Tom Woods and Stefan Molyneux: The Interview

Stefan Molyneux

Tom Woods interviews Stefan Molyneux, discussing deplatforming and Freedomain's approach of practical call-in shows on childhood trauma and family damage. Stefan exposes violence in homes and advocates peaceful parenting as the real path to freedom.  0:00:00 Introduction  0:11:48 Philosophy Meets Politics  0:16:27 Helping Lost Young Men  0:28:06 Masculinity and Purpose  0:32:41 Boys Face Bias  0:34:02 Schools and AI Collapse  0:35:57 Entrepreneurship as Escape  0:37:11 Lowering Marriage Risk  0:40:55 Legacy of Exposing Violence  0:46:03 Voluntary Families and Peace  0:47:30 Reputation and Smears  0:51:53 Leftist Power Explained  0:55:39 Root Causes and Resentment  1:03:03 Still Standing Strong   GET FREEDOMAIN MERCH! https://shop.freedomain.com/  SUBSCRIBE TO ME ON X! https://x.com/StefanMolyneux  Follow me on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@freedomain1  GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND THE FULL AUDIOBOOK! https://peacefulparenting.com/  Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!  Subscribers get 12 HOURS on the "Truth About the French Revolution," multiple interactive multi-lingual philosophy AIs trained on thousands of hours of my material - as well as AIs for Real-Time Relationships, Bitcoin, Peaceful Parenting, and Call-In Shows!  You also receive private livestreams, HUNDREDS of exclusive premium shows, early release podcasts, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!  See you soon! https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/FREEDOMAIN2026

Transcript

00:00:00Hey everybody, Tom Woods here. It's episode 2779 of The Tom Woods Show, and joining me, as you can see,

00:00:05those of you who are watching on screen, is Stéphane Molyneux, a name and face you surely recognize.

00:00:12We might say that for a period of time, there is no doubt whatsoever that Stéphane Molyneux hosted the biggest

00:00:22philosophy show on the planet, probably in the history of the world, in terms of downloads and every other metric

00:00:30you can possibly imagine.

00:00:31And then Stéphane Molyneux ran afoul of the, I don't know what you want to call them, the thought police,

00:00:38whatever, and suddenly you couldn't find him anywhere.

00:00:41And yet, and I'm sure we'll get to this, I see people on a regular basis, on a regular basis,

00:00:48on so-called X or the old Twitter, saying things that make Stéphane Molyneux look like Mitt Romney.

00:00:57You know, and this goes on every single day, and there are no consequences. So it must have been an

00:01:02interesting thing for you to observe the Overton window shifting kind of over to where you were when they kicked

00:01:13you off everywhere, and then continuing to shift.

00:01:15And meanwhile, you got all these people popping up who are kind of sounding like you and are not really

00:01:21suffering those kinds of consequences.

00:01:23So it's like, it's kind of like you hit at just the wrong moment in terms of when this was

00:01:28done to you was almost just the wrong moment. You know what I'm saying?

00:01:32Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's an interesting question. I actually had to grow a beard much like you.

00:01:36I got so deplatformed and so removed from screens. I couldn't even use the mirror. It was just appalling.

00:01:42I became a vampire. They even got to my mirrors. So, yeah, it's a funny thing.

00:01:46I think that the impact of my deplatforming scattered the ideas and arguments that I was making for many years,

00:01:54of course, far and wide.

00:01:56You know, there is this kind of cliche that you want to get flack when you're over the target.

00:02:00And so it's almost like a self-sacrificial, you know, take me down, so borrow me a style so the

00:02:08hobbits can escape,

00:02:08or take me down so that the ideas can spread.

00:02:12Because I was off all the major platforms.

00:02:15I probably got like 20 places in a very coordinated effort by whoever, whoever, right?

00:02:19Somebody above the clouds pulling the strings.

00:02:23And my daughter was the one who actually convinced me and made a very good argument as to return to

00:02:28Twitter.

00:02:28And so then when I returned to Twitter and was sort of browsing around and looking at things,

00:02:33I was like, what planet have I returned to?

00:02:38Because everything that was absolutely cliff edge, leaning into the abyss stuff when I was back on X in 2020

00:02:47had just become like, well, you just toss it off like a nice weather for this time of year.

00:02:52And the Overton window had moved.

00:02:55Was it the right time, the wrong time?

00:02:57I don't know.

00:02:58I mean, I have a billion views and downloads.

00:03:00And yeah, like I was top of the heap as far as things go that way.

00:03:05And I think that my unpersoning, you know, you've seen that picture of Stalin with the guy by the river,

00:03:12and then he's erased.

00:03:13So now everyone's like, hey, who was that guy?

00:03:16Who was that guy who was there and not there?

00:03:18And why was he worth erasing?

00:03:20Because now it's just a picture of a river.

00:03:21Like there is no guy.

00:03:23Oh, it's just even Stalin's guy.

00:03:25There's no guy.

00:03:26Yeah.

00:03:27So when there's a giant smoking crater where a prominent person used to be,

00:03:31especially for, I say the young folks, I'm going to be 60 in a couple of months.

00:03:35So yeah, the young folks are like, well, if he's hated by the powers that be,

00:03:40he's got to have something of value to say.

00:03:43And so it was, you know, I don't want to say martyrdom because, you know,

00:03:47I still have a pretty great life.

00:03:48But there definitely was this, oh, wow, he got nuked from orbit.

00:03:54Let's go look at the smoking crater and see what was going on.

00:03:58And I think it actually, not quite the Streisand effect, but I think it drew arguments that I was making

00:04:03more to the center of people's minds.

00:04:07Well, we'll get to that in a second.

00:04:09I feel like most people listening to me will know you, but some people who, let's say, maybe came to

00:04:14our,

00:04:15I don't know if you want to call it our movement or what, but more recently might not be familiar

00:04:19with you.

00:04:20So we are going to talk about things you think and ideas that you associate with yourself that maybe you're

00:04:26particularly proud of and get to all that.

00:04:29But you and I have an interesting thing in common in that one of the things, just one, but a

00:04:36significant one.

00:04:38One of the ways that we came to be more widely known was that you and I both used to

00:04:44fill in for Peter Schiff when he had a terrestrial radio show.

00:04:47And I don't know if you've had the same experience I have, Stefan, but I have people, you know, even

00:04:52today telling me this was like 17 years ago or something, 16 years ago.

00:04:57I have people today telling me I first heard about you through Peter Schiff.

00:05:01Did you have the same experience?

00:05:02Oh, absolutely.

00:05:03Yeah.

00:05:03I love Peter.

00:05:04We have diverged on things like Bitcoin fairly considerably, but that's relatively minor given to our criticisms of central banking

00:05:11and Federal Reserve and money creation and so on.

00:05:13So all the sort of hypnotic illusion of the modern economy that seems like something until you actually look at

00:05:19the numbers and it's just this mirage over a bottomless hole of debt.

00:05:23So, yeah, I love Peter.

00:05:24I did a debate with him about Bitcoin, I think, over 10 years ago.

00:05:29And so, yeah, well, he's a gold guy.

00:05:31I'm a Bitcoin guy.

00:05:32It's a relatively minor disagreement.

00:05:34But, yeah, Peter has been a great guy.

00:05:36And he was one of the few people who did actually have me on after the deplatforming.

00:05:41And whether that's courage or blindness to general movements, I'm going to go with the former because he seems like

00:05:48a great guy.

00:05:49But, yeah, we love Peter.

00:05:50And, yeah, we both did his radio show.

00:05:52And this was the first time that I'd worked with things like commercial breaks and callers and so on and

00:05:58having people you could call to say, hey, can you bring up this cue?

00:06:02And it was really – it gave me great respect for the radio host because, you know, we can just

00:06:06yammer without interruptions, without a clock, without – oh, got to bring this segment to a close.

00:06:10And so it is really quite a tap dance on the terrestrial radio side of things.

00:06:14And I was glad to have that experience.

00:06:16So was I.

00:06:17They make it look easy.

00:06:18But then after a few times of doing it, I felt like a pro.

00:06:21I'm ready.

00:06:21I know when the break is.

00:06:23I know how to start shutting up the guest.

00:06:25I know how to – you know.

00:06:26But there would be little challenges like, well, it's one minute to the break.

00:06:30I can't go to the break now.

00:06:32I can't ask anything significant now.

