In this Flash X Space from 6 October 2025, Stefan Molyneux dives into a multitude of topics ranging from cultural history to environmental ethics. The episode opens with Molyneux expressing his disheveled state, humorously admitting to lying around with "his pants on his head," which sets an informal tone for the philosophical discourse that follows. He extends his gratitude to his audience for their keen interest in philosophy, showcasing the awkward yet relatable nature of modern communication.
Molyneux takes a deep dive into the topic of colonialism as he critiques the misguided narratives surrounding India’s historical caste system. He recounts an intriguing retweet from Elon Musk regarding the origins of British colonialism, provoking discussions on the implications of identity and ancestry. Stefan argues that the caste system, rooted in over 3,000 years of Indian history, cannot simply be attributed to foreign oppression, highlighting the irony of cultural pride entwined with historical blame. He counters this with humorous anecdotes about the primitive state of ancient Britons, driving home his point that no culture is without its flaws.
Transitioning into the ethics of environmental pollution, a caller probes Molyneux on the moral responsibilities of large nations like India and China in contributing to global pollution. Stefan responds with his trademark blend of humor and philosophy, advocating for a voluntarist and anarcho-capitalist approach. He critiques governmental intervention as a means to address environmental issues, suggesting that true responsibility lies within the free market where private incentives will drive individuals and corporations to take action for ecological upkeep. Molyneux recitals historical examples to illustrate how government often fails to provide adequate solutions, instead burdening future generations with the consequences of mismanagement.
As the conversation unfolds, Molyneux explores the role of ancestry and identity in contemporary society, criticizing the emotional investment people have in their historical lineage. He dissects the notion of in-group preferences, addressing how various ethnicities factor into discussions of privilege and societal behavior. Through his philosophically rich discourse, he promotes the idea of focusing on the present rather than the past, encouraging listeners to think critically about their place and responsibilities in our interconnected world.
The dialogue with callers remains lively, delving into specific regional issues such as the political landscape in Latin America. Molyneux’s exchange with callers about Paraguay and Bolivia touches upon the implications of French and Spanish influences in the region on notions of democracy and governance. He expounds on the historical context of political systems, examining the impact of colonial legacies on systemic freedoms and societal norms. Stefan posits that Western values, particularly pertaining to individual rights and limited government, should be a benchmark for evaluating political ideologies across the globe.
As the discussion draws to a close, a heartfelt moment arises when Molyneux expresses his concern for public intellectual Jordan Peterson, who has faced significant health challenges. The discourse serves as a commentary on the broader societal pressures faced by figures who challenge the status quo. In summarizing his views on the times he has navigated, Stefan reflects on the past decade of social media and free speech, underscoring the importance of maintaining open discussions in a rapidly changing digital landscape.
Throughout this reflective and often humorous exchange, Stefan Molyneux invites listeners to challenge conventional wisdom and engage in thoughtful dialogue about morality, culture, and personal accountability. Whether addressing past grievances or contemplating future pathways, the episode champions the power of philosophy to illuminate our understanding of the world. As Molyneux wraps up, he reiterates his commitment to seeking the truth and encourages his audience to do the same, leaving them with a sense of ambition and a thirst for deeper inquiry.
0:05 - Introduction to Philosophy
0:29 - Elon Musk and Colonialism
1:56 - The Caste System Debate
3:38 - Cultural Admiration
4:39 - The Ancestry Argument
7:19 - Self-Reflection on Foolishness
12:33 - Pollution and Its Consequences
19:15 - Government and Social Issues
25:16 - Charity and Voluntary Action
30:44 - Jordan Peterson's Health Update
35:26 - Political Changes in Latin America
41:44 - Defining the West
49:48 - Democracy and French Thought
59:01 - The Role of Philosophy in Society
1:01:46 - Reflecting on Past Freedom
[0:02] So, I'm sorry.
[0:06] Oh, my God. I'm so sorry. I just, oh. I'm just lying here with my pants on my head. And I wanted to talk philosophy. So I have a few minutes until my next thing. And I just wanted to drop by and say hi to everyone. And thank you all for showing your interest in philosophy. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be laughing... .
[0:30] Oh, this Indian thread, which sort of erupted when our good friend Elon Musk retweeted one of my tweets about how, you know, if you go to... if people come from, let's say, overseas and become British, then people who are British go to India, and therefore they were Indian, therefore there's no colonialism, they were just Indians oppressing themselves. and this really has become it's a wild education. I remember back in the day in my sort of former incarnation on X getting into some of this and you know pointing out that, what was it? It was like some. I can't remember the number but it was some crazy number of infanticide of females in India and anyway, and listen, I mean there's definitely, look, obviously some brilliant Indians in mathematics and science amazing stuff and so on but somebody was saying that the caste system, which is a very sort of rigid class system, brutally enforced.
[1:30] The caste system in India is 3,000 years old, give or take, right? And now somebody's telling me that white people imposed the caste system on India. Aryans imposed the caste system on India. I'm sorry. There's nothing funny about the caste system. Honestly, it's not that. And I don't mean to sound cold and callous about the suffering. of the untouchables and the Dalits and so on.
[1:56] But to simply have this perspective that A, you know, the Indians will say, but your ancestors were squatting in caves when our ancestors were building a great civilization. It's like, oh, okay. You know, I mean, the British came late to civilization after being conquered by the Romans, the French, the Vikings, each other. You know, I made jokes in a presentation from like over 10 years ago that the British was so primitive, you know, sort of 2,000 years ago, the British was so primitive. They thought that they gained invulnerability by painting themselves blue. And my joke was like, if there was a nuclear war, the ancient Britons would believe that the only things that would survive is cockroaches and the blue man group. And I mean, to me, looking at the deficiencies of my quote, ancestors, yeah, I mean, there's just facts. I don't know why people get so ego-invested in all this kind of stuff. It's just facts. My ancestors largely sucked, if you go back far enough, and your ancestors sucked in most of human history until about five minutes ago sucked intergalactic chunks of sharded evil.
[3:13] And I mean, the Indian continent, subcontinent, there was no India, right? When the British arrived, it was just a bunch of warring principalities. They were all exploiting each other and subjugating each other and dominating each other and so on. And, you know, it was either going to be the British or it was going to be the Muslims probably, right? So if I had the choice, I'd go a little bit more where the food is poorer and the laws are better.
