#0028 - Stefan Molyneux

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On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience episode 538 with guest Stéphane Molyneux.

The No Rogan Experience season two starts now.

Welcome back to the show.

It's a show where two podcasters with now 85 hours of Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan is one of the most listened to people on the planet.

His interviews and opinions influence millions, and he's regularly criticized for his views, often by people who've never actually listened to Joe Rogan.

So we listen and when needed, we try to correct the record.

It's a show for anyone who's curious about Joe Rogan, his guests and their claims, as well as just anyone who wants to understand Joe Rogan's ever-growing media influence.

I'm Michael Marshall.

I'm joined as ever by Cecil Cicarello.

And today, we're going to be covering Joe's August 2014 interview with Stefan Molyneux.

So, Cecil, how did Joe introduce Stefan in the show notes?

Says, Stefan Molyneux is a Canadian philosopher.

He runs the number one philosophy show on the internet, Free Domain Radio, and also runs a very popular YouTube channel.

He did, and this is 2014.

So I thought it should be in the past tense now, but that is true.

That's a little bit of a hint.

So is there anything else we should know about Stéphane Molyneux?

Yeah, Molyneux's been known for his white supremacist views, his promotion of white genocide, his promotion of white nationalism, and he embraces a number of conspiracy theories.

The Southern Poverty Law Center describes him as, quote, an internet commentator and alleged cult leader who amplifies scientific racism, eugenics, and white supremacism to a massive new audience, and that Stefan Molyneux operates within this so-called racist, alt-right, and pro-Trump ranks, end quote.

So also from Wikipedia, I'm going to quote directly, quote, Molyneux has described himself as a men's rights activist.

Molyneux argued that violence in the world is a result of how women treat treat their children.

More on that later in our show.

And here's a quote.

If we could all just get people to be nice to their babies for five years straight, that would be it for war, drug abuse, addiction, promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases.

Almost all would be completely eliminated because they all arise from dysfunctional early childhood experiences, which are all run by women.

End quote.

Molyneux Molyneux believes feminism is a form of socialism and has the aim of reducing white Christian birth rates.

Also believes that progressive gender politics are holding back young men.

He was banned from both YouTube and Twitter.

And then when Muss took over, they gave him his account back on Twitter and X, but he is still off of YouTube.

Yeah, he is, absolutely.

So what did they talk about in this conversation from August 2014?

Taxes, anarcho-capitalism, taxation is theft.

Governments are violent actors using threats to coerce members of society.

They talked about how women beat kids.

Elliot Roger, who was a mass murderer, we talked quite a bit about that.

Parenting, cutting people out of your life for differing opinions.

And they wrap up by talking about how great Joe is at his job.

Yeah, they sure do.

So our main event this week is going to be their discussion of misogyny and the role of women in society.

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But now, our main event.

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So why are we covering something from 2014?

I feel like that might be a question that's running through people's minds right now.

So I want to talk about a bonus episode that we did with cara santa maria so kara santa maria and joe rogan sat down they had a conversation and in that conversation this clip was played this this we cut this clip and we used it in that in that show and it uh sort of aroused in us a sense of curiosity uh because there's a there's a mention of another guest so i'm going to play that clip now this is from the cara santa maria bonus show that we did.

It's also, there's a bunch of people that attribute other people's depression really irresponsibly to a bunch of different things.

They'll say, like, oh, I had a guy on the podcast last week that was saying that Robin Williams killed himself because his wife's, his ex-wives took all his money.

As if he knows it all.

Well, anything about it.

Yeah, it's like, oh, I'm so glad you're such an expert on that.

He was saying that it was women's addiction to free stuff that was caught.

It was so that's horrible.

And it makes you want to be like, who the fuck are you to presume that you know what's happening in somebody else's head ever?

Not only that, it's insanely irresponsible to go against the grain of science and medicine, which is clearly established that it's an illness.

So when we heard that, both Marsh and I had a tiny bit of skepticism that Joe would say to his guest, that is irresponsible.

And so I decided to go and look for the show that he was talking about.

I was like, what, what show could it possibly be?

And I started looking and the show right before Kara Santa Maria was on.

So Kara Santa Maria is episode 539.

Stefan Maloney was 538.

So I listened to part of it, sort of scanned it, and I found this piece about Robin Williams.

And they talk extensively about Robin Williams.

And so we decided, hey, why don't we listen to that and see sort of where Joe stood.

many, many, many years ago on his stances on misogyny and feminism.

Because in the show with Kara Santa maria that we did for bonus show he seemed to be on board for the most part with feminism don't you agree marsh yeah yeah absolutely and i think the thing the reason i was dubious about how much he would have pushed back is because one of the things we noted all the way through the first season of this uh podcast was that joe almost rarely if ever um pushed back on his guests even if they were saying things that he had personally disagreed with on uh on other shows or just you know stances that he'd made pretty clear on other episodes.

Once there was someone in the room with him saying things he disagreed with, he'd pretty much just roll over and wouldn't offer any kind of conflict.

And I speculated, as did you, that that's what we would have seen from Joe at the time, which given that he was pretty much, he seemed pretty decent when he was talking to Kara, he wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but this is Joe 10 years ago, and it wasn't that bad.

We both remarked that if that is, if Joe 10 years ago is how Joe was now, we would not be doing this show.

There'd be no, there wouldn't be enough material in here.

There wouldn't be enough impetus to be putting Joe Rogan under that kind of spotlight.

So it was really fascinating to then go back and see what actually did Joe say to the guest, the episode before Cara, who was saying these things, and how much pushback did he actually offer.

And I think it's important too to look back at some of these really early episodes because we did it as a bonus show and we got an opportunity multiple times to sort of scroll back and look back at Joe 10 years ago, et cetera, and see how he looked and how he pushed his guests and how he interacted with his guests.

And I think it's important to look at some of that stuff.

So it's a great, I think, jumping off point at the beginning of the season to look at Joe, like we suggest, 10 years ago

and see, did he change at all?

Has his views changed at all?

Has his style changed at all?

So that's going to sort of frame this entire episode.

So we'll jump right in.

The first part, first, the main event here is about misogyny.

And this whole entire interview sort of focuses.

They come back to this point quite a bit throughout.

Joe was on another show.

I believe it was the Young Turks or a spin-off of the Young Turks, where he was on a show with Anna Kasparian.

And Anna Kasparian and he had a conversation about Stefan Molyneux and about sort of a back and forth reaction video.

You did a reaction video to them and they did a reaction video to you and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And so we catch that conversation early early on in Joe's podcast when he sits down with Stefan.

So I was on Anna Kusparian's show.

You're good buddy, you're good friends yesterday.

And we had some interesting conversations and part of it was about you.

And I appreciate that.

You know, we were talking just before the show.

I don't care what you say about me.

Just make sure you spell my name right.

Well, that's what I was telling her in a way.

I was saying, you know, she was getting upset, you know, the things that you had said about what she had said.

And I said, well, you gotta, look, this is, there's a weird thing that goes on where people make these sort of call-out videos.

You know, everybody likes to do a call-out video, but nobody likes a call-out video turned on them.

And what Anna did is essentially she listened to Adam Corolla's rant about conservatism, and she made a rant about that.

And then you made a rant about her rant, and then she's pissed at your rant about her rant, about Adam's rant.

I'm like, first of all, this is like an incredibly ineffective way to communicate.

But it's a massive amount of time involved.

And

it doesn't give the other person the opportunity to respond.

And when you do it, like one person goes on this long rant describing you in very disparaging terms and minimizes you.

And then you have to respond to that.

And then you go there.

It's way better to just sit down and talk through ideas.

So there's a lot of these ideas that you have said that are very controversial that we're going to give you an opportunity.

Below me?

There's no way.

I know.

It's crazy.

No, and to be fair, I mean,

I was working on the flight down.

I was working on a response.

Okay.

So I just want to point out some of the language early on even Joe is using, which is sort of women get hysterical.

They keep on saying the words upset.

Oh, she was so upset.

She was so upset.

But they're not really saying that about.

anybody else in the equation.

They're only talking about the woman in this equation as if she's the one who's getting upset.

Neither, none of the guys.

All these guys can keep their cool, but the woman, she's the one who's hysterical yeah i mean that's a that's a really good point because this is this is essentially an internet drama and we don't need to talk too much about the specific conversation it was about whether the word conservative is an insult or a pejorative and that's kind of the back and forth that's going on but it's not really the point here but the the point is that this exchange of essentially video essays or rants as joe is calling them uh this is what prompted joe to have stefan on the show and as as joe point joe paints it these are people who are making long points at one another uh kind of going back and forth.

But I think, and he's sort of painting it as if they're just kind of making these kind of big, big, kind of overlong arguments at each other.

But I don't think Joe's really tuned into the messaging that Stéphane Molyneux is actually putting out.

And actually, there's a clip I think we probably have where Anna and Joe are talking about it.

And Anna brings up an actual clip of what Stéphane Molyneux was saying about her.

And we'll hear the misogyny in this, I think.

Another person that I'd never heard of before, by the name of Stéphane Molyneux, I hope that's how you pronounce his name, did a video response to me.

And in his video response, which by the way was about an hour long, he made a number of pretty condescending statements, including the following.

See, I don't wear a lot of makeup here.

I wear a lot of makeup.

In fact, I wear no makeup.

Why?

Because I actually do some research, right, before I create a video.

You know, it may not be the end of the world to do a little less foundation.

on the skin and a little bit more foundation in critical thinking.

So the thing is here, Joe is completely glossing over the fact that Stefan in this clip isn't critiquing Anna's argument or the points that she's making or any of her ideas.

He's talking about the fact that she's wearing too much makeup and how his ideas are so good, he doesn't need to wear so much foundation and stuff.

And Stefan, throughout this conversation with Joe, will present himself as a guy.

He's just interested in spreading philosophy.

He just wants the most true information out there as possible.

We just want to really go into depth on some ideas.

But he's making personal attacks here about Anna.

And those attacks are about her being a woman and how she's presenting herself and how she's maybe been made to present herself in certain sort of cultural spaces.

