[1:48:45] Well i actually this is a long tangent the the wider point here being
[1:48:50] no no no i'm you you made, you made a point about how a company gains control i'm trying to understand how.
[1:48:55] Okay so a company let's say owns like because they're producing one of these things that requires a large number of coordinated factors to produce like a military aircraft or semiconductors which means that they are making up the primary payment provider in the town like they are okay so hang on hang on so hang Hang on.
[1:49:12] Hang on, hang on, hang on. Hang on. Let me just understand. Okay. So you've got a weapons manufacturer in a town, right?
[1:49:18] Yes.
[1:49:19] Okay. So they're selling their weapons to a larger segment of society than just the town, right?
[1:49:26] Yes.
[1:49:27] Okay. So people don't want a weapons provider to act in an evil fashion. So they will not give their money to a weapons provider unless the weapons provider is carefully vetted to make sure it doesn't act in an evil fashion. In the same way, you would hire a criminal to be your security guard if he just got out of prison for stealing, right? So you would vet that person and you would not give him control or you wouldn't give a pedophile your babysitting job, right? because he's, so you would want to make sure that the companies with a lot of economic clout would not act in a predatory manner. And if there were two companies and one said, I'm going to act in a predatory manner, or you can't stop me, or I'm going to do whatever I want. And there's another company that said, here's the ways in which I'm going to show you, I don't, I'm not going to act in a predatory manner. You can come vet everything. There's going to be independent audits. Like I'm going to sign contracts saying I'm not going to do X, Y, and Z. And anybody who finds that I violated this contract, I will then put a million dollars in escrow, you get it for free. Like they would set up all these safeguards because people know that there's a risk of concentrated power.
[1:50:31] I have to jump in here because we don't have, you don't have too much time, but also Stef, couldn't the evil company just like hire mercenaries to go secretly kill the people who work at the good company?
[1:50:45] I don't know if you guys have been entrepreneurs, direct to customers, and I don't want to say I'm right because of it, but I have, right? So when you come up with these kinds of problems, everybody in the free society would be aware of this as a risk. So what you do is instead of throwing problems, say, okay, if I was an entrepreneur and I got to make a hundred million dollars by solving this problem, what would I do? Right? So to think about it, not in terms of the balky customer, but in terms of the nimble and agile entrepreneur. So if I wanted to sell my security protection to a particular society, I would have to solve the problem of everyone's saying, well, I don't want to give you a penny. Because you're just going to take over the country, right? So you'd have to solve that problem. And whoever solved that problem would be the one who would get more of the business. And so you would set up a whole bunch of contracts to make sure that that didn't happen. You'd have independent auditors because everyone recognizes that as a threat, right? So because everyone recognizes that as a threat, as an entrepreneur, you have to work very hard to calm people's fears about that threat. Now, listen, I can't obviously replicate the entire economy of the future, but people will find a way to solve that problem.
[1:51:59] We live in a society where everyone knows large companies use basically slave labor, whether it's Nike or Apple, and they still buy their products. People don't care. They buy the cheapest, best product on the market. The morality of a company affects what people will pay for a product, maybe at a level of 10 to 20 percent, but not at enough of a level to put the company out of business.
[1:52:23] Well, are you saying that people are amoral in their purchases, but they don't take over, they don't violently take over entire countries, right? So people will look for efficiencies in terms of price. Absolutely. Are they super fastidious about that? Well, no, not in particular. But Nike is not about to take over your entire society and put you in a slave camp. So it's a little bit less important. Literally, what's that fruit company that took over a country in Latin America? This is not help you get your point across, right? So if you just start tearing your hair out and yelling in my ear, that's not a good way for a debate.
[1:52:57] What's the fruit company that literally did this? They literally took over a government and had a revolution. I want to say it was one of the major fruit manufacturers. Not Dole. It's where we get the term Banana Republic from. I think it was Nicaragua.
[1:53:12] Yeah, they took over a government. So in a state, the society, there's no government to take over. so I'm not sure what you're talking about.
[1:53:18] Well, you can take over
[1:53:19] ... save the stateless people.
[1:53:22] I'm sorry?
