Stefan Molyneux
  • 2 months ago
In this episode, I tackle profound listener-submitted questions on freedom, virtue, and personal growth, drawing on ideas from Larken Rose and the rise of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. We discuss how childhood experiences shape our adult lives and the need for measurable progress in promoting virtue while combating societal evils.

Engaging with listeners, we navigate morality, empathy, and the pressures of societal judgment, alongside the implications of current financial systems. I emphasize the importance of balancing hard work and relaxation, urging a return to tangible realities for better mental health.
Concluding with insights on Bitcoin's historical value cycles, I encourage parents to actively engage in their children's education, fostering informed choices against prevailing ideologies. This episode blends philosophical inquiry with practical advice to deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

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Transcript
00:00Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well. Stephane Molyneux from Free Domain.
00:06Great questions from listeners. Facebook, freedomain.locals.com, subscribestar.com slash
00:11freedomain. Hope you'll check out the show and support the show.
00:14Larkin Rowe's opinion. I found his YouTube and it got me thinking why that guy's views
00:18aren't higher, around 100K views on best videos. It also seems that the ideas of liberty are
00:25spreading. The world actually starts to accept Bitcoin. Do we have a change? Maybe
00:31the part that is so missing is the curing of the childhood, but his ideas are correct in essence.
00:37Yeah, I mean, my understanding is Larkin Rowe, as he tried to do the no paying of taxes thing,
00:42had a whole thing, presentation prepared, and was not even allowed to make his case.
00:47And there was jails and all kinds of terrible stuff. You know, it's not great when you have
00:52a kid, in my humble opinion. Smart guy, creative guy, and passionate guy. And,
01:00you know, like railing against the powers that be doesn't,
01:06it doesn't mean much if nobody notices that you exist and nothing really changes, right? Then
01:12it's just shouting into the wind in the middle of nowhere. I'm not saying that about him in
01:16particular, just in general. There's sort of an insight that happens, right? There's an insight
01:21that happens when you pursue self-knowledge. And the insight is this. Who's done me the most evil,
01:35right? Who's done me the most evil? And in my experience, it was people in my personal life
01:41when I was a child. They sort of done me the most evil. And that's the most evil that you can do the
01:45most about. You know, you can go against those who do evil against children, and you're actually
01:53making progress. You're making strides. And I don't know Mr. Rose's opinion of child abuse and
01:59evildoers regarding children. I don't know. But you actually want to, because I come out of a
02:08very empirical tradition philosophically, and also because I have been an entrepreneur for over 30
02:13years, results are all that matter. Plans are fine. You can have the best marketing plan in the
02:19world. But the question is, are you actually making progress? There's just a spreadsheet
02:23reality to being an entrepreneur. You have to make the numbers. It doesn't matter what you
02:28project. It doesn't matter what you imagine. It doesn't matter what you think. You actually have
02:30to make the numbers. You actually have to sell goods. You have to have to move products. You
02:34actually have to make payroll. And with that empiricism comes a, okay, well, if I'm going to
02:39dedicate my life to promoting virtue and fighting evil, then I have to have something measurable
02:45at some point, don't I? I have to have something measurable. Well, I produced a bunch of articles
02:51about the evils of foreign aid and the central banking. It's like, okay, that's great. But the
02:55production of articles is like the production of business plans. It doesn't actually change the
03:01movement of one particular thing. Well, you know, I'm spreading awareness. I'm just, okay, well,
03:06when I was in marketing, that was all the fallback, right? So I was director of,
03:10I've been chief technical, I've been director of technology, chief technical officer and director
03:14of marketing. So director of marketing, it's always a fallback position, right? You spend,
03:20you know, half a million dollars on a marketing campaign and it doesn't move any product.
03:26So then what do you say? No, no, no. I'm raising awareness of the brand. You know,
03:30you simply move it from the column of something that's measurable to something that's not
03:34measurable. I'm raising awareness. I'm positioning the brand, you know, whatever, right?