These aren't about her ideas.

This is just misogyny.

And Joe completely misses that.

He's incapable of seeing that.

So what Joe sees is, well, Long conversation, long conversation, you're talking past each other.

It's just better to get people in the room to talk about it.

It's always better to sit down and hash it out face to face.

Let's have a proper conversation, the Joe Rogan way.

And to Anna's credit, she actually pushes back on this and explains why having Stefan Molyneux in to have that conversation is actually a really bad idea.

Really, the best way would be to have him in the room or have Adam in the room.

And I think that's the problem.

I don't protect Adam.

I would love to sit down with him and have a conversation with him because I think he's sane.

After reading more about Molyneux and some of the crazy things that he's talked about on his show, I have no interest in talking to him because it's, I don't want to legitimize that guy.

He's not a legitimate person in this conversation.

And I actually regret my response to him.

I thought that that was a terrible idea.

So Anna's right here.

She knows that bringing Stefan, bringing attention to Stefan by having him in these conversations in person or having him on the show, that legitimizes him.

And that's a bad thing when he does have these extreme views, the extreme views we're going to talk about in this show.

Joe, as ever, is completely incapable of understanding that point, that point about platform and legitimacy.

So he gets Stefan on the show in this conversation to a massive audience.

And he's going to talk about his views here.

In fact, this, I think, is the third time he's had Stefan Molyneux on the show by this point in the space of about a year or 18 months, something like that.

That is legitimizing Stefan.

So on Rorgan Shaw, Molyneux is going to sit there.

He's not going to bring out all of his misogynistic attacks.

He's not going to be talking about how Anna shouldn't be wearing so much makeup or any of this stuff about feminism being a form of socialism designed to stop white Christian babies, because he knows that his job here is to come across as reasonable.

If he can do that, he can get a load of Rorgan's viewers to come across and watch his channel where he will feed them that stuff.

It's a massive opportunity for Stefan Molyneux to seem legitimate.

It's not the space where you're going to get the real him, his real thoughts, because he comes into this with an agenda of, if I look reasonable, anyone who criticizes me looks unreasonable and I get a massive audience from it.

And think about how Joe is even framing the whole thing.

He's making it sound ridiculous, like Anna did this sort of ridiculous thing.

He summarizes her argument really badly.

So does Stefan.

They do a really bad job of summarizing her argument.

And so essentially, Stefan has the floor and he gets to straw man everything that she said.

And so he gets to come across as reasonable.

Like you say, he's going to tone down his rhetoric.

And so now people get an opportunity to hear him be like, well, I don't know what the hell.

Kasparian was so freaked out about.

This guy seems totally irrational.

And there's going to be a chance for him to garner more listeners for his, at this point, the most popular philosophy podcast on the internet.

Yeah.

And it's the equivalent of sitting down with somebody and saying, well, they didn't actually say the N-word.

So maybe they're not a racist.

Well, they might not have said the N-word to you then.

That doesn't mean it's not a word they don't use, love.

And it doesn't mean they haven't got racist views they didn't happen to show you at that point.

And it's a similar thing with the misogyny here.

For sure.

So now we fast forward to near the end of the show.

This is when they're starting to talk about misogyny.

This is when they're starting to talk about this mass murderer who killed a bunch of women and Robin Williams and all kinds of other stuff mixed in.

But it's near the end of the show.

I would say maybe it's certainly past the midpoint of the show.

Yeah, like an hour to talk about this.

And in fairness, Joe brings this up as a criticism.

And that's your, again, credit to Joe.

He's bringing this up as these are the things that people find objectionable about what you're saying.

Yeah.

So let's play the first part.

One of your positions that get criticized, or one of the other things that gets tossed at you, is the term misogynist.

And I'm sure that's a, that's upsetting to you as well, right?

You're not a misogynist, are you?

I don't even, like, if people could define to me what that, if it means general hatred of all women, then I made a really bad choice of who to get married to.

Isn't it interesting, though, that that's what a misogynist means?

It's like if you criticize anyone who's gay, you're a homophobe.

If you have issue with someone who's black who does something stupid like Al Sharpton, you're a racist.

You know, it's a cute way of dismembering your argument or dismembering your position right away.

But you've said some stuff

about women that I have even disagreed with.

And one of them, you did this thing recently where you're talking about how the way to get assholes out of society, it's women's responsibility because women are breeding with these assholes and they're making assholes.

It's not only women's responsibility, but it's a key part of the equation that I think is not discussed enough, which is the sexual choices of women.

That expression or that sentence is really critical.

It's not only women's responsibility.

Okay, so first of all, we are straight in here with the straw man on what misogyny means.

Right.

Because he's saying, oh, if only somebody could define that for me.

Stefan, somebody could define that for you.

You know what the word means.

You are the internet's leading philosophical radio presenter and you don't know what the word misogyny means.

I don't believe that.

You know what people mean by misogyny, and they don't mean that you dislike every single woman.

Misogyny is a dislike or a contempt or an ingrained prejudice against women.

Even if that is not necessarily a fully conscious, it's not a hatred, but it's just a, I just don't think women are good enough to do X.

They're not as good as men at this thing.

Women are too emotional to do this.

It's these types of opinions.

This is kind of what misogyny means.

It doesn't mean you have to hate all women.

For that standard to have been true, he would be essentially saying that there can't have been any misogyny throughout history because men kept having babies with women.

So surely no man has ever in all recorded history, apart from, you know, anyone who's ever bred hasn't got hatred of, isn't misogynistic.

That's obviously not the case.

If your baseline assumption is that women are lesser than men, or if you, for example, will do things like taking an aside in a taking an aside in a criticism of a woman's position to tell them they should be wearing less makeup, well, you might be misogynist.

If instead of just attacking their ideas, you're saying, oh, I can't believe what she's saying because she's wearing too much makeup, that's a misogynistic attack.

And

when he said that, the first thing that popped in my head is Jordan Peterson today is still using a very similar tactic where he's like, well, you,

how do you know I'm a Christian?

You know, like where he's making people sort of, and then he'll make people define the word and he'll sort of force them.

And you're like, come on, everybody knows what a misogynist is.

Let's not.

dance around this thing and don't use this um i'm going to make you say uh i'm going to make you sort of repeat everything i need and then i'll pick out the tiny little piece that i disagree with so i can go at it's like we know what a misogynist is.

Settle down.

I also too, the way he's like, yeah, you know, I married a woman.

So how could I be a misogynist?

It's like, yeah, I have a black friend.

How could I be racist?

That's a silly thing to say.

And he is, he's touting that.

And he's touting that in the very beginning of this conversation.

Yeah, it's literally the joke, I can't hate women.

Me mum's one.

It's like, yeah, that's not how that works.

Ridiculous.

And so Joe takes him to task.

Now, Joe does, he doesn't fully take him to task because he's saying, look, you've said some stuff about women that even I disagree, even I, Joe Rogan, disagree with, but he still gives him space on, you know, criticize any gay person and you're called homophobic.

And this is a disingenuous argument.

No one is saying Stéphane Molyneux is misogynistic because he sometimes criticizes women.

It's about the tenor and the tone and the content of the criticisms and the attacks that he's making.

But Joe's taken to task a little bit.

And when he does take him to task, even this little bit, Stefan, who's very clearly there to sugarcoat his views, to hide the worst of them, to make himself seem as reasonable as possible, regresses to, well it's not only women's responsibility i've never said it's it's women's responsibility to avoid violence it's not only their responsibility it's other people's too and joe picks out the inclusion of the word only is critical there but the thing is

Molyneux will say own it's not just the women's responsibility here when he's presenting a persona to Rorgan and Rogan's audience but is that how he phrases things when he's making those points to his audience or to an audience that's on his side when I found an article from Time magazine where someone actually went to a men's rights conference.

Stéphane Molyneux defined himself as a men's rights activist.

In this article, they point out Stefan Molyneux, a Canadian radio host, he blamed mothers for the violent behavior of men.

And to the audience, he said that because 90% of a child's brain is formed by the experience it has before the age of five,

women have, and the fact that women have a almost universal control over our childhood, violence exists in the world because of the women, because of the way women treat children.

This isn't a, it's also men's responsibility argument.

This is because of the way women treat children, he says.

He goes on to say, if we could just get people to be nice, as you pointed out earlier, nice to their babies for five straight years, it would be the end for war, drug abuse, addiction, promiscuity, and STDs, almost all will be eliminated because they all arise from dysfunctional early childhood experiences, which are all run by women.

So it seems pretty clear that it's not about it's not just women's fault.

He's saying it is just women's fault in this.

I want to jump on Joe a little bit here.

I recognize that he is pushing back, but man, the way he says misogyny here, the way he's like, they say you're a misogynist.

There's like a tone there where he doesn't think that word, he thinks that word is stupid.

You can sort of tell he thinks, he doesn't think a lot about that word.

He doesn't think that that word

represents what might happen in reality.

He thinks that's a made up thing to ad hom somebody, to do an ad hominem attack on someone, not to deal with their ideas.

At least that's how it comes across to me.

Now, maybe you might hear that and think differently, but when I hear that, that immediately, there's something in me that says, You don't even think that misogynists exist.

At least that's how it sounds.

Yeah, or you think misogyny is the straw man that Stefan's talking about, of someone who hates all women.

But even, even when you, when you bring up someone who hates all women, Joe won't accept that as misogyny either.

I think the next clip will actually illustrate that really perfectly.

But in what I saw, the thing that you went off on, you were talking, I think it was the Elliott Rogers thing.

Is that what it was?

We were talking about that fucking crazy kid up in Santa Barbara that killed everybody.

Yeah.

By the way, he killed more men than he did women.

It's one of the things that I found fascinating: that this whole yes, all women hashtag yes all women thing came out after four men were murdered and two women.

Yeah, that guy was a piece of shit, regardless of gender.

Gender had very little to do.

He was mad at the men that women found attractive.

Just because he killed men doesn't mean he wasn't a misogynist.

And he wasn't motivated by his hatred of women.

You even say it at the end.