[1:53:23] I guess all of this is basically, your framing of the world works if it was possible to flip our world into the utopian society you want it to be.
[1:53:31] Okay, so these are just terms of insults. These are just, oh, utopian, blah, blah, blah. It's like, everything's utopian until it's achieved. The end of slavery was completely utopian until it was achieved. Not using women as breeding chattel was utopian. Utopian is not an argument it's just a girly dig you know it's just sort of pointless.
[1:53:49] I don't think we're incrementally away from your society I'm trying to like actually create something that can grow from where we are do you think we can reach this within our lifetimes
[1:53:59] God no.
[1:54:02] Okay, listen, guys, listen.
[1:54:04] No, no, sorry, hang on. Let me just make the last point, then it's all yours. So no, of course we can't reach this. You know that the people who ended slavery, it was like two or three generations before they achieved their goal. I'm a moral philosopher. My business timeframe is in the centuries. So the way that we build this free society is I focus on peaceful parenting and I've convinced probably half a million couples to have children over the last 20 years by pointing out the virtues and values of peaceful parenting and doing shows with my daughter where people understand how fun and productive it is to be a peaceful parent, to not use violence and aggression in your child raising. So I've certainly done my part in trying to up the population of good people. If you raise children peacefully, then violence is just not a language that they speak in advocacy. They can speak it in self-defense, but they don't say.
[1:54:52] Well, violence was required for my family, therefore violence is required in society. So the way that we build towards a peaceful society is we raise children with the non-aggression principle, and then that's the language they speak, and they know that it works in the family, therefore they will accept that it works in society. You didn't have peaceful parenting in your family when you were growing up, so a peaceful society is incomprehensible to you. And I'm not trying to trick you here or take a little dig, but you are confirming exactly what it is that I'm saying. So you grew up with violence and coercion and manipulation and what are at the center of your family. So you, it's like, I can't imagine a society that's not built on centralized violence. That's my whole point. Peaceful parenting takes that mindset out of the world so we can start building towards a peaceful world. Calling it a utopia, eh, well, you know, whatever. Everything's a utopia until it's achieved. It's not really an argument. And the fact that it's upsetting to you to even talk about a free society goes back to your childhood and the violence you experienced, which I really do sympathize with. But that's why you have such a strong emotional reaction. And that actually confirms my thesis that violence in the family leads to a belief in the necessity of violence in the world.
[1:56:04] Okay, guys. I don't want to force Stef to have the last word here, but I just want to sort of touch base on how we're going to wind this down, because we do have to wind it down at some point.
[1:56:15] I'm all about winding things up, baby. I don't wind anything down. Anyway, go on.
[1:56:19] We do have super chats, and I would like to try to go through. There's not a whole ton. It's not going to take an hour, I don't think, but I would like to go through those if we could.
[1:56:27] Sorry, I just need to go to the bathroom. Just kidding just kidding
[1:56:32] I'm happy to address super chats about how evil I am first.
[1:56:37] Before we do that do you guys want to do like a five minute closing statement each to sort of
[1:56:43] I don't need one
[1:56:43] no I think let's hit the super chats.
[1:56:46] Okay okay cool alright let's see here, dudemon said I procured this money within the bounds of the NAP have no fear accepting it. Thank you. Appreciate that. Average YouTuber says, what is Stefan's definition of government?
[1:57:10] A centralized group of people with the legal right to initiate the use of force in a geographical area.
[1:57:24] Uh, grandmasters react, uh, says anyone who advocates for the NAP is an enemy, plain and simple.
[1:57:34] What's an NAP?
[1:57:35] A non-aggression principle.
[1:57:37] Oh.
[1:57:39] They didn't give any, uh, explanation.
[1:57:42] Listen, if I'm not anyone's enemy. I'm not doing any good. So I've got no problem with that.
[1:57:48] All right. King James camera doesn't really show the name. So sorry if I don't get the name right. King Ja, something says who wins in a basketball game, the team of cohesive men with a uniform goal or the team of individualists concerned with the NAP?