00:06:34So I probably have to riff for about 45 seconds.

00:06:37I mean, it's just – it is interesting.

00:06:38You have to adapt yourself to that.

00:06:40But one thing that impresses me about what you did in building up Free Domain is – I mean, I

00:06:49– look, I had some institutional support.

00:06:51Ron Paul liked me.

00:06:53And now, that didn't come from nowhere.

00:06:55That was a part of a function of my work over the years.

00:06:59But still, he amplified me, which helped.

00:07:02And, you know, I was at the Mises Institute, and so I had some institutional support.

00:07:07You did not have institutional support.

00:07:09I mean, yes, you had people who would, you know, share your articles, stuff like that, because you used to

00:07:14write more than you do.

00:07:15So you would have that.

00:07:18But you really built this thing yourself.

00:07:21I don't want to compare you to Alex Jones because you're a completely different kind of person.

00:07:24But I can compare you to him in the sense that he had everybody in the world against him.

00:07:29Nobody wants to touch him with a 10-foot pole.

00:07:31And somehow, he built something that all his enemies would slit the throats of their own grandmother to have, you

00:07:38know.

00:07:38And you kind of did the same thing.

00:07:41And it's – I mean, the growth that you had from zero to this incredible thing, you know, even forgetting

00:07:49about the later cancellation, what do you attribute that to?

00:07:53Don't ask about my grandmother.

00:07:55No.

00:07:55So, well, I had, of course, the great good fortune or experience that for many years, I was in the

00:08:04business world.

00:08:05And I did sales, marketing.

00:08:08I was chief technical officer.

00:08:09Before that, of course, I have a graduate degree in history, really focusing on the history of philosophy.

00:08:14And before that, I was in the theater world.

00:08:17I did acting, playwriting.

00:08:18I went to the National Theater School.

00:08:20So, yeah, I had voice – I had a good coincidence of things.

00:08:23Like, I had some voice training.

00:08:24I had entrepreneurial experience beforehand.

00:08:26And I knew how important marketing was because the job that I had before I vaulted into full-time podcasting

00:08:34was a director of marketing.

00:08:36So, I knew how to bootstrap stuff up and get it into the public eye.

00:08:41And, you know, everybody looks at the beginnings of shows like, oh, so glamorous and so on.

00:08:45But it's like, you know, if you're starting out as a band, right, like a music band, you spend most

00:08:51of your time driving and setting up equipment for, you know, a cozy 90-minute set.

00:08:56And then you go to the next town.

00:08:57And most of your time is not doing music.

00:08:59It is just getting ready for and all of that.

00:09:02It's the same thing with podcasting back in the day without institutional support.

00:09:05And, I mean, remember, I started in 2006.

00:09:09It was like crazy.

00:09:10Well, I started 2005 and then I sort of went full-time 2006, 2007.

00:09:16So, there really was no institutional support back then.

00:09:18I was like the third guy on YouTube.

00:09:21And so, there was no structure to build these kinds of things up.

00:09:25So, I did the usual boring grind that you have to do when you have something great.

00:09:29You know, you think of MC Hammer back in the 80s and 90s.

00:09:32He was roaming around clubs with his home-pressed records in the back of a trunk just begging DJs to

00:09:39play his song.

00:09:40And there's just a lot of background stuff, you know, and that sort of 10-year overnight success stuff.

00:09:44So, I'd spend like 80% of my time just promoting the show, you know, going to websites, going to

00:09:50forums, emailing people,

00:09:52and, you know, coming up with catchy stuff to get people to start listening to the show.

00:09:56So, you just have to do a lot of, it's kind of dull stuff, it's necessary stuff, and that way

00:10:03you can get things into prominence.

00:10:05And you do that because, at least I did that, because I really feel that rational philosophy was not particularly

00:10:13actionable.

00:10:13It's one of the things that's kind of frustrated me about philosophy over the course of history is, you know,

00:10:18a lot of interesting debates, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and all of that.

00:10:22But how much of it is actionable, and how much of it can you directly use to improve the quality

00:10:29of your own life?

00:10:31How much of it is tires spinning in air, and how much of it is actually on the track getting

00:10:36you somewhere?

00:10:36So, I really felt that after 3,000 years of philosophy, philosophy should be doing a whole lot more.

00:10:42If you compare that to something like Christianity, which even over the course of Jesus' life and shortly thereafter was

00:10:48transforming lives by the millions,

00:10:49and now by the billions, and it's like, well, why is philosophy not able to keep up with that kind

00:10:54of track record

00:10:55and bring some of the values of rational debate and reason and evidence to people's lives?

00:11:02So, I really felt a sort of yearning, burning hunger to bring practical philosophy to people as a whole in

00:11:08a way that was digestible.

00:11:09You know, we have to start teaching philosophy and ethics to kids as young as two and three years old,

00:11:14like, you know, don't bite, don't hit, don't grab, don't steal, don't push, all of that kind of stuff.

00:11:18And, you know, reading through someone like Schopenhauer or Heidegger, it's not exactly kindergarten-friendly stuff.

00:11:23So, I really wanted to make it more accessible, more practical, more useful to people as a whole,

00:11:28and that just became this crazy, burning mission for me that guided everything I did every day.

00:11:34And, you know, if you have a big enough goal, you'll do any sacrifice to get there.

00:11:38And so, I did the boring stuff and built it up just based upon a whole lot of practical, entrepreneurial,

00:11:44technical, and marketing experience.

00:11:48Was the growth consistent and gradual, or were there occasional spikes, and what caused the spikes?

00:11:56Oh, there was very little growth, really, as a whole, until I turned the beady laser eyes of philosophy to

00:12:03politics.

00:12:04And so, I started doing a segment called True News, where I started analyzing current events,

00:12:12and then the focus on politics and current events really boosted the show.

00:12:18Like, it was growing a little here and there, but, you know, people think abstract philosophy is not particularly gripping.

00:12:23But when you take philosophical principles, you bring them to current events and to politics,

00:12:27there was a big boost there.

00:12:29And then, I would say the biggest thing was 2015, 2016, I did a whole series of videos on the

00:12:36lies about Donald Trump.

00:12:37And people, it's funny, you know, again, this is just sort of a false dichotomy people have.

00:12:41People say, oh, my gosh, you must have been rabidly pro-Trump.

00:12:44And it's like, no, I just didn't like the fact that the media lied about everyone, including me.

00:12:47Like, I'd been in the media and just sort of lied.

00:12:50Yeah, you have a certain kinship with people who have the same experience.

00:12:52That's right.

00:12:53That's right.

00:12:54So, you know, I'll play tennis with someone I disagree with because we have tennis in common.

00:13:01And if someone's lied about in the media, then I don't mind exposing those lies because it helps discredit a

00:13:07pretty pernicious element in society,

00:13:09which is the modern media, which is all agenda-driven, everything for the revolution, nothing for the truth.

00:13:15And so, because I put out, they were called The Untruths About Donald Trump.

00:13:20I think it was a three-part series, got like millions and millions of views.

00:13:24And that brought people to my Truth About series.

00:13:28And my Truth About series, I did The Truth About Just About Everything.

00:13:31And the George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Joseph McCarthy.

00:13:35I did The Truth About series, The Truth About the Crusades, and The Truth About the Fall of Rome and

00:13:40things like that.

00:13:41And so, the sort of the blue-screen PowerPoint presentations.

00:13:44I actually just did The Truth About marijuana a couple of days ago, which is being received with a great

00:13:49alarm by habitual weedheads,

00:13:51which I hope will help change their minds about the dangers of marijuana.

00:13:56So, yeah, that really began to boost things.

00:13:59And I think because I pushed back so effectively against the lies of the media in 2016,

00:14:05they didn't seem to want me around too much in 2020.

00:14:10I don't know, that four-year thing, I was trying to map it out, you know, crazy charts on the

00:14:14wall.

00:14:15And I couldn't figure out the pattern, maybe you can help me out 2020.

00:14:19They just seemed to want to despawn me and deactivate me and send me out to the outer rim.

00:14:25And they did very effectively.

00:14:28And then, you know, I went from playing stadiums to playing coffeehouses, which is fine.

00:14:33You know, it's still music.

00:14:34And so, I worked with a core audience.

00:14:36I wrote four more books.

00:14:38And now, I'm sort of coming back a little bit here.