You say, he's mad because he felt like he should be the object of their affection.

And that has everything to do with women.

That has very little to do with the men.

Yeah, absolutely.

What Joe is doing here is he's disputing that the motivation for Elliot Rogers' killings was misogyny.

He didn't do it because he hated women.

It wasn't just about a gender.

He was just mad and wanted to kill people.

Well, Elliot Rogers wrote a manifesto before his spree killing.

We're not going to link it in the show notes.

We're not going to do that.

You don't link to mass murderers' manifestos.

But the first line of that manifesto is, humanity, all of my suffering on this world has been at the hands of humanity, particularly women.

It includes the line, I had to make up for all the years I lost in loneliness and isolation through no fault of my own.

It was society's fault for rejecting me.

It was women's fault for refusing to have sex with me.

He went went on, women are sexually attracted to the wrong type of man.

This is a major flaw in the very foundation of humanity.

And it was only when I first moved to Santa Barbara that I started considering the possibility of having to carry out a violent act of revenge as the final solution to dealing with all of the injustices I've had to face at the hands of women and society.

And then I will arm myself with deadly weapons and wage a war against all women and the men they are attracted to.

So Joe is not only wrong here about, you you know, this, this wasn't about women, he's whitewashing the actions and the motivations of a spree killer in service to what?

To denying the existence of misogyny as a motivation for violence.

It's, it's a wild thing for Joe to be doing here.

I don't think you're wrong, Marsh.

It feels very, very much like he's doing that.

In fact, listen to how he says that yes, all women hashtag.

Listen, again, I'm talking about how he's speaking it, but really, genuinely, there is something to that.

And he, it sounds like he doesn't think that's anything when he's like, yes, all women, when they, when they said, yes, all women.

I feel like, here's what I feel like is happening.

I feel like, and this has happened to me in the past, when I've said something that has been wrong or that's been, uh, that's been hurtful to people, I've received messages.

And there is a part of you that wants to defend yourself.

You want to say something.

You want to be like, well, wait a minute.

Like I didn't, I didn't mean it that way or whatever it is.

Instead of reflecting on who you are.

And I wonder if Joe is getting pushback from women, from feminists, and from people who listen to his show and who are like, hey, man, you're making some really bad takes here.

And they're pushing him and he's pushing back.

He's sort of digging his heels in on how he feels about this stuff instead of taking in other ideas on maybe you have some bad takes on this stuff.

All right.

So they're going to continue on with this murderer Elliot Roger.

And this Elliot Roger guy was a, you know, he was socially awkward and probably mentally, there was something wrong with him.

Aspergers, whatever the fuck it was.

I don't know what was wrong with him, but if you watch his videos where he's talking, there's clearly some sort of a weird social disconnect.

He had a really hard time connecting with people and

couldn't get a woman to like him for various reasons.

Blame them for his hate and his feeling.

That's...

When people see, when they look around, they see all these people that are attractive.

They see all these people that are that are attracted to each other, and then they're left out of that.

They're frustrated.

They're angry.

It drives them fucking crazy.

And I think that's where this Elliott Rogers guy fit in.

And when this yes-all women thing came about, on one hand, I agree with it.

It's got to be way more difficult to be a woman, way more difficult to constantly worry about your own physical safety, worry about men wanting to sexually assault you, which is very rare for a man to fear.

I mean, maybe in prison, yeah, but in real life, it's very rare for men to worry about other men physically sexually abusing them or wanting to get them somewhere and roofy them up and sexually abuse them.

But for women, it's a super common occurrence.

So women in bars are always worried about covering a drink.

I've talked to at least five women over the course of my life that believe or were definitely roofied or were definitely drugged by someone with unknown drug.

They woke up in someone's hotel room.

It's disgusting and evil and creepy.

And it's something that men don't have to worry about, but women do.

But when a guy like that comes along, I think it's not a matter of,

it's not a matter of, it's a matter of a mental illness is what it is.

I mean, that guy was a mentally ill person.

I don't know what causes a person like that to be mentally ill, but I don't think that women can prevent that by not breeding.

I don't think that women can prevent a guy like that from being born.

Listening to this clip, Joe is just all over the map.

here.

He sure is.

He really is.

Like, he's not going to accept that misogyny was the driver in Elliot Rogers' murders, yet he is then able to articulate that women do face more threats at the hands of men and, you know, than men ever will.

And that it is all women and that women will experience this all the time.

And that it isn't women's, that Elliot Rogers had a mental illness and that's what was responsible, but it's not women's fault to take that away.

So he's just sort of swinging back and forth through the positions here.

And it speaks to me like a man who hasn't fully thought things through.

It feels like, yeah, all I can really take is that Joe is someone who he likes to think his own thoughts.

He likes to try and process it himself, but he doesn't then listen to anybody else.

He's not capable of listening to anyone else's experiences, really, when it comes to things he might have an emotional reaction to.

And that's not the women whose experience is different from his own.

It's also not the people who are highlighting that misogyny is driving these acts.

And it's not even to the killer who says, I want to kill all women.

Like, Joe won't listen to any of these things or let them influence his worldview.

Also, he keeps on coming back to this person was crazy.

There was something wrong with him.

This person was nuts.

This person, they were definitely insane.

Blah, blah, blah.

He keeps on going back.

And it's like, yeah, there was something wrong with him.

He was a misogynist.

That was something wrong with him.

But it's not something that Joe wants to pick up on.

He thinks that's like completely abnormal behavior and doesn't recognize it maybe in the person who's sitting across from him.

Yeah, exactly.

And the thing is, I don't know that Joe would would have this difficulty accepting it if it was a spree killer who had published a manifesto saying, I want to kill people of color.

I hate people of color.

Everything that's wrong with America.

And then he went off and killed a bunch of people of color and some white people along the way.

I don't think Joe would be saying, well, we can't call that guy a racist.

That guy wasn't a racist.

I don't think Joe would be doing it.

But when it comes to misogyny, he is doing it.

And I think it's worth us reflecting on why that might be and what the difference is.

I don't think Joe Rogan has been accused of being a racist anywhere near as many times as he might have been accused of being a sexist.

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.

And I think, would he be trying to carry so much water for that guy to say he was crazy if that person were to kill a bunch of people of color?

Would he be saying over and over, well, this is a crazy part.

This is just a crazy part.

This is just, or would he say, no, this was an awful racist?

Yeah.

More on Elliot Roger.

That guy was a monster.

That guy was an asshole.

And it's no woman's fault.

Well,

okay, so let's pull back from Elliot Roger because we don't know much about his childhood.

We know that he had some complaints about the way his stepmom treated him, but I went over that in the video.

So a study came out recently.

And again, I had the guy on my show to talk about it.

And what he did was he went to a sort of middle-class neighborhood and went to a daycare.

And he said to the women, listen, I really want to study.

aggression, yelling, whatever in families.

I need you to wear this recorder for, I don't know, a week or 10 days or whatever it was.

And so he had the women wear this recorder and then he got the footage back or the audio back.

And he found that the women were hitting the children a lot, a lot, like 936 times a year, an average of three times a day from 16 months to four years of age.

Where was this study?

Where is it taking place?

I can't remember where, but it was.

Yeah, I'll give you the link for, maybe Micah can dig it up.

I'll give you the link for the show.

936 times.

How many people were involved in the study?

I think 40 or so.

So it's not comprehensive, but this is a middle-class neighborhood.

Comprehensive and even poor, right?

40 is a pretty good number.

And out of those 40 people, what percentage of them were hitting their kids?

I think all but two.

And the other two were verbally aggressive.

Whoa.

So the idea that women are not part of the cycle of violence to me seems...

So.

What I think is interesting here, this is off the back of the criticisms about Stéphane Molyneux's position on Elliott Rogers, something that Stefan has talked knowledgeably about on episodes of his show.

That's why Joe is bringing Elliot Rogers into this conversation.

Joe's not bringing up out of nowhere.

He's referencing the fact that Stefan has put up videos about what motivated Elliot Rogers.

Once there's any kind of pushback, Stefan immediately, 100% shifts the focus away from Elliot Rogers completely.

He brings up a different study.

There isn't even a moment where he tries to defend it.

He says, well, you know, we don't know too much about Elliot.

So let's go over here and look at this thing over here instead.

Well, if you don't know that much about Elliot Rodgers, why are you publishing videos about him in the first place?

But instead, he brings up this thing here instead.

He brings up this study.

And it's enough to distract Joe.

And Joe.

essentially almost forgets that they were ever asking questions about Elliot Rogers because he's, whoa, that stat is crazy, man.

Yeah, yeah.

He got motivated by shiny change.

Yes, 100%.

And he just immediately followed the shiny change.

He's like a goldfish or something.

You could easily just move him around his cage or his little little tank.

I want to say that I think I found what they were talking about.

It's hard to know, but the numbers seem to match up in this particular article I found from Time.

So you can look at this.

There's an archive link to the Time.

It's a recording of where they talk about that.

I think the title of the article is, Would You Record Spanking Your Kids?

And so that's the title of the article.

And then they talk about this particular study that happened.

And it really has nothing to do with violence perpetrated and continued by women.

It has the way in which

people use

violence in parenting and how that's systemic in our country.

I mean, like, it's more so that, I think, than it is just women perpetrating it.

And then it's also very specifically, if you're recording the women, one of the things you have to understand is that women do a lot of the caregiving and the raising of young children.

So would they be more

around disciplining the child and doing those sorts of things?

I think so.

So again, I think like you've got to take some of these things into account when you pay attention whether or not this is a good study or not.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Like it does, this doesn't.

These things don't, and he'll bring up lots of stats in this kind of area.

They don't prove that women are more violent.

It just means that women are more present.

So if there is spanking going on in a child's life, it's going to be by the parents who are the most present.

And this is being used to suggest that violence against children is an issue of female perpetrators.

But even just take a step back and consider that.

Think about anyone in your life who's ever talked about experiencing violence from a parent as a kid.

How many of them single out their mothers as being the ones they were scared of?

And how many talk about their dads being the ones they were scared of?