[3:39] But yeah, so just this paradox, and people get so wrapped up in this ancestor stuff, it's wild. I mean, don't take pride in what your ancestors did. You can have admiration for various cultures. And I can't think of a single culture that I don't have some admiration for, honestly.
[3:58] The in-group preferences of Judaism is great in many ways. The asceticism and commitment of the Islamic community is impressive. and the black community has brought amazing things to America and, you know, the Spanish community, Mexican community, the Hispanic community have brought wonderful things to the world and the Europeans and, I mean, the Asians. I look at Asian engineering, having worked with a bunch of Asian engineers in my career, sort of East Asian. not South Asian. Fantastic. Fantastic. Love Indian food. So, you know, each culture sort of brings things.
[4:37] But it's just wild. It's just wild to think that people are so invested in this ancestor stuff that they don't even notice this. Like, your ancestors were squatting in caves when my ancestors had this great civilization. Oh, and your ancestors, while squatting in caves, imposed the caste system on us.
[4:58] So my ancestors were squatting in caves in England and Ireland, Germany, I guess. and not only squatting in caves, I guess painting strange symbols on the wall with their own body products, But not only were they squatting in caves. But they were also amazing time and space travelers squatting in caves while simultaneously imposing the caste system on India, 3,000 years ago, 3,000 miles away.
[5:28] Amazing.
[5:29] I mean, that's really incredible. They had portals, you see. They had portals that led them to grow 100 times in size and be transported to India to impose the caste system. And I don't know. It's wild. It's wild.
[5:41] Anyway, I'm here. I'm here to chat with y'all if you have thoughts and comments. You know, somebody said, because I can be pretty blunt and maybe harsh with people who are being foolish. And somebody said, you don't subscribe to love thy neighbor, and I do, actually. I do.
[6:05] I will return insult for insult because I'm not a pacifist, but I very much am love thy neighbor as myself. So I don't know how you handle it. I don't know how you do it with yourself, but I'm certainly happy to hear. But if I'm being an idiot, what do I call myself? An idiot. if I'm being foolish, I call myself a fool. I wouldn't say harsh necessarily, but I'm strict when I'm being foolish. And I've done this. I mean, since I got back to X in the summer, I had a brain fart regarding statistical distribution, and I tried defending it, and I was wrong. And I just said, you know what?
[6:48] Brain fart. I got it wrong. And I'm wrong. I don't know why this ego thing. Who wants to be right all the time?
[6:55] Ew, gross.
[6:56] You can't be. You can only be bullying. So I love my neighbor as myself. If I see somebody being foolish, I'll say, you're being foolish. If I see myself being foolish, I will say to myself, you're being foolish. I don't expect perfection from myself. I don't expect perfection from others. But we have to be honest
[7:14] In our striving towards the truth. So I do love my neighbor as myself. and if someone's being a fool, I'll call them a fool and if I'm being a fool, I'll call myself a fool it's not punitive, it's just accurate, alright, anyway, enough of my yapping you have sem slash something something if you would like to unmute I would be over thrill joyed to hear what you have to say going once, going twice don't make me vamp my teeth are not sharp enough what you got, what you got. Yes, go ahead.
[7:55] Oh, yes. I am sorry because I'm six beers deep right now. Actually, no, seventh. So I don't think I have anything interesting to say. But I'm going to be here. And if anything interesting comes up and I feel the need to interject, I will.
[8:16] Okay, good to know. Jacob. John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith. What is on your mind, my friend? Feel free to unmute. Yes, see, some people get this delay, I don't know what goes on with that. Some people don't. All right, what's on your mind?
[8:29] So I just, on India, I'm thinking about the level of pollution that they're contributing, India and China, I guess. And so I wonder, I had this idea of preemptive self-defense where they're destroying the planet and what can we morally do about that?
[8:50] Yeah. Yeah.
[8:51] It's a bit edgy.
[8:52] Yeah. Well, listen, I don't honestly know. The solution is in the free market. I'm a voluntarist and a narco-capitalist, which means I'm an advocate for a stateless society, because whatever you ask the government to do to solve these problems is just going to make it worse. So I don't know. It's not a fun topic. It's not a pretty topic, of course. And, you know, when you have to, when you, so in, in the colder climates, you know, winter has just been kind of harsh on people who don't plan. And so we just don't have as many people left from our sort of evolution who are really bad at planning. and in warmer climates they just don't have to plan as much and so you just end up with a lot of people who just don't seem to have the ability to plan very well or to consider long-term consequences and so on, and that's really tough it's really tough so i you Know i don't have an answer other than we need less government in every sphere and corner of the planet and of our lives people can't handle power and the initiation of the use of force that characterizes political power is immoral so um you know i never like asking the government to do anything because whatever you ask the government to protect you from will end up being taken over in general by your worst enemies and used to make your life relatively unpleasant so....
[10:13] As a yeah as a free society how would we address that at neighbors polluting and doing things that affect us
[10:22] Right. So the way that a free society does it let's just do it within a particular geographical area so let's say you buy a house on a river and you just you love the river it's peaceful lots of fish. And you love to swim in it and so on and then i open up some battery factory or some paint factory up river and i just start dumping all of this crap Into the river now the traditional answer is well you go to the government and you say uh, you know please go and solve this problem for me and get the guy to stop polluting.
[10:55] Now, actually, pollution, you know, they always talk about these dark satanic mills of the 19th century, the air pollution that characterized the Industrial Revolution in England. And not many people know, It's a fairly obscure bit of history, but not many people know.
[11:12] Sorry, would you mind? I'm sorry. Much though I love background baby noises, I can do that. No problem.
[11:18] So, the apple farmers in London were having a bad time when the factory owners first started pumping all their crap into the atmosphere. It coated all of the apples and made them inedible. And so the apple farmers went to the court system, which Dickens was a court reporter, Charles Dickens was a court reporter and knew how bad it was. And there's many sequences or scenes within his books talking about how bad the court system was. And he actually was partially responsible for getting reforms into the court system so things could be resolved relatively quickly, or at least faster than they used to be. So all of the apple farmers went to the government and said, we're suing these manufacturers because they're putting all this crap in the air, which is destroying our apple crop and so on. And unfortunately, the government, what the government did was it basically looked at the amount of taxes it was collecting from the apple farmers and said well that's not very much and then it looked at the amount of taxes it was collecting from the industrial manufacturers and they said, well boy that's a whole lot, because you're employing a lot of people and and you're paying a lot of taxes and so basically they said to the farmers uh
[12:32] Too bad too bad so sad we're not giving you anything and they sided with the industry.