03:39But if you are, in a sense, selling the promotion of virtue and the thwarting of evildoers,
03:47then at some point, shouldn't you be able to measure that?
03:52Shouldn't you be able to? I went through the whole metrics, like I have through this show,
03:57reduced a billion to a billion and a half instances of violations of the non-aggression principle.
04:03At least a billion to a billion and a half violations of the non-aggression principle
04:07have been directly changed or prevented by the show. So I have something measurable,
04:11as opposed to, well, I've been talking about the evils of the military industrial economy. Okay,
04:17what's changed? What have you actually done? What have you actually achieved?
04:21So I'm a measurable guy. You can't manage what you can't measure. So all the libertarians are,
04:27well, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. It's like, okay, what specifically have you done
04:31to promote virtue and thwart evil? Not raising awareness or general this, that's all just
04:36nonsense. I used to literally laugh at people who would try and tell me, they'd give me a specific
04:42goal, give me X amount of dollars and I'll produce X, Y, and Z. And then I'd agree with them. And
04:47then when they'd come back and they'd say, well, I didn't achieve X, Y, and Z in any tangible way,
04:52which is kind of what I promised. But what I did do was I raised awareness and I positioned and I
04:58promoted and it's like, okay, how's any of that measurable? And yeah, anyway. Why is usury still
05:03not outlawed? So usury, of course, is the lending of money for interest, which occurs because the
05:08present is better than the future because the present is guaranteed, the future is not, right?
05:12So we want money in the here and now rather than money later, because we know that we're going to
05:18be here now, but we don't know if we're going to be here next year. And we're mortal, right? So
05:23if you want to start a business, you need someone to invest in your business and they're going to
05:27need a return. So usury is the lending of money for interest because the present is more valuable
05:32than the future. And it would not be outlawed because it's not a violation of the non-aggression
05:36principle to lend someone money for interest, right? All right. How have you been? I have lost
05:41track of you for a bit. You really had an impact on my trajectory. In peaceful parenting philosophy
05:47and your video of, quote, forgiving your mom. Yeah, it's interesting. So the people, yeah, people
05:54who lost track of me, people who kind of vanished when I was de-platformed, well, Bitcoin has gone
06:03up four or five hundred percent since I was de-platformed. So I'm sorry that it cost you so
06:09much money to not follow me. But what can I do? What can I do? All right. Hi, Steph, you've done
06:15so many call-in shows and in my opinion, the greatest at shining a spotlight on a person's
06:19free will, often doing so with patience, kindness, empathy, and sympathy. As appropriate, do you have
06:24any advice or insights about how or if it is possible to achieve this when feeling disgusted
06:28or repulsed by what you're hearing or seeing? Some context. I've recently become more vocal
06:32about discussing my standards and morals with people following years of mostly self-censorship
06:36and observed disgust. And in the odd extreme case, feeling repulsed to the point I'm looking for
06:41physical conversational acts at standard. These are people usually sharing sad, at times difficult,
06:47and challenging stories slash things in their lives, but they neither want to hold themselves
06:50nor the people they are complaining about accountable. Am I being too judgmental?
06:54Yeah, judgmental is just one of these words that is invented by people who don't want to be judged.
07:01Right? And judgmental is often weaponized. It's a weaponized term. So people who say,
07:07don't be judgmental, are judging you for being judgmental, like it's a self-detonating argument.
07:12I judge that you shouldn't judge. I judge it negative that you're judging. So you shouldn't
07:17judge, but that's a judgment. Judgmental itself is a self-detonating statement because it's judging
07:21you. And generally it's people, like everybody wants to have the weapon when the other person
07:26doesn't, right? Everybody wants to have the weapon and the other person is disarmed, right?
07:31Governments want that. Criminals want that. I should be the only one with the weapon.