You know, the dad with the belt, that kind of thing.

Well, you know, Stefan would have you believe this is a purely one-sided issue.

He'll say when he's pushed on it, I'm not talking about only women, but he's only talking about women.

So he's not saying anything about the men.

And when he gives these lectures, he's not saying, obviously, male aggression is a really serious issue.

There's a lot of resources in there elsewhere.

So I'm going to look over here at this other side of it.

He's just looking at the other side of it and pretending that

the whole male side of it isn't a problem or doesn't exist.

Yeah.

And so let's talk about female aggression.

That's what this next clip is about.

And again, this doesn't explain Elliot Roger, but, you know, but the reality is that women...

And men too, like, again, and not all women, right?

My wife is an incredible mom,

but there there is a lot of aggression coming from women towards children.

Now, it's funny because when people talk about, when I talk about this kind of stuff, people will say, well, what about men?

It's like, but we know about men.

We need to look at the stuff that's not seen, right?

Because right now it's like, you know, like it's just men are basty and men need to change.

Yes, men need to change.

Absolutely.

Of course, men need to change.

But saying that women are not part of the cycle of violence is not correct with the data.

And I am committed against all calumny, against all insults, against all hates and trolls.

I am committed to doing everything I can to maximize peace in the world.

I know that sounds like crappy and deluded and all that, but that is my commitment, you know, in life.

And if we can get women to stop hitting children, the world will become a much more peaceful place.

If we can get men to stop hitting children, absolutely.

But

male aggression has already been focused on so much that there is this blind spot, which is the degree to which women use aggression in the raising of children.

80% of British mothers spank their child before the child is one year old.

Wow.

I mean, it's mad.

It is mad.

And we'll come to that stat because I had to spend some time looking to see if I could figure this out.

But first of all, let's just really address the fact that he's defending against this claim that this is a one-sided attack by saying, well, everyone else is talking about men.

He's just helping shed a light on a blind spot.

But that only works if you're clear in your messaging that you are addressing a blind spot, not the major or sole cause.

And that is where Stefan gets valid criticism because you can't say the world will be better if we stop women hitting children without making clear that men are even more likely to be the perpetrators of violence towards children.

You just don't happen to be talking about it right now.

And anybody listening to this interview with Joe Rorgan will say, why is he getting all this criticism?

He keeps saying, yes, male violence is an issue.

Yeah, there's loads of people spending their time over there.

He's just interested in the fact that people aren't spending their time on female violence.

But the point is, he's saying that here on Rogan, where his agenda is to look reasonable, to deflect any criticism and to try and recruit as many of Rogan's fans over to Molyneux's channel, where he won't be as nuanced in his language.

Right.

Even here, he's saying, you know, I'm just saying that when people say that the people saying that women aren't part of the cycle of violence, that's not correct with the data.

Nobody is saying that.

There is nobody saying that women aren't involved in spanking their kids.

I haven't found anyone who's ever said that.

We do know that violence is more more likely to come from men and it's more likely more substantial and more extreme when perpetrated by a male perpetrator.

But obviously women can spank their kids as well.

80% of British mothers, apparently, I have no idea where this 80% figure came from.

He said, oh, it's mad.

It's not just mad.

I think it's made up.

Okay.

I can't be sure of that because this was an interview in 2015.

So, okay, maybe there are sources that I couldn't find.

I spent a lot of time looking because 80% of British mothers before the age of of one year old.

So this is babies.

This isn't 80% have spanked their kid at some point.

It's spanking a baby.

I looked at this data.

It doesn't sound remotely plausible.

As someone who lives in the UK, this did not sound plausible.

I couldn't find his source.

So what I could find to try and sort of triangulate around whether his source could be true or whether his stat could be true, I found a 2021 YouGov poll, which found that 13% of people say that they were never physically punished as a child.

13% say they were never punished, with 29% of people between the ages of 18 and 24 saying they were never ever

physically punished as a child.

That was the lowest age group in the study.

That feels incompatible with the idea that 80% of mums are spanking their one-year-old.

The highest figure was 93% of people aged 45 to 54 say they were physically punished.

But the wording of that question is

as adolescents.

So not as babies, not as one-year-olds.

I found another study from 2024, a UCL study, which said that physical punishment for any frequency, of any frequency, was most common for three-year-olds.

And that was 70% for boys and 64% of girls.

And it decreased as children got older and moved through their primary school years.

The peak age,

the peak age was around three years, and the decrease with age is a universal finding that's been reported internationally in comparable contexts.

And that study included the line, quote, looking across time, more than 80% of mothers reported using physical punishments

by the time the child was seven years old.

Unquote.

So there's the 80% of British mothers banking their kids.

But it sounds like if this is what he's referring to, he's mistaken the seven for a one.

Maybe.

That's the best that I can do because it's 80%.

It's the same figure.

I mean,

our

Secretary of Education mistook AI for A1.

So it's possible that it could be that he just, you know, he missawed.

He thought the little dash on the top.

We're not sure.

We can't be sure, Marshall.

Who knows?

Who knows?

I can't be be sure of that.

I genuinely don't know if it was a mistake or not, but we've got an 80% of mothers saying they've spanked their kid by the time the kid was seven.

So we've got something in the same kind of area.

Sure.

What I did find was a medium post from 2015 from someone who was a fan of Stephen Molyneux, who summarized some of the statistics from a Stephan Molyneux video where he talks about these, what seem to be these specific claims.

So, and I'll link these in the show notes.

But in this post, it highlights that, quote, biological mothers are three times more likely than biological fathers to commit abuse against a child um which sounds like a horrifying stat interesting there it's worth thinking about the wording biological mothers more likely than biological fathers if we think about that in the context of who's like who's more likely to end up as a single parent for example great point or with custody in their new relationship biological mothers so maybe yeah biological mother is with her her new partner and she's the one who's disciplining the child i'm not saying the physical copper punishment is is right at all i'm very firmly against it, but I just think it's worth seeing this in context.

There's another quote here.

In a large representative study that examined the characteristics of perpetrators in substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect in the United States, neglect was the main type of abuse in 66% of cases involving a female caregiver, compared to 36% of cases involving a male caregiver, to which Stéphane Molyneux's commentary was, so almost twice as likely to neglect, which in many ways is the worst abuse.

So working that through, if we think about what that means, it must mean that abuse other than neglect wasn't the most prevalent form of abuse in most cases.

66% was the most prevalent form of use and that was neglect.

So spanking can't be 80% because that would be more than the 66%.

So

by the stats at the time, it can't make sense.

It seems incompatible with the world where 80% of women are spanking back.

Right.

And a final stat I'll bring out from that medium post.

A 2011 study in Child and Youth Services Review published an article indicating that the percentage of mothers who spanked their child increased with age, 15% did so at 12 months, 40% at 18 months, and 50% at 20 months, to which Stefan Molyneux said, can I just say something here?

I can't believe it's the 21st century and this still needs to be said to at least half of the women who are taking care of babies.

Stop hitting babies.

Okay, that's what he's saying here.

And again, hitting babies is bad.

But this study that Stefan is quoting in 2015 says 15% of mothers are doing it.

Stefan just told Joe it was 80% of mothers doing it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, okay, I had to do a deep dive on this because the thing is, if we're being as charitable as possible here, we could say that Stefan is misquoting a statistic that he's misread or misremembered that happens to wildly overestimate the prevalence of violence towards babies from women in a way that perfectly conveniently aligns with the extreme point he happened to be trying to make at the time.

At the bottom of all this, the good news is Stefan wants to live in a world where fewer than four in five British mothers spank their one-year-old infants.

And good news, Stefan, you live in it and you always have lived in it.

All right.

So now they're going to continue to talk about that particular study.

Here's the next bit.

What we're talking about is horrific.

You know, what we're talking about is just that's...

Anytime you're hitting a fucking baby, that's sick.

I mean, the fact that so many people do it is really hard to believe.

I don't have any access to any statistics, and I believe you.

I'm not sure if I can do it.

Well, again, people can look.

I grilled the guy on my show and so people can listen to it.

But Mike's going to put it out on Twitter.

My Twitter handle is Stefan Molyneux.

But yeah, people can look at the study.

And this is lots of studies around this.

I'll retweet that study because that's incredibly disturbing.

So the effect of citing this study is really very clear.

Joe is horrified, sidetracked, and incapable of remembering that we were talking about Elliot Rogers and whether women are really more aggressive to their children than men are.

These are Stefan's main points that Joe was trying to debate and counter and were completely sidetracked.

Stefan has totally redirected him on this.

We're not even on the same conversation anymore.

Yeah, I mean, this is a perfect example at a sort of a very early phase in Joe's podcasting career where someone completely changed the subject.

And I look through the transcript.

We never mention Elliot Roger again.

So we are at this point, there's still over an hour of tape left in this show that Joe is recording, and they don't mention Elliot again.

They're done.

That's the end of the conversation.

He has completely sidetracked him.

And it reminded me of how easily Joe was sidetracked during the Asim Melhatra interview when he was able to cherry pick some of these stats and show Joe that statins weren't, were over-prescribed.

or whatever, you know, the conversation he was having with Asim Melhatra.

It was really easy to see how easily joe was pulled away from any kind of criticism whatsoever and and then he gets stuck in that that sort of whoa joe mode and then it's over now there's there you can you can basically just push him where you want you can just move him around the room to wherever you want once you once you're able to you remember you remember that thing where they used to do with chickens where you come down with your finger and the chicken just stares at the one and it's just frozen i feel like

you can do that to joe with studies if you do it correctly then you could just basically pick him up and he's completely movable.

You could put him wherever you want.

We're going to take a short break.

We'll be back right after this.

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All right, we're back.

Let's jump right back in.

Now they're going to continue to talk about women, obviously, because this is a section about misogyny.

And they're going to mention that it's a lot of things are women's fault.

Yeah, that's a terrible cycle to be a part of.

And those numbers are absolutely incredibly disturbing.

But that's not exactly what I had read.

What I had read where you were essentially talking about women's attraction to assholes and that this was the cause of their being more assholes.