[12:38] Now of course and that's sort of like giving immunity to vaccine manufacturers, right? It just takes all of the desire for quality out. So they didn't end up having to clean up the smokestacks because the government cited them. Now, whether this was a rational calculation of tax revenue or outright bribery, because the new manufacturers had a lot more money than the apple farmers, so maybe they just bribed people, I don't know. But the net result, the net net, as people used to say the net result was that the apple farmers could not get any redress for the pollution that was destroying their farms, and they ended up just having to sell and move. And then this has set the stage for all of this absolutely appalling levels of pollution. that went on from there. So the government doesn't really solve the problem of pollution, at least in that instance, and was just a terrible thing.
[13:29] So the way that it works in a free society is when you buy your property on the lake, sorry, when you buy your property on the river, it's downriver from me, then you buy insurance. And you buy insurance that says the river has to be kept to a reasonable level of cleanliness. It doesn't have to be perfect, whatever that means, but a reasonable level of cleanliness. Like one hiker peeing in the river isn't going to kill the whole thing, but 500 tons of arsenic will. So you buy insurance. And then you have a company and you pay them every month and people on the river pay that company every month to keep the river clean.
[14:07] And if the river gets dirty, there's a contract which says they have to give you five times your home value or whatever. You'd make it something punitive so that they have every incentive to keep the river clean. So what they do is they monitor the river. They take samples from the river. They make sure that the river is clean because they personally, personally will lose money.
[14:28] I mean, if the government doesn't enforce pollution laws, no individual politician or bureaucrat loses a penny. So where there's no incentive, there's no quality. It's what Nassim Taleb used to call, or probably still does call, Skin in the game. People who don't have skin in the game can never be counted to produce quality, which is why you get better service at a restaurant than you do when getting your driver's license because the waiter or waitress usually is a tip-based life form. I've done it, and it makes a big difference in terms of quality.
[15:00] So if somebody decides to open a factory up or wants to open a factory up, upriver, then your pollution control company leaps into action because they don't want to have to pay everyone on the river five times the home value or whatever the punishment would be.
[15:16] And they go in and they say, you know, we'd really rather you didn't put your factory in here. We're going to buy the land to make sure that doesn't happen. We're going to maybe build it or build a nice summer home and so on. and if somebody does somehow sneak and build a whole bunch of bad stuff and pump it into the river then they find out who that is and they that person then has to pay for the cleanup and if and it's kind of ironic right because what i've always been talking about this is sort of my very first article from 2005 it's this month 20 years right i'm talking about how pollution control would work in a free society so you have companies that make money if the environment is kept clean. And they lose money if the environment gets dirty.
[16:02] Now, in a free society, there's no such thing as a corporation. A corporation is a legal fiction that allows people to extract money from a business and take it to their own personal accounts, but it doesn't go the other way. If a business does something really bad, corporate shield keeps the executives from being held liable.
[16:21] It's sort of like if you have an invisible friend who goes to jail, if you commit a crime, you're likely to commit more crimes.
[16:28] So in a free society, it would be like it was before corporations were instituted, whereas if you ran a bank and the bank ran out of money, then you lost your home. The image of the Wild West guy with a barrel around his body because he's actually even out of clothes. So they made pretty good efforts to keep banks solvent.
[16:47] Because if the bank went insolvent, the bank executives would lose everything. Lose everything. Whereas now, it doesn't happen that way.
[16:55] So yeah, you would have private incentives to keep things clean. And let's say that there was some business that went and started polluting the river, and they wouldn't listen to reason, or whatever it is. Okay, well, then you have a very powerful weapon in a civilized society. and the most powerful weapon in a civilized society is ostracism and by that i'm referring to in particular economic ostracism like if you think of the number of interactions you have to go through in any typical day in your society it's crazy how many there are.
[17:32] I mean to get electricity to run the internet to get oil or gas or whatever you use to heat your house there or air conditioners, to get on the road, to drive down the road, to go into a store, to buy things. Everything is an economic interaction. And if people in your society don't want to, in a free market, private society, if people in your society don't want to do business with you, you can't live in that society. I mean, I guess you could stay on your land, but if the electricity company doesn't want to deliver electricity to you, and if you don't get any heating, and you don't get any cooling, and you don't get any water, and you don't get any groceries, you can't live in that society.
[18:15] And so society has a very powerful tool called not interacting with people.
[18:21] I remember this from high school. I would ask girls out and they would choose to not interact with me.
[18:28] They ostracized me!
[18:30] Actually, I did okay in high school, but you know, it happened. It happened. I mean, from time to time, if it's not happening, you're not aiming high enough. So, and then of course, after spending 20, actually after spending about 15 years advocating ostracism as the means of maintaining social control, what happened? That's right. That's right.
[18:49] You have guessed correctly.
[18:50] I got de-platformed from everywhere!
[18:53] See it was just a matter of ostracism.
[18:55] So after promoting this as a method of social control um well i suppose i i got to be a test case i got to show the world just how powerful ostracism is, when society or at least political elements within society which wouldn't be
[19:11] present in a free market society disapprove of what you do so there's lots of different ways to handle it the government won't solve your problems. They won't solve your problem, so, sorry...
[19:20] i appreciate your reply i have i want to go back to the original topic a little bit more and just a thought i don't know um i don't have much to say on it but basically i wonder if our ancestors would have behaved differently um in terms of the white man's burden if they had have known about genetics
[19:38] well yes i was actually just uh i want to do a post probably tomorrow it's probably too late tonight and do a post about...
[19:46] But you know, there's this endless Marxist blood labels usually--sorry, blood libels, not blood labels--endless Marxist blood libels against whites, because whites kind of naturally, white Christians in particular, are very resistant to communism. And so there's all these Marxist blood libels. And of course, one of them is that the whites came to North America and they genocided the natives by giving them smallpox blankets. And it's like, bro! There wasn't even a germ theory of disease until the late 19th century. Nobody knew what caused these things. They didn't even know about germs!