[1:58:09] So you can't follow rules if you're just forced. All you're doing is obeying force. So voluntarily getting together for a common purpose is a perfectly, it's perfectly in line with the NAP. You know, like if Malcolm and I choose for our next, very next conversation to play chess online, then we both agree to the rules of chess. Nobody has to hold a gun to our heads. So you can obey rules. You can have organizations, you can have a team, you can have a common goal. None of that violates the non-aggression principle. So the idea that individualists, pure hedonists, we never sacrifice our will towards anything. I mean, that's just a sort of cliche, right? Individuals work together. We're just saying, maybe we can work together without compulsion right at the center of society that wrecks our societies every couple of hundred years, right? You know, the 250 year rule, right? That's because of the cycle of violence.
[1:58:59] So is there in your society, is there like no police because i think you really briefly you touched on something about how like murderers and rapists would be like excommunicated or just just like um marginalized from society.
[1:59:16] Sure okay so so yeah the first thing is that and this is not utopianism this is very well studied that children and i'm not putting malcolm's family in this at all just just so everyone's clear i'm not i mean he seems like a great dad and very enthusiastic dad and i think that's great i I don't, I'm not hugely concerned about the bopping stuff. It's just the principle that we're trying to work with. So children who grow up to be criminals come from child abuse. Now, there are genetic susceptibilities towards child abuse, but they tend to have to be activated through physical violence. And again, I'm not talking about what Malcolm's doing. I'm talking about real beatings and, you know, other sorts of sinister things that parents can do to children.
[1:59:55] So in the absence of child abuse or with a small amount of child abuse, and we don't get a free society if there's still violence in the home, right? So when we have less child abuse or we work towards less child abuse, by the time we have a free society, there will be very few criminals. Because criminals come out of child abuse. So, of course, my goal is to minimize child abuse over the course of society. Of course, it's a long-term goal, but the goal is by the time we have a free society, there will be very few rapists and murderers and thieves and so on because that all comes out of child abuse. It will still happen, of course. I mean, there could be visitors from other cultures. There could be people who've got brain tumors. There could be whatever people who get possessed by demon K-pop hunter things or whatever, right? Right. So there will be criminals. And will there be police? Sure. Yeah, of course. I mean, you've got somebody broken into your home. You call the local defense, the DRO, and they send people over and they try and figure out who stole what. And they try and catch it and get your stuff back. And then they say to the people who stole from you, let's say Bob stole from you. They say to Bob, hey, listen, man, you stole. We found stuff in your possession. And so you've got to make restitution, you know, maybe you've got to do something to deal with your temper or your entitlement, I don't know, whatever, right?
[2:01:14] And if you don't do any of that, then you're ostracized from the society, and then you have to leave and not come back, and you're on a list, you're on a social credit score, you're on a list, and you can't function in that society until you get yourself off the list through some sort of whatever it would be to resolve these sorts of issues. I don't know what it would be. If he's got a brain tumor, you cure the brain tumor, maybe he's better after that. Who knows, right? But yeah, there would be people that you would call, but it's hard to imagine. Like, in the world that we live in right now, uh, it's hard to imagine just how peaceful things used to be. Like when I grew up in London from the age of four or five, I just roamed the whole city. We went to the war museum. We went to the Hendon air museum. We went, we went to swimming. We went, it just did them all over my friends and I, no threat, no danger, no worry, no concern, no fear. Uh, that's life in a, well, certainly more peaceful place than London is now to put it mildly. But, sorry?
[2:02:11] Not to like date you here, but people were kind of beating their kids more probably back then, right? I'm not saying that's the reason it was peaceful, but doesn't that kind of counter the whole idea that it's child abuse causing all these problems? If people hit their kids less now, shouldn't we have a more peaceful society?
[2:02:32] Well, no, because again, you have to look at the overarching violations of the non-aggression principle. So getting fathers out of the home results out of violations of the non-aggression principle. Having dangerous immigrants, as has happened in England where the quarter million little girls got raped, that is the result of violations of the non-aggression principle. So as violations of the non-aggression principle have escalated, society has gotten worse. Now, why did violations of the non-aggression principle escalate? Because people, by being beaten in the home, it normalized using the government to solve all kinds of social problems. Because if you say, well, authoritative violence solves problems in the home, how are you going to say authoritative of violence doesn't solve problems in society. So then you hand over all this money and power to the government to solve all these problems and it ends up just shafting you in the worst conceivable ways. But it's a good objection for sure.
