 Hey everybody, tonight we're debating capitalism versus socialism and we're starting right now. With JF's opening statement, thanks for being with us, JF, the floor is all yours. It's a pleasure to be here. We've talked to a lot of communists and socialists before and so today I'm standing again for capitalism and mostly I will be asking to the serfs, does he have a plan for certain problems that I perceive in socialism? For those of you who know me, those will be repeat problems but I'd like to hear our debate opponent tonight respond to these questions. The first thing is, are we acknowledging that humanity is a biological system? Are we acknowledging that the theory of evolution is true? Are we acknowledging that people are making more babies or less babies according to the characteristics that they have? This to me is a truth of life, but I don't know if my opponent denies it. To me, this is a simple fact of species on the earth, they evolve, they change and they favor certain forms and they obtain certain directions through evolutionary pressures. They become something. Now once you realize this, you realize that any system ultimately will be an evolutionary system, any political management plan for a society will be ultimately evolutionary and although it's a more sensitive word, ultimately what it means is that everyone is participating to a form of eugenics, whether it's unintentional or intentional eugenics is happening and so to someone who tells me I'm not a eugenicist, I will show you a bad eugenicist. Ultimately you are influencing what society becomes and how people evolve. You just don't want to acknowledge it or you don't want to recognize it, but ultimately you do. Now, the problem once you realize that this is the state of humanity that we will always be an evolutionary species, at least as long as we're engaged in baby making is the fact that evolutionary systems converge especially when you start giving to certain features, especially when you start rewarding certain features and especially when you start adopting a needs-based approach. If we were to go in a park and look at the square rows and start feeding all of the square rows according to their needs rather than their ability to gather nuts, we would find ourselves in a million years from now or maybe in a hundred years from now with a bunch of fat square rows incapable of caring for themselves and capable of gathering in nature the foods that they need. And there's a very simple approach to this, sometimes you'll see little signs that will say don't feed the birds or don't feed the square rows. By not feeding the square rows, we're trying to leave the evolutionary pressures go onto the birds or square-row populations so that they don't become incapacitated by too much caring, by too much giving. And one of the fundamental issues with socialism, it's not the only one, but it's so grave that it's not fixable in my view, is the fact that its eugenic function is poor. It is poor because of the needs-oriented approach of socialism. Capitalism has its own way to exclude those who are unable to produce. If you don't make money in some way, if you don't produce something that some other people are willing to pay for, you would have less money and you would have less resources. And although it's not the case in our current society, because our current societies are not fully capitalistic, but in principle, in a fully capitalistic society, you would be essentially dying off from not having resources at all and having little babies. The problem is if you don't have that kind of eugenic function, if your policy is let's give to everyone according to how much they need, which socialism does in one way or another, whether it's through some kind of universal checks, some kinds of food distribution to the people or service distribution to the people, you are creating an infinitely reproductive needs function. That is, people are draining your categories. They're making babies with it. They haven't proven that they were capable of gathering those categories. You have just given them through the hand of the government. And eventually you find yourself in the next generation with more poor people, more unable people who are more dependent on the government. And who knows how much time it takes before this system reaches the end. History actually seems to demonstrate to us that it only takes less than 100 years before these systems crash. But it could take more than 100 years and perhaps a communist or socialist society can be stable for 200, 300, 500 years. But what we know is that at some point you're going to reach the problem that you are allowing the multiplication of needs while not incentivizing the addressing of needs. You're not incentivizing it the way capitalism does. How does it do it? Capitalism incentivizes it by saying if you find a way to address the needs of people, you're going to get money and you're going to be able to use that property in whatever way you want, including the ability to make babies. Communism and socialism do not do this. They incentivize inability. They incentivize people begging to the state without delivering to society. And therefore socialism is bound to fail in some term, whether it's short or long. You got to thank you very much, Jay, for that opening statement. And we will kick it over to Lance, but first I want to say folks, if it's your first time here at Modern Aid Debate, we are a neutral platform hosting debates on science, religion, and politics. And we hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you were from. So thanks for being with us. And Lance, the floor is all yours. I just want to quickly say I will address all the points you brought up, but I just have a prepared statement. So I was going to use that for my first five minutes, if that's all right. As you wish. So when the last drop of monarch's blood had been spilt at the end of the French Revolution in 1799, the estates were converted into a national assembly, bringing an abolition to feudalism, state control of the Catholic church, and for the first time, the ability to vote in a democracy. Promises were made of egalité, fraternité, and most importantly, liberté. Thus began not only the age of classical liberalism, but the age of capitalism. Capitalism has been the prevalent economic system for the past 400 years. Despite the promises of equality and liberty, Marx and Engels were able to observe how capitalism at its very core requires the exploitation of labor in order to be profitable. This isn't a matter of debate in order to make money selling widgets. You first have to sell the widgets for more than you pay the workers who build them. This is what creates different classes in society between those who hire workers and the workers themselves. We've had several dynamics like this in human history, master and slave, lord and serf, and then we have employer and employee. Not that the advent of capitalism got rid of the other dynamics. In fact, they formed hybrids. Capitalism didn't appear in its final form from the very beginning. There was other versions like mercantile capitalism, which is essentially a form of usury. Various forms would appear and die off like economic systems before them. Modern forms of capitalism include both the Industrial Revolution and the riches brought to it by the white race to the North Atlantic slave trade. I use the term white race because it was colonizers who invented the concept of race in order to justify the subjugation of African slaves that they brought over to the Americas to work both in cotton picking in the south and textiles in the north. Hundreds of years of slavery combined with capitalism, amassed vast amounts of wealth for a certain subset of Americans. It then evolved again with the invention of corporations, which could insulate the owner from the legal liabilities of his company. Corporate institutions have grown to be the dominant economies of the planet, many surpassing the GDP of entire countries. As these corporations grow under capitalism, they also consume competing companies in the form of mergers and acquisitions creating complete monopolies in certain fields. And while it may be tempting to insinuate that JF Kirepi is unable to read his copy of Mein Kampf because the pages are currently stuck together with his own cum, or that hatred of socialism and communism is because one of the most famous philosophers of those was Jewish, it should be pointed out that it's no surprise that a proud ethno-nationalist would endorse an economic system whose final form is fascism. After all, the dictatorial regimes of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler all followed a set pattern, an authoritarian salvation of the capitalist system resulting in their oversight over its industries. Longing returned to the mythical glory of their empires, a vilification of an entire people as a scapegoat, Catalonians or Jews, a distrust for the lying press. And finally, the expansion of layperson or promised land in the form of settler colonialism. Corporations have no loyalty to their country of origin. Their loyalties are exclusive to producing profit for the shareholders. This can be seen in a company like IBM that is actually complicit in the Holocaust, developing the cataloging system necessary for the mass organization of the Jewish genocide. If one is to advocate for modern day capitalism, they are also advocating for corporate dictatorships whose decision making rests within a small handful of board members and CEOs. As I stated previously, these companies will devour one another until they have complete monopolistic control in their field. Is this further? It's for this reason today that in America, nine banks control the majority of wealth and assets we depend on, eight food companies control all the products you see in the grocery store, five media companies control all the movies, television and radio broadcasts. We listen to three technology companies control the vast majority of social media in the world. Two companies produce the vast majority of beer in America. Under our capitalist system, six men owned the collective wealth of seven billion people, the myth of a purely meritocratic system in which people advance solely on their talent wouldn't justify this discussing inequality even if it was true, which it isn't. Capitalism is now resulting in the ecological disaster that threatens all life on earth, yet the ability to stop CO2 output while pushing for an endless growth in a system with finite resources will eventually meet its catastrophic end. I'm sure it's inevitable that we will discuss the trillions of lives lost, the hands of the communists in China or Russia. But what I will be proposing here today is to look to other economic systems, both from the past and present and analyze and adopt what is most beneficial to the vast majority of humanity. Any mature conversation about these topics should avoid playing team sports to previous ideologies and ascertaining which aspects are the most beneficial to everyone. In this, I state that no economy is completely giving workers over the control of their own production. And that a starting point for us to achieve that in our current system is through the implementation of worker cooperatives and worker unions. The Italian region of Emilia-Romagna is where one third of the GDP is successfully produced through worker co-ops and the fifth largest umbrella corporation in Spain, known as Montan, are two examples of such systems working efficiently. Now, I may just be a low IQ individual, but that doesn't take a lot of brain horoscopes to know the simple fact that our understanding of the universe evolves over time. Alchemy gave way to chemistry as astrology gave way to astronomy. So too can our economic system evolve to one that is more democratic, more efficient, less exploitative and better for every member of the human race. You got it. Thank you very much, Lance, for that opening statement as well. We are going to jump into the open conversation, folks. I want to remind you we have many juicy debates coming up. As you can see, for example, at the bottom right of your screen, we are thrilled as on June 9th, Apostate Prophet and Dr. Michael Brown will be debating whether or not there's a God. You don't