00:14:44So, I went down to Sam Hyde.

00:14:46I don't know if you know him.

00:14:47He's a pretty wild comedian.

00:14:50And I went down to Sam Hyde's show in January.

00:14:53And then, that came out.

00:14:55And that's been doing fairly well.

00:14:57And YouTube has even invited people back.

00:14:59Not me personally.

00:15:00That's a little too far.

00:15:01It's a pretty little too far.

00:15:02But YouTube have said, you know, sorry, we went a little bit overboard with the censorship.

00:15:06I mean, we can't give you a channel back.

00:15:08But, you know, come on back.

00:15:09Now, I don't know if this is like, you know, Chairman Mao's, let a thousand flowers bloom so that we

00:15:14can cut them down later.

00:15:16But it seems like some of the more hysterical censorship stuff has eased off as these things tend to peak

00:15:23and fall.

00:15:24So, it looks like there is more scope for the kinds of stuff that I was talking about before now

00:15:31than before.

00:15:31So, we'll see how that goes.

00:15:34How many subscribers you have on YouTube when they canceled you?

00:15:37Oh, it was a funny game that YouTube and I were playing, Tom.

00:15:40It was really wild.

00:15:41So, if I got to a million subscribers, they'd have to send me a plaque.

00:15:46Like, oh, they can't do that?

00:15:49So, it was like watching the fox and the grapes, you know, like I'm reaching up to try and get

00:15:54that.

00:15:54And they're like, oh, you seem to have lost some subscribers.

00:15:57And so, I do a big show and I get a bunch of subscribers and say, oh, you seem to

00:16:01have lost some subscribers again.

00:16:02And we just did this ragged edge dance around a million for, I think, well over a year.

00:16:08But, yeah, I mean, I had, you know, two plus million subscribers overall, like on social media as a whole.

00:16:14But, yeah, they never quite wanted to trigger that plaque to me.

00:16:19So, it was a funny dance.

00:16:21I remember seeing it like, oh, getting close.

00:16:23What are they going to do?

00:16:24Oh, subscriber's gone again.

00:16:27Okay.

00:16:28Well, that sounds incredibly petty, but that also sounds exactly like these people.

00:16:35So, we cannot rule that out.

00:16:37Now, let me ask you about, we could do a whole show on this and I don't really want to.

00:16:43But Jordan Peterson has become associated with one particular thing.

00:16:48Even though he has opinions on a wide range of topics and he's not right about everything and he's not

00:16:53good at everything, by the way, he shouldn't debate Marxism.

00:16:56I think he got to the point where he felt infallible.

00:16:59He's great at everything.

00:17:00He's not.

00:17:01But what we associate him with is young men feeling aimless and useless and he connects with them.

00:17:10That's the thing we think of when we, we don't think about Zionism.

00:17:13What we really think about is that, that that was what he tried to do was connect with them.

00:17:19Now that you have, you know, you have the call-in shows where people can call in and say, I'm

00:17:25having this problem and I don't know what to do about it.

00:17:28And you help them.

00:17:29Do you think of yourself as playing in that limited sense, a kind of Jordan Peterson role?

00:17:35Not that your call-ins are just for men, far from it, but do you see yourself as being a

00:17:40kindred spirit on that particular issue?

00:17:42That's interesting.

00:17:43Yeah.

00:17:44So the call-in shows were just, I really like chatting with people.

00:17:48I love having conversations.

00:17:50Philosophy is a conversation and reason and evidence are a social collective endeavor.

00:17:56Everybody who isolates themselves goes mad because we always need other people to bounce ideas and thoughts off and get

00:18:03feedback.

00:18:03So the call-in shows were just like, hey, I really like talking to people.

00:18:07Also, they're easier because, you know, I don't have to do research.

00:18:11Like I don't have to do all these graphs and sources and math.

00:18:16And so it's not quite laziness.

00:18:19It's a public service, Tom.

00:18:20But it also happens to coincide with something that takes a lot less labor because if somebody calls in and

00:18:25they just have a question or a challenge or a problem, we can just roll with that.

00:18:29So it's nice that way.

00:18:31But it was never designed to be for people's personal problems.

00:18:34It wasn't like there's nothing in the call-in show format which says you can't call me up to debate

00:18:39ethics or determinism or free will or whatever the nature of reality.

00:18:43And in fact, I just had one yesterday where we went through the question of does infinity exist?

00:18:50It's a great, interesting, challenging question.

00:18:53But what I found was that when I talked about things like childhood, you know, this is nothing new in

00:19:02particular.

00:19:02It's the old poem that the child is the father of the man.

00:19:05The childhood experiences have a huge impact on adulthood, particularly in the realm of good relationships, productive work environments.

00:19:16And at the more extreme end, you know, things like criminality is often associated with childhood trauma, addiction, hypersexuality, and

00:19:26all other sorts of dysregulated dysfunctions.

00:19:29And so the fact that I was willing to talk about childhood, which, again, has really frustrated me in the

00:19:36history of philosophy, very few philosophers have talked about childhood.

00:19:42Like, can you be easily rational if you are raised by crazy people?

00:19:46Can you be really peaceful if you were raised in a situation of chaos and violence?

00:19:52And the statistics for child abuse are fairly appalling as a whole.

00:19:56I mean, much better now than they used to be in the past, but they're fairly appalling.

00:20:00And so the idea that the child is the father of the man, the child is the mother of the

00:20:06woman.

00:20:07So the fact that I was willing to talk about childhood and its effects is a conversation that should be

00:20:12happening in society.

00:20:13But I was very happy to talk about these kinds of things.

00:20:16I've gone through talk therapy myself, and I have a lot of exposure to these kinds of ideas.

00:20:22I've been sort of studying self-knowledge and all of that since I was in my teens.

00:20:26So I think I have some useful principles to bring to bear on this kind of stuff.

00:20:30And so when people called in and they wanted to talk about their childhoods or they wanted to talk about

00:20:36their adult problems, you know, someone calls up and says, you know, I'm lonely and I can't talk to people

00:20:41and so on.

00:20:42Well, I mean, if you're born that way, there's nothing you can do.

00:20:46Like if somebody calls up and says, I'm short or I'm tall, it's like, well, philosophy can't rewire that or

00:20:51I can't change that.

00:20:52But why would somebody be lonely and isolated?

00:20:54Well, I would assume it would be for the same reason that I don't speak Japanese because I didn't grow

00:21:00up speaking Japanese.

00:21:01And so if somebody is lonely and isolated, we assume, or at least the first place to ask the question

00:21:05is, were you lonely and isolated as a child?

00:21:08And if you were lonely and isolated as a child, then that's probably a good reason as to why you're

00:21:13that way.

00:21:13And then you have a causality and then you stop blaming yourself.

00:21:16Like I don't wake up every morning and say, I'm such an idiot.

00:21:18I don't even speak Japanese.

00:21:19It's like, well, I didn't grow up with Japanese and I haven't put in the 10 years needed to study

00:21:24it.

00:21:24So I don't blame myself.

00:21:26That's just the way that I was raised.

00:21:29And stopping attacking yourself for deficiencies, putting the causality on childhood, then frees you up to stop attacking yourself and

00:21:35start actually fixing the problem.

00:21:37Because you can't really fix the problem if you just attack yourself.

00:21:41And it's funny because I remember many years ago you did a very interesting show that really stuck in my

00:21:46head.

00:21:46You do lots of very interesting shows.

00:21:47But one of them that stuck in my head was when you were talking about losing weight.

00:21:51And you said that as a guy who wasn't super tall, you felt that if you were a bigger person,

00:21:56you would have more weight and impact.

00:21:58And I don't know if you remember that.

00:22:00Oh, I think a lot that if I were taller and of larger build, for one thing, I would pick

00:22:07a lot more fights.

00:22:08Like when I see obnoxious people out in society, I would go over there and lecture them because they wouldn't

00:22:13dare say anything.

00:22:14And I've kind of taken it as, well, maybe it's on purpose that I'm not that way because all I

00:22:18would do is fight with people.

00:22:19But I have indeed thought about how my life would be different if I weren't 5'6 and the way

00:22:24I am.

00:22:24Right, right, right, right.

00:22:26And for me, losing my hair was a great advantage in life because I was a bit of a vain

00:22:31and shallow young stud muffin.