[2:03:24] You know, you're talking about Bob with a brain tumor, like stealing somebody's stuff. And I'm just, I'm thinking about like Mexican cartels selling cocaine to everybody and getting so rich and powerful through the drug trade that they have, you know, their army's bigger than now your local, your little mercenary police force. Not to debate this all the time, but it just seems like there's certain potential problems where eventually, right? If the guy who is, is, uh, selling cocaine, because he, he doesn't have moral qualms about that. If he's going to amass more resources through and running casinos and stuff like that, then he's going to have the biggest army. And then he's just going to take over everything through force eventually if he wants to, right?
[2:04:07] Okay. Well, let's, uh, ask this question. Why do people take drugs?
[2:04:14] Because they were abused as kids? I don't know.
[2:04:17] I mean, in general, that's why, I mean, there's a doctor, a Canadian doctor I had on the show a couple of times, Dr. Gabor Mate, who has dealt with drug addicts his whole life as a doctor, and he also does a lot of work in psychology. He's written entire books on this. Yes, everybody who is a drug addict has terrible tales of child abuse, and some of them have been in the system. So if you don't abuse children, the demand for drugs go down. See, people don't take drugs to feel good. They take drugs to stop feeling horrible. They take drugs just to feel normal. And so if they're already happy, you can't sell an up to a guy who's already happy. So with better childhoods, the demand for drugs goes down enormously. Addiction goes down enormously.
[2:05:02] Dysfunction goes down enormously. Crime goes down enormously. And that's the one. I don't want to spend the rest of human society playing whack-a-mole on the effects of all of this abuse of children. And again, I want to be very clear. I'm not putting Malcolm anywhere near any of this. We're talking about like child abusers. And so rather than saying, well, we have to have all of this violence in society to deal with the victims of child abuse, acting out their early horrors in society as a whole, how about we just really focus on bringing the non-aggression principle into the home? And then we would be, I guarantee you, but they'll look at this debate in a thousand years and say, it's shocking the violence they put up with because they weren't willing to deal with what goes on inside the home. And in the same way that, you know, you see that line of human history, that line of like subsistence, subsistence, death, death, death, half the children dying, and then just, you know, mid-19th century, it just goes through the roof. That's because we got the right systems in place, and we stopped using force, or at least we reduced the amount of force that we used in the.
[2:06:04] Allocation of social resources. We let the free market, the price system handle it. And we just have got massive, unstaggering amounts of wealth. I mean, the average medieval peasant lived on the modern equivalent of $1 a day. And so we got this incredible wealth because we changed our moral systems and we'll get the same rise in prosperity and drop in violence when we get the family right.
[2:06:29] Okay. Malcolm, did you want to say anything before I go to the next one?
[2:06:32] No feel free or if you have some specific thing you want to question i mean some of these are more like
[2:06:36] we talked a lot i was just wondering if you want it if you had anything
[2:06:40] i've just been reading all the comment threading because i wasn't able to do that during the debate it's been very fun
[2:06:44] wait where are the comments? there are comments?
[2:06:47] you saw me trying not to smile during the debate it's because i was reading the comments and they're funny sometimes
[2:06:52] oh gosh
[2:06:53] Oh, are the comments, they're on YouTube?
[2:06:57] Okay, let's go to the next super chat here. Isn't forcibly stopping your 15-year-old daughter from eloping with a 30-year-old migrant or getting an abortion a blatant, unforgivable, NAP violation of her self-ownership?
[2:07:16] Is that a question to me? Or was that an open question?
[2:07:19] I wouldn't do that. They wouldn't care. If my 13-year-old daughter tried to do that, People know where I'm at. You know, I'm coming out there. I wouldn't be, I wouldn't hit the kid. I'd probably deal with the situation another way, but presumably you wouldn't, right?