want to miss it. So hit that subscribe button so you don't miss it is going to be epic. And with that, we're going to kick it into open dialogue mode. Gentlemen, thanks so much. And the floor is all yours. All right, so perhaps I can just return to my initial questions to the serfs or Lance or the serfs is that how are you? Are you either works? Yeah, no, Lance is good. Serfs is good. It doesn't matter. All right. So my initial question was so do we agree that humanity is a biological species with evolutionary forces with natural selection applying to it? Absolutely. Yes. Okay, so do you understand the parallel between say, population of squirrel that I would feed constantly, no matter how good they are at gathering nuts? And do you understand that ultimately, I would drive this population to become unable to to do the gathering that they should do to survive on their own. So this is the first time I've heard squirrel theory. I've heard Jordan Peterson proposed this with lobsters before. I would like to start to say that eugenics is a bad thing. And I don't think we should participate in it. And I haven't heard anyone use it as a way of defending capitalism yet. But I will say this in relation to squirrels, almost all animals on the planet with the exception of humans are engaged in something known as homeostasis, in which they will basically have an equilibrium with the world around them. And that includes squirrels. For example, if you put a whole bunch of rats in a cage, and you give them a finite amount of food, they will stop reproducing as the food supply goes down. That's something that most people engage in humans are unique to this planet in the sense that we continue to excavate and exploit and expand upon the planet despite the could result in the detriment of all our lives. Exactly. So don't you see the problem in giving in that most consuming species? And I agree with you that we are a species at very high disequilibrium with nature. But don't you think therefore it is the worst species that you could possibly feed for free? Where does the free part come into this? Have we moved past the squirrels? Are we on to squirrels to humans now? Yeah, we're talking about humans. And I'm guessing that some aspect of your socialistic project must be to to address the needs of the people. Maybe you should define what is socialism in your view. Sure, absolutely. So socialism is the worker control over the means of production and distribution. And in my proposal that I've laid out here, it's not going to handle the second part, but it's going to meet the first part. And in that, I want to expand democracy the same way that you have democracy in your ability to vote for your elected leaders. I want the same democracy to be expanded into the place for you spend eight hours your day every single day working in your job. So I think people in their jobs should have democratic control and say in their own positions. And so do you think that these democratically controlled production lines will be more efficient? They are more efficient. Yeah, most studies that have looked at the efficiency rates of worker cooperatives compared to traditional capitalist enterprises have shown that they are typically more efficient and less wasteful than their counterparts. And I guess that you're going to tell me what most communists come here to tell me that they're more efficient, but they're not successful because there's a conspiracy against you guys and the banking system. No, I wasn't going to throw that in there. But if we're doing the brackets, I mean, I'd probably pivot back to the fact that they have the same rates statistically of decay as their capitalist counterparts, they don't have the same rate of birth. So that means that they do not start up as often as capitalist companies do. However, they fail at the same rate as capitalist companies. So if they were given the right or given the ability to start up on a regular basis, they would be just as efficient, sorry, more efficient than the capitalist counterparts, but they would die or decay at the same rate. Now, what proportion of the population do you think it's important to them to be in control of their working place? And what proportion just doesn't care about it? Well, I don't think most people are aware of the ideas and proposing, which is why I'm trying to tell them on bigger platforms. So I don't think if I polled the average American, they would tell you that what they're looking for in their job is ownership over their own production. They would probably tell you they're looking for financial security for their friends and their family. And that's important to everybody. But in terms of what percentage should be, I am advocating for all every single job to be worker controlled. Every against the will of the people, let's say, let's say there's a part of the economy that tells you we want to stay capitalistic. Our workers are perfectly fine with this. You would object to discontinuing it to exist. I'm not forcing it upon anyone. I'm not saying that this has to come down from the government on high or that there has to be some kind of Stalinistic regime that forces people to do things against their will. I'm saying that this is what I'm advocating for. Whether or not people choose to do this is something that I hope that I can spread by telling this message to more people. All right. Well, I don't severely object against worker co-ops. I'm kind of enthusiastic about the fact that there are certain banks in Quebec that were worker co-ops. They turned out to be not so well managed and offering fees that became uninteresting with time. But, I mean, in a capitalistic society, there is every ingredients needed for you guys to try as much as the as nature allows. And if you find your workers who are interested in building these projects, you should get them. And if you are right about the increased productivity, which I personally doubt, but as long as you're doing it without forcing it on people and with your own funds, I don't object to worker co-ops existing really. So I think then the burden of proof would be on you to defend the current paradigm that we have, which is that CEOs in America on average make about 325 times the rate of pay as their employees and that we have a system now in which most workers don't have democratic control in their jobs. So we're talking about an environment where you spend eight hours of your day and you have no say as to what happens in your job. That to me is a fundamental problem. And that's one of the broken parts of our current system. Well, to me, it's not a fundamental problem. And to me, I think it shows a secret that a worker co-op or a socialistic system will never reach in terms of the mechanism of a capitalistic society and why ultimately it wins, why it creates so much wealth that that it looks that that even a poor worker in a capitalistic society ends up making more money than a rich one in a socialistic one. Ultimately, it boils down to the application on that. Well, just compare America in compare a worker in America in the sixties to a to someone in the USSR. Sure. You said a rich one, though. So you said that a worker in America is making more than a rich person in a quote, I'm not telling you you won't find a single one in the USSR who's not richer than a McDonald worker. Of course, you will find this because communism is the accretion of power to central entities, and therefore there are lots of path for corruption opened. But in general, the amount of wealth that was created by American society surpasses any sort of worries around the division of it. In other words, I I end up being richer today because Facebook is so rich and because there are these central entities that are making even more. And yet my life is great today because these big entities exist. But anyway, it's good going back to what you can do. OK, so you asked me to define socialism. Can you define communism for me? Well, to me, communism is some kind of accomplished form of socialism. So I use the words interchangeably. But we're talking about control over the means of production. And we I tend to I tend to try to use socialism for meaning a part of the means of production have been taken over and communism, meaning it's been taken over in full. But then the in full, the definition of the in full is very relative. For example, as far as I'm concerned, the means of production have been taken over so much in countries like Canada and the US that were essentially we've attained communism at this point. So I can define it for you. It's a moneyless, classless, stateless society. So we have not really had a true communist government in human history. No, and you won't because if you centralize power that much, you will have classes. Right. But I like I think your umbrage might be with, say, Stalinism or something of that nature. Is this what you're trying to associate this with? Well, no, not even that. I take issue with control, democratic control, state control and worker control. If it is done against the will of what is being controlled. So going back to what you mentioned about the inequalities of our societies, I don't take it's not a problem for me and it doesn't change the path of my life. If I look at the progression between my great grandfather to me, it really doesn't change our lives that McDonald is one hundred times richer than us or one billion times richer than us. It really doesn't matter because you're not poor. Uh, well, I've been as poor as someone can be. I mean, I've been in the streets. I've been without locations to live. I've been without jobs and I've been with zero dollar in my account. So I don't you can tell I'm not poor right now. And yes, I've been successful on YouTube, but I know what being poor is. And really, it doesn't change my view of capitalism. Even when I was poor, it's not a lack of empathy that I have with or a lack of understanding with poor people here. It's a principle stance that I'm taking today. Sure. So in the case of Jeff Bezos, how much more does he make than the average worker in terms of like compensation? I don't know. And he makes it doesn't matter. He makes about he makes about nine million dollars an hour. So that's over hundreds of thousands of times. What does average worker makes? Wouldn't you have to justify because this is this is you proposing this, that he justifiably works hundreds of thousands of times more than his average worker? No, in order to receive the compensation, because work time is not the unit of contributions to society. In other words, you can work all your life and produce less for society than Jeff Bezos could produce in a second. But that doesn't justify whether or not he gets paid that much more than his workers do, does it? Well, what do you mean by justify? Because it seems that embedded in your concept of justification is the assumption that work hours is the unit of contribution to society. No, I'm saying that if you work, you should be compensated for your work. I think that's something that we both agree on. At least I hope so. And yes, and is there anyone working at Amazon who's not getting compensated for their work? But are they being compensated adequately for the work? I mean, in the case of Amazon, if you're showing up there and you're risking your life and you're getting COVID and then you're actually having to shit and piss in bags, I would say, and I would posit this, that maybe getting 15 to 17 dollars an hour doesn't justify that kind of lifestyle and that maybe we should be paying them more, maybe they should have more rights, maybe they should be unionized, they can fight up against the pissing and shitting and bottles and cans. Maybe they can. I mean, they can if they want, really, as long as they're voluntary, voluntarily working for the salary they're given and they're accepting to piss in the bottle, so be it. I will not intervene in a third party relationship in which people are voluntarily submitting eight hours of their day to something else in exchange of money. But do you think it's voluntary because if you don't have a job in America, you probably don't have health care. And if you don't have health care, you might die. And if you don't have a job, you can't pay rent or eat. So I wouldn't say that it's necessarily voluntary. It's kind of like you're coerced out of survival. Well, the state of default of humanity is to be faced with the natural elements. So I'm not going to start seeing the employers that offers a cover from the natural elements that offers an option to these people. I'm not going to start seeing him as the evil person, because the fact is if Jeff Bezos wasn't there and if all of the capitalists weren't there and if all of the companies weren't there, these people would just be in the forest, literally running for their lives. And so no, I'm not going to see the employer relationship as an extortionist one, when in fact in this relationship, all that Jeff Bezos gives is an option. Are they in the forest looking for nuts for squirrels? Or how does that work? Well, they'd be in the forest, potentially running away from other tribes or running away from natural predators. Collecting nuts, I guess. But you're trying to make a joke and it really doesn't connect. No, I'm not. I'm actually asking. I'm very confused by this. You're the first person who's ever proposed this kind of idea. They do. They do. But I don't understand how the idea of survival in the animal kingdom is in any way related to economic systems for modern society that we're trying to propose here. Here it is. Here is how it's connected. Do you think that there are some human families that make more babies than others? Of course, there is. Do you think that therefore their genes are more present in the next generation, as opposed to the other families that made less babies? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of other factors to contemplate there. But sure, if one person has one kid and one person has 10 kids, the person with 10 kids will have more genes in the gene pool. So if there are a bunch of genes that make you such that, one, you don't produce anything for society, but two, you can beg as well as others and in fact, better than others for government or support. Do you think that this might cause a problem on the evolutionary times case? If the government was to start feeding these families with everything they need to survive and make further babies, further higher numerous babies? Right. But then the solution to your problem would just be to have as many kids as possible. Like wouldn't it just be if you just fuck a ton and have 30 kids, you're going to win at my strange scenario? Well, that would be the solution from the perspective of a human wanting to undermine the system. But this human in a capitalist society would find themselves with the limits of his own resource, he would find himself finished by the system if he cannot find something to produce, something to sell, something to trade. The problem is if you start rewarding people arbitrarily for just having needs, you end up rewarding the having of needs and you end up rewarding everyone who can just beg more money or equal amounts of money while not producing for the rest of society a good output. It sounds to me like you really have a problem with welfare, but you don't want to say it outright. Oh, no, I mean, I'm totally fine saying it out, right? I take issue with welfare. Do you support things like UBI and welfare? I absolutely support UBI, but I support real UBI and that I think that we should be taxing those who make the most in society and using those taxes to be able to pay for those who can't work. And honestly, everyone to a certain extent. Now, do you realize given that you seem to accept the theory of evolution and you seem to accept all of the basis that that if you feed a family that makes more babies, you will have more of them in the next generation and more of their genes. Do you see the unsustainability of this system over evolutionary times? So the problem comes in that more people are going to receive more food and make more kids. Is that it? Exactly. And that ultimately you will find yourself with an infinitely growing population until you cannot sustain their needs. You cannot you cannot produce enough to sustain the needs that you've created. OK, so if I'm going to snap us back to reality in our current system, we over produce food as a humanity, like as a species. We currently produce twice as much food as we consume. We throw out twice as much food. Sorry, we throw out like we produce twice the amount of food that we would normally be able to consume. So the problem isn't food production in any way. This happens to be distribution, and that is usually the case with a lot of things in the capitalist systems. So it doesn't go down to a matter of like how many babies are going to be able to be born at a given time if they're receiving a certain amount of food. It all comes down to the fact that we have certain systems in place that benefits certain people. But you say you snap back to reality, but really you slap back to an alternate reality. First, the surplus of food you mentioned, that doesn't matter if you have created an infinite need function, you're going to reach a point at which you have people consuming all of this food. I don't think you've addressed the problem inter-generationally. How do we lead to a sustainable system in which yet we are creating infinite needs? Yeah, but I mean, you keep going back to this. It sounds really eugenics-y, right? Like I'd ultimately, if I really boiled this down, it kind of sounds like poor people have too many babies. Is that a disingenuous reflection? It's one way to phrase it. The thing is, as a capitalist, I don't even take issue with poor people having babies, as long as they have the ways to self-sustain their families and to to deliver services to them. The problem is when you start taking from others to feed these families, then you are entering a relationship of theft. And that's a problem evolutionarily. And I don't hear a solution. You seem to be, your solution is, well, that's eugenics, and therefore I don't have to address it. The thing is, we've discussed the logical basis of what you call eugenics. You accept all of the series of facts and rational processes behind my conclusions. But you end by saying, well, I'll call it eugenics, and therefore I don't have to address it. I would like you to address it. Sure. If you would like me to address this, yeah, the solution to large population growth happens to be both historically and from a scientific standpoint, being education and empowerment of women. So if you take any country that is developing and happens to have a large population growth through the education empowerment of women of their population, you will see a lowering of exceptional birth rates. So that's a solution that already has, or sorry, that's a problem that already has a solution. I think it has a local solution in a bubble of time. And I will say you're totally right. When you what you call education and empowerment, I tend to see it more as anti reproductive propaganda, but OK, let's take your word education and empowerment. It's true that if you pass a perfectly fertile woman through the university system and you keep her eyes open in front of the professors and you get her through 10 years of her most fertile life into learning quantum physics, it's true that she's going to produce less babies. That being said, I don't think it's a sustainable system because what you have as a reaction to this is simply people evolve away from going at the university. People evolve low IQ to avoid the university. And I think that what we're seeing in our society is we've attained this speak. We we have reached a peak of IQ and now the high IQ people are really doing to making two little babies. So what we're going to see in the next few generations is probably a decrease of IQ, a higher reproductivity of the lower IQ scales. And that's OK, you know, but it means that the system here is not sustainable. It's like you're not going to force people to go to university or if you do, then you'll become a thing and a moral act in my view. I kind of like don't want to get too bogged down on IQ. I didn't think we'd be talking about that in a debate between capitalism and socialism to be totally frank. And I kind of think of it as in cell, sorry, astrology for in cells. So maybe if you think that it's like a temporary solution to a problem, but it's one that bears out and you just admitted that it bears out every single time that it's implemented, why not continue to do the thing that works? Isn't that just the natural progression of this? I mean, the thing is something can work and it won't work over evolutionary times. There are there are temporary solutions over evolutionary times that can work, but evolution by its nature is already fighting against it. And I think it's already what we're seeing. I think that you have high fertility in low IQ females right now. They are the reproductive elite. And this is going to have impacts down the line. It's going to change our society. We're going to have a lot of stupid people, and that's OK. I actually have respect for for low IQ people. But yeah, it doesn't solve the problem on the evolutionary scale. And I'm left thinking, well, capitalism has all of these solutions built in and capitalism never even wanted to fix these problems. It's just that in the simple systems of constant voluntarism and the accumulation of property, somehow the ingredients were there to make a human society that was aromated enough to nature that it wouldn't fight against it. The problem with the projects you're proposing is that they are really all fights against nature and we can get more in detail on the worker co-op, for example, but that's another fight against nature. The fact is that the brains of people, of workers have not demonstrated their fitness at managing the world, at managing their own companies. So why would I put them in control of the whole companies? To me, it looks like giving to a very important decision to a bunch of people who haven't demonstrated their ability to make particularly good decisions. So that's why I can address that one. All right. First off, I think your entire plan, you're basically just describing the movie Idiocracy. And then secondly, to workers working in the means of their own production, having supervisors and stuff like that, those exist within every single one of the work cooperatives and the big examples I was trying to give you. Those have hierarchies, but they are justified hierarchies in that if you are the CEO of the company, you will only make between five to eight times, which your workers do, but you will justifiably have to do about five to eight times the work that they do. Well, at the same time, at the end of the year, every year they get to vote on their board of CEOs in that if you are a shitty CEO or you're a CEO who's just basically embezzling money for your own enrichment, then you will be removed effectively, which would be a much better system, a much more democratic system for every single person who's working for these companies instead of the dictatorships that we have now, which is basically every major corporation in the U.S. Well, I agree with some of what you say. First, the CEOs doing embezzlement. Yes, there are dirty players in capitalism and there are forces that are to be criticized and they make our world less productive. I'm just not sure that even a worker co-op can stop this kind of system of corruption. I'm just not sure that the people as any insight that would allow to fix these problems. Ultimately, the worker is just one component in the whole ecosystem of a company. Why don't you have customers co-op or providers co-op? Why is a company being defined by the people who are giving work hours to it only when, in fact, a company is a system of ins and outs of demands and requests and offers? That is... I mean, why not offer to yield reviewers, too? At the end of the day, you should offer to every single person who's working the company in some respect. Yeah, well, that's asinine nonsense. You have to have it with the people who work in the company itself. That's what workers owning the means of production do. They're the ones who actually produce the products. Otherwise, there's no point in involving outside. You can take outside influence. You should take feedback as a company. But ultimately, you're the one making the products that people buy. Yeah, but all I'm