And if women just stood up and said they're not going to be with assholes anymore, we wouldn't have any assholes in the world.

And I just don't know.

Well, look, I mean,

when it's stated as a complete and isolated absolute, I get that it sounds deranged, right?

Right.

And I, you know, I've certainly held men's feet to the fire as far as aggression and violence goes as well.

And I've talked to dads not to hit their kids and all that.

So I'm not saying, well, no, I don't need to talk to you.

You're the dad.

Let me talk to the only person who is ever aggressive to children, which must be the woman.

But the reality is, I think, and I think this is, you know, somewhat debatable.

I think it's fairly well established that in general, men ask women out and women say yes or no.

That's generally how it works.

And there are exceptions and all that, right?

But in studies I've read about 90% of dates are initiated by men.

And so women are doing the choosing.

And I'm saying to women, one of the ways that women can incredibly contribute to reducing the cycle of violence is to to choose better men.

Okay, pedantic point here, but women are doing the second choosing.

The first choosing is done by the man to start the conversation in his worldview.

So a little pedantic point, but I did want to point it out.

What are you talking about?

Better men?

Like women need to find better men.

Shouldn't we be teaching men to be better men?

Like and not just to be awful?

We're saying, well, you know, it's a mixed bag.

Whatever guy you get is whatever guy you get.

No, you could just be a better dude.

You can just increase the

sort of niceness factor of men versus whether or not women have to navigate a landmine field every time they're trying to decide who to go out with.

Yeah, completely.

But also, especially when he's saying here, women should be choosing better men.

Don't go for the asshole.

Don't go for the abusive person.

Go for the better man.

It suggests that women go into dates knowing that a man is violent and abusive.

Like they put it on their Tinder profile, like six foot two, violent and abusive.

In reality, that isn't how it works.

In fact, it's more likely to work the other way.

Abusers are often highly manipulative.

Yeah.

So they'll only become abusive once they're in relationships, once they feel they've got a sense of ownership, entitlement, control, power, these types of things.

They'll cycle between love bombing and abuse to keep people coming back to them once they're kind of hooked in.

All of this stuff is very, very well known about manipulative abusers.

And he glosses over all of that and leaves it with women just must like dating abusive guys, I guess.

So he can just put all the pin, like pin all the blame on women here.

Yeah.

What a great point.

Absolutely.

Okay.

So now we're going to continue on with the sort of women versus men argument.

And I get that.

I mean, men are attracted to particular physical things which indicate fertility, and women are attracted to particular male traits that indicate good provider.

And again, there's nothing wrong with any of that.

That's perfectly natural.

But the reality is that we do need to be wise in who we choose to raise our kids with and who we choose to have kids with.

And I berate men all the time for choosing looks over virtue.

I mean, on my show, I'm horrendous on men for choosing looks over virtue.

And we've all been there.

We've all done it.

And we all know what a mistake that is, right?

What is it that someone says, I don't care how good looking she is.

There's some guy out there who's tired of screwing her, right?

And so I talk to men about don't just, you know, go for virtue.

You know, virtue is the big tits of philosophy, right?

I mean, that's what you want to go for when you're going to get married.

And for women, I say the same thing, go for virtue.

But I think men's tendency to choose on shallow standards is fairly well known.

And again, I'm just trying to sort of shine the light on that other side and say, look, if like you need to sort of cross your legs and grit your teeth and say, he may be sexy, but he's not a good guy.

I'm not going to have kids with him.

And I think that will help a lot.

I mean, I want to empower women to be like, not to be victims alone, right?

I mean, I'm trying to empower, once you give people, like if you say, look, women are part of the cycle of violence, then women aren't helpless and just need to sit on their knees and beg men not to be violent.

Women can actually talk amongst themselves and be empowered to do things to help reduce the prevalence of violence in society.

Choose better men.

Don't punish your kids.

Don't yell at them.

Don't hit at them.

Reason with them.

That gives women something to do rather than cross their fingers and hope that men get better.

Number one philosopher on the internet just said, virtue is the big tits of philosophy.

I just want to point that out.

Yeah.

So

can I ask why men aren't pushed to get better?

Like, why do we have to hope?

Why do we have to just hope that men get better instead?

Can't we do more than that?

Isn't there a way to maybe do more than that?

It's just so, it just seems so lazy.

It just seems so unbelievably lazy that you would say, well, it's all on the women here.

Yeah, it's like men are some sort of naturally occurring phenomenon like the weather.

It's like, well, we can't really control it.

We just have to have fingers crossed that men start to improve.

And he's saying that he's very fair in his criticism, but he's criticizing women for actively seeking out abusive men.

And then he's criticizing men for being taken in by the looks of deceitful women rather than trying to work out of the wound of bad people.

It feels like either way in his worldview, the problem is women.

It's the women who can't make good choices or the women who are deceiving men, but it's all on the women.

And it just, as he was talking there, when I've just listened to it as we would go in that time, it seems like the way that he's phrasing it as, you know, the women who are going after these men who are like, they might be sexy, but they're not a good guy, you know, cross your legs, grit your teeth, don't go for for that guy.

It feels in that space of women prefer dating assholes than they do nice guys,

which was the manifesto of Elliot Rogers.

And I'm just going to bring it back to Elliot Rogers because that's where the conversation was.

It was all about women don't know how to date nice guys.

They date assholes instead.

It's like an incel mantra, like genuinely is.

And I think that is actually one of the interesting things about Rogan.

As much as we criticize Rogan having this belief that just sit down and talk people for long enough and you'll get to hear what they're about, he is actually doing this.

He just can't hear it.

So he has got Molyneux to sit down and get to this point where Molyneux is really showing this kind of incel language, incel coded language.

But Joe, because he's in the middle of conversation, he can't spot it.

So he's not good at picking these things out.

People will reveal themselves over a long conversation, but you have to be tuned in and capable of spotting it.

Molyneux's standard here is women's virtue.

Go for women that are virtuous.

What exactly do we mean by women who are virtuous?

I'm sure we could figure out exactly what that world, what virtue looks like in his world, what a virtuous woman looks like.

And I'm guessing it is the woman who grits her teeth and crosses her legs and doesn't go off and have

the sex that he would expect men to go off and have.

He's not asking for men to be virtuous.

There's no advocacy for men to be virtuous at all.

These are red pill ideas.

It all comes down to women, if you want to end the violence in the world, stop hitting kids, stop dating violent men, problem solved.

Yep.

There's no sign here of, oh, and also men have a role to play.

That's his idea.

Okay, so now they're going to scroll back to what we started the show with, the Robin Williams conversation.

Yeah, back to Robin Williams.

These videos that you do, I think they're very interesting, but to do a...

biography on someone requires an extensive amount of preparation and massive amounts of research.

So when you do the truth and the word the truth is a very tricky thing because there's many truths, there's many versions.

Like, I've had conversations with people.

They'll say, Oh, you know, I heard that this person met this person and that person was an asshole.

I'm like, Well, actually, I was there, and that's not what happened at all.

That person was annoying as fuck, and the other person was trying to get away from them, and that's why, you know, they looked like an asshole.

You did this, the truth thing about Robin Williams, and your conclusion was that Robin Williams died because of women's addiction to free stuff and that he essentially killed himself because of the fact that he owed money, because the fact that he spent a lot of money in his alimony.

I think that's an irresponsible statement because I think, first of all, it may have been a factor.

It certainly was a factor in his unhappiness, but we're not even aware of what kind of behavior he had in those relationships.

It was probably also a factor in the breakup of the relationship, also a factor in the antagonism that he shared with his ex-wives, if and when, whether or not that did take place.

But also his alcoholism, his drug dependency, his medical state, the state of the just the natural body and brain chemistry after years and years of abusing drugs and then going back into it.

And then depression itself.

Then on top of that, Parkinson's disease.

Then on top of that, whatever medication that he was taking for Parkinson's disease, disease, which many have been proven to cause depression in people.

So to boil it all down to Robin Williams died because of women's addiction to free stuff, I think that's irresponsible.

Okay, I'm going to give Joe sort of half points here, in my opinion.

He says irresponsible, he calls him out for saying it and does say it's irresponsible twice, but he also sort of kind of says, well, it probably played a factor, but then there's also this other stuff.

And so he's kind of adding things in here to make it, he's he's sort of softening it and making it seem like Malinu had a point, but there was other stuff involved.

Yeah, I think that's true.

Although I think that is, it's Joe kind of not wanting to upset or

contradict his guest.

He always has to placate.

He always has to play nice.

I actually think it's a relatively admirable pushback.

Like he's not ruling out the fact that divorce settlements could have had some sort of part to play in his, in the mindset, which means because he's not wholly ruined that out, it sort of gives Stefan less of a handhold to respond.

He can't be like, well, you say it wasn't a factor, but how about this?

He's like, okay, it might have been a factor, but could be these other things as well, or these other factors.

And so he can still point the finger at Stefan for being irresponsible while also taking away one of the easiest ways to push back, which is to go, well, you know,

I've said it's the whole factor.

You said it isn't a factor.

If I can prove that it was at least part of a factor, you're wrong.

And we never have to deal with the fact that I've said it's everything.

So I don't think it's too bad a pushback.

There could be better, but for Joe, this isn't bad.

Now they're going to talk about divorce still, because they're still on the same topic.

And they're talking about divorce and sort of the origins of divorce and the origins of alimony.

But then this idea of until death do us part kind of came out of the Catholic Church.

And that's sort of where it came from.

And it is brutal.

And some people got upset and say, well, you're saying that being a wife is only a job?

Well, kind of.

And being a husband is kind of a job too, right?

I mean, there is a financial aspect to marriage that, you know, it's foolish to ignore.

And

I think it is pretty terrible.

I think that's also something that breaks up a lot of families too, because

more than half of people who are considering divorce, if they stick it out five years later, they say, I'm really glad I did.

You know, there's a lot of

people who go through challenges, rough spots, tough spots, transitions.

You never know.

You get sick or

you lose some money or you lose your job.

I mean, things can happen that are really tough.

People have affairs.

But the majority of people who stick out their marriages.