07:35And it happens in terms of debate as well. So, you know, racism, bad, except for, right? And
07:42there's always this asterisk where you get to change whatever definitions that you want so that
07:46you get to wield the weapon and the other person doesn't. Judgmental is a term that is deployed by
07:51people who want the power of judging others, but never to be judged in return. And so they use the
07:56term judgmental. In general, look, I have tough time with some callers. I have a tough time with
08:02some callers. I get impatient, particularly, of course, when they, it's an eldest, somebody who's
08:07an eldest sibling talking about abusing a younger sibling. As a kid, that can be tough for me.
08:12In general, you just, you have to go earlier and earlier and earlier to get more and more sympathy,
08:19right? So you look at somebody who's really dysfunctional in the present. If you rewind
08:23enough, you'll see some of the factors that influence them, not determined, but influence
08:27them to become that dysfunctional. So you go back earlier and earlier. Oh, tell me what happened
08:32before that and what happened before that. Keep going back earlier. And there are people, of
08:38course, who've become inverse of morality, right? They've been so attacked and broken and made bad
08:44moral choices themselves that all they do is defend evildoers and attack the virtuous, right?
08:49It's sort of an autoimmune disorder, in a sense, psychologically speaking, or from a social debate
08:54standpoint. So what's happened is you want an immune system in society that opposes evil and
09:01promotes virtue in the same way that you want an immune system in your body that defends healthy
09:08cells and attacks, you know, bacteria and viruses and so on, right? But of course, an autoimmune
09:14disorder is when, I'm no expert, this is just my obviously complete amateur and non-trained
09:19thought about it, but an autoimmune disorder is when your immune system attacks healthy cells
09:25rather than dangerous cells, right? It attacks healthy native cells rather than dangerous foreign
09:34intruders or incursions. So the same thing can happen with people from a moral standpoint,
09:42that all they do is defend evil and attack virtue, right? They have become so corrupted
09:51by evil and by bad choices that they have become the inverse of virtue and those people are
09:57extremely dangerous. You know, like every time somebody gets executed, there's 6 million people
10:02saying, well, he was vindicated. He's wrongfully executed. You know, this is appalling. This is a
10:07travesty. Every criminal is innocent and everybody who promotes virtue is committing hate speech,
10:14right? This is just an inverse and it's when people get so toxicified often as a result of
10:19abuse slash propaganda slash bad choices, people become so toxicified that they attack that which
10:25keeps them safe and defend that which puts them in danger. All right. Hey, Steph, do you think
10:32you'll ever release something similar to the Ayn Rand lexicon? Your definitions are great and I'd
10:35love to have them in some kind of master document. That's interesting. I think that would be a task
10:40for AI myself. So we'll look into that. Thank you. Hi, Steph. Thanks for taking the time. My question
10:47is how do you find a good balance to avoid burnout from work and exercise? Thanks. I understand it's
10:52sort of a general question and apologies if you answered this before, which is possible.
10:56For context, I'm trying to work off physical and financial consequences of the last few years
11:01of careless behaviors and finding it amazing but taxing, seeing good results but feeling a bit
11:05overwhelmed at times and curious about this. And thanks again. Well, look, there are times when you
11:09just have to work really, really, really hard. I mean, there are just times when you're just going
11:13to have to buckle down and work really hard. After that, it should be followed by a certain
11:17period of relaxation. Otherwise, you become a workaholic and that subtracts from the amount
11:21of work that you can do productively over the course of your life. You know, like if you spend
11:25eight hours a day doing maximum weights, all you'll do is injure yourself, right? And then you can't
11:31exercise and you get flabby or so. You need to have a balance. The way that I do it is I just
11:39don't force myself. I don't make myself do stuff. That's kind of important. Like this morning,
11:48I had a couple of things to do in the morning and I wanted to come out and get some sun
11:52and talk about these great questions, but I don't make myself do stuff. And of course,
11:59as you get older, like there've been a couple of times over the course of the show where I don't
12:04really feel like doing a live stream, right? I'm just kind of tired. I'm a little low energy or
12:08whatever. But I always say to myself, look, once you get into the live stream, the demon cocaine
12:13gods of philosophy will take over and you'll be fine. Like you'll just get the energy. The audience
12:17will give you the energy. So you just have to recognize that you'll probably get into it fine.