pointing is that the unit of making the product is a very arbitrary unit. Ultimately, there's work that's been going on into the parts that were bought by the company. So why don't we give control of the workers that produce, say, the car wheel drive? Why don't they control the company that makes the car? Well, it seems like it's pretty arbitrarily divided on, well, these guys are spending eight hours in this building or that building. Capitalism has resolved this by offer and demand and price at the moment of trade on a voluntary basis. So you really can do anything once you buy the wheel drive. You can make a car with it and you don't need to know anything else than this is the price of a wheel drive. And if you're not happy with that price, you can go to another company and get it from them. Why would we give control and decision making power to units that have really shown nothing else than just an interest into renting their body for eight hours to a given entity? To me, it strikes me as unnatural and potentially leading to failure. That being said, as I said at the beginning, I'm all for worker co-ops to be given their chance. I just don't think it's going to be a particularly good way to manage a company. So they've already been given their chance. There's already like a wide body of data that we can use to see whether or not they've been efficient within the marketplace. Now, again, I don't know how many times I need to reiterate this. They are not directly going to be in charge of all decision making. You will have to have people who are superiors. People who are going to manage teams. The difference being is that those people can be voted out if they're not performing adequately. That's basically it. And at the end of the day, why would a worker want to have any involvement in a company even though he's just kind of like a flesh meat sack there for exploitation? Because I think fundamentally every single person should have skin in the game. It'll make them better employees. I mean, the results speak for themselves. Every single time people who are involved in worker cooperatives are pulled on this, they report better job satisfaction, better involvement. They're more encouraged to work in the job because they're actually being involved in the products they're making. I've seen these studies. I find them extremely focused on single domains and extremely limited. I think that if you were to build an entire society where like 50% of the whole economy is in worker co-ops, I think you'd start seeing problems that you wouldn't detect in these studies. That being said, again, worker co-ops should be led to exist. They can exist without problems in the capitalistic system. So in the case of the Italian region, I was telling you about one third of all the businesses in that region are worker cooperatives. So we have an overwhelmingly large data set to be able to pull information from. And it's been showing itself time and time again to be more efficient than its counterparts and as well produce higher job satisfaction for the workers. All right. Well, if people are happy in Italy doing that, they should keep going. Now, the efficiency of democratic system. Do you realize that you're pushing for a system in the workplace that is absolutely unsatisfactory in terms of how it manages our politics, for example, because we have democratic politics. Do you realize that are you satisfied with the way our politics is turning out? No, but that doesn't have anything to do with the fundamental principle that I think every person should have a vote in democracy. Like just because I don't enjoy if Donald Trump gets elected doesn't make me think immediately that I should just abolish democracy like that. I mean, I don't think that there's any reason why we should skirt into something like authoritarianism or fascism just because we don't like the results of the election. Well, I certainly don't do not advocate for authoritarianism. But what I notice that the transfer of authority that happens when you create a democracy is to take what you found was immoral if done by a dictator or a single individual and to suddenly find it moral when it is imposed by the mob. There is a fundamental problem in that all of the authoritarian things that you seem to criticize within the current structure of hierarchy in a capitalistic company, you just want to delegate this authority to the group. Why is it better when the authority, the same authority with potentially the same oppression to the individual is suddenly transferred to a wider group? Well, if you're using the parallels politics, that's the same problem, right? Like, why is it better if someone, say, a fascist has complete authoritarian control over his people, which is the current paradigm we have with corporations? With corporations, we have small amounts of boards and CEOs. Their only responsibility is the fiduciary responsibility they have to their shareholders. All the decision making is made by them and it can affect millions and millions of people sometimes. So that is a fundamental problem. I think we should expand democracy into those companies so that everyone has a say in what involves their lives. But for example, don't you take issue with the fact that people have voted across the years drug laws and that ultimately it is the people who is oppressing drug smokers and putting them in jail. So if you want to talk about the history of drug prohibition, a lot of it is centered around racism in the United States, particularly to vilify black and Hispanic people. And one of the problems with that is it was propagated through the US system and then spread worldwide. Its racist origins do not in any way think to me that it makes it OK that that was permitted for so many years. There was a huge amount of money spent on fear mongering and scapegoating individuals so that everyone in society ended up thinking that drugs were bad. That's where that all comes from. And this goes back to a big problem we have with the capitalist system. Under a capitalist system, if you have capital, you have power. So the more capital you have, the more power you have to basically change society as a whole. So that is a fundamental problem to me because you have individuals who will have a lot of accrued capital, a lot of accrued power, they will be able to influence politics. That's the bigger problem I find with liberal democracy in any way, shape or form. Then I take with the very fundamental idea that everyone should have a democratic vote. Well, I think that you're making my point here because you're you're talking about people and you're demonstrating a case in which they were they were driven into a bad vote. They vote that I guess you disagree with. Do you disagree with the drug laws as they've been enacted and applied in the US? Oh, yes, of course. Absolutely. Yeah, I think I think that drug should be legalized. But that doesn't change the fact that again under the system is those with capital who will be able to exude power over politics, who will be able to influence politics either through lobbying or other coercive methods. There's a huge entrenchment with the both the prison industrial complex that required a large amount of people to be fulfilling those empty seats when it comes to prisoners. Like this whole thing is like you're opening up a huge can of worms in terms of like a different topic. But that doesn't change the fundamental principle again, that I believe that everyone should have a democratic vote. Like, do you not think that do not think that democracy should exist? I think that democracy is an aberration and a violation of individual rights. I recognize that there are some things in society like the gathering of trash that may need some kind of collective system. And perhaps democracy is this imperfect system that could allow us to determine the schedule of trash collection. But ultimately, I think that democracy is an authoritarian regime putting the authoritarianism into the hands of the mob. And so I reject democracy as a whole. So what is your alternative? So you are the one who's ultimately advocating for authoritarianism, not me. No, I'm not. I'm advocating against authority. I do not think that a group of X million people should have authority over whether I smoke drugs or not. Yeah, so how do you manage politics then? Do you just want to abolish the state? Are you going for like I'm basically a monarchist. So I think of the state as a kind of small operation that should remain less than one percent of the economy that should just handle whatever really can't be handled by the rest. But I'm for the abolishment of most of the state. And as far as the control of whatever is left, there could be democratic components to it. But what I ultimately believe in is a super strong constitutional order that essentially keeps this democracy from growing into the kind of authoritarian nightmare that it has grown into right now. So I am assuming you're essentially an anarcho capitalist, which means your cartoon character. And ultimately, what that means is that you would have to justify unjust hierarchies, right? That would be the idea of what an anarchist is. Any unjust hierarchy, the burden of proof is lying upon them to justify that hierarchy. That's that's exactly what the definition means. In your society, then, I assume the rich, the incredibly wealthy would just be the ones who had access to everything they needed, like hospitals, schools, education, and those who were unable to accrue wealth or survive in that society would just have to die by the wayside. I don't take issue with people dying if if it must happen. And in fact, everyone dies. That being said, you said that I justify unjust hierarchy. No, to the contrary, there is an unjust hierarchy right now, as you've said it yourself in the fact that a mob of people can have decided that for the last 100 years, we were arresting the people who just decided to smoke drugs for themselves. I believe that this is an unjust hierarchy and I'm defending the opposite, an absence of hierarchy or a presence of hierarchy in those cases where it is consented to by the individuals. So in your ideal scenario, then, in this like Ancap Wonderland, what exactly takes place? Like how do people govern themselves? Like how does someone have access to a hospital? How does someone have access to a road if the government itself is not even building the roads? Well, we can talk about the roads and I think that the roads would be like they were before the government took them over, which is that most roads have been built by the people who live on them and are then sold to the government. Most roads are actually private entities that have been handed to the government just for the maintenance function. As far as hospitals, they would follow the law of demand and offer. So if you're a doctor, you're setting a service. If there's not enough people buying your services, then your hospital is not worth existing. It will disappear eventually because it doesn't make enough profits. And that's pretty much it. I mean, you could have in these societies superb systems of health insurance, but you may not also. It all depends on what people need and what people are willing to pay. And ultimately, the free market will be what determines what exists. I don't know where you read that. Like I have never heard someone say that all roads were built privately and then bought to the government. But on average, roads are usually paid for by the government itself through taxpayer dollars and then established and built. And yes, the roads would then turn over to, I guess, people in the Ancap paradise. But that doesn't mean that the, let's just say, development of new roads would ever take place without some kind of social funding. Like you have to understand on some level, unless you happen to be wealthy or, I mean, outside of that, in your ideal scenario, everyone would be left by the wayside. Like the poorest individuals in society wouldn't have access to health care. They wouldn't have access to education. They wouldn't have access to toilets. Access to toilets. I think that that toilets are I mean, people are buying their own toilets today. They are building their house and they're putting a toilet in it. Yeah, if they're not homeless because