[2:07:33] Well... If you are raising your children and you have the natural moral authority of consistency and peace and reason, then your children will listen to you. Again, my daughter is almost 17. So my parenting job is almost done. I've been a stay-at-home parent since she was little. And of course, she's had her temptations and like we all do, but she listens. We have lots of conversations and she's not running off with any migrants. You know, it's easy to be feared. It's hard to be loved. Fear just means, boom, you're going to scare people, you're going to hit them, and then it's easy to be feared. But the way that you develop sustained, positive, healthy, happy relationships, and the way that you have some reasonable moral authority as a parent is through your children loving you and respecting you, which is just, it's a lot harder than hitting them. And so a lot of parents will go towards the hitting and then wonder why their kids go off the rails is because kids don't really listen to people if all they are are scared of them, because the kids get bigger and you get older.
[2:08:35] Yeah, I'll answer this in my own way because if it's going to me, I want to raise the type of family where people are afraid of my kids. By that, what I mean is if some 30, you know, 40-year-old person tries to coercively marry my daughter, they know exactly what her brothers are going to do, right? And they know, don't mess with that, right? I try to raise my family as a clan because society is breaking down. And so the only form of trust, you know, we used to have societies, maybe they were more, you know, homogenous back then and so you could trust people out there. That's not the world I live in anymore. So I need to build the new clan. I need to build the new homogeny. I'm trying to do that within the walls of my house.
[2:09:14] Well, and of course, but the problem with that is that the anarcho-tyranny that's going on at the moment means that if you have any vigilantism that might have been more acceptable in the past, your kids will just go to jail now.
[2:09:25] Yeah, I know. So hopefully they're smart enough to do it without. I mean, if you look at the number of crimes that are being solved these days, it's crashed. It's something like homicides. It's like half of what it was like five, six years ago.
[2:09:36] Sure.
[2:09:39] They just won't be able to brag about it.
[2:09:44] Average YouTube enjoyer says, aren't governments unavoidable? Like, what would you call a bunch of neighbors meeting about agreeing on rules and enforcing rules? It looks like a legislative body in law enforcement.
[2:09:58] Well, you mean like an HOA or something like that?
[2:10:02] I guess so.
[2:10:04] Well, I mean, it's voluntary.
[2:10:05] A neighborhood watch.
[2:10:06] Yeah, it's voluntary and people won't buy houses in neighborhoods which are governed in ways that they don't like, right? So, I mean, some people are going to want more strict stuff. You know, some people don't care if you have three cars up on rusty blocks on the front yard, Alabama style. Some people want all of the hedges put into perfect Alice in Wonderland shapes. So, people will move into the neighborhoods where the rules reflect the kind of rules they want, they'll sign long-term leases, and there'll be competition to get the best kind of people. You don't want necessarily to be too restrictive. You don't want to be too open. So there's a balance, and there'll be lots of experimentation that goes on to try and find out what's optimum, because the beautiful thing is that when you don't use force, you get a wide variety of solutions that people can choose from. And, you know, like in the Soviet economy, you get one can of soup, right? But in, you know, you go to the free market, there's like, you know, 200 cans of soup, and you can choose what it is that you want. So there'll be lots of experimentation just based upon you don't get to initiate the use of force as a whole.
[2:11:09] Well, I mean, just, okay, so couldn't you see, though, an organization like that? So a bunch of people, they have a nice neighborhood, and they say, we don't want people who look homeless coming into the neighborhood. So we're going to put up a gate. If they hop over the gate, we're going to, like, forcibly remove them.
[2:11:27] Sure. And?
[2:11:28] That seems like a really, like, inevitable violation of the NAP, though, right?
[2:11:33] No, it's not. They own the property. You're allowed to protect your property. Your body is your property. Your home is your property. Your property is your property, almost by definition.
[2:11:41] Well, who decides to own stuff when there's no legislating body?
[2:11:45] Well, that's because you have these DROs to...
[2:11:47] What's up to people just planting a flag on their lawn and saying, this is mine now?
[2:11:50] No, but you have, first of all, you have principles of homesteading. This is how the entire West was settled. and principles of property worked really well, even in tailgate parties, like people just come out and they do their property thing. We're very good. We're very hardwired, to use Malcolm's argument about how we evolve. We're very hardwired with property. And so, yeah, the homesteading, I did this when I was a gold pan or a prospector after high school up north that we got our property set up and all of that.