00:22:33So I actually grew up a lot better because of that.

00:22:36So I think that's one of those evolutionary things.

00:22:38Like all of the, so many of the man children that I talked to in their 40s have kept their

00:22:41thick head of hair.

00:22:42And you don't really notice aging other than hair as a man in general, unless you gain a lot of

00:22:48weight.

00:22:48So, yeah, so I started doing that sort of call-in stuff and that also really helped grow the show

00:22:54because to have information that is practical and can change your life for the better is, I mean, it's kind

00:23:03of catnip to the world as a whole, as it should be.

00:23:05And so the fact that I was able to bring some philosophical principles and self-knowledge principles to bear on

00:23:12people's actual lives, I think, really brought philosophy to life for people.

00:23:19And they're like, oh, this is not just an abstract ivory tower cloud-based discussion that's never going to change

00:23:25anything.

00:23:26It is something that can really help me improve my life.

00:23:30And the thou shalt bear false witness was really, really important to me growing up.

00:23:35You know, there were a couple of things I was told growing up.

00:23:37I was raised heavily Christian.

00:23:41And thou shalt not bear false witness and tell the truth and shame the devil.

00:23:46Or tell the truth though the skies fall.

00:23:47Those two things were very, very important to me.

00:23:51And telling the truth about childhood and the good and bad experiences that we've all had, very important.

00:23:57And tell the truth though it shamed the devil or though the skies fall was very important to me because

00:24:03it gave me the sense that if you tell the truth, liars are going to hate you because you expose

00:24:09them.

00:24:09And I'm sure you've experienced this as well many times that when you do good in the world, if the

00:24:16good actually really genuinely achieves something, well, how do you further the course of virtue without harming the desires of

00:24:27vice?

00:24:27I don't think you can.

00:24:29Like you can't do good, effective good in the world without harming the interests of evildoers.

00:24:35And, you know, when I was younger, I'd sort of strive forward confidently.

00:24:39Like, well, I have truth and righteousness and virtue and values on my side and I'm right and it's logical

00:24:45and so on.

00:24:45And then, you know, like most first-time generals, you generally forget the basic thing that the enemy has their

00:24:51say as well.

00:24:53And what, I mean, it was a basic calculation mistake that I made and one of many, but it was

00:24:59like, well, but I'm right.

00:25:01And you say, well, but I'm right and it's true and it's good and it's proven and I had all

00:25:05the charts and the value data and all of that.

00:25:08And then you think, okay, so I can take on all cameras.

00:25:11You know, if you're, you know, Mike Tyson in his prime, hungry for some earlobe, then you're pretty confident that

00:25:16whoever's going to come into the ring that you can beat them.

00:25:19So I kind of got myself into a trim fighting weight intellectually.

00:25:22I wrote a whole book on debating and I've been debating since I was in my teens.

00:25:27But they don't fight fair, right?

00:25:29So that's the difference is that you say, okay, I'm ready for this boxing match.

00:25:33But then all they do is they just, they slip you a poison or they call in an airstrike.

00:25:38Like you don't end up fighting in the ring, but Queensbury rules.

00:25:41You don't end up with a fair fight.

00:25:43And so because I had arguments that couldn't be answered, I had to be silenced, right?

00:25:49And that was a calculation error that in the hubris and overconfidence of being in the right, you think, okay,

00:25:57well, then the world is going to sway to my will because my will is aligned.

00:26:00But that was as true and reasonable, but if they just can't beat you fairly, they'll just take you out

00:26:06unfairly.

00:26:07And that is obviously has been a pretty valid strategy because it works quite well.

00:26:12Now, in the long run, it doesn't work particularly well as, you know, Galileo, Jesus, Socrates, you know, and so

00:26:19on, Plato, Aristotle, all of the people who've been attacked for telling the truth.

00:26:22Not to put myself in too crazy, illustrious a company, but I'm a sort of minor example of a much

00:26:26larger pattern.

00:26:28But in the short run, you lose.

00:26:30But in the long run, the truth, I believe, does win.

00:26:34In part, I asked you that question because I do read your so-called ex feed.

00:26:41And, you know, some of it has to do with the angst between the sexes, you know, and women tend

00:26:48to be this way.

00:26:49And men struggle with such and such and all that.

00:26:52And I was just what I what I want to know is suppose I mean, and obviously it depends on

00:26:58the circumstances.

00:26:59You can't give me a generic response, but still, I don't know, maybe you could try.

00:27:04I'm imagining if in 2026, a young man, let's say a 20 year old man calls you up and his

00:27:12and he just seems like purposeless and aimless.

00:27:15And he's searching for something to anchor his life to.

00:27:19And he he looks around at social media and everybody seems to have everything put together except him, you know,

00:27:25and and he he finds the opposite sex to be hopeless and impossible.

00:27:29And, you know, the dating world is impossible.

00:27:33And and, you know, he looks to his future and, you know, it seems like, you know, he's worried about

00:27:40the price of homes and all that.

00:27:41And it seems like everything is organized against him in some way.

00:27:45Like, even if it isn't deliberately done that way, if it were, it would look exactly like this.

00:27:50Yes. So how do you if somebody calls you who's in that kind of despair, how do you orient somebody

00:27:57like that?

00:27:58Because, as I say, that's the that's the Jordan Peterson demographic.

00:28:03How do you where do you even start?

00:28:07Yeah, it's a bit. It's a big question.

00:28:08I don't believe that the place to start is to tidy your room.

00:28:11I mean, it's not a bad thing to do to tidy room, but I don't think it's really the central

00:28:15place to start.

00:28:16But what is it that motivates human beings as a whole and young men in particular?

00:28:22Well, young men are hungry, ambitious, want to conquer the world, want to do good and fight evil.

00:28:28Like, well, what are all the games that we played as kids?

00:28:31Cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers.

00:28:33You know, we used to play World War One scenario games of tennis balls and and so on.

00:28:40And so young men want to take on the world to do good, fight the bad guys, promote virtue and

00:28:47and so on.

00:28:47And that has been, you know, progressively kind of squished and sandwiched.

00:28:52A society that cannot tame and channel the aggression of young men is doomed, is doomed.

00:29:00We need that level of aggression.

00:29:03I mean, not violence.

00:29:04I'm talking about violence, but assertiveness, aggression and so on.

00:29:08Now, a big problem, of course, is that young men grow up in highly gynocentric environments, right?

00:29:14So the vast majority of people who teach kids take care in primary school and so on, vast majority are

00:29:22women.

00:29:22So you're under the thumb of females, which, you know, that's fine.

00:29:26It's not the end of the world, but there's not male authority.

00:29:30There's not male mentors and so on.

00:29:32And then, you know, maybe you'll start to get some male teachers in high school and so on.

00:29:39But the other problem is that the rise of single motherhood means that boys are growing up without a father

00:29:45vigorous, without fathers.

00:29:46And unfortunately for single mothers, the men who kind of parade through the household tend to be of lower quality

00:29:52because higher quality men don't generally want to spend their time, energy and resources raising other men's children.

00:29:57So usually they're just there for sexual access or dating frivolously and so on.

00:30:02So for the kids of single moms, they generally don't get much access to quality male role models.

00:30:09And single mothers tend to cluster because they tend to be rather poor.

00:30:12So they tend to cluster around other single mothers.

00:30:14So you just don't see a lot of males around that are high quality.

00:30:18And then you don't have any particular mentors.

00:30:22So then you don't really know what to do with your masculine energy.

00:30:25And we know, I mean, just statistically and factually that most female teachers are prejudiced against boys because when you

00:30:35take the gender or you take the sex off the essay that's handed in or the test that's handed in,

00:30:43boys get mocked better.

00:30:44If the female teachers don't know that they're boys.

00:30:47So female teachers mock down boys and mock up girls.

00:30:49If you look at something like the rise of ADHD, to me, ADHD is just boys.

00:30:56It's a complicated, some Roman S-P-U-R way of spelling boys because boys are not designed to sit

00:31:03nicely in a chair for six hours at the age of six.

00:31:08We are climbing trees.

00:31:09We are roaming around.

00:31:10We are building things.

00:31:11That's all we wanted to do.

00:31:12And there used to be some understanding of this to give kids a lot of physical activity and so on

00:31:17and actual hands-on stuff like boys learn generally by doing.

00:31:20Girls learn a little bit more by reading and seeing.