they're homeless, they're not building a house at all. Well, yeah, if they're homeless, the opposite of this is to say that someone who's homeless is entitled to have a house builder work for them. And so who's the authoritarian here? Well, it is Lance right here because he's telling us that you are empowered to compel the house builder and the doctor and the hospital to serve this homeless person who has nothing to offer to them. So the reason I care about sustainable system is that ultimately, Lance system is unsustainable, authoritarian and consistent and ultimately the forced labor of a bunch of people who shouldn't be forced to work. Or if he if he has them not through forced labor, if he doesn't force the doctor to cure them and force the house builder to build a house for them, it will be essentially forcing them through printed money or death or government intervention, which will be another kind of force and another kind of test. Yeah, so in terms of building houses for the homeless, it's statistically been proven you don't have to do it from a moral standpoint, but it actually saves your society money at the end of the day. It costs an overwhelming amount of money to police and to hospitalize people who are homeless or they have drug addiction or they are, you know, perceptible to crime or things like that. So ultimately, yes, building houses would be something that would reduce the amount of crime and reduce the amount of burden on your hospitalization system on top of which we currently live in a current paradigm right now, the capitalist one, the one that, you know, exists in which there are very small amount of people in this case, it happens to be six individuals who have the collective wealth of seven billion humans. So we have a gross disproportionate disparity of income redistribution and a big problem with that is that they are not being used to put that money towards anything of good. Like I know a lot of the money is obviously going to be in shareholder value. I'm not trying to say that it isn't. But if we have such a huge concentration of wealth into the hands of the very few at the expense of everybody else, there should be more equitable systems. That's what I'm advocating for like systems that work better for every single human. You don't even have to do it from a humane perspective. It just works from like better from a societal perspective. Well, I don't think there should be a more equitable wealth distribution and moments of the past where we have seek this more equitable wealth distribution have led to societies that have just not produced as much beauty and as much wealth and as much productivity for everyone as those who are more capitalist that being said on the question of the homeless and saving the homeless can benefit society. That we never really get the final count on this because if we got the final count, you could just start a business in you would start a business and saving homeless and you would cash in on it. We never really quite get this. We get what's the problem? What's the problem for that business? You would essentially get them out of homeless status and you would have to deal with the burden that the homeless people provide is to society itself. It's going to be in the amount of money that you as society have to spend on hospitals on policing and stuff like that. So there's no profit incentive for a private company to come in and solve that. Well, then we enter another domain, which is if the homeless are costing things to society because they're committing crimes and you say that it's because it becomes an economic gain because you will keep them from committing a crime. Then you're essentially getting extorted by a bunch of criminals. And we cannot as a society have organizing principle that say we're going to pay you not to become a criminal because it's your beginning the extortion here. It's like how many people how much are you going to pay for just keeping them of the streets as we say. And there's no end to it again. It's an unsustainable system. What do you think causes crime causes crime? I mean, what causes people to eat and consume pornography and do ABC? It's just it's the human brain. The human brain. So so so the answer is poverty. Poverty is typically the most common precursor to crime. And it makes sense if you don't have money to feed yourself or you happen to be addicted to drugs, you're probably going to turn to crime to be able to feed yourself or get yourself those drugs. So it has nothing to do with some kind of innate probability. There's there's no gene for poverty that exists within the human genome. You don't know that. OK, is that is that what you're proposing? You've discovered the poverty gene? Is that where we're at? No, because genes don't work that way. It's not a poverty gene or a homosexuality gene. The problem is that the human genome is a complex entity and some some of it makes you more likely to be intelligent, less likely to be intelligent and down the line in the causal influence of thousands of genes, you may have that that lead to more likely criminality or less likely to be criminal and or less likely to be poor or more likely to be poor. There's definitely polygenic studies that show genetic correlation with wealth, genetic correlation with IQ and educational attainment. So there's the answer to your question is almost yes. It's just not one gene. It's a thousand genes. So isn't this your field of study? Yes, I'm an evolutionary biologist. Yeah. So why is your understanding of the so cartoonish? Like I don't I can't wrap my head around the idea that you think poor people were genetically predisposed to being poor. Well, I will let people judge who's more cartoonish before between the guy who has no training in biology and asks for the poverty gene and the other guy who does have training in biology and who informs you that we have correlations between genes and poverty and IQ and educational attainment in the thousand counts. Well, yeah, I mean, they'll have to judge between a clown on the Internet who makes jokes for a living and someone who's actual academic field of study is in this very specialization. I mean, do you have an argument because I can pull the studies we can get into the nature papers that look into the meta study of all twin studies? And the thing is, do you have an argument or do we have nothing here? Yeah, I do have an argument according to the International Monetary Fund, as well as numerous studies on what is the causal link between poverty and crime. It's almost always established that crime is a precursor. Sorry, poverty is a precursor to crime, like that that has been established time and time again. I've yet to see anyone propose the fact that there is a genetic link for people becoming poor outside of maybe like the bell curve. Well, you can get into nature papers and you type genetic correlation between GWAS studies and twin studies and you'll find you'll find genome-wide association analysis of risk tolerance and risky behavior. That's one that's more specialized. I would have to find the one that gives all the answers that you want, but there's definitely genetic correlation between the genes on the one hand, the twin studies establishing the polygenic influence of genes and all of the factors we've talked about. Now, have you ever realized that it's not because there's a correlation between poverty and criminality that this is not this correlation is not ultimately explained by a genetic influence? Well, yeah, but I think the idea between correlation and causation there, I mean, you're doing to have a lifting on the other part, right? At the end of the day, if it's poverty that is going to be the precursor to crime, then those who are impoverished most likely will have lower test scores on whatever like quotient you're trying to give them. They'll have lower IQ scores, obviously because they are embattled in poverty. That wouldn't surprise me to find that out. That does that's not an indicator that somehow they're genetically predisposed to being poor. Like I've never heard anyone suggest that that there happens to be a genetic coding that makes people pop like impoverished. Well, you can go look why evolution is true. The blog they have a post recently called how much variation in human behavior is due to variation in our gene and sir, quite a bit. And so the reason you've not been exposed to these ideas is that you've been presumably hanging out in social circles of leftism. There is seriously no scientific question today that the genes influence all of the factors we talked about criminality, IQ, educational attainment. Well, it's definite. The definite answer is yes. And you'll see the link to the original peer reviewed study in that blog post. Are we going to talk about capitalism or socialism at all? Is that going to be on the menu? Or well, you know, we're still talking about that's the important thing is that we're talking about these issues because if evolution applies to humans and it does and if genes matter to behavior, then socialistic systems, welfare systems, UBI systems are unsustainable over evolutionary times. That is my point tonight. And I all I hear is Adam and N's and Sal's jokes. A guy who recognizes himself that he's a comedian on the Internet. I was expecting more. Yeah, fair enough. I was not. So I've been I've been basically met with exactly what my expectations presented. I'll say this, though, when it comes to all those problems and what exactly is the causal link and what exactly is going to create, let's say, more poverty in society. Ultimately, you would want to see less, right? I'd assume. Less poverty. Yeah, less, less poverty. You'd like to see more equality, right? More people living their best lives, I would assume. Not necessarily, you know, I take planet Earth as what it is. You know, when I look at the population, whether it's of animals, of plants or of humans, I don't see something that must be manipulated towards something better because of my taste. I don't have that kind of narcissism to think that my preferences over the world should overtake it. I see it as a natural system that will develop and that will either sustain or not sustain. And so when I look at humanity, I'm fine with our past, for example. You know, if I look at the human population a million year ago, I can imagine that they were living kind of rough lives. And I don't take issue with this. I'm fine with what we are. We are animals. We come from populations of haves and we are subject to evolution. I'm fine with everything we've went through. And sometimes I think that in what we think is an advance, we are actually directing our societies toward systems that should not be, should not be adopted and that we should, yes, return to a state that is perhaps more poor, but more in line with nature. I mean, from my perspective, I think if we both agree that humans evolve over time, so do economic systems evolve over time, then we should be taking the aspects of those economic systems and then utilizing what works the best and then trying to improve our lives and the lives of everyone around us, because ultimately it's not even from like an egotistical thing. It can be from a more like selfish reason. I think everyone's lives are better when everyone is collectively thriving. The more poor people there are, the more people who are like suffering on the street, the less quality of life you or me is going to have. I mean, the more crime that there's on the street, the more problems everyone else is going to have. If you improve the lives and the conditions of everyone around you, then we will also live better lives. That's one way to see it. You know, there were poor times in the past of my great grandparents that somehow sometimes I think it was still a better time and a better world. So it's not all about wealth definitely. And there are desirable things of societies of the past that got abolished by the current eccentric lifestyle and the over perfusion of wealth and money and the system. And I'm fine with poverty existing. I don't want to combat it because when you start combating it, you start entering the game of unsustainability, the game of feeding the birds, feeding the square ones. And to me, that's a dangerous path to take. I don't know where we