And again, it's not like 99%, but certainly more than 50.

Majority of people who stick out their marriages, Joe, are very happy that they did.

I hate using those terms.

I hate saying the majority of when you're dealing with individual relationships because they vary so widely that I don't think that you can really narrow them down to statistics.

I think every individual interaction between two unique people is unique in and of itself.

I don't mind Joe's pushback there.

He could quite easily have gone, oh, that's interesting.

People kind of regret divorce or happy they didn't divorce in the end.

He could have just nodded along, but he pushes back and says we shouldn't be doing these kind of generalizations.

It's not the pushback I would have chosen, but I think it's still something.

I think it's something.

Obviously, what Stefan is not caring about in this statement at all, that oh, you actually maybe shouldn't get divorced.

Maybe you should try and stay together.

Most people are pretty happy if they do stay together.

He's missing how many divorces happen because of male violence towards women.

A huge number of divorces happen that way.

And before divorce, women were trapped in abusive relationships.

You didn't have a way out.

Divorce gave people, gave women a way out of those

situations, those potentially deadly situations.

Women are more likely to be killed by their male partner than by a stranger.

That is just kind of true.

Stefan's advice to all this is stick it out, it'll get better.

And what that means is if you are someone who's in one of those situations and you're listening to the internet's most famous philosopher, apparently, you're going to hear the message of, I should stick it out.

I shouldn't try and get divorced.

It'll get better.

It'll get better.

And that is really dangerous and damaging information.

Yeah, and it wasn't just that divorce was legal too, because in our country, I don't know how it was in the rest rest of the world, but I can certainly speak to the United States.

There was a lot of rules against women having their own finances for a long time in the United States up until the 70s.

So there was several, there was women couldn't get loans by themselves.

They couldn't have credit cards by themselves.

There was lots of things that held women down in our country.

So they were 100%

dependent on a man in order to have

a normal life.

They couldn't live on their own in the same way they could if they were married.

So there was also some really deep misogyny built into our system that we're still trying to overcome.

Yeah, for sure.

So this next piece is they're talking about alimony.

In Europe, there's, I mean, really no such thing.

Yeah.

Like, and people can check out the movie Divorce Corps.

I found like

I don't get any money from this stuff, but I think it's a good movie.

And they sort of compare what goes on in Europe.

So in Europe, the worst that can happen is you have to pay alimony during the period that the divorce is going through.

But once it's done, it's done.

Now, there can be child support and so on, but it's not much.

It's a weird thing, this idea that once a woman has separated from her husband, that she's no longer able to live her life as an independent.

That's so strange.

I don't understand how that ever came to be.

And this idea that you have to keep her in the same fashion and style.

In the style to which she has become accustomed.

It's so crazy.

Like if you, if you're a woman and you are used to being a waitress and you're used to living in an apartment, there's nothing wrong with that.

And then all of a sudden you meet some guy who's some real estate mogul who's worth a billion dollars and he puts you up in his Beverly Hills mansion and you live with him for a year and you get married.

Should you discount the 30 years of your life that you lived as a waitress?

Should there be an average?

Yeah, it feels like, and this is, there's a sort of a long bit in this where they keep doing the same thing.

They're sort of picking these really obviously slanted corner cases and they're saying, oh, well, you know, like if somebody was married for like a month, why do they they need, why do they have access to all the money that you had beforehand, et cetera, et cetera.

And they keep bringing it up in multiple different times throughout this conversation.

And I'm like, man, there's also a lot of people out there that build their wealth together and then they get divorced and then they should have to split that wealth up.

And then since the other person might not have been working and maybe was taking care of the house, they should also get something for that.

Like the idea that you just say, well, alimony is stupid because in a corner case that I picked out, it sounds stupid is a bad way to argue.

Yeah, it is.

And early in the conversation,

they even talk about whether Robin Williams' ex-wives, whether the amount that they got was a just settlement.

And to Joe's credit, Joe pushes back.

Stefan's saying, is it fair that they got this amount?

And Joe's like, well, I don't know if it's fair that Robin Williams got paid that much for making people laugh.

The world is weird in terms of numbers.

It's like, okay, that was an interesting thing.

Absolutely.

But because Stefan keeps that conversation going and keeps bringing different angles, eventually he distracts Joe off and Joe's now kind of on board and he's kind of parroting the same kind of stuff.

And the whole point here about the alimony stuff is men have way more capital and income and opportunities in society.

And women up until the very, very, very recently have been expected to have to be the main childcare.

They still are in most cases, in fact.

So they don't have the careers that bring them income.

Alimony is an attempt to address that.

And for every extreme example that they'll talk about already and that they're going to talk about in the next clip, there are thousands of examples where a man's career was built on his wife raising their kids.

And that's why he was able to make that kind of money to get to that position.

And she wasn't able to because her career was put on the back burner in order for them to raise their kids.

Exactly.

Okay.

So last bit on alimony here.

There's two cases, Kevin Federlein and Tom Arnold.

We won on both of those cases.

Those cases are all men.

But remember, it's only 3% 3% of alimony payments are men to women.

Yeah.

Sorry, women to women.

Women to men.

Yeah.

And it's $10 billion a year.

It's a $10

billion a year money transfer thing.

And it's pretty brutal.

I think it's brutal on men.

And I think it's brutal on women.

I mean, free stuff is

bad for the brain, unless you're like...

It's bad for the soul.

It's bad for the soul.

You know, free stuff, again, hey, you know, I mean, you're injured, you know, absolutely charity and all that.

But

the focus on free stuff, I think,

personality is like a muscle.

It needs resistance.

You know, you need to have challenges in life.

Ah,

you can hear him sort of suggest, you know, free stuff makes you weak.

And Joe immediately jumps to agree.

This is again that finger that comes down in front of the chicken's nose.

And Joe is just like, yep, you can 100% hypnotize me if you know the ways in which to do it.

They come in and they have that

flute or whatever.

The Cobra and this is it.

Free stuff for people.

Joe doesn't agree.

Yeah.

All you need to do is you keep trying sort of different buttons until you find the one that gets Joe completely on board.

And then you just keep hitting that button.

Because from here, this is relatively near the end of the conversation.

Stefan knows he needs to go away making the listeners feel like he's a very reasonable guy, making sure that Joe's listeners like him.

So he actually redirects the entire conversation for the rest of this conversation from this point, basically, essentially by asking Joe, so why are you so cool and successful and dreamy?

Hey, now I've got you.

Can I just ask you why you're so brilliant?

And I, shit, you know, Joe, I check.

Joe talks about himself after this for six straight minutes without Stefan saying a word because Stefan has found that little button to get off the bits where Joe was asking tricky questions or pushing back or saying, maybe alimony isn't a totally evil thing.

Maybe it's reasonable for this partnership.

He finds that button, he presses it.

And now Joe is completely on board again.

Why don't you introduce this last clip here?

You wanted me to move it very specifically.

Yeah, so this, this is from earlier in the conversation, but I think it's worth putting at the end of this segment because this is all about public perception.

And then Joe is kind of bringing up what the public perception of Stéphane Molyneux is and why that might be flawed from the way that people have listened to him.

And I just want to play it and then we can talk about it.

Do you think that maybe part of the problem with your perception,

the public perception of you, is that you don't engage in these kind of conversations where you're allowed to elaborate and you're questioned on things and people get to see a more nuanced perspective?

What do you mean?

Instead of this like hour-long echo chamber where you do these videos, you know, just, it's your thoughts, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

Thank you.

Good night.

You could just hear Joe falling in love with his own format over and over and over when we listened to his show.

And it was starting as early as 2014.

Yeah, absolutely.

But in a way, he's kind of right that the reason Stéphane Molyneux gets criticism is because he isn't regularly involved in conversations like this, where he can sanitize and whitewash what he's actually saying in front of an or in front of a larger slightly more mainstream audience and bring those people back to his channel because what Joe is completely missing here are is what the criticisms of Stéphane Molyneux actually are he thinks the criticism is always too black and white he's kind of dogmatic he'll say these things in an echo chamber and never engage with the criticism and that's why people have issues with him that isn't why people have issues with stefan molyneux anna in that clip you played right at the start that her criticism very clearly included Stefan makes misogynistic jibes and attacks based on her looks, based on her makeup, based on her trappings of being a woman, because he sees that as lesser.

These are misogynistic attacks.

And Joe can't see that.

And part of the reason he can't see it is because Stefan isn't doing that here.

He's sort of saying, do you not think if you had more conversations like this, people wouldn't have these kind of criticisms?

If this conversation

was what Stefan was all about, it wouldn't be as extreme.

Like, why would, but the reason people people don't have those more extreme criticisms, I mean, there are still, as you say, the longer you spend with Stefan, this stuff will come out.

But people aren't able to have the criticisms of the far extreme end of what he's saying is because he's not doing that here.

Why would he do those things here on Joe Rogan's show?

Rogan is a guy.

He's not going to start bringing up misogynistic, dismissive arguments at Rogan.

So they're on the same side here.

They can be bros about it.

But also, Stefan knows if he's on his best behavior, the rewards here can be massively significant.

And that's what he's doing on this show.

We're going to take a quick break and then move on to our toolbox section.

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Wow.

So that's the tool bag?

And something just fell out of the tool bag?

So Marsh, we have a toolbox, a short toolbox this week on slippery slopes.

So can you tell our listeners what a slippery slope fallacy is?

Yeah, absolutely.

So a slippery slope logical fallacy.

It's a rhetorical technique where you argue against a point by making out that it will inevitably lead to some really serious consequences, even though those consequences don't actually follow directly from the point in hand.

So for example, my wife wants me to repaint the front of our house.

Well, I could tell her, I don't want to do that because if I do that, it's going to make my neighbors homeless.

That sounds ridiculous.

It makes no sense as an argument.

But I could say, I could say, well, if I paint our house, then other neighbors nearby, they're going to want to paint their houses and make the front of their houses look even nicer so they can keep up.

And before we know it, the entire area has spruced itself up.