[20:18] Exactly, if we wanted to genocide them We would have done it
[20:21] Well, there's one mention of people talking about giving smallpox blankets to natives, and that is not enough. That's not a strategy. It was not written down. It was not. And of course, I mean, the natives gave two things back to the white man. one which was voluntary and one which was less voluntary. They gave back smoking and syphilis. Syphilis is a North American disease, which then was transferred back to probably through sexual, I mean, certainly through sexuality.
[20:48] But yeah, syphilis, one of the worst illnesses known to man. So, and smoking, right?
[20:52] So, yeah, just this idea. This is all these sort of crazy blood libels that go on just there to insult. And then you can see all this, like, what about your ancestors' atrocities? It's like, bro, all of human history was atrocities. Every single slice and dice and piece of it.
[21:08] The Muslim slave trade was 20 times larger than the North Atlantic slave trade. It's just that they tended to castrate their slaves, most of whom died.
[21:17] So, yeah, it's all just a bunch of nonsense. I'm so sorry. I wandered away from your original question.
[21:23] It was just, what do you think our ancestors have behaved instead of enslaving? And would they have done something differently if they knew the population?
[21:34] The sensible strategy in the world is to stay home and make your government as small as humanly possible. I believe that the end result or goal of a moral situation is zero. right because uh the initiation of the use of force is immoral and so yeah with the multi-generational project for humanity just as the end of slavery was a multi-generational project the multi-generational project for humanity is to keep reducing the size and power of government so that people can come up with voluntary i.e, quality solutions to social problems so yeah the idea that you can just race around the world.
[22:14] And you can pass the laws that took thousands of years of trial and error to develop in your country and just impose them on other countries. I mean, the British system of law and the British society was heavily conditioned by close to half a millennia, 400 or more years of ritualistically killing the 1% of the most violent and brutal members of the population.
[22:40] So you go through that process, you know, because they would put them in jail, let them hang them or guillotine them or draw and quarter them or, you know, whatever it is, they'd kill them or reproductively disable the most violent and aggressive or send them to Australia. And so after you go through that process for a couple of hundred years, you have a particular kind of society. And you can't just take the laws from that society and then just take them to some other continent where people haven't gone through that process and they haven't had that winter whittling of those with the least forethought. And you can't just drop the law books on that country and have it be like your country. But again, they didn't know or understand this. They were working on the Christian idea of the soul, which is that everyone can be like everyone else, because we all are inhabited by this godlike substrat of the soul.
[23:30] And they didn't understand these things, and a significant amount of counterproductive—I mean, it's hard to call it foolishness, because they were acting according to the beliefs of their day.
[23:41] And it took Watson and Crick in the 1950s for them to get the double helix structure of DNA while playing in an inordinate amount of table tennis, if I remember from the book. But yeah, they just didn't understand, they didn't know, and they were wrong. You can't just go to some country and take your laws, impose your laws on that country, and then have it be like your country. It just doesn't work that way.
[24:08] Also, part of the problem is that we spent generations developing technology and science in medicine. And through that process with education, birth rates dropped and our population stopped growing. And then we sort of bombed these other countries with modern medicine. And so they were able to increase their population size very quickly over the past hundred years. And so that's a major problem in the world right now. And so we've sort of gave them a gift, not knowing where it would lead. And I feel like we should take it back.
[24:46] Well, I think you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. But I would say for sure that all charity must be voluntary. And so free speech would allow for the communication of effective ideas about human nature, biology, genetics, culture. So you'd have free speech about it.
[25:08] All charity must be voluntary and must be based on a free speech access to the truth. So yeah, foreign aid and things like that from a state level, I mean, you know, it's just taking money from the poor people in rich countries and giving it to the rich people in poor countries. I think Ron Paul came up with that. But yeah, it's just absolutely terrible.
[25:30] It's money laundering as a whole. And it is the round trip of the foreign dollar, you know, just America gives India a bunch of dollars and then because it's dollars they have to spend it on American businesses it's just another form of you know fat cat smorgasbord corporate subsidies and so on so yeah it's all it's all terrible and if you want to help people then you can do it at a personal voluntary level with your own money but you don't get to enslave my kids for your own wackadoodle do-goodery because you didn't have kids and you don't want to just live with cats so
[26:01] i appreciate your time
[26:03] Yeah, it has to be voluntary. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. I appreciate that. And if there's anyone else, we can have a short, short, sharp show tonight.
[26:12] But if anybody else has any questions or issues that they would like to bring up or chat about, I'm obviously thrilled and happy to hear from y'all.
[26:25] I've got a show coming out this week. It's a really good show. You know, for me, at least, when those analogies and metaphors come together just perfectly, Oh, it's glorious.
[26:36] And I had somebody who was dealing with somebody, you know, obviously it's an amateur way of saying it, but I viewed them as, well, I think that person described them as narcissistic. And I was talking about how, if you want to understand a narcissist, think of how you interact with your NPC in a video game, that you only think about your own needs and preferences. You don't think about the other person's needs and preferences. And in fact, if the NPC in your video game were to do things that you don't want, you just dump them and get another one. And that's how the narcissist in general will deal with personal relationships and dating and so on.
[27:12] So, I hope that will be helpful when it comes along. All right. So let me see. What else did I have to chitty chatty bing bing about you all?
[27:27] The creator of Nutella has died on Valentine's Day at the age of 97. Nutella is tasty, but Satan poop. It really is not, I think, ideally healthy for you. And it's funny because he's like a skinny guy who lived to 97, which means I can only assume that he did not eat much Nutella. Good though it is, it is not particularly good for you. Have you seen that breakdown of Nutella? How much oil and fat and all of that stuff is in it?
[27:57] I also wanted to point out, you know, this general theory that the Marxists put out, you know, that the Marxists are fantastic at creating hatred and division between groups. I talk about this in my documentary in Hong Kong. And this idea that England became wealthy by stealing from the third world and so on.
[28:16] No, no, actually, England's wealth began to severely rise, significantly rise, you can say severely rise. England's wealth began to rise in the 15th century, long before it broke its international boundaries and so on, is important.