move from here, James. Did we do want to go to the next section or should we? We shall. And so I want to say a couple of things, folks want to first let you know our guests are linked in the description. We really do appreciate our guests. So I want to mention that you can find their links down below. And that includes if you're listening to the modern debate podcast episode of this debate, as we also put our guest links down in the podcast description for that episode. But also want to let you know, folks, as usual, we ask that you'd be your regular friendly selves, attacking only the arguments and not the person as we really do appreciate these guys for being with us tonight. And so we are going to jump into the Q&A and also want to let you know let's see. There it is. All right. Thanks so much. Good on that note. This one coming in from Bubblegumgun says eugenics is quote unquote good. It it's just the stuff people do in the name of eugenics that is bad, just like how socialists do bad things in the name of socialism. Any thoughts, J.F.? I can't tell who this is. Well, exactly. Eugenics is happening whether you like it or not. So. You can either be uninformed about it and do it accidentally, in which case you're probably going to have very bad effects on the world or you can inform yourself and inform your and embed your interventions into society with this knowledge. You're going to be much better with the knowledge. And I would just like to use this opportunity to quote the article in Nature, Human Behavior. I was talking about the article showing absolutely strong polygenic signals for lots of human behaviors. It's called dissecting polygenic signals from genome wide association studies on human behavior. Gotcha. And Lance, if you had anything to add, I want to give you a chance if you had anything you want to say. Yeah, sure. Eugenics is bad and you shouldn't do it. Gotcha. And folks, now I remember what I was going to say. I was going to say that we have asked moderators, if you haven't heard, we've asked moderators to not take a position as we were trying to Uber maximize our neutrality. And so we have now asked moderators if you'd be so kind to not debate people in the chat. We do appreciate you, moderators. Thank you for everything you do. And bubblegum gun with another question says, JF, we haven't had capitalism for nearly 200 years. Small government never stays small. Under government, you need welfare. Capitalism can only exist under anarchy. Yes, it's true. All of this is true. But let us return to what were the initial conditions that lead to our current wealth. Let us not abandon and let us say, all right, let's rebuild a society on those basis. One for Lance Pancake of Destiny says, Lance, why should I work when I can do nothing and get the same money as one I would work? Socialism supports. They claim laziness. They also says, convince me to get a job, Lance. And I'm not in the US. No worries. Socialists don't want people not to work. They want people to work better and more efficiently and have more democracy in the workplace. I want to give people more freedom. I want to expand freedom, not just in the voting booth, but actually put it in the place where they work eight hours of their day every single day. That's the idea. Gotcha. And old nemesis of JF's. Brenton Langel says more food equals more people is idiotic. The third world has less food and more babies than the first material abundance than than the first world. And then says material abundance is correlated with less kids, not more. That is that is correct. When I say food, I use it as a very loose analogy for everything that you could plug into someone's life that would lead to them making babies instead of dying on the street. Gotcha. And one for Lance says this is sphincter of doom says the workplace is already democratized. Every consumer has power over a corporation and everyone is a consumer, even though not everyone is a worker. Sure. So the idea that you've got democracy in your voting ability to buy products is actually just an illusion because at the end of the day, like I stated, if you look at the five companies are sorry, I think it's seven companies that produce all the food you buy. It goes down to seven major umbrella corporations that actually own every small major brand that you see in the supermarket. So when you're walking up and down the aisle and you see thousands and thousands of products and you're like, I can vote with my dollar. You're actually just choosing whether or not to give your dollar to seven different companies. Gotcha. And this one coming in from bubblegum guns is capitalism plus small government leads to neoliberalism, J.F. Does it lead to it? Maybe indirectly in the long term, you can look at the development of the story of the U.S. And think that perhaps we have reached liberalism because at the root of it, there was liberal there was capitalism. So are we are we bound to always end up with attracting the communists around us and they start draining our productivity? Maybe that would suck. But I think that we can we can create a constitution that would be strong enough that even when the communists come to drain us, they can't. Gotcha. And this question for Lance, we have a number of them in a row for Lance. This one coming in from a sphincter of doom strikes again, saying co-ops don't scale and are only competitive when they get special tax treatment or bringing in outside investors. Sure. So they absolutely do scale. Look at something like Ocean Spray, for example, it's the largest cranberry production juice in America. It's a massive scale project. Or again, using the example of Mondragon, it's the fifth largest corporation in all of Spain. And they're actually an umbrella corporation that manages a whole bunch of smaller work cooperatives. So the idea that they don't scale to larger sizes is just a complete myth. Gotcha. And this one coming in from. Sinker of doom strikes again. I'm going to read these two together. So it's a mouthful. They say the largest co-op, Mondragon is only successful because it gets special tax treatment and controls the third largest banking institution in Spain. And then says it gives special loan treatment to its member co-ops compared to outside it, thus allowing it to appear to withstand recessions more, even when it had to be bailed out by the Bank of Spain. Give you a long response. Yeah, no worries. I can't speak to all of that because I don't like talking about things that I don't have a lot, like complete knowledge over. So I'll just say that I think there should be special treatment given towards the start of work of cooperatives. I think this should be incentivization from governments to make worker cooperatives more feasible. That's one of the problems with worker co-ops is they don't have initial investors the same way private capital companies do. And the simple reason being is that if you are someone who's looking to invest in something, you'd probably want to extract as much wealth as possible from your investment. So the idea of investing into one or the other might seem not as lucrative, but that might be one of the reasons why that they've received grants in the past. Got you on Super Cave Hill also says Lance exploitation is not necessarily a bad thing. The company I work for exploits my labor, but we both benefit because the money I make is worth more to me than the effort I put in. Yeah, but that wouldn't be what the definition of exploitation is. You're just basically satisfied with your pay. And that's awesome. You know, I'm totally here for it. I'm happy you're happy in your job. But that wouldn't be what the exploitation itself is. That comes in the fact that the person who is hiring you is selling your work hours for more than you're giving them. That's all. Got you on Svintra Boom says the US origins of the drug war was stemmed in politics. Nixon wanted to crack down on his loudest political opponents in namely hippies and their cannabis and the Black Panthers in parentheses heroin. It was an it was opportunism, not racism. Is that one to me, too? I think so. OK, so when it comes to Nixon, you're talking about the formation of the DEA, not the start of the prohibition of marijuana, which is what I was referencing. But in that case, yes, Nixon was certainly trying to use it for political motivations. He was he was extremely racist. I mean, you just have to look to like the Nixon tapes and hear all the things that he was saying about various different groups. I'm not going to say them on the stream because we'll probably get it shut down. Yeah, that was certainly a thing. Got you on Super K Pilsa's lands. Democracy is basically mob rule. It is not a good system, allowing the unwashed masses to vote on important issues has always led to problems. I guess my answer would be, have you never liked a single election in history? Because if that's the case, maybe you're not being represented by anyone who's politically viable. I don't know what to say. Gotcha. And this one coming in from Sunflower says drug laws are way stricter in most other countries, namely Asian countries that are practically racially homogeneous. It isn't always a race thing. And that one, that one's again to me, I think. Yeah, so I was speaking to the history of marijuana prohibition specifically to the U.S. So I cannot speak to the Asian countries and what their histories are. And to be honest, I'm not as well versed in their own drug laws and prohibition. Gotcha. We've got, don't worry, JF. We've got one more for Lance and we've got one for you. So we've got this one. Svigdur Dooms says forcing firms to structure themselves as co-ops against the wishes of workers or owners is anti-democratic. It is imposing your personal sensibilities onto others in the name of democracy. So I would agree with you. I'm not asking anyone to force their workers or their companies to suddenly do that. I'm saying that once there are more of these companies appearing and popping up and everyone can understand how they are better for the conditions of the workers, you would start to see them grow more organically. I haven't actually been enforcing that. If you want to talk about breaking up big tech companies or nationalizing big tech companies, though it's something that you probably find a little bit more spicy in terms of my takes, that would be closer to what I'm sure you would assume is authoritarianism. If we make things that I think are necessary for the public utilities, such as internet and stuff like that, something that becomes a creative, sorry, a public commons, because it's in the public interest. Got you. And Tao of Charles says, JF, in your ideal society if someone dies and has no friends or family, who deals with the corpse? Would the poor soul simply be left to rot? You could have a minimal government system that just collects dead bodies from the streets, or you could count on private interest. I mean, at some point wherever the person dies, there will be people annoyed by the smell of the body and they will have interest in cleaning it out. Got you. Very practical. Our speaker of Doob says the idea that if the state currently provides X, you wouldn't have X without the state is simply the converse error fallacy failing to distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions. I see much to me. Sorry, if the state provides X, you won't have X provided by the state. Can you repeat that for a second? You bet. So it is a I'm in the same boat where it's so they say the idea that if the state currently provides X, you wouldn't have X without the state. There might be a missing comma. So let me just so the idea that if the state currently provides X, you wouldn't have X without the state. They're saying that is just the converse error fallacy. I agree. Gotcha. And then they say there is no evidence income inequality is inherently bad. Singapore has more income inequality than the U.S. and no problems commonly claimed to be caused by income inequality. Wealth is not immutable. I can't speak directly to again, Singapore, because I'm not as familiar with the things went on there. I can speak to income inequality in countries like Canada, the United States and Europe and say that it is quite dramatic how we've gotten to this point. Regardless, it doesn't