00:31:23And, of course, the majority of or a disproportionate number of ADHD diagnoses are just boys who are younger, right?

00:31:30They're just younger boys because, you know, the difference between early six and late six is quite considerable in terms

00:31:35of brain development.

00:31:36I mean, it's like 10, 15 percent of the life.

00:31:38So I think that boys do face a lot of hostility and opposition and, you know, they're associated with the

00:31:47patriarchy, which is bad.

00:31:49And boys are just considered to be like broken girls.

00:31:52Like, why are you so loud?

00:31:53Why don't you sit still?

00:31:54Why do you keep whispering?

00:31:56Why do you lose track?

00:31:57Why don't you pay attention and all of that?

00:31:59So boys are just sort of seen as defective girls.

00:32:02And that's really tough if the females around you, if your single mother associates you with the man who left

00:32:10or whatever it is, then you get some negative feedback from your single moms.

00:32:14If you're surrounded by a bunch of single moms, like in your environment, they're all kind of bitter towards men

00:32:18for the most part.

00:32:19And then you have teachers who kind of put you down and then you, you know, maybe you make it

00:32:22to university.

00:32:23And then in university, you're told, particularly if you're white male, that you're an evil part of the patriarchy and

00:32:28a colonizer and a slave owner and an oppressor and so on.

00:32:30And it's just, man, it's just, I mean, it just seems in particular towards boys, there's just a massive amount

00:32:37of institutional bias and just frankly, verbal abuse towards boys.

00:32:42And girls are promoted and girls are, they're liked very much.

00:32:48They're viewed as positive role models.

00:32:49And that's fine for girls.

00:32:50I mean, good, you know, I have a daughter and you have daughters and we, we like all of that

00:32:54sort of stuff.

00:32:55But, you know, if I had a son and when in talking to dads in my social circle, they are

00:33:02concerned about their sons.

00:33:03They are concerned about institutional bias.

00:33:06They're concerned about sexism against boys.

00:33:08I'm sure you saw this statistic recently that like over 90% of the jobs created since COVID went to

00:33:14women.

00:33:15And when women get jobs, they don't form families.

00:33:20In fact, they tend to delay forming families.

00:33:22When men get jobs, they tend to form families.

00:33:24It's sort of a general principle of sociology that when men come into money, they tend to found families.

00:33:29When women come into money, they tend to delay the foundation of families, which does have something to do with

00:33:34the birth rate decline and so on.

00:33:37And so I think that young men are facing a very hard uphill battle.

00:33:42Now, the good news for me, at least, is that the kind of men who listen to me tend to

00:33:46be very smart.

00:33:49I'm not trying to sort of praise my own show.

00:33:51It's just, you know, we deal with complicated topics and math and statistics and data and syllogisms and so on.

00:33:57And so it tends to be, you know, high IQ males and females who listen to what I do.

00:34:01So they have options.

00:34:03And so every government program in the long run achieves the opposite of its stated goals, right?

00:34:10So communism says we want equality.

00:34:12It ends up with wild inequality.

00:34:14Communism says it wants peace.

00:34:15It ends up with war and gulags and so on.

00:34:18And so we know that government programs lead to the opposite of their stated goals, as violence does.

00:34:24You know, some guy says, I'm going to bully my girlfriend into staying and loving me.

00:34:29Well, then she ends up getting away or hating you, right?

00:34:32Or both.

00:34:33And so the good news is that by being very anti-male, it's going to push more males into the

00:34:40entrepreneurial world.

00:34:41Like if you can't get a job, you have to make a job.

00:34:43And there's not anything about that, of course, in government schools.

00:34:46They don't want to teach you to be independent of the system and so on.

00:34:49And higher education has become, particularly in the arts, just a ridiculous joke.

00:34:54I mean, Tom, can you understand this?

00:34:56I know you're a very, very well-educated man.

00:34:58Have you heard this stuff when you get take-home exams in the age of AI?

00:35:02Have you heard this stuff?

00:35:04Oh, yeah.

00:35:05So I saw the thing where they gave the take-home exam for the midterm.

00:35:11And then for the final, suddenly it was, oh, by the way, you have to come in for that.

00:35:14And the first one, everybody did great.

00:35:17The second one was a catastrophe.

00:35:19There were three people out of the whole class.

00:35:21And it was not a small class.

00:35:23There were three people who weren't cheating.

00:35:26Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily how you find the autistic people, but it could be.

00:35:30It could be a little bit.

00:35:31But yeah, so higher education is completely imploding in and of itself.

00:35:35Because, you know, it used to be 10% of the creme de la creme went to higher education.

00:35:39Now it's 50%.

00:35:40So, you know, putting somebody on the basketball team doesn't make them taller.

00:35:44And putting someone in university doesn't make them smarter.

00:35:47And so they've just had to lower the standards.

00:35:48And now with AI, it's all become nonsense.

00:35:51So hopefully that's all going the way of the dodo.

00:35:53And people can actually learn in productive ways through experience and reason.

00:35:58But so, yeah, so for my audience, I'm sort of trying to give across business skills.

00:36:04I do, you know, public business consultations about, I've been an entrepreneur for like 30 years.

00:36:09I know a little bit of my way around the playground.

00:36:11So I really do try to help people understand it's actually not that hard to build your own business.

00:36:17It's very satisfying.

00:36:18It's very productive.

00:36:19And you don't even need that great an idea.

00:36:21You just need follow-through, commitment, conscientiousness, and hard work and in market research and all of that sort of

00:36:27stuff.

00:36:28And so most of my audience can absolutely make the transition to an entrepreneurial life.

00:36:34And I've known a whole bunch of them who have.

00:36:37And I've certainly helped a bunch of people ahead and behind the scenes in that process.

00:36:41And it's kind of like what happened in South Africa when whites were excluded from government contracts

00:36:47and whites were excluded from a lot of jobs and then the whites just became entrepreneurs.

00:36:52And then you end up better off thereby.

00:36:54So it's just that bob and weave and that judo, you know, roll with your energies, roll with your enemy's

00:37:00energy to end up with a victory.

00:37:02So I'm definitely trying to help people understand that the entrepreneurial life is really the only life where you can

00:37:10stay in control.

00:37:11And the other thing, too, is that people mix all of this data together that is really, really paralyzing to

00:37:18people.

00:37:19So, you know, if you said, you know, boy, there's this lifelong danger of lung cancer.

00:37:24You'd be like, oh, my gosh, that's really dangerous.

00:37:25It's like, yeah, but take out the people who smoke and the people exposed to a bunch of asbestos and

00:37:30mold or whatever it is, right?

00:37:32Then your lifetime risks are actually very low.

00:37:34And when it comes to something like marriage, people say, oh, 50 percent marriage ends in divorce and it destroyed

00:37:39my father and it's just terrible.

00:37:41And you lose half your stuff and you get dragged through court and you get accused of terrible things.

00:37:44And that's all that's all very true.

00:37:46And that's all very valid.

00:37:48But but and I've got a whole set of questions that people just need to ask and get answers to

00:37:53people they date.

00:37:54I mean, if you have value alignments and and you look for people who are reasonably mature and you look

00:38:01for markers of mental health and stability and you can negotiate and you can, you know, if you disagree with

00:38:08someone, the first question to ask is, OK, explain my perspective.

00:38:12You don't have to agree with it, but at least explain my perspective.

00:38:14So I know if you understand it, just some basic life skills and all of that.

00:38:17If you do that, then your odds of divorce are like five percent and and and so you you can

00:38:25lower the odds of negative things by taking some basic data ahead of time.

00:38:33And if you do that, then you're in control of your life.

00:38:36But if you go into marriage thinking, well, everybody faces a 50 50 divorce risk, which isn't even quite true,

00:38:42but there's things that you can do to lower your risk to the point where you gain getting far more

00:38:48benefits and risk because marriages, as you and I know, are just incredibly beneficial to both parties, in particular for

00:38:53men.

00:38:53Right. We live longer.

00:38:54We have better mental health.

00:38:55We have more purpose and less depression and and and so on.

00:38:59So marriage is incredibly beneficial.

00:39:01And if you can get all those benefits with a less than five percent risk of divorce, why wouldn't you

00:39:07take that?

00:39:08But if people don't even know how to ask the right questions to lower the risks of of danger, then

00:39:14it's like, well, you know, if you if you mix the people driving blindfolded with the people who were looking

00:39:18out the window, then risk of crashing seems way higher.