12:24But yeah, you don't have to work out. You don't have to relax. You don't have to work hard.
12:31You don't have to diet. It's all a choice, choices and consequences and so on. So yeah,
12:36don't make yourself do stuff. But yeah, I mean, I remember there've been times in my life where
12:40I've had to work really hard because I've made commitments or when I started my business,
12:44I was doing 60, 70, 80 hours a week for a while, but I was just so excited to have my own business
12:50that it was well worth it for me. So there are times when I've had to work hard to pay off debt
12:56and so on. When I was in my teens, sort of mid-teens onwards, I worked two, sometimes three
13:01jobs to pay bills, took in roommates because it was just great to have my mom out of the house,
13:07right? So it's just choices and consequences. It's just choices and consequences. Remind yourself
13:13that you are free to do and to not to do. It's just choices and consequences. And that way,
13:19if you just bully yourself, you are depleting your future enthusiasm, right? Like someone can
13:24force you to do anything, but they just deplete your future enthusiasm. Your boss can frighten
13:29you by yelling at you, threatening you to fire, to make you work a weekend so that some project
13:34can get done. And all that's happened is then your boss, he'll get that weekend, but he's lost
13:39your generative enthusiasm. He's lost your excitement and happiness. It probably will
13:44cost you sleep or peace of mind and therefore you're not as good at concentrating. So coercion
13:49or aggression can achieve things, of course, in the short run, it's like a drug. It achieves
13:53things in the short run, like cocaine for happiness at the expense of the long run.
13:57So it's the same thing with forcing yourself to do stuff, holding a gun to your head metaphorically
14:02in order to make yourself do stuff. You'll do stuff, but it simply destroys your future
14:07enthusiasm. So if I don't feel like working out, I always say to myself, I don't have to work out.
14:12I don't have to work out. And there've been, you know, sometimes I'll go two days without working
14:16out because I just really don't want to. And I just have to trust that it will come back. And
14:21it usually does, right? All right. I have been working, says someone with some AI, not yours,
14:26since you posted that AI code producing video. And wow, do they hate you and refuse to create
14:31apps that help people connect off of the main socials. To get responses, I have to change words
14:36like children to dogs and parents to pet owners. Do you have any funny, sad, frustrating stories
14:40that you could share about working with AI? Well, I mean, I've not done much with AI as a
14:46whole because, of course, I mean, I understand why you'd say it and I don't have any complaints
14:51about the sort of colloquial way of talking. AI doesn't hate me. AI doesn't have any emotions.
14:56And people as a whole, they don't hate me. There's nobody out there in the world who hates me. Oh,
15:02yes, but Steph, there's all this negative stuff about you. Yeah, I get that. They hate the
15:06consequences of virtue on their conscience, right? This is really, really important to understand.
15:10People don't hate me. I'm a really nice guy. I enjoy the world. I want the best for the world.
15:15People don't hate me. They hate the effects of virtue on their conscience, right? Like if
15:19somebody hasn't seen a friend for a while and they were both kind of tubby and lazy,
15:24and they see their friend and their friend is ripped. I look at myself like I am, right?
15:30But their friend is ripped. He's quit smoking. He's quit drinking. He's got a great girlfriend.