change the fact that globally again, six white men control the collective wealth of half of the rest of the human race. So I think that is an enormous amount of income inequality. Gotcha. And thank you very much for your question coming in from Bubblegum Guns as Lance fascism was created by an anarcho syndicalist who was nationalistic, nationalistic syndicalism was based on the guild system of feudal times. So I'm not sure if you're referring to Hitler or Mussolini and speaking about fascism itself as in the fasciste, which is again referencing to like the bundle of sticks logo if we're getting into that. But the idea, perhaps that we're getting closer to is maybe the fact that the word socialist is in the word Nazis, which seems to be a common trope that pops up in the Internet, which of course is the very definition of like a misnomer at the end of the day. It's the Democratic People's Party of China that doesn't mean that they're in any way democratic. And the same thing applies to the Nazis themselves. They were not socialist. Got you. And Sphincter of Doom says poverty is only a good predictor of crime when you ignore any other factor. Further, absolute poverty is what is relevant as a predictor, not relative poverty. So again, inequality doesn't matter for you, Lance. Well, I would be basically referring myself to people who spent a lot more time studying this than me, especially large left wing Pinko Kami organizations like the International Monetary Fund who have said that the largest precursor for crime happens to be poverty itself. And that to me makes sense just on the surface, let alone if the actual statistics bear it out. Gotcha. And this one coming in from Medus NCO says Lance, please explain why I'm entitled to any of Bezos's benefits that he earned by inventing, they put it in all caps, Amazon. All that leads to is people being reluctant to innovate. So I don't know if you work for Amazon, because that would be a different thing if you're just an everyday citizen. I don't think you're entitled to anything that Amazon, the company earns. Otherwise, I would be a little silly, but I think every single person who works for Amazon is entitled to a certain percentage of that company. I also think it would ameliorate the conditions of the workers if they had access to that. And finally, I don't think that Jeff Bezos does, you know, five hundred thousand or whatever the actual multiplication version of the work of his employees is. I'm not saying that it's not much more difficult to be a CEO than it is to be perhaps a warehouse worker, although it is pretty fucking shitty to be a warehouse worker these days when you have to literally shit in piss and bags and cans and stuff like that. So I think if you were to have a hierarchy of that kind, you would have to justify it. And I don't think in any way Jeff Bezos has got chance. Finkter of doom strikes again and saying no one has the right to anyone else's labor or property, which is an extension of bodily autonomy rights. Your rights are not conditional upon how convenient it is to others. I assume that one's for me as well. You bet. I mean, you just said the line, no one has the right to anyone else's labor. So I agree. You got it. And then this one coming in from let's see, we've got to have one in here for JF. We do. Okay. Deadpool three E says, I love how let's see they say I love how JF has been sweating bullets because of how wrong he is. Then says also there are no peer reviewed papers correlating genes with poverty, IQ and crime. But that poverty affects genes in crime rates. Well, first, yes, I'm sweating tonight. That's because the summer is starting here. And so I have not had the chance to install my AC and I'm standing beside my farming rig, which includes four levels of different illumination. I'm producing a lot of heat right now, but it's all for growing my plants. So I'm paying a price, but ultimately to get the benefits of this labor later this summer when I harvest my plants, tomatoes, squashes, peppers, all kinds of stuff. Now as far as there's no study that shows correlation between genes and poverty and genes and other things. The study I named it, it is let me just go back to the title, go see dissecting polygenic signals from genome wide association studies on human behavior in nature, human behavior. And he seems to suggest that somehow the correlations between poverty and something else undermines this genetic link. No, to the contrary, this article looks at the genetic correlation between these multiple variables and show that ultimately you have things that you may consider very differently, things like number of sexual partners and do you have ADHD or do you have autism? And it shows the partial genetic correlation explaining both. And in many cases, you have genetic correlations explaining both rather than one causing the other in the social or cultural domain. Got you. And thank you very much for this question coming in from Super K pill says Lance poverty and inequality are two different things. Think you'd agree or maybe you well, what are your thoughts in terms of what they're trying to get at Lance? I agree. Momento Mori says, how does Lance explain the 100 million people killed by communism in the last 100 years? I think the numbers wrong. It was closer to one trillion. So we should be accurate if we're going to make those kind of claims. Next up, this one coming in from Brenton Langle says JF is not qualified to talk about human genes. His PhD was in neuroscience. His thesis was on lamp rays. He is no more qualified regarding humans than Lance. There is no matter of qualification other than the facts that we are able to spout and the facts that I'm able to spot are based in twin studies, G was studies. It doesn't matter who I am. I could be lens and be quoting these studies and I'd be right. But it turns out I'm a biologist who's also a theorist in evolutionary biology. I have experience working on genetic populations of monkeys at Duke University. And I've also worked in the private sector research in clinical psychiatry, specifically the genetic origins of patients response to different levels of psychiatric medication in relation to their genes. So I know what I'm talking about, but you don't have to believe me on this. You just have to look at the facts and drag and drag your own conclusions. Or if you have if you have facts that are contradicting me, show them. Can I can I respond to that one as well? Sure. He taught monkeys how to play video games. JF did. Well, yes, I did. Wow. Well, that's a problem. Super interesting. No, it's it's incredibly based. Robert, it's absolutely fantastic. I feel lucky in my life that I've been close enough to these reasons, my cacts, that I could train them into playing soccer, literally on a PC game that I had programmed myself. Amazing. Robert Anderson says the serfs, socialism slash communism is built on eugenics. Have you not been listening to anything JF has been saying? I mean, I hadn't heard that argument until today. This was the first time I'd been introduced to it. I'm certainly taking it in for what it is. And I'll have to add it to my lexicon of new ideas that I've been exposed to. Gotcha. And this one coming in from Kevin De La Riva. Thank you for your questions at Lance. Why do you want to slow down economic growth and allow China to pass us up? China has already passed you in terms of their GDP growth rate, and they will pass you economically in about six years. Gotcha. And then thank you very much for your question coming in from Reverend Arrow says what beer was Lance drinking? Oh, it was it was a theme for the Lefeind du Monde. It's an incredible. This is a very good beer. Yeah, it's a very great respect for the first thing we the first thing we both agree on, I think. That's awesome. And we have this one. Your environment Seattle. Thank you says question for JF. You think that because twin studies show economic failure can be caused by genetics? Eugenics. Oh, OK, so they're saying you think that because twin studies show economic failure can be caused by genetics that therefore eugenics is good, but pores with poor people with good genes do exist. You're you're mixing my statements up and misinterpreting them in just small ways. First, what the twin study shows is that human outcome in our societies are influenced by genetics. That's a fact. The second statement, I never said that I'm for eugenics. I'm saying everyone is committing eugenics. No matter how you change society, you end up having a eugenic effect. So all I'm saying is let's be conscious of the eugenics we effects we have and let's manage them in the most efficient way so that we direct our society in the direction that we find is the most sustainable and moral to us. And third, he mentioned at the end of the super chat, what was it? They said, but poor people with good genes do exist. Yeah. Yeah. And so they should they should let their sperm and eggs compete on the sexual market. We'll see how good they are. Gotcha. Sigger Doome says, quote, choosing from seven different companies, unquote, is still literally choosing Lance. They say not having infinite choices or all the choices you want doesn't preclude democracy. Otherwise, democracy would never exist. It's absolutely true. I'm saying the fundamental problem is that these numbers can keep getting smaller. Like when I was a kid, I believe there was more than eight or nine media companies that controlled all the media we consume. They hadn't like coalesced into this big five that we find ourselves now. I mean, eventually, Jeff Bezos just got MGM, I think the other day for for like to the tune of what, 16 million dollars. Like eventually it's going to be Disney, Amazon and maybe one other provider, maybe Netflix, if they can hold out and then it'll be just two and then maybe eventually one. Like I'm fundamentally opposed to monopolies dominating entire realms of food or music or art or anything really, like even airlines or beer. Like I think that's a huge problem. Gotcha. And this one coming in from space ace one seven zero says, could we ask J.F. How capitalism can work to punish billionaire criminals a la Jeffrey Epstein? Oh, well, it's quite simple. Primes must be pursued and they must be put in jail. So as long as you have a solid service to apply the law, it should apply to billionaires as much as it applies to people who are poor. And sometimes there may be this equilibrium. I think in the Jeff Epstein case, there's even a story of him of him succeeding at buying out a case against him. In exchange, he didn't have much punishment, if any. So definitely there's a problem there, and it's all about the morality of our law makers and our suppliers. And how do you fix this? That's a tough problem because ultimately they they seem to be easy to corrupt. Is it true that you accepted a twenty five thousand dollar donation from Jeffrey Epstein to start your channel? It's true, but I don't like saying the word accepted. What I like to say is I took twenty five thousand dollar from Jeff Epstein. So I mean, welfare is OK if it comes from Jeffrey Epstein, then. Well, it's not welfare since it was a voluntary transaction. And my thinking as far as this goes is I had to have some fun to start my YouTube channel and there he was. And any money that I took from him would go less into his pedophilic interactions. And so if you will, I consider my taking of twenty five K from him as having kept bad actions from happening in the world. You were saving the kids, essentially. Yes, I mean, maybe not to the point of getting a Nobel Peace Prize, but almost. This one is that academy. This one coming in from Dennis Ridolfi, Jr. says workers making all decisions ever went to a union contract talk. People are simpletons. Yeah. And I mean, the same argument can be put forth for democracy itself for people voting in their elections. For the example of like them voting for Donald Trump. I was deeply upset about that. I was really upset when they voted for Stephen Harper here in Canada. But that doesn't change the fundamental principle that I think they should have the right to that democracy that doesn't just because I don't like the results of what someone comes up with. It doesn't mean that I should take those powers away from them. Gotcha. And this