00:39:22But just take off the blindfolds and you're probably OK.

00:39:26You mentioned before your series, The Truth About, which is a just such a brilliant idea, The Truth About.

00:39:33And I have a tongue in cheek e-book series called Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About X, Y, Z.

00:39:39That's a pretty good one.

00:39:40But yours is much, much pithier.

00:39:41But if you had to look back on all the stuff you've done, all the ideas that are associated with

00:39:46you, I wonder if there's if there's one that you can pick out and say that you're the proudest stuff.

00:39:53Now, I'll say, by the way, that in terms of the various presentations you've done, I think my wife told

00:39:58you that she is a huge fan of your bomb in the brain series, which indeed has to do with

00:40:05childhood.

00:40:05She's a huge fan of that.

00:40:07And she said, I don't care what what they ever say about him or whatever he says.

00:40:11I'm never not going to love him for for that alone.

00:40:15But as you look back, I mean, it could have to do with parenting.

00:40:18It could have to do with UPB.

00:40:22Is there any one that you say now that if I had to just sum up my legacy in one

00:40:27thing, it would be that?

00:40:29Oof.

00:40:31That's a good question.

00:40:33Yeah, I know.

00:40:34I should have prepped you for that.

00:40:35No, no.

00:40:35I like the on the fly stuff.

00:40:37I'm jazz, not rehearsed.

00:40:40That's interesting.

00:40:41Think of it as like a call in show, right?

00:40:43A caller just called in and said, come on now.

00:40:45Now, what's your what's the thing that it doesn't have to sum up your career, but that you're particularly proud

00:40:52of like that?

00:40:52You can't ever take that away from me.

00:40:54I did that.

00:40:56Yeah.

00:40:56So let me sort of give the reason why and then tell you what.

00:41:01So.

00:41:04The non-aggression principle is the great evil in the is the great is the barrier against the greatest evil

00:41:09in the world, which is the initiation of the use of violence.

00:41:12And everybody says that, oh, yeah, violence is bad, but they don't realize how prevalent it is.

00:41:20So aggression against children is a form of violence.

00:41:23I made the case many years ago that spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle.

00:41:27Politics is based upon coercion.

00:41:29Money printing is based upon counterfeiting, which is a form of theft, which is a form of coercion, debt and

00:41:34so on.

00:41:35So our entire system is run like this giant inverted pyramid on the gun, on the gun in the room,

00:41:42which people spend their whole lives ignoring and pretending it's some sort of social contract or, you know, it's for

00:41:46the kid's own good and so on.

00:41:48And so I think that.

00:41:51Showing the violence.

00:41:55It's like that old Monty Python, come see the violence inherent in the system.

00:41:58I think that's from the Holy Grail or something like that.

00:42:00But it's like, you know, you see those procedural shows, those like cop shows or whatever, and they go into

00:42:06some room where the murder happened and then they turn on that special light, some infrared thing that shows the

00:42:12blood everywhere.

00:42:13Right.

00:42:13And that's sort of what I want to do is people can't change what they won't acknowledge.

00:42:17And you can't work to build a society that's less violent if you don't see the violence that's everywhere in

00:42:23your own society.

00:42:25So the various things that I've done to show people the violence that surrounds them that they don't see, that's

00:42:33been normalized.

00:42:35I think that is probably the greatest legacy in the long run.

00:42:42You know, until people see slaves as human beings and slavery is a great evil, you can't change into a

00:42:47less slave society.

00:42:49We don't have a non-slave society because we get to choose our own jobs who are still largely enslaved,

00:42:52but we have a less slave society.

00:42:58So I would say that in the goal of building a peaceful world, my ideal, of course, as an anarcho

00:43:06-capitalist is a property rights-based, non-aggression-based, stateless society.

00:43:11And so how do we get there?

00:43:13Well, if you can't see the violence in the family, you can't see the violence in society, you can neither

00:43:17make the family more peaceful nor society more peaceful.

00:43:23And so, of course, people are like, well, geez, we have this big abstract goal of a stateless society.

00:43:27Yes, I do.

00:43:28My very first article on Lou Rockwell back in 2005 was the stateless society, an examination of alternatives about how

00:43:37society could function in the absence of a centralized state.

00:43:41And so how do we get there?

00:43:43Well, you know, people far more competent than me, von Mises, Rothbard, and, you know, countless others have made the

00:43:50case for, I mean, gosh, you could go back to the 19th century where people talking about the stateless society

00:43:56and the government's only grown bigger.

00:43:58And I'm a big one for cause and effect.

00:44:00If something isn't working, you have to figure out what's missing, what needs to change.

00:44:04And so very competent, brilliant people have made incredible cases for stateless society and it's not really taking root and

00:44:13government's getting bigger and bigger.

00:44:14So there has to be a factor that's not being taken into account, which is one of the reasons why

00:44:18I went towards childhood.

00:44:20Because if in our childhood we accept and worship coercive authority in the form of parents, then how are we

00:44:30supposed to go out into society and not have an automatic respect and deference to a centralized coercive authority called

00:44:37the state, right?

00:44:38So if you are taught the value of coercive authority as a child, then it's going to be very hard

00:44:46to overturn that in your mind because it feels like a betrayal of parenting and your childhood and your family

00:44:52values and so on.

00:44:54So recognizing that people's susceptibility to political power arises out of childhood experiences in the same way that you and

00:45:03I will never not know English, right?

00:45:04I mean, we can speak another language, but if somebody speaks to us in English, we'll always be able to

00:45:09understand it absent some catastrophic brain injury.

00:45:13So tracing the threads of our addiction to political power from early coercive experiences, I think, is one of the

00:45:22best things that I've done.

00:45:23And the promotion of peaceful parenting, which it's a free book at peacefulparenting.com, the promotion of peaceful parenting and

00:45:30the promotion of the voluntary families.

00:45:31We want a voluntary society. We want a society when we're not forced to interact with people.

00:45:36We're not barred from interacting with people. And we have a society that flourishes on the non-initiation of force.

00:45:43I don't say peace and property rights. I don't mean pacifism because self-defense is fine.

00:45:47And so how do we get there? Well, we get there by teaching children the language of peace and reason

00:45:54from the beginning,

00:45:55not violence and subjugation, both in schools and in more extreme forms of religion where children are threatened with hell

00:46:01from an early age, which is terrifying.

00:46:03And so can we reason with children and can we show them peaceful, benevolent authority?

00:46:08Well, then they'll grow up and the state will seem like a very foreign concept.

00:46:12Whereas if we're just aggressive towards kids, then they will grow up thinking that aggression and authority is the only

00:46:18way things can be run.

00:46:19And then they're susceptible to state power. And this kills people by the hundreds of millions.

00:46:25I mean, democide, as you know, in the 20th century was a quarter of a billion people killed by their

00:46:30own governments.

00:46:30Like the deference to violent, coercive power is.

00:46:35Is dozens of major wars worth of bodies, not even counting wars, just in peacetime.

00:46:41So I think turning the family into a voluntary institution rather than a coercive institution,

00:46:47I think is the only way to turn in the long run society into a voluntary institution rather than a

00:46:52coercive institution.

00:46:53I'm not going to live to see it, but that's fine.

00:46:55I mean, most of these things that you really want to change in society are multigenerational.

00:47:00But I think I have sort of cracked the code as to how we can get to a voluntary and

00:47:05peaceful society,

00:47:06which is the reformation of childhood.

00:47:08And of course, you know, good arguments, which I've had some and other people have had many as well.

00:47:14But I think the one missing ingredient is the childhood.

00:47:17And you can't have a voluntary society if you don't have a voluntary family.

00:47:23And a voluntary family means that we judge people by their virtues, not by their genetics.

00:47:30All right.

00:47:30I have a couple more things before I feel like I can let you go.

00:47:33The first one has to do with what actually happened to you.

00:47:37Because I myself, you know, have attracted the...

00:47:45Now, I haven't had to deal with what you've had to deal with, but I've attracted negative attention from people.

00:47:52It's a nice way of saying that you managed it better than I did.

00:47:56It's a good thing.

00:47:57It's just something to be proud of.

00:47:59It's that in the old days, for some reason, I cared what the libertarian movement thought.