[2:12:15] And so, yeah, people, they need property and you have to have property and property is sort of wired into our nature. Kids, of course, you know, that's mine, that's yours. I mean, sort of, we've evolved to, at least in the West, to have property foundational. So, you just need companies to recognize and reinforce property. But the amount of wealth would be so staggering that, I mean, honestly, the people wouldn't really need to steal. You know, I'll just give you one tiny example, right? So, if the federal registry had not gotten bigger after the Second World War, the estimate is that the economy would have grown between two and three percent more, which means we all would have an average income of about $300,000 a year right now. Just all other things being equal, if the federal registry hadn't grown to its absolute tumoresque style in America. And that's just one tiny aspect of the state making us all poor and broke. You know, the statism always results in massive debt. It always results in unfunded liabilities. It always results in collapse followed by tyranny. You know, I really think we got to start looking outside the way we've been doing things before to get a different outcome. Otherwise, you know, the insanity is doing the same thing over and over.
[2:13:21] Question. What is the federal registry?
[2:13:24] Oh, federal registry is a giant list of all of the regulations that govern the economy outside of just basic property rights and so on.
[2:13:31] Okay.
[2:13:33] And it's grown to like hundreds of thousands of pages. And it was, you know, not tiny, uh, at the end of the second world war, but it's just grown in this massive way. And it's cost, uh, Americans, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in extra income. That's just one tiny example. Then that's really over 70 years or so.
[2:13:51] Okay. Uh, CB said, uh, he said, why were both fire departments and police made utility?
[2:14:01] Sorry, what was that question?
[2:14:03] Why were fire departments and police made utilities?
[2:14:06] You mean, why were they taken over by the state?
[2:14:09] I guess I assume so.
[2:14:10] Yeah, that's what they mean, I suppose.
[2:14:12] Well, I mean, they used to be more private. And what was it in Gangs of New York? They created this whole fictional thing where they're all fighting to put out the fire and so on. But yeah, they used to be very effective fire solutions. So the way that it works in a free society is the fire departments are run by the insurance companies. Because you have insurance against your house burning down. And so the fire departments and fire suppression and fire prevention is all run by the insurance company because the fewer fires there are, the more money they make and the lower their premiums can be. So you want the people who have a direct financial incentive to solve problems to largely be in charge of those problems. And if they do a bad job, then people would just go to other insurance companies with other departments to deal with fire. So, I mean, with governments, of course, what happens if they get it wrong, if they go wrong? Nothing, right? I mean, for instance, I would want a system where if a judge let out a criminal from punishment and that criminal committed a crime, the judge would be charged with that crime as an aid and accessory. Whereas now, of course, people get turned out in the West into the streets all the time. 16, 18, 20, 30 convictions doesn't matter and nothing happens to the judges. That's not a system that I'd want or any sane person would want. In a free society, we'd want the judges to be liable. We want them to be rewarded. If people went into straight and narrow, we'd want them to be punished if they committed more crimes so they've got some skin in the game and they're not just going to act politically.
[2:15:39] Sorry, sorry. I was wondering how you handled them just being everyone goes to jail. Was that being the case? So how would they be rewarded if they got it right and the person didn't do anything wrong again?
[2:15:48] Oh, I mean, they would get a bonus. They would get a raise because it's cheaper for society to have people out in the streets than in prison, but it's more expensive if they let them out of prison and they commit more crimes. So when they found that sweet spot, they would get financial rewards baked into the system.
[2:16:02] So they get a raise if they let them free, but they face the same punishment as the person's crime as they get it wrong. It seems like they would always convict the person then because it'd be so risky to let someone free if you could go to jail as like a rapist as a judge, right?
[2:16:16] Okay. So then how would you solve that problem?
[2:16:20] I genuinely don't know. Like, I'm interested. Clearly, you've thought about it.
[2:16:24] If I was a judge, I'd just execute everybody. I'm not going to jail.
[2:16:27] Yeah.