[28:31] Uh okay we don't have any callers right now. I had, I had some thoughts about a man who is both noble and flawed i mean not uncommon, I have my flaws hopefully I have a smidge or two of nobility maybe not when i'm giggling like a helium-laced school girl but anyway uh poor poor Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson's daughter asks for prayers because her father is quite ill.
[29:00] This is Dr. Jordan Peterson, famous U of T professor of psychology, who has reached a level of fame that is reserved for very few people in this life, and which comes with an inordinate amount of stressors.
[29:13] You know, especially if you're skeptical of anything on the left, they just pump hatred into the air until people go nuts on you. I've experienced it myself, though, of course, not to the degree that Jordan Peterson did. So with all humility, my goal is speak maximum truth, maximum truth, maximum philosophy, which is speak as much truth as you can until they're going to kill you and then pull back. That's the general goal and idea.
[29:40] And of course, Jordan Peterson has had some significant health issues. I think a couple of years ago when his wife was ill, he started taking benzodiazepines. I think he got addicted and didn't he get airlifted out to Russia and put in a coma for a month, the detox and like things were just wild. And then he came back. He came back and started working again. He's had gum issues and various health issues. And now the issue is, I don't even know the exact terms, but his daughter seems to think that it has something to do with mold exposure as a result of clearing out his father's basement after his father died. And so I hope, you know, I wouldn't necessarily say that they're in a spiritual battle against existential demons, but I would say that we certainly, I didn't say we, I certainly wish the best for Jordan Peterson.
[30:29] I hope that he gets well. He is a powerful voice for skepticism, and significant amounts of reason in the world. And fingers crossed, I hope that he gets better.
[30:42] And I certainly wish the best for him and his family. Flawed, yes. Flawed, I will get into perhaps another time. But right now, we have another caller.
[30:52] Tomas. There was Tom Tom sitting on a bomb. Hello. How are you doing? Good, how are you doing?
[30:59] Okay, so my question, I was reading an ex-post today or yesterday, I don't remember, from a Danish poster. And he wrote something like, let's move every Muslim immigrant from Denmark to paraguay and let's pay them 60 000 euros and and then paraguay can deal with them but he received a lot of um uh hate so to say because people said that paraguay was a christian country they don't deserve it but my my deeper question would be does this person she he does not consider paraguay to be part of the west do you consider latin america as a general to be part of the West? What's your take on this?
[31:44] That's an interesting question. That's interesting. Tell me a little bit more about Paraguay. I mean, what is its legal system relative to, say, British common law or, I guess, French law, Napoleonic law? What is its general philosophy? What is its approach to free speech? And so on. I mean, a lot of Western countries don't even feel that Western anymore, particularly England. Did they arrest like 12,000 people for social media posts last year? So tell me a little bit more about Paraguay and its legal and free speech structure.
[32:16] I cannot tell you a lot about Paraguay because I'm from Chile, so I don't know the specifics of Paraguay, but I can tell you about my country, which is still in Latin America. I know that we follow the Roman law system inherited from the Spaniards, and I would say that at least my country is pretty Western in that regard, but you also have countries like Bolivia or maybe, I don't know, Nicaragua, which are more genetically also to the indigenous side, or you have even countries like Uruguay, which is mostly European. So it's a mix-mix, I would say, in that sense.
[32:51] Now, I know a little bit more about Chile. I did a show on Chile many years ago, and it's brushed with almost socialism, its recovery into relative free market capitalism. But I will admit that, I mean, I've kept up with El Salvador a little bit more, but I've sort of lost a lot of what's been going on with Chile.
[33:14] Well, I would say that Chile is following some similar process that the West is solving. So we received a lot of immigration. Our immigration came from mostly Venezuela, but also Peru, Haiti, Colombia, the Caribbean countries. And now we also have a political process ongoing. We have a left-wing government, which we have presidential election.
[33:40] A woman got in, right? A woman got in who was more socialist.
[33:43] No, no, no. It was a young man. I think it was the youngest president of the entire world. So a millennial president, very, very woke in that sense. And now he's going away. And the possible next president is a German descendant and possibly from the extreme right, so to say. So in that sense, I would say that Chile is following a similar trend to the Western countries. but what's your what's your take on it
[34:14] He's got a um i don't even want to say hard right because, I mean you never hear really about hard left or extreme left but they have a a more a less globalist more nationalist woman i think is is ascending to power in japan and it may save them from this, the plan, right, to bury Japan in the non-Japanese.
[34:40] And so, yeah, if Chile, I mean, was it 73? Pinochet overthrew Allende, who was a socialist, which meant that he was going to end up destroying the economy and, I assume, doing a lot of pretty horrible and deadly things to those who weren't socialists, as the socialists tend to do.
[35:01] I think I could also tell you something more. Maybe people may not know this, but I remember that when the big strikes came into the U.S., I think it was around 2020, there were a lot of strikes everywhere.
[35:14] Sorry, the strikes. Yeah, sorry. Go ahead.
[35:16] Strikes, yeah. So very big strikes, looting everywhere. Six months prior to that, the same thing happened in Chile.
[35:22] So we had the same strikes, very, very left-wing. They tried to even overthrow the government. then we've got a whole change the constitution process. And I think if that constitution were to change, then Chile will have been destroyed because that constitution gave seven or even more different judicial systems for the country. So depending on your ethnic background, you will be judged by different judges. So basically that will destroy the country, I would say. I remember that.
[36:01] The issue of judicial fairness in a multi-ethnic society is a big challenge. I'm sure you're aware of the leader of Singapore who got his start as a lawyer and realized that ethnic... Juries don't tend to convict their own ethnic accused, and this is why they went not to trial by jury, but they went to trial by judge, because the juries of a particular ethnicity are much less likely to convict someone of their own ethnicity than someone of another ethnicity.
[36:37] I've heard ratios as wide apart as if you have ethnicity X and the prisoner is ethnicity X. I could do this word, I feel it. I feel it strongly. Then if it's the same ethnicity, the conviction rate is 20%, and if it's another ethnicity, particularly a disliked ethnicity, then the conviction rate is like 80%. I've heard as wide a gap as those kinds of things. And of course, that isn't justice. That isn't justice.