And so, because it's so spruced up and much nicer, the landlord who owns the rental property over the road feels they can increase the rental price because it's such a pretty area.

And now our neighbor who lives in that place can't afford the new rent and is going to be forced out.

So we can conceive that each of those steps might possibly follow the previous one, but really, all of those downstream consequences don't follow from the initial premise.

Really, I'm just trying to pretend they're inevitable because I don't want to have to paint the house.

And in this conversation, Molyneux is going to do that a lot, especially when we talk about his supposedly anarchist political philosophy.

Yeah.

And we're going to get into his anarcho-capitalist views here at the end.

If you're not familiar with that term, that's like a really fancy way of saying libertarian.

It is a very far.

the philosophy ways of pretending he's a libertarian.

And here we go, the first clip.

Well, I mean, so, and I was a resistant anarchist.

Like for me, I was 20 years what's called like a minarchist.

I came sort of out of the objectivist Ayn Rand school, where your government is basically law and national defense, maybe a court system, maybe that sort of tiny, tiny government.

It's called the night watchman state, which is, you know, keep other people's mitts off my stuff and keep their shivs out of my kidney kind of thing.

That's the basic function of government.

And I was like,

but it always bothered me because that would still have to be funded through taxation, right?

And taxation, philosophically, morally, is the initiation of force, right?

I mean, it's like, I have a good idea, you have to pay for it.

And if you don't pay for it, you are going to get some letters.

And if you don't pay for it still, we're going to send some.

people over to your house in blue costumes.

And if you don't pay for it still, they're going to take you off to jail.

And so it is the initiation of force.

And that always bothered me.

And I guess it was about 2006.

uh i just um i just gave up the ghost as far as that goes if you like nobody wants to go with these particular directions it's just principles right you have to sort of hang on to your principles no matter what

Yeah, okay.

So you

believe Ayn Rand.

I can dismiss you out of hand.

That's perfect.

He believes something more extreme than Ayn Rand, even.

It's not even that he believes Ayn Rand.

It's that he moved on.

He's like, no, you're too wimpy for me.

I've got to move on from you.

I just, nobody who believes this stuff tries to ever just make it on their own.

They're always so safely nestled into a society that doesn't do what they're suggesting.

They're just like rocked to sleep every night by taxation.

And then they're like, yeah, but if taxation was here, I'd kick its ass.

I would totally kick its ass right now.

It's such a, it's such a liar's position because none of these people are trying to live it on their own.

Like they tried, a couple of these libertarians tried to do this with the sea steading.

I don't know if you've heard about this, but years ago they had the sea setting stuff and that stuff didn't work because nobody, one, because it's a bad idea, but then also just genuinely, it's not going to work.

You can't get this to work.

This sort of anarcho-capitalist utopia isn't going to exist in the world.

And none of these people believe it either, I don't think.

Yeah, I think I agree.

But he's talking here about taxation is the initiation of force.

Is that true?

Well, this is the slippery slope.

You know, he starts by saying, well, I have a good idea.

Well, it's more like the people have elected someone to carry out a service that we have collectively decided is a good idea.

He's trying to make it out like you're trying to, you're being forced to fund some guy's pipe dream.

It's not that at all.

The good idea is a collective good idea.

But you're saying, I have a good idea.

You have to pay for it.

Again, it's a we.

We've all agreed that we are going to pay for it.

He said, if you don't pay for it, you'll get some letters.

All right.

We've slipped down the slope a little bit, but we're at strongly worded letter.

Okay.

If you don't do it from there, we'll send people to your house.

And then after that, they'll take you to jail.

And it's slip, slip, slip after slip down the slope yep and you could argue it's inevitable inevitable but it's also just there to make it seem like that that first step of let's fund this good idea seem really sinister yeah and we've we've seen this in other places think of how jordan peterson got famous you know he said he'd be willing to go to prison rather than hypothetically respect a trans person by using their name and he cited a law where the maximum penalty was a fine not prison But he said, yeah, but if it came to that, I'd refuse to pay the fine and then I'd be taken to court.

And then I'd lose the court case.

And the court would tell me to pay and I'd still refuse to pay that and then it'd be in contempt of court and I'd be in prison for contempt of court.

You see, they'll throw you in prison just for disrespecting a trans person.

You can do this with anything.

You can do that.

If you push the consequences farther and farther, you can keep slipping that slope.

Did you know that if you take too long to eat a burger and McDonald's, they can throw you in prison.

If you're eating and you take so long and it's getting to closing time and you refuse to leave and they try to make you leave and you refuse and they call the police and you refuse and the police try to move you and you refuse and you resist arrest and you and then you're in prison.

See, McDonald's can throw you in prison.

We should boycott McDonald's.

Amazing.

Amazing.

All right.

So now we're going to continue out with that idea, the government's use of force.

It's not good philosophy to have a universal called the non-aggression principle, which you and I and this fine fellow here and the listeners, we all accept, right?

We're all here voluntarily.

You don't force anyone to come to your shows.

I don't force anyone to listen to what I do.

So we all accept that at our personal level.

And that's what we teach our kids, right?

Don't hit, don't take other people's stuff, don't push, you know, all that kind of stuff.

And so if we're going to have these rules, you know, much like science, like how far can we push these rules?

Now, I think that it's kind of wrong to say, well, we have these rules, but right up to here, we'll completely abandon them and go to the opposite.

Or at least we need to acknowledge that is what's going on in society.

So if we say that the non-aggression principle is the way that we should live, well, the government is just people.

How do they get this get out of jail free card where they can do stuff that is specifically illegal for the private citizens, like print money, like take out debts on behalf of other people.

And you and I can't do that.

I can't go buy a car and send you the bill.

And they can invade countries.

They can force people to pay for things.

They can incarcerate huge numbers of people, largely on a whim.

They can tell people who are doing things like drugs, which is a purely voluntary form of enjoyment and self-medication, they can throw them in jail.

I can't do that.

You can't do that.

If I want to pay for my kids' education, I don't get to walk up and down the street with a machete saying pay or die.

I mean, but this is the way that we've set up or the way we've inherited society.

Sorry, I I don't want to go on too big a rant.

No, but it's a good rant.

It's a good point as well.

The idea that

society has been sort of inherited, you know, that we have sort of been born into this system that is really not that well engineered and has massive flaws in it.

And it's a very good point when you talk about the reinforce the

taxes, like enforcing tax laws, that you can lock people in jail for owing money.

It's one of the only times where someone gets locked in a cage because they owe money, even if you choose to pay that money.

Okay, pinning that for a minute later.

But none of these people, and I'm going to keep coming back to this.

None of these people are just willing to just leave, right?

They don't want to pay for any of the establishment stuff.

Okay, that's fine.

That's your right.

You don't have to stay here.

They can go to Malanuistan or wherever they want to live.

That's fine.

But they don't ever do that, right?

They all voluntarily live here and then they don't want to pay taxes.

And then, you know, like, look, go live in your, in your utopia that you suggest and see how long that non-aggression pact stays when there's no one there to enforce anything.

See how long a non-aggression pact stays when there's real anarchy.

None of these people want real anarchy.

They don't know what they're talking about.

They just keep saying like, oh, well, you know, like, you just, you just, it's a, it's the government.

that's attacking me.

It's like, dude, take away the government and see how many people attack you.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And when he talks about the government, he's gone from saying, well, the government is just people to talking about them as a they, as if the government are other people, you know, rather than people put into position to represent the majority of people.

And obviously, government isn't ideally executed.

There's lots of problems with government.

People enter government to look after their own interests or the interests of the rich.

But the proposals he's suggesting would exacerbate that.

The proposals he's suggesting will look after the rich more than the poor.

So this is only going to be more this kind of minority, minority interest groups.

But listen to his false characterization in terms of that slippery slope.

He said, if I want to pay for my kids' education, I don't get to walk up and down the street with a machete saying pay or die.

The government is also not saying pay or die.

It's saying pay or you'll get a letter.

And if you don't pay, you'll get a court summons.

And if you don't pay that, you'll get a judgment.

And, and, and.

And yeah, if you slip down the slope long enough, you'll apparently get to death, but the death bit might seem a bit of a stretch.

Now, he's actually going to explain that for us later.

He will get to the death bit, but you can see how far down the line it's going to be.

Yeah, yeah.

And a lot of these guys all seem to have the idea that social safety nets are for freeloaders.

They keep saying that over and over again.

Oh, so you know, and we heard it earlier when he was talking about free stuff, how he was easily able to change Joe's mind.

When, you know, you can't, you can't just let yourself collect free stuff that's bad for your, your, you know, your mindset, et cetera, et cetera.

Look, man, if you send your kids to school and then you don't pay taxes for it, that's freeloading, man.

Then you're the freeloader.

Like, what are you talking about?

You just keep, they keep on doing this thing where they're saying, well, yeah, you know, I don't want other people to freeload off me, but they're willing to do it on us.

Yeah.

And nobody gets more free stuff than rich people.

That is, that's

the universal true thing about society.

100%.

You know, he's got this.

He's

explicitly using this argument.

We teach our kids not to use force, yet the government exerts things from us by force.

Well, we also teach our kids to share and to pay a fair share.

And that is ultimately what the idea, the concept of government is, is that we all share and pay a fair share.

And it's better for everyone if we do that.

Okay.

Next bit is where they're going to sort of continue on.

This is literally the second after we cut the tape.

This is they're continuing on talking about Wesley Snipes.

Yeah.

Wesley Snipes is a perfect example.

The actor chose to not pay his taxes based on an erroneous belief.

He had this belief that the Constitution

does not force you to pay taxes and that it's a misunderstanding that if you fight it in court, you would win.

He had these terrible advisors.

So he decided to not pay taxes for a long time and he made a really large sum of money.

And that is when they go after you.

When you're one of those people that is already the privileged few making an exorbitant amount of money and then you step up and say you don't have to pay taxes and you do it blatantly.

It didn't even matter if he tried to pay the money back.

They were going to lock him in jail no matter what.

They're like, this is, it's not, it's a crime.

And it's the only time it's a crime to owe money.