[2:16:28] Well, first of all, I mean, people who are real sociopaths, like serial killers, you're just not going to let them out, right? That's just that no judge would deal with that. But, you know, in terms of shoplifting, you know, you get a fine or whatever, right? So the more minor crimes would be dealt with that. But you would just raise the bonus incentives to the point where it balanced out, right? So this would just be an economic question, right?
[2:16:52] Okay. Let's see here. Live Free or Die says, move to New Hampshire. Many liberty-loving families Low crime, low taxes A gun behind every flake of snow Look up Free State Project.
[2:17:08] I love New Hampshire I've given speeches at the Free State Project Like major meeting I chose New Hampshire, it's the number one state I wanted to live in But we ended up moving here because I wanted somewhere a bit more purple But yeah, I love New Hampshire
[2:17:19] New Hampshire is great. Porcfest for the win.
[2:17:22] What is the free state project says is it child abuse if you don't raise your children with the great families of new hampshire it's a
[2:17:34] it's neglect it's neglect
[2:17:36] i i would recommend new hampshire right to check out rural pennsylvania rural pennsylvania is pretty it's a lot cooler than i thought it was before i moved here
[2:17:45] wait til your kids are teenagers and then see how much they like the rural life. We'll check back in in about 10 years when your six year old is 16.
[2:17:55] They'll figure it out. They're going to be on the internet. All their friends are AI anyway.
[2:17:59] It's not the same as meeting up in person. I don't mean to be too old-fashioned, but anyway, sorry, go ahead.
[2:18:05] There's a lot of New Hampshire stuff here in the power. Are these your guys, Stef?
[2:18:09] I have a lot of friends in New Hampshire, yeah.
[2:18:12] Okay. New Hampshire supremacist says come live in new hampshire if you like low crime low taxes and great families defensible land excellent people a gun behind every flake of snow that's like the same chat okay uh live free or die says would you be a gay retard if you didn't have kids or they'd be safe and surrounded by free people and then in parentheses it says new hampshire.
[2:18:37] Well i i just posted this on x the other the day that there's something kind of deeply wrong about people who don't want kids like our default setting is to have kids it goes back four billion years and the people who don't want kids and i'm not talking about people who have challenges and difficulties i great sympathy for all of that we don't get into any of those kinds of guarantees but people who can't even be bothered to have kids it's it's parasitical it's vampiric because your parents only had you because you're going to have kids you're just breaking the whole deal it's wretched
[2:19:05] yeah. Yes i i it's maladjusted i i agree with that.
[2:19:10] And they're weirdos in general. I've known a few of them over the years and it's just like, what is your major malfunction? Like just reboot. I just hear every time they get up at the couch, I just hear a windows crash sound. Bonk.
[2:19:22] New Hampshire is great said, why don't each of the speakers live in New Hampshire?
[2:19:28] So I tried to. I lived there when I was younger for a period and my board vetoed it. They said they couldn't justify it. So I decided the next best place that I could justify was Pennsylvania because I said, oh, look, we're equidistant from New York and DC and Philadelphia. So there's like a business reason to be here. But with New Hampshire, I just couldn't find a reason. We were trying to get out of Miami at the time, which I absolutely hated living in. So really it's because of the board of my company. And now I like living here.
[2:19:58] I'm not American.
[2:20:01] Right. You're Canadian. Right. Yeah. So, so I'm from Canada too. I live in America now. Um, and Malcolm, your company, your company, that's like the, the Collins Institute or whatever, or what, like, what is your, uh,
[2:20:13] Oh no. Oh God. I probably shouldn't talk about it because they don't like to know that
[2:20:17] I actually have a real job, but, uh, no, I, I, I run a chain of companies.
[2:20:22] Okay.
[2:20:23] What's this real job thing I keep hearing about? It sounds awful.