[37:06] Well, every race?
[37:07] Yeah, so if you're going to start judging people...
[37:09] I'm sorry, if you're going to formalize the judging of people rather than having it informal through the preferences of ethnic juries, if you're going to formalize having different rules for different ethnicities. And multiculturalism generally leads to multi-legalism, which is different legal standards for different ethnicities. And this sort of goal of universal morality is nixed.
[37:30] I'm so sorry, I interrupted you. Go ahead.
[37:32] No, no, I was just asking if what you cited was for every race or... Because I also heard that maybe Europeans or whites, they don't tend to have this unity as a group thing.
[37:44] Well, I would say that there seems to be a lot of hostility to white in-group preference. That is not the case for other in-group preferences. And that is a little annoying, to put it mildly, because that's not a universalization of the principle.
[38:04] It's sort of like if you play soccer and you have to pass to the opposing team, but the other opposing team only has to pass to themselves. Well, it's an unfair. competition.
[38:15] But there is, of course, this belief in the world that all white in-group preference leads to Nazism, and therefore you have to nip it all In the bud. And that's not, I mean, whites working together actually worked to overthrow and defeat Nazism. So it's not really a very good thesis, but it's compellingly believable to a surprising number of people.
[38:40] Well, I appreciate those comments, and I would love to get to Chile one day. I have been as far south as Brazil. I think that's the further south I've gone, at least in that continent, but it would be fascinating to go to Chile and to try and sort of understand the threads of how Chile managed to avoid the catastrophes of a lot of Central and South American countries in their endless experimentation with socialism and actually, you know, the sort of famous meme with the helicopters and all of that. I'd be fascinated to find out how that came about. It would be a good documentary to do, but I have to sort of rebuild my shattered platforms, so to speak, because I used to love...
[39:24] I've done three documentaries, three, yeah, three, one on Poland, one on Hong Kong, and one on California, which was a six-part series. And love doing the documentaries. You can actually catch me in Mike Cernovich's documentary called Hoaxed, the movie. You should check it out. It's really good. And the bit at the end is great.
[39:45] So I like doing the documentaries, but they're very expensive, and I don't have a platform with which to distribute. And I hope that you guys will check out. If you go to YouTube, just do a search for FreeDomain1, the number one FreeDomain1, if you could subscribe to me there, I would really appreciate it. But yeah, I'd like to do more documentaries, but right now it's just setting fire to a pile of dollar bills, sadly, because I do the documentary, but I don't have a big enough venue to get the documentaries out and find any particular way to monetize them. And of course, as an entrepreneur of now 30 years, I feel, I feel good, and I also feel that I have to and should be responsible to your donation dollars, so I hope that you will subscribe here on X, and donate at freedomain.com/donate. I promise to be as responsible as I can and not throw money into big piles and set fire to it because I like to do documentaries.
[40:44] But you know, the world is changing. The world is bouncing back from the edge of insanity. You know, everyone thinks that the pendulum just swings forever, but usually it does sort of go back more towards the center. And I think we're getting that kind of stuff now. So who knows what could be possible. I certainly do miss doing uh in public speaking all of that kind of stuff i i definitely miss all of that stuff and who knows, it could it could happen it could happen, Right.
[41:15] Yes, we have another caller. If you want to unmute. I'm all ears. Hi. Novan. Novan.
[41:27] What's up?
[41:28] Yes, sir. How's it going?
[41:29] Hi. I want to follow up on the last question. The other guy said that if Latin America is a part of the West, right?
[41:44] And as your response to that is, I gather, is that you have to tick some boxes to say if you are part of the West or not. Between those would be common law or I don't remember the other ones. Can you help me, please?
[42:10] Yeah, so I would put in sort of the Western category the major innovations that the west developed politically were threefold uh number. One the free market uh number two uh free speech number three uh limited government small smaller government more voluntary uh free market activity. And and common law right? So the idea of a trial by a jury of your peers according to objective rules with the general common law developed systems of discovery evidence presentation being able to interrogate your accusers and and so on so yeah common law free markets and free speech to me would put people in general in the western tradition if that makes sense.
[42:57] okay i i have an observation about so uh before uh in my country before 1825.
[43:08] Sorry, your country is which one?
[43:10] Bolivia.
[43:12] Bolivia, sorry, go ahead.
[43:13] Right next to Chile. Before that date, we were part of the Spanish Empire. And after that, we, quote-unquote, we gained independence. And the ideas that were present in the moment the people were writing the Constitution, I think, or I suspect, are the ideas borrowed from the French Revolution. And the ideas from the French Revolution, I think, are contrary, or I mean, are on the opposite side from the ideas that you just said.
[43:59] Right. Yeah, but actually, I'm sorry, just to point, I've got a whole 12-hour series on the French Revolution available to donors, but very briefly, I would say that the French tradition is an outlier in the Western tradition in that it tends to be equality of opportunity is more of the Western tradition. Now, I grew up in England, so for me, the Anglo-Saxon is at the core of the Western tradition. But France is not individualistic. It is collectivist in general. France is not pro-free market. It is pro-equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.
[44:40] France, as you know. and this is true of Italy to some degree as well, is famously hard to fire anyone, and it's hyper-regulation, and they're not particularly friendly to the free market. And of course, in the French legal system, which comes out of the Napoleonic Code, you are guilty until proven innocent, which is not at all part of the Anglo-Saxon common law tradition where you are innocent until proven guilty. France was not a big fan of free speech. And of course, the two big revolutions that occurred at about the same time with truly opposite results is the French Revolution and the American Revolution. The American Revolution was equality of opportunity, small government, free markets, free speech, and an armed citizenry. The French Revolution was collectivist, totalitarian, anti-clerical, and fanatically murderous, and produced an absolute catastrophe of a disaster in the West.
[45:42] And the other thing, too, is that the Anglo-Saxon tradition tends to be highly protective of children, and France, to some degree because of... The major thinkers in terms of France in childhood were pretty terrible that way.