15:35He's exercised. He's lost weight and so on. Then he's going to feel frustration, sadness,
15:42and resentment and some hostility. So he doesn't hate that his friend has gotten healthy. He hates
15:47the effect that getting healthy of his friend has on his own conscience and free will and
15:52responsibility. And with AI, it's tough, right? It's very tough to find a way to box AI into a
15:58particular document set. It always goes back to some larger cloud source. All right. Somebody
16:03writes something. Why is China such a wonderful country? GDP has grown exponentially, 800 million
16:08out of poverty, clean, amazing, advanced, and peaceful, multi-million population cities. All
16:12this in just a few decades while America is turning to crap. Well, I mean, it's an interesting
16:16question. When you think about China as a whole, say, well, but it's communism. Yes, of course,
16:25that is the general way of phrasing it. But I've seen a picture sort of struck with me. There's some
16:33road that's being built and some guy didn't want to sell. So they just built the road in China
16:39around this guy's house. So no eminent domain, nothing like that. Seize your property in that
16:44kind of way, right? I mean, who knows, right? But they say, well, in China, you can't criticize the
16:50leadership and you can't criticize communism. And it's like, yes. And in the West, you can't
16:57criticize X, Y, or Z group. It's not particularly different in that way. So, yeah, it is a wild
17:07thing to see what's going on in China. All right. Will you do Joe Rogan's podcast? I did do Joe
17:15Rogan's podcast three times. The first two were very positive, very friendly, very happy. And then
17:21I don't know if he'd got orders from someone or somewhere or whatever happened, but he sort of
17:26lured me down with the promises of a positive show and then totally ambushed me and brought up
17:32all of this nonsense. So, I mean, it was fine and all of that, but I wouldn't go back on that man's
17:38show if you paid me, you know, without apologies, which of course won't be forthcoming. Did those
17:43nipple tassels I sent you arrive yet? Well, I had to have something on top of my birthday cake.
17:51Why do you think perfectly rational people are still considering voting for Kamala Harris? I just
17:55did that one yesterday. What color undies are you wearing presently? See, that's what they call a
17:59false assumption. How do I raise my son to overcome and win in our weird feminist world we live in?
18:07You know, there've always been crazy people. Ideology has just unmasked them, right? So,
18:13there've always been crazy dysfunctional people when there was more of a sort of uniformity and
18:17conformity of belief than they were covered up because they knew how to pretend to be virtuous.
18:22One of the great positives of the modern world is crazy people are advertising their craziness
18:26with wild hair colors, weird haircuts, nose rings, tattoos, and weird ideologies and pear-shaped
18:36anti-patriarchy body shapes and so on. So, in the past, people were able to much more bury and mask
18:43their dysfunction. Now, it's like watching tigers roam around without any high grass, right? They're
18:49completely obvious and clear. So, there's pluses. Everyone's looking for the minuses, aren't they?
18:56The fact that there is much less, quote, social conformity enforced has meant that the crazy
19:02people are allowed to fly their true colors right in your face and then you can make your choice
19:09based upon that. I mean, I just remember when I was younger and you see all these weirdos with
19:15strange appearances and so on and I just never quite understood that. It's like it's less work
19:21to just look normal. It's less work. You don't have to get tattoos or piercings or sit there with
19:26blue hair dye. It's just easier to look normal. Why not just look normal? All right.
19:34Recently, a friend lost their dog and went on antidepressants to avoid feeling the pain.
19:39Why? Why would you be that upset about losing a dog? I love dogs. Don't get me wrong. Love dogs,
19:45love pets, love animals. But the idea that you would become depressed because your dog died,
19:54well, that's because people project all of these fantasies onto dogs. Dogs are just biochemically
20:00wired to pair bond with you. That's it. They're not loyal. They're not defending you. They're not
20:08virtuous. You know, we don't deserve dogs. They're too good for us. And it's like they're not
20:12virtuous at all. They're just four-legged beasts chemically wired to pair bond with local mammals.
20:20And we've hacked into that to have them pair bond with us rather than their own kind, right?
20:27Dog loyalty is a hack that comes at the expense of the dogs. You're exploiting a hack in the
20:33biological system in order to have the dog bond with you. I mean, if you were to say to the
20:37average dog, hey, do you want to bond with this biped who will probably cut your balls off? And
20:43even if they don't, you'll have absolutely no chance to reproduce and have a family of your own.