00:48:03And I just shouldn't.

00:48:06I mean, I should just say what you want to say and, you know, and say it the way you

00:48:10want to say it.

00:48:10Who cares?

00:48:11Just say what you...

00:48:12No one cares.

00:48:13You know, and the thing is, in particular, it was that I really felt like there should be nobody who

00:48:17dislikes me in the movement because I'm just putting forth the idea.

00:48:21And you are, to be fair, a very likable, charming fellow.

00:48:25So, I mean, it would take a fair amount of willpower to dislike you.

00:48:28I mean, what would be wrong with people?

00:48:30They would have had to have hit their head or be hit by lightning or something to dislike Tom Woods.

00:48:33No, that's how I feel.

00:48:35But it turns out, like, it used to really fascinate me that there was a wing that, like, you know,

00:48:40they would really, really like to see me dead.

00:48:42You know, it was a crazy thing.

00:48:44I mean, it was just crazy.

00:48:45But I don't give these people a single moment's thought.

00:48:50But what they would do is I would take some position that, yeah, it's probably jarring and jolting to most

00:48:57people.

00:48:57They haven't thought about it or they've been told it's a forbidden thing to think or say.

00:49:01And they would sum up my position by taking the wildest sentence they could find me saying about it and

00:49:08saying that's his position.

00:49:11Whereas even I, even with my own audience, I feel like sometimes I have to ease people into this one.

00:49:15You know, so if I took the wildest, craziest sentence I said in the midst of the hundreds of millions

00:49:21of sentences I've uttered over the course of my career.

00:49:24Yeah, that would not be the way I would go about it.

00:49:26But if you want to discredit somebody, of course, you think of the what's the craziest thing.

00:49:30It's like when they want to make you look ridiculous, they find the craziest photo of you they can and

00:49:36they post that.

00:49:36As if we don't all have a crazy photo that was taken at that instantaneous moment when we were making

00:49:43a funny face.

00:49:43You know, like as if we don't all know how cameras work.

00:49:46Or they even change the lighting and give you like that bottom lit Hitchcock lighting and so on.

00:49:51I mean, sometimes I have enough bad pictures they don't even need to do that.

00:49:56But I don't know exactly what you're talking about.

00:49:57But anyway, but you were the victim of this because there are like certain Stefan Molyneux quotations that are out

00:50:05there.

00:50:05Do you believe such and such?

00:50:06And the answer is, yes, I do.

00:50:09But that is not the most charitable formulation of my views.

00:50:13So, I mean, is is that kind of what you feel like happened?

00:50:19Is that because I know that MailChimp threw you off because somebody on Twitter quoted one thing you said, one

00:50:26thing in a career of millions of words.

00:50:29They quote seven and that's all MailChimp.

00:50:33MailChimp's a they're they're terrible.

00:50:35But do you see what I'm saying?

00:50:38Like, is it is it that was it that they they just took like three little things here and there

00:50:44and to make it sound as terrible as possible.

00:50:47And then instantly, well, sorry, you're gone.

00:50:50Yeah.

00:50:51Well, I mean, you can destroy a career with seven words.

00:50:56I mean, and justly so, you know, if somebody comes, Bob comes along and says, well, I, as Bob, killed

00:51:04a hobo last night.

00:51:05OK, well, that's that's, you know, that is OK, but it's only one of seven words for an entire career.

00:51:11It's like, yeah, but they're kind of important.

00:51:13Seven words and so on.

00:51:15Or or, you know, we could sort of come up with with any number of sort of funny seven word

00:51:20career destroying things.

00:51:21That would be just, you know, like it takes a lifetime to build up a reputation and it takes only

00:51:25a short time or a moment really to destroy it.

00:51:28Or like someone who's a serial killer can very justly say, hey, man, most of the time, like ninety nine

00:51:35point nine nine nine nine percent of my life.

00:51:37I wasn't killing anyone.

00:51:39I mean, I had to sleep.

00:51:40I had to eat.

00:51:41You know, you're you're so generous to your enemies that you're sitting here coming up with plausible ways that you

00:51:47might say very few words that justify doing what was.

00:51:51But but but all right.

00:51:52Enough's enough.

00:51:53OK, so so so the big OK, so the big the big conflict, I think, other than politics and so

00:51:58on, which which I dipped into.

00:52:01I mean, the big part, the big the big conflict is that on the left, they have the basic theory

00:52:08that all differences in outcomes are the result of bigotry.

00:52:13Right.

00:52:13So if women are paid less, that's just straight up sexism.

00:52:16If some like if if blacks are doing less well than East Asians, it's because of racism.

00:52:23Right.

00:52:24So every disparity in outcome in any group you want to aggregate is absolutely the result of racism, sexism, prejudice,

00:52:35hatred, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:52:38Now.

00:52:39That's just not true.

00:52:40I mean, we know this with the wage gap, and this is of an old thing that the wage gap

00:52:45is not because men hate women.

00:52:47And, you know, when I was talking about IQ differences in various groups, then, you know, that that goes.

00:52:53I mean, this is all the way back to Charles Murray in the 90s with the bell curve that everyone

00:52:57with an IQ of 110 makes about the same amount of money.

00:53:00Everybody with an IQ of 90 makes the same amount of money.

00:53:03And if you if you have different average IQs, that is going to explain a good portion, not all, but

00:53:08a good portion of the differences.

00:53:10So if there are reasons that are not based upon historical hatred and prejudice, which are bad, historical hatred and

00:53:21prejudice and sexism and racism, all bad.

00:53:23I accept that.

00:53:23But if there are differences in outcome that is not based upon hatred, then the left loses a foundational argument

00:53:37which supports their power, which is the only differences in outcomes result from hatred.

00:53:41Hatred is bad.

00:53:42Therefore, we need to eliminate the haters and we need to make everything equal.

00:53:47Right. And so we if there are arguments against that, IQ being one of the ones and, you know, the

00:53:56fact that women, you know, it's kind of nice if we get a continuity of the human race.

00:54:00So women have to have children and when women are pregnant and breastfeeding and, you know, you've had more toddlers

00:54:07than I have, but, you know, they're tiny little death magnets.

00:54:09So you've got to be around them all the time and you've got to focus on them and so on.

00:54:13And so if we want to have a civilization that continues and we want to have the best health outcomes

00:54:20for our children, which is 18 months of breastfeeding and and being with mom and dad and growing up with

00:54:25mom and dad and in particular mom.

00:54:27If we want that, then women are going to have to make less money, at least directly.

00:54:32They'll make more money because their husbands are more motivated to work.

00:54:36You multiply like a photocopier.

00:54:38So I'm sure that drives some of your ambition as a whole, which is great.

00:54:41Right. So if we want to have, you know, a continuity of civilization and human beings and all of that,

00:54:47which is kind of what we work for, then women are going to have to make less in the free

00:54:51market and they're going to make more through their their husbands.

00:54:54And if we say, well, we want to have men and women make exactly the equal amount of money, the

00:54:59only way we can do that is to not have children.

00:55:02And so economic equality between males and females in the direct marketplace sense can only be achieved by women not

00:55:09having children.

00:55:10And we know this. We know this statistically.

00:55:12So before women have children, they make just about the same amount of money as men.

00:55:15And then when they have children, that's when the path diverges.

00:55:17So saying that we want men and women, there's no wage gap means no children.

00:55:22And it's a subtle form of depopulation or antinatalism and kind of murderous in many ways.

00:55:27I mean, geez, I mean, I think we're similar ages.

00:55:30I think you're a little younger than me.

00:55:32But I mean, in our generation, like a third of the babies were aborted.

00:55:35And part of that had to do with this focus on economic equality.

00:55:39So I think the fact that I was sort of, you know, that old, is it Ben Franklin?

00:55:45Like there are a thousand people trimming the tree of evil to every one person hacking at the root.

00:55:49I really like to very much look at the root causes and not the effects, right?

00:55:53If you want to move a shadow, you have to either move the light source or move what's blocking it.

00:55:59There's no point pushing at the shadow or, you know, whatever.

00:56:01You need to look at the actual root causes of things like evil, of things like dysfunction, of things like

00:56:07a depression or lack of ambition.

00:56:09Or look at the root causes.

00:56:10And the closer you get to the root causes, the more you can change.

00:56:15You know, the Archimedes said, give me a lever big enough I can move the world.