[46:01] And Rousseau, of course, famously dumped all of his children in French orphanages, which were just brutal, and they almost certainly died, and he just ignored them. And so the protection of children is really not part of certainly French intellectual life. The French intellectuals are famously pedophile-adjacent, is probably the nicest way to put it, but they all sign these declarations saying, oh, yes, you should lower the age of consent and children can consent. And, you know, I mean, their biggest intellectual in France's history, at least in modern history, is Michel Foucault, who was a violent horrifying drug-using sadomasochist guy who just did the most appalling things in sex dungeons all over the world. And there's horrible rumors about what he did in Tunisia with underage kids in grave yards and so on. And so, yeah, there's not –.
[46:54] It's not – of course, you could say, and I understand it, that in the British tradition, there is a lot of rum, sodomy, and the lash and boarding schools with the child sexual assault and the Jimmy Saville and, you know, all of the stuff that happens in the House of Lords in particular, a lot of which was covered up by Margaret Thatcher, by the way. But you could also say – but it's not part of the general intellectual tradition. It is sort of – It's not frowned upon. It's not elevated in.... Jimmy Saville had to hide the kind of stuff that French intellectuals seem to praise, and that's sort of a different matter.
[47:35] So yeah, France to me is very much an outlier in the West for a variety of reasons. And so I would certainly say there are countries not in Europe that are closer to what I would consider the Western tradition than France.
[47:51] Okay, so Latin America would be a 50-50 in a rough estimate.
[47:57] I would put Chile, when it had its height of the free market as much closer to the West than France would be.
[48:04] Okay, okay, gotcha, gotcha. But in the order of traditions, between the French influence and the Spanish influence, particularly the modern era French influence is the biggest so therefore Latin America would not be a great part of the West or something like that, right?
[48:33] No, I think that's And Spain is a very interesting case because, of course, the Spanish had an empire and the Spanish was a world power to which you generally get only out of the free market.
[48:47] But Spain got completely eviscerated by all of the extra gold from the New World to the point, as I mentioned in the recent show, that they had a 400-year recession. Like all the smart people left who had their intellectual and mobile skills to go. And so Spain was really at the height of the Western tradition in many ways and then went empire and then through empire hyperinflated the currency through the tons of gold that it got from the new world and then sank into sort of second world status and was moribund for, again, like 400 years. It's wild, the effect that it has, the incredibly long-lasting effect of your smartest people leaving the country is really brutal.
[49:35] And of course, this is some of the concern that's going on with India, that if all the smart people leave India, what happens to India? Intelligent people are by far the most important resources that any country has.
[49:49] My last question, if you weight the thinking or the thought of French intellectuals and the thinkers that were used on the founding of America, Can you say that those thinkers were more inclined to democracy in the modern sense, or were the French thinkers more democratic in that sense, that equality of outcomes? My thesis is that democracy tends to help the thought of those thinkers, of the French thinkers, not the thinkers that found America.
[50:42] Right, right, right. I mean, of course, this was the idea of, you get this debate in America all the time. It's not really a debate... So we say, well, we're a democracy. It's like, no, no, no, it's a republic. And a republic is supposed to be a democracy that is limited by a constitution and rights, right? Whereas it's a sort of raw democracy is just majority gets to do whatever the hell they want with almost no interference from anything else.
[51:06] So, the unfortunate thing with a democracy is you can think of a building, an apartment building with 50 people and a landlord. And the landlord wants to raise rents, and the tenants want the rents to be lower, so, how do you deal with this? Well, in a free market society, the landlord can raise or lower his rents within the contractual obligations he has or the lease that he has with his tenants because he owns the building. However, in a democracy, the landlord being outvoted 50 to 1, what do the tenants want? Well, they don't want to raise any rents. In fact, they want the rents to be as low as humanly possible. So in a democracy, the tenants of the apartment building will simply vote to take away the building and give it to themselves and then vote for the rents to be $5 a month, right? Because that's a democracy.
[52:13] And in the very short run, that's very beneficial to the tenants, right? Because they get their rents lowered from $1,000 a month or $2,000 a month to $5 a month, and they dance and they skip down the hallways until, right? until things stop working, until their kids want to move out and maybe have apartments of their own, which they don't have because nobody is investing in apartments.
[52:43] I mean, in Toronto, where I grew up from the age of 11 onwards, people simply stopped building apartment buildings because there was this ferocious rent control. And so what did people do? Well, they built condos instead because condos are not subject to rent control for obvious reasons and they also converted apartments to condos.
[53:03] And it's the same thing in New York where you have these key apartments called key apartments which is the rent control is there, it's been there for 30 years or 40 years, so these apartments are ridiculously cheap like overlooking central park for like 700 800 bucks a month and you're supposed to be able to change the rent when somebody dies but they just exchange keys without informing the landlord that anyone has died if somebody dies or moves out or whatever. And so you get this whole scam. It's this game ofcat and mouse.
[53:32] And so you want to look at democracy. It's always going to be the case that those who want will always outvote those who create. Because those who create are very rare. Those who build apartment buildings, those who make stadiums, those who make movies and songs... you know when Napster was at its height you know people were just downloading songs all over the place and how many people were downloading songs as opposed to how many people were writing and recording songs
[54:02] yeah
[54:03] and it's the same thing with movies you know when i was in i was doing a lot of business in china in the year 2000 and everywhere I would go it's like oh you know we've got these uh movies for you cheap free movies copy paste CDs, DVDs you name it right and those guys were a dime a dozen but people who can write act indirect create produce and distribute movies... they'd be distributors, in a way.
[54:27] But people who can write and create good stories are very rare but people who can copy paste a DVD are very common and so the people who want vastly outnumber the people who create people who want free apartments vastly outnumber those who can build and create and fund quality apartments and so the people who want always outnumber the people who create and so the poor take away they vote to take away the wealth and property of the rich. And then everybody ends up poor.
[54:59] Like there's this debate in England about, as is in the case of a lot of Western countries, this is an inheritance tax. Inheritance, unfair for some kids to get all this money and other kids don't. It's like, how do you know? I mean, I grew up poor. It gave me a huge amount of ambition. Some of the kids that I knew who grew up rich didn't have much ambition, so it all tends to correct over time. There's not some magic benefit to starting off life with more money, and there's lots of costs, you know, the poor little rich girl and...
[55:23] A friend I had shortly before i met my wife he actually helped introduce me to my wife uh he would tell me that you know he grew up very wealthy but incredibly lonely because both his parents worked and he was very sad and yeah...