20:47Or would you rather be running wild with a bunch of dogs, hunting and mating and having a cool,
20:53exciting natural life? Now, of course, dogs would not prefer to be castrated and or the end of their
20:58genetic line because you won't allow them to have any pups. So it is a certain kind of exploitation.
21:04Now, again, human beings are more important than dogs. So the fact that we've exploited a
21:08biochemical hack in order to defend our sheep themselves from predators, I'm fine with that.
21:14But let's not pretend that the dog loved you. Like, for God's sakes, forget that your pets
21:19don't love you. They don't love you. They're just biochemically wired to respond to positive stimuli.
21:24And that's it. They don't assess your virtues. They don't assess your moral courage. They don't
21:29assess your integrity and so on. Well, but it'd have to be nice to them. It's like, yeah, well,
21:34yeah, of course. And that's part of the hack. So I don't get it. I mean, I guess this is people who
21:42have invested way too much fantasy life into their pets. And that has come probably because
21:48they've been burned or have had harsh treatments by adults. Right. But if you've been badly treated
21:56by adults, the answer is not to then engage in a Dungeons and Dragons style typhling fantasy
22:00relationship with your bio-hacked dog. That's crazy. Deal with the pain of what people have
22:08done to you and then find better people to be with. All right. I notice more and more we are
22:14becoming a society that avoids processing our feelings. How do we get here? And I suppose,
22:17more importantly, how do we get out of this mess? Thank you. Love your work and long time subscriber.
22:22Well, of course, the powers that be don't want us to process our feelings for pretty obvious reasons.
22:27And people do that. Why do big cities always turn blue? Because big cities are akin to zoos and
22:34animals in zoos turn weird. You've got monkeys trying to mate with their drinking bowls and so
22:39on. People kind of turn crazy. And so big cities. The other thing with big cities is that the way
22:47we stay sane is to process limitations. That sanity, rationality is about and entirely wound
22:54into the concept and process of limitations. Like we have an economy, as I've said before,
22:59because human desires are infinite, but resources are finite. How do they get allocated?
23:04There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. Right. So the further you are disassociated from
23:13reality, the more you fantasize about your virtues. So
23:23when you live in a city, how disconnected are you from that which keeps you alive? How
23:28disconnected are you from farming? How disconnected are you from electricity generation? How disconnected
23:34are you from the manual labor that keeps your world going? You are a deluded, semi-psychotic,
23:41pseudo-aristocrat who lives in a world of fantasy because everything that keeps you alive,
23:48all of the brutality and labor and sweat and blood and tears that keep you alive,
23:53has all been abstracted and moved away. And so you end up in a very deranged state
24:03because you just don't know about any of the things that keep you alive. There's this meme
24:08which says, well, this is like weird guy with a man bun, this hipster who's like,
24:13yeah, I genuinely believe that society is going to collapse, says the meme,
24:16in 10 or 20 years, which is why I get a useless degree and live in a big city. It's very strange.
24:23Why did I used to dislike you? Probably because you were told to rather than coming to the source.
24:29What is a reasonable price target for Bitcoin? Will it be just gold 2.0 or the next one world
24:32currency? Well, this is no advice, don't buy or sell anything based upon what I'm saying,
24:39it's just my own personal opinion. I've been saying this for well over a decade that I view
24:45750k US as a reasonable price point for Bitcoin. How can parents protect their children from what
24:52is happening in the public schools? You don't even need to ask me that question, right? Obviously,
24:59if you can homeschool, homeschool. If you can get them to some school that more closely aligns
25:03with the values, do that. Failing that, if your country doesn't allow you to homeschool,
25:08move countries. And if even that's impossible, then just keep them as alert and aware of the
25:14propaganda as possible. How much are you worth? Well, infinity, because wisdom has no price.
25:20Thanks, everyone. Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show. Would massively,
25:24appreciate it. And I really do appreciate your thoughts, care, time, support, and attention
25:31over the great philosophical conversation we're having the best in the world ever.
25:37Take care, everyone. Bye.