[2:20:28] Uh nero says i for one will be send the non-violent child i raised out into a violent world so they can be exploited and savaged by 70 iq non-whites, i think he meant will will not send
[2:20:48] no i think he's joking and look this is the way when you are moving into a hostile society, and we saw this in the U.S. With many immigrant communities. I mean, this is what the mafia was. This is what the mob was. You create a clan-based local government to protect your people against a hostile, wider society. And that's the way that multicultural societies often have to work. I mean, you could say it's a shame that we are in a multicultural society. But I think that we sort of crossed that bridge a long time ago. And so now i need to raise my kids expecting to compete in that system
[2:21:24] well, and just remember there's a not insignificant numbers of low iq whites as well so it's not just non-whites i just want to point that out right
[2:21:34] i was i was like we broke this gate when we like i mean when i talk about the mafia and the mob you know every every catholic immigrant wave we've had in this country has brought a major crime wave into this country um whether it was the irish or the italians or the Hispanic wave that we have now. It's something we've dealt with before. But this country jumped that shark a long time ago, like a hundred years ago.
[2:22:00] Okay. Uh, freedom breeders, New Hampshire LP read power chats. Thanks. Uh, ladies get your family right. Find men who love freedom in New Hampshire. Wow. A lot of love from New Hampshire tonight.
[2:22:15] I feel that's like some, uh, shooting in the sky mating display with fireworks coming out of your armpits. Good for them. Good for them.
[2:22:23] Okay. CB clarified his question. He says, if police and fire departments were so much better as private entities, why would the people have let them become public?
[2:22:35] People don't let things happen. It just, it's like saying, why do you let your taxes go up? I mean, the government does what it wants and we all just run around like field mice at the base of dinosaurs and try and find a way to survive. It's a terrible system. And, you know, we do what we can to try and influence things for the better. But, you know, people don't just decide. It's like, why did you let the government send weapons to Ukraine? It's like, what are you going to do? Stop them? I mean, come on. I mean, they're the government. So yeah, it's a terrible system.
[2:23:05] Okay, that is actually, oh, there's one on entropy here.
[2:23:10] Can we finallyget something from New Hampshire, please? I'm begging you.
[2:23:14] Never mind, we already read that one. And actually, I see now it's only a six cent chat, so we never should have read it. Okay, well, that's everything then. So do you guys want to, maybe we'll do plugs and then we'll call it a night. Do you want to?
[2:23:31] Plugs? I like being bald! Oh, sorry. Okay, got it.
[2:23:35] Down below and also for i put the link to freedomain.com for stef and to malcolm's youtube channel that he does with his wife um but is there anything else you got wanted to let people know about
[2:23:48] um you know uh Parrhesia.io or the Collins Institute we're trying to make, education uh cheap inexpensive and non-biased so you can edit it heavily yourself for your kids that i mean we made it for our kids because i don't want them to get brainwashed by the school system. We also made Wizling.ai, which we use to make our kids stuffed animals, like talk to them about educational subjects. And these days, well, it's not really stable yet. We're working on RFAB to create better chat systems. But yeah, check us out on YouTube. I'd love to see you guys. Right now we're sort of crashing out because YouTube almost canceled our channel for saying Hitler was bad, which I was very surprised about. We said he was bad because he was too progressive, and apparently you're not allowed to say that. And That's where we are these days.
[2:24:37] Yeah, for me, peacefulparenting.com, you get the free book, the audio book, the PDF, and there's a print copy out shop.freedomain.com. If you want some, I guarantee you it will start some conversations, philosophy, merch, and freedomain.com/donate. I don't do ads and I don't do sponsorships. So I'm basically like Socrates in that I'll just, you know, let's talk philosophy. Maybe you can buy me a coffee or something. So I really do appreciate the conversation today. I really do appreciate the invitation and I had a really great time.
[2:25:06] And I think Malcolm was a very, very good and spirited guy to have these conversations with.
[2:25:11] And I really do appreciate that. And I had a blast and I hope we can do it again sometime.
[2:25:18] Thank you. I really enjoyed it too. I just want to say, I like, you know, I don't do debates all the time. Once in a while, I like to do these. I love to listen to intelligent people sparring with each other. And I thought that was fantastic. I really enjoyed it. So thank you to both of you guys for being here. Thanks to everybody for watching. big thanks to everybody sending the super chats we appreciate the support everybody have a great night and we will catch you later
[2:25:42] bye
[2:25:43] really appreciate it thanks for having us on and you can always invite me back to debate anything else that I say that's offensive
[2:25:49] great.
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