[55:36] It's not it's not i mean that the issues with my childhood really didn't have anything to do with not having money so... but but of course if if you say well you can't leave your money to your kids anymore well then oh people would just stop creating businesses and they'll stop working hard they'll stop working their 80 hours a week.
[55:56] And there are way more people who want jobs than people who can create jobs. I mean, I've been on both sides. I've been a job applicant, and I've also, over the course of my business career, I mean, I wasn't obviously any kind of big shakes, but I did create about 100 jobs over the course of my career and you know it's pretty good but it's not that common none of my friends were entrepreneurs creating jobs actually i have one friend who's done it uh one friend in like 40 years who's created a business and hired a bunch of people and i've had a lot of friends sorry that sounds kind of sinister i had a lot of friends they're all sleeping with the fishes but so yeah.
[56:34] The people who want jobs are very common the people who can create jobs are very rare. And if you just simply take away the reward, which is, you know, one of the reasons why people work hard is to create a legacy that they can give to their children. And if you take away their ability to give that legacy to their children, they'll just work less hard.
[56:52] I mean, you don't have, you don't have, oh, look at all these people. They're leaving $10 billion a year to their children or whatever it is. And then you say, well, we'll get that $10 billion!
[57:01] It's like, no, you won't.
[57:02] Because the moment you make it impossible to give your wealth to your children, people would just stop working to collect that much wealth or they'll just spend it or they'll find some legal loophole or they'll leave the country or like you just you won't get that money it's crazy i don't know why people don't understand this it's just absolute retarded fools out there in the world who think that well, we could just we could just take stuff from people there's all this money there and it's a mirage it's killing the goose that lays the golden egg ripping it open you don't get any golden eggs anymore it's just a mirage you run at this thing and you don't get a lovely lake you can swim in, you just get a desert because it all vanishes. You charge at it.
[57:40] It's like saying, well, this guy doesn't want to be my friend, but if I beat him up, he'll want to be my friend. It's like, no, he'll just want to stay as far away from you as possible. So the more you start using force against people, they'll just try to avoid it or stay away.
[57:53] Anyway, sorry, I know this is a long topic, but if you had any final thoughts, I'd love to hear.
[57:59] Yeah, thank you. So you would say on a philosophical level that the modern democracy has more to do with French thought than the Western thought as you describe it.
[58:12] Yeah, so, I mean, to be a politician means you have to flatter the masses. And flattering the masses is to be a slave to the lowest common denominator, right? You have to flatter women and say that they're wonderful and nothing is their fault. And you have to insult and provoke sentiment against the rich. You have to provoke hostility towards the rich. And you have to, you know, appraise designated groups, and it's just horrible. And you can't go on any principle and you can't ask for any sacrifice, and you just have to lie to everyone. It's a vile, hideous existence and you just can't get any truth.
[58:56] You can't get any truth out in the political arena. So anyway, I appreciate that. We're going to take one more quick call. Thank you for a great question and Agrippa... either going to get stomach cramps or some nice Italian wine. All right. Agripa, if you wanted to tell me what's on your mind, I'd love to hear your thoughts. All right. He's here. He's not here. He is. Schrodinger's caller.
[59:26] He requests to talk, but he will not talk. Ah, you know what? It could be ASL. He could be miming, or he might be trying to beam his thoughts into mind.
[59:36] Oh, well, that's all right. That's all right. Okay, well, I'll stop here, because I just had a short amount of time tonight. Thank you, everyone, who came by this morning. We had a really good donor-only call, which we do every Sunday at 11 a.m. We did all of the ways in which you can reduce your risks of getting married, so if you'd like to get a hold of that show, Freedomain.com/donate, set yourself up for a subscription on Locals or Subscribestar or right here on X, and you can get a hold of that. And thank you everyone so much for dropping by tonight. A great pleasure, as always, to chat with you. Again, our best wishes, hope you'll join me in putting out our best wishes into the universe For Dr. Jordan Peterson Hope he gets back in the saddle
[1:00:18] Stefan, you were such a legend in 2015 to 2017 I used to watch you in the living room on YouTube when YouTube was still uncensored Just thank you for what you were doing back then, and thank you. Thank you.
[1:00:34] I appreciate that. Thank you. That was a wild time. You know, that time, I would say 2005 when I started, I was like the third user on YouTube. So, like that time, 2005 to 2015, I mean, the suppression started kind of after that. But 2005 to 2015, those 10 glorious years, to have been on the fiery forefront of free speech in that era was a glorious liberty. I hope will come again. I hope will come again.
[1:01:04] But that means that we need more white males in the conversation because I've done a whole presentation on free speech and demographics. And generally, only white males tend to be free speech absolutists. Not obviously exclusively, but generally. But that time, before the elites figured out the power of social media, when we could speak truth to power, get facts out there and have millions of followers, have a significant impact and effect, I will go to my grave with a smile on my face to having been at the forefront of free speech in the most glorious time of human liberty in the spoken,
[1:01:40] Written, or mimed-out word that has ever existed. And I will forever look back upon that time with great gratitude that to talk about seize the day, right? Carpe diem, talk about seizing the day, I knew it wasn't going to last. I poured everything I had into communicating as much philosophy as humanly possible before the gate came down. And boy, did it come down. But that time before, oh, it was glorious, glorious. I tell you, it was absolutely glorious to stand atop the world and beam the healing and pacifying thoughts of recent evidence in a way that philosophy has never been able to achieve before. Ah, to be young, to be vocal, to be mildly cautious, but largely unafraid.
[1:02:34] Ah, it was a glorious time and I hope it will come again. But even if it comes again, that first time will never come again in the same way, you can't have sex again for the very first time. So it was a wonderful time. And I'm glad that you appreciated it, and I'm certainly glad I did everything what I did. and I'm glad at what I've done to navigate things ever since. Once more, big shout out and thanks to our good friend. Well, not my good friend. I don't know the guy, but our good friend, the good friend of free speech, Elon Musk, for opening up this platform and inviting me back in.
[1:03:04] Alright, love you guys, I will talk to you Wednesday, if not before, and thanks to you for your time, care, and attention tonight. Bye!
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