00:56:18Well, give me early enough causes and we can all change our lives incredibly.

00:56:23And so for the left, they feed on all differences are based on hatred.

00:56:28Hatred is bad.

00:56:29And therefore, we need to eliminate the haters, which in the extreme case, of course, is gulags.

00:56:34You know, if I went to Hong Kong to do a documentary right before COVID, and I was talking about

00:56:40this there, that, you know, some people have a green thumb.

00:56:44I don't know if you've ever done any gardening, but some people just have this amazing ability to grow things.

00:56:48And instinct, they're at one with the chlorophyll.

00:56:50I don't know what's going on, but there's just wild stuff that happens.

00:56:53And those people, if they're farmers, they tend to grow a lot of stuff.

00:56:56And then because they can grow a lot of stuff, they can bid more for land because they can get

00:57:00more crop yields from it.

00:57:01And then they end up accumulating more and more crops.

00:57:04The good news is that it doesn't last long.

00:57:06You know, rags to riches to rags in three generations.

00:57:09Their kids are going to regress to the mean and not be as good at farming.

00:57:12So it generally cycles.

00:57:13But at any given moment, there's some guy with a hundred acres and you're slaving away on one acre because

00:57:18he's, you know, maybe you're kind of lazy.

00:57:19Maybe you want to write books instead of garden or farm or whatever.

00:57:23And maybe he just works all the time.

00:57:25And and and then, you know, the communists kind of slither up to you like the serpent in the Garden

00:57:29of Eden and like, hey, man, you know, the only reason the only reason that he's got all that money

00:57:33and he's got that pretty wife and he's got all those kids.

00:57:35The only reason that he's got all that money and and you have only one acre is he stole from

00:57:40you and he's exploited you and he robbed your fathers.

00:57:43And they just gin up all of this hatred and so on by saying that the only difference between the

00:57:49wealthy and the poor is that the wealthy are evil and the wealthy have stolen.

00:57:53And we're going to steal it back from you.

00:57:55We're going to give it back to you and so on.

00:57:57Right. And and that's I mean, if you can get people to start, I mean, there's a lot of sadistic

00:58:02people in the world who just love to watch people attack each other and they love goading up resentment between

00:58:08classes and races and sexes and so on.

00:58:11But in order to do that, they have to put forward that the only reason for the difference is evil,

00:58:19corruption, theft, exploitation and so on.

00:58:20Like the only reason that that guy's got a Rolls Royce and and you're riding a bike is he stole

00:58:24that Rolls Royce from your ancestor and you just what people up into this frenzy and then they go and

00:58:29attack and kill people.

00:58:30And it's just I mean, this is the 20th century and actually leading into the 21st century quite a bit.

00:58:35You know, the tax the rich is like the rich are already paying the vast majority of taxes.

00:58:39For heaven's sakes, half of the people don't pay any taxes at all.

00:58:41So if you come up with a counter narrative, which says maybe he's just a better farmer and maybe the

00:58:50fact that he's a better farmer means you have more to eat.

00:58:54You know, if the guy's got 100 acres and he can produce twice the crops, everybody ends up with 200

00:58:59acres worth of food for only 100 acres.

00:59:01So the price of food goes down for you and like rather than saying the basic free market principles that

00:59:06you're better off because I mean, to put it in a sort of technical sense, you're better off as a

00:59:13person.

00:59:14If the person with the best ability to maximize value gets the resources, you're better off.

00:59:22Right. And helping people to understand that's never going to happen from government schools because they operate on the opposite

00:59:27principle.

00:59:28Well, the government schools are communists, which is why we kind of get communism over time.

00:59:31And so when I come along or other people come along and say there are valid, statistically accurate, true explanations

00:59:43for differences in outcome that have nothing to do with hatred, exploitation, theft, racism, sexism, whatever it is.

00:59:52That strikes right at the core of leftist power, which is to arouse resentment by saying that people who are

01:00:01less successful are robbed from, stolen from, exploited and generating that kind of class hatred.

01:00:08And it is, you know, I mean, it's a red tide of blood that comes in from these ideologies that

01:00:14all differences in outcome are based on exploitation and hatred is really one of the most dangerous ideas in the

01:00:21world as a whole.

01:00:22And it destroys nations, it destroys cultures, and it destroys hundreds of millions of people like in the most brutal

01:00:27possible ways.

01:00:28And so when someone stands up and says, that is not true, I mean, is there hatred and bigotry in

01:00:36the world?

01:00:37Of course there is.

01:00:38But I mean, the fundamental contradiction of socialism is capitalists are just greedy for whatever money they can get a

01:00:45hold of.

01:00:46But capitalists are also so racist and sexist that they won't hire people because it doesn't make any sense, like

01:00:51fundamentally.

01:00:52And so I think that the major opposition was that I was, you know, standing like you and like a

01:00:59lot of people, of course, we're just standing in this oncoming.

01:01:02I don't want to use the tsunami example because you can't stand, you're just going to get washed away.

01:01:06It's maybe not the best, maybe not the best example, but we are building roadblocks on this, you know, increasing

01:01:13thundering Mad Max freight train violence is coming down the pipe.

01:01:16If people think that the only differences in outcomes arise from exploitation, violence, theft, and evil, then it's a really

01:01:25brutal world that we end up in if that idea goes forward.

01:01:28And there's lots of people who want that brutal world because they're better at violence than we are and we're

01:01:31better at thinking than they are.

01:01:33So we want to give reason and they want to provoke violence.

01:01:36And so I think that when you interfere with the goals of evil, then evil will have its way with

01:01:43you.

01:01:43And I would say, as far as most people in history, I've got off remarkably light as far as a

01:01:48whole.

01:01:48I'm still out there talking and I'm still in one piece and I'm still six feet north of the deep

01:01:52dive.

01:01:54So if you have a counter explanation to that which evil needs to promote, to provoke violence, evil will target

01:02:01you.

01:02:02And it can't answer your arguments because they're reasonable and statistical and factual and verified and so on.

01:02:09IQ as a predictor of life outcomes is one of the most validated metrics in all of human psychology and

01:02:14sociology along with the accuracy of stereotype bias.

01:02:18And so you get in the way of the evildoers and they want you out of the way and they

01:02:24can't reason you out of the way.

01:02:26So they just have to, you know, do what evil people do, just lie and provoke hysteria and so on.

01:02:31And so, I mean, it was very well done, to be fair, you know, I mean, you've got to give

01:02:36your enemy their due.

01:02:37Like they built up the case for many years and not just with me, but, you know, people like us.

01:02:44And then when they execute, they're ready to roll and it's very well done.

01:02:49But, you know, evil is good at being evil.

01:02:51You've got to give them their credit where credit is due.

01:02:55And I actually consider that reasonable.

01:02:57I wouldn't want to consider myself a good boxer if I was only fighting girl guides.

01:03:03How do people follow you given the limited options, but they're more than there were before?

01:03:09How do they follow you?

01:03:10A website, Twitter?

01:03:12What do you want to share?

01:03:13Oh, yeah.

01:03:13So freedomain.com slash connect is where my social media is.

01:03:20And yeah, it's, you know, it's coming back.

01:03:23It's, it's, it's, I'm like that, you know, the end of the horror movie, you know, they bury the guy

01:03:29and then they walk away.

01:03:31You know, the hand comes out, grabs the ankle.

01:03:33It's like, I'm still alive.

01:03:35I'm not dead yet.

01:03:36Again, to do my Monty Python references.

01:03:38So, yeah, you know, I mean, I'm still doing my thing and enjoying it as much as ever.

01:03:43And I have a 500-year plan for the liberation of humanity.

01:03:47So I'm not looking at the day-to-day.

01:03:50I'm looking at the long-term.

01:03:51And so, and I really do appreciate chatting with you.

01:03:54For those of you who don't know, Tom and I go way back in a ways.

01:03:58And so it's really a great pleasure to have this conversation today.

01:04:02All right.

01:04:02Excellent.

01:04:02Well, I'll also have links for you up at tomwoods.com slash 2779, the show notes page for today.

01:04:09So, Stefan, glad you're, I'm glad you're grabbing that ankle and you're, you know, they, they may have buried you,

01:04:16but you weren't dead.

01:04:17So thanks a million.

01:04:18Thanks, Tom.

01:04:19Always a great pleasure.

01:04:20And thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

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