You know, every other time it's like, well, you have a debt and, you know, well, you have to pay that debt off.

Like, say, if I loaned you 100 bucks and we went to court and the court found out that you didn't pay me that 100 bucks, you don't go to jail.

You just have to pay me the hundred bucks.

But if you owe the government 100 bucks, they have the option to lock you in a cage.

And that to me is sort of akin to shitty parenting.

I want to point out that Joe is also missing that you can also be arrested for unpaid child support.

So it's not just taxes.

It can be other things too.

And unpaid child support, you owe money and they can arrest you for that.

I just want to say too, and I think this is important because I think Joe is missing this part of it.

Often people that are put in jail are put in jail for fraud.

They're doing a thing called tax evasion.

They're evading the tax.

That means they're trying to hide it.

They're deliberately trying to

steal money.

And in this case, steal the government's money, which is our money, right?

That's my money.

That's all the people who live near me's money.

That's all their money.

They like it's our collective money, and they are trying to steal it from us.

That is why they're putting.

There's again, you mentioned it earlier, Marsh, the they.

The they is us.

That's us, man.

So them stealing money, a person who steals money by tax evasion is stealing from all of us.

And that's something that I think Joe is sort of glossing over by using words that he that I don't think he understands.

Evasion is the key phrase here.

Yeah, exactly.

And he says, you know, it's the only time that owing a debt can send you to prison.

That's not true.

If you went bankrupt and you weren't paying

and you were sort of hiding money in a bankruptcy proceeding in order to avoid paying creditors in a civil case.

you could go to jail for bankruptcy fraud if you're trying to hide that money in sort of deceitful ways.

So it's not the only kind of way.

But it is a key point.

The people aren't being arrested for not paying the government money because the government have just like decided to demand money.

They're trying to avoid paying the amount of money that people have decided that we all pay in order to get the things that we need.

Because government is people.

Stefan keeps saying this.

And the people have decided that publicly funded education is a good thing.

If you want to opt out of that, you have to opt out of everything.

You can't pick and choose and say, well, I won't do the education bit because I'll go private.

So I won't pay for that bit of it.

That's not how it works.

You have to

pay into all of it.

It's also interesting that Joe is making out like, oh, it's unreasonable that they don't just let you off if you pay what you're told, that you try to avoid it, you get caught, and then you pay the money.

Firstly, that's not always the case.

For example, often you might be given the opportunity to pay what you owe if it's early enough or if it's not a huge amount or if it came from a genuine error.

You know, you owe $200 in taxes that you didn't pay last year.

We found this.

pay the $200.

Sometimes you might get an additional fine on top to kind of dissuade you from doing it again.

But they'll try and get the money from you because it's better to get the tax money into the system than have to spend money prosecuting tax crimes.

But once you then still refuse, or if you're found to be deliberately trying to avoid paying tax, paying once you get caught, obviously isn't enough.

Because think about it with any other kind of property crime.

Like you get caught stealing something and you say, oh, sorry, here it is back.

Are we good now?

Like that is not how theft works.

You don't just get to give it back.

If you've embezzled money from a business and you get caught, they don't say, could you give me the money back, please?

You get done for embezzlement.

So it's not unusual here.

All right.

So this next one, they're still talking about basically anarchy.

But if we were invaded like that in this anarchist version of society, what would you do?

I mean, you obviously couldn't force your version of society on other people.

If you have dictatorships like, say, North Korea or something along those lines that has a strong military power and decided to invade, what do you do in an anarchist society?

I mean, that's a good idea.

So let's say

you have

an anarchist society and next door you have some status society, right?

Okay, I mean, there's a couple of answers, which, you know, who knows, right?

But one of the answers is that invading an anarchist country is pretty tough because what are you going to take over?

So if you look at countries that invade other countries, they take over the tax system.

Natural resources.

Well, to some degree...

That's one of the main reasons why we invade countries?

It's like the hugest reason.

Well, I'm not sure.

I mean, that doesn't really explain much about Afghanistan, although there are some arguments that

are

trillions of dollars in minerals.

But you can get that stuff through trade, right?

I mean, you don't have to go and invade it.

Why would you do that when you can just take it?

You have no cities, you have Kabul, and then you have like a bunch of dudes with goats, and you go, yeah, I think we're going to just go over there and take your shit.

Why would you do that when you're this giant military force?

And you also make money in invading because the people that are contractors that get government funds to go over there and spend money on tanks and planes, and it's a huge business.

The business of the military-industrial complex cannot be denied.

But have they made money?

Because I know that there's the theory.

They have.

So, who's made money from the invasion of Afghanistan?

First of all, Halliburton.

Halliburton.

No, no, that's

amounts of money.

But in terms of the minerals, like in terms of getting the minerals, because I know they're there for sure.

Yes.

But who's actually making money from them?

Well, they haven't yet because they have to figure out a way to extract them.

It's lithium.

There's a lot of minerals that we need for Tesla cars and cell phones and all the battery operated things that we use.

For the most part, we use lithium-ion.

That's the current technology.

And trillions of dollars worth of that stuff in Afghanistan, one of the biggest supplies of it in the world.

Right.

And so the reason I wanted to include that clip is this is how flimsy Stefan's worldview is.

And Joe is able to dismantle it with almost no effort at all the moment Stefan accidentally strays into a subject Joe knows something about.

Stefan Mongu's point is here is like, well, yeah, Afghanistan, we didn't, there's nobody who was trying to invade Afghanistan for natural resources.

There's no natural resource in Afghanistan.

And Joe's like, well, actually, here's something I know about.

You're completely wrong.

And this is the problem with someone like Stefan Molniu.

All of his kind of bluster, all of his, you know, internet's most prolific or most popular philosopher, all that stuff.

falls away the moment you get him talking about something with someone who knows something about that thing.

And it all just collapses.

And his whole worldview here is completely collapsing.

And it's being taken apart by Joe Rogan.

This isn't like a seasoned expert

dismantler of arguments.

This is Joe Rogan.

So credit to Joey.

Wow.

Okay.

Last clip.

This is finishing up on slippery slope arguments.

You keep saying the state wants you dead.

That's an unfair way of describing their position.

No, no, but I wasn't describing that the state wants you dead in that clip.

What I was describing was,

so again, if I like marijuana and you think I should be thrown in jail for marijuana,

then I must comply with the laws that you support or I will get shot.

I mean, at the base of every law is a gun.

I mean, that's what the state is.

That's how it's different from a restaurant or the Boy Scouts.

I mean, at the bottom of what the state does.

is a gun that is the initiation of force.

That is the upside down pyramid that it rests on is a bullet.

And so when people say, I want the government to do this or the government should do that, what they're saying is that violence, the initiation of violence is how we're going to solve this problem.

And that initiation of violence goes against specific individuals.

And so if you're for the war on drugs and I enjoy using drugs, then you want force to be used against me.

You want people to come and use force against me to prevent me doing my peaceful activity.

And that is, I mean, stripped of all the rhetoric and all of the flag waving and all of the matrix-y stuff that goes on that we're raised with, law is is an opinion with a gun.

That's what government law fundamentally is.

And to resist the state is to risk death.

I mean, we've seen this over and over again.

So this is his slippery slope explained as best as he can.

This is how he justifies saying the state wants you dead.

This is how he justifies saying that

anytime you go against, anytime you're asked for taxes,

when you're doing publicly funded education, it's with a death threat.

He's trying to say every tax statement is a death threat.

And this is how.

This is the bottom of every one of his slippery slopes.

And his argument does not hold any weight

if you don't end up at the bottom of that slope, essentially.

I'm the last person that thinks I'm smart.

Trust me.

Okay, Marsh.

Was there anything good in this 2014 broadcast of Stefan Molyneux?

Yeah, I think there's a few things here and there.

I think Joe actually gives some reasonably good

pushbacks in part to this conversation.

He pushes back reasonably okay early on in alimony and stuff.

Obviously, we came to this because of that Cara Santa Marie.

We wanted to know whether he was a different guy when he talked to Stefan Molyneux than he was when he talked to Cara.

And I don't think he was.

I think this seemed like the same Joe Rorgan who sat down with Cara a couple of days later.

I still think he's too easily led.

I still think he's too easily distracted.

Molyneux definitely plays him and diverts him away from any really tough conversation, tough questions.

And Joe doesn't notice that.

But I've got to give Joe some credit that this is better than I feared it would be.

This feels consistent with what we saw with Cara, and it feels like he's trying to still consistently have some values here.

And he does offer some reasonable pushbacks at times.

At one point, Stefan Molyneux even retracts what he was saying, I think, about Robin Williams.

He says, Oh, and then I retract that.

Now, maybe he retracted that because he recognized the longer he spends talking in this, talking about this part of the conversation, the worse he looks.

But regardless, he did retract it off the back of Joe's pushbacks.

So I think like there's a discussion that happens.

And this actually is spurred on by the why are you so dreamy portion of Stefan Molyneux asking Joe about essentially about

how he can motivate young people, et cetera.

And he's so good at it.

So how do you do that?

And Joe goes on this sort of long,

and I mean, it's sort of like, it's a quasi-insightful sort of male role model for young men bit that he explains a bunch of motivational ideas in a really quick succession.

And if you aren't really paying a lot of attention, these all sound really great.

They sound like very similar to like clean your room and all that stuff that Jordan Peterson says.

You know, it takes a minute.

You realize that you have to be incredibly privileged and you have to sort of live Joe's life in order to really execute all these things.

But they sound good as sort of advice on the sort of 30,000 foot level.

And I think that's where Joe excels.

And I think where he got his,

you know, where a lot of people nowadays are looking at Joe and saying he's sort of the leader for young men and he's motivating young men.

I think like this is sort of like, when I look at this, I think this is why the young men might have heard him and thought, this is someone who I want to emulate or at least think about how I'm going to live my life based on the principles that Joe is talking about.

So I can see the origin of that in this, which is really interesting to me.

I don't know that it's good necessarily, but it gives me an insight into Joe Rogan that I didn't have before I started, which I think is a positive thing.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair.

Okay, well, that's it for the show this week.

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