question coming in from Sphincter of Doom says, if co-ops need special treatment to compete, they are not actually competitive. Sorry, if co-ops need what to compete, they said, if they need special treatment to compete, then they're not actually coming. Well, I'm not asking for special treatment in any way, shape or form. I'm saying, oh, are you talking about how I want government and investment in them? We have government investment right now in capitalist ventures all the time in a variety of forms. I'm just saying that that should be also extended towards worker cooperatives, too. Gotcha. And Vince says, if JF believes in eugenics for preserving intelligence, why did the attempt to have? Let's see. All right. We're let's see. Dr. Dr. D. R. I. L. L. says, even if you grant JF all his premises, if we get advanced enough AI, it trumps all his arguments against welfare and for eugenics based on evolution. AI doesn't solve evolution. Really, you evolve as long as you make babies and as long as you have mutations in your genes. So no matter what kind of supercomputer would control humanity, there would be people advantage by the supercomputer and there would be people finished by it. So as long as unless the computer can determine that you can only make two babies, in which case it would essentially be a fascistic central control of human reproduction, which I don't think is desirable. But other than this, evolution continues into humanity, no matter the state of informatics and how far advanced the computers are. Gotcha. And this one coming in from. Mars. Appreciate it. Says supposedly, quote, unquote, atheist leftists put even the worst and most extreme Christian fundamentalists to shame in their total denial of evolution and genetics. Is that a question or just a comment? Some of these are just comments. I think they're saying. I can read it again. I don't know if you need me to, though. Um, yeah, I don't really have a comment on that. Gotcha. And this one coming in from Michael Lyon says, anarcho capitalism is the only morality. Should someone have the right to take from you because you worked hard for it? I assume that's to me. Yeah. So the problem with that system is that, a, ideally you're going to already be in a position of wealth as in you may be inherited wealth from your family or you have something to that effect. Be you're going to be completely able bodied. You've got no, you know, physical detriment to you that would make you unable to work. You aren't old. You aren't too young, anything of that sort. And then at the end of the day, we're all going to be placing each other in competition with each other. So the problem being is that the way our classification, stratification of society is now, not everyone gets a fair shake. You know, you have but to look to the differences between the white and black experience in America. And even to this day, you know, black people on average have a harder time getting bank loans when they're trying to start businesses. Black people on average have a harder time getting hired for positions if they have black sounding names, they won't even get like a first callback. So there is a way in which society already judges us that wouldn't really work. If all of a sudden we abolish the government and just let capitalism run amok and have this kind of like free market utopia. Gotcha. Bubblegum Gun says based and anarcho capitalist gamer monkey pill. Next, I don't know. Manammer, Manimmer, thank you for your question. This is J.F. They say you you say you aren't in favor of eugenics. So how would you benefit by establishing an ethno state? Something you are on record calling for. If you don't believe in superiority and inferiority of these different people groups, why separate by race? Well, you know, as I said, eugenics, I say it happens whether you believe whether you care about it or not. So evolution goes on. You just need to know this as you implement systems of society. Now, the other question about creating a state and should a state be to the service of its people or should it be open? My thinking around this is simply that this the function of a state is to form a social contract between the humans who are currently living and binding also their descendants. And I do not think that a state has obligations toward people who are outside of it or people who are unrelated to its founders or the people who were in it at the moment of founding. Now, in my view of the state, the state should be so so reduced that it really doesn't matter, but it's important to when you say that the things I've said in the past, those are based around a concern that the Constitution should protect the people who form it and should maintain its continuity into the future. Got you, Burt, Christchers, fake laughs as Lance. You tried to lead J.F. down past, but they worked against you. You had, gosh, they said, you have a devastatingly poor showing here. Oh, that's that's it. I'll try harder next time. Maybe maybe if I can get my own $25,000 cash injection from Jeffrey Epstein, I'll be able to perform better in this debate. Maybe I can put you together with Jocelyn Maxwell. Hey, whatever it takes. Next up here for that welfare. Sphinctor of doom says monopolies are a product of regulatory capture, not capitalism. Regulatory capture is a function of regulatory power. Is that one to me? I think so. Yeah, definitely. Regulatory capitalism is a form of regulatory power. I assume you might be talking about the idea of croning capitalism and while people like to point that out as being the problem of society, it's just only there weren't a few bad capitalists. Everything would work out when it seems to me as these cycles and the systems perpetuate themselves, they seem to be siphoning more and more money into the hands of the very few. So it seems to be pretty indicative of where the system is going. Gotcha. And that. Oh, we had one more. I think this is for you, J.F. We haven't had a lot for you. Hello. Hello, Baluba says J.F. stated he embraces eugenics, does he also believe that eugenics should be used to select for certain people groups? Well, again, there's this misconception that I support eugenics when I really don't. I think that trust the human built institutions are typically terrible at doing the right kind of eugenics. And that nature is actually the best source of the best natural selection pressures. And so no, I'm not for eugenics. I'm not for selecting features in humanity by any sort of force, any sort of central control or any force of state intervention. Gotcha. And with that, want to say, folks, we appreciate our guests. They are linked in the description, so you can click on their links and we appreciate them being with us. So as always, we do want to encourage you to be your regular friendly selves, folks, namely attacking the arguments rather than the people. And so one last thank you, J.F. and Lance. It was a pleasure to have you tonight. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me 100 percent. And folks, I will be right back in just a moment, letting you know about upcoming debates in a post credit scene. So stick around for that, and I will be right back. Thanks, everybody. Ladies and gentlemen, want to say thanks so much for coming by. That was a great debate, really great interchange in the dialogue. We really did. I I enjoy that thoroughly in terms of these guys, you could tell they're very experienced. And so that, honestly, those are my favorite debates, frankly, when they're very experienced. And I don't really have to I don't really have to moderate much because I just get to sit back and listen because they, you know, they won't jump all over each other in terms of interrupting and stuff like that. And so we do appreciate that. And we'll store it. T HFC rants. So sorry that I just saw your super chat come in. I didn't get to read it while the speakers are here. I think it came in like just as I was going off air. So sorry about that, my friend. And so want to say hi to you in chat and also let you know about some awesome stuff. Folks, you see on screen right now on the far right. Those are just some of the podcasts we were on. And folks, I've got to let you know, if you have not already looked us up on your favorite podcast app, modern day debate is available on your favorite podcast app. We are pumped to let you know about that. And I just released the super straight debate with Tom jump and Vosh this morning on our podcast. So folks, that's going to be a juicy one. If you haven't listened to it, well, hey, great opportunity to listen to it. Download it and you can listen to it over the next day or so. Just in your leisure. Some people have told me like, oh, I listened to what worked out. I listened to it while I'm cleaning around the house. I listened to it while I'm cooking, whatever it is. I want to let you know we are pumped that we are on your favorite podcast app. So check it out, folks, as we are very excited about that. And like I said, that debate with Vosh and T jump on the super straight subject was a juicy one. I remember that one. And so you don't want to miss that. I think that was exactly one Wednesday, one week ago already. That's crazy how time goes so fast. But glad to say hi to you in the old chat. I've got big news I'm going to share with you in just a moment, but I do want to get to say hi first. As it's nice to just get to hang out with you guys. Really excited. So maybe you're coming here for the first time. Want to let you know, my dear friend, we are a neutral platform. So we don't have any videos that argue, let's say, for like a politically left or a politically right or Christian or atheist or whatever. We don't have any type of videos that argue for any position. We are purely debates. That's what this channel is really very few like it that I've seen. And so we are excited about that. We hope you feel welcome, whether you be Christian, atheist, politically left, politically right, gay, straight, trans, you name it folks. Everybody. We really do appreciate you being with us and we're glad you're here. And that includes JD. Thanks for being with us as well as Stover and Ken Lee. Thanks for coming by and Robert Evans. Glad you are with us as well as YouTube user and Ozpin 88. Thanks for coming by as well as Ryduck and public utility. Thanks for coming by as well. B. Rai and Lysandro's books. Glad you came by super K pill. Good to see you. And let me know if I pronounce this right. Is it Quebec, Quebec voice foie gras? We are glad you were here as well as marketing disaster. Thanks for coming by and second horizon. Glad you came by Odin the father pumped. You came by and then Nicholas Petrus. Thanks for coming by GM for the people. This is your first time here. I don't know if you've seen you before, but we're glad you're here and Robert Evans. Glad you came by Ken McCracken. Thanks for being here. Ryan Seymour. Glad you came by as well as five Rises. Thanks for stopping in. Dead Star pumped. You came by and then human girl beta glad you came by and Brian Griffin. Good to see you. So James, how are you doing? How are you doing? I'm doing well. I'm excited. That was a great debate. Seriously, a lot of positive feedback about that. So I hope you enjoyed it as well. And then Michael Lyon. Thanks for coming by. This is nice work, James. All credit to the speakers. We do appreciate them. And then Lockbeard. Good to see you. Thanks for dropping in and then fire Rises. Is this your first time? I don't know if I've seen you here before, but we're glad you're here. And Jeff Goldblum. Love your movies. Thanks for being with us. Bert Kreischer's fake laugh. Thanks for coming by as well as Nero and Nick and Apricot Sloth. Good to see you again. It's been a while. Z, is it ZPTH Oz. Thanks for coming by. Now, folks, I told you I have big news. I want to, well, let me give you some updates. We've got all sorts of big news, all different types of big news. So let me say this. Oh, Topazzo. Thanks for letting me know about the Twitch chat. I'm so sorry. Twitch chat. Good to see you, friends. Monimer. Thanks for coming by as James will be real with you. It's infuriating seeing people spout stuff like AJ was saying. Who's AJ? And then said, but I love and appreciate what you do here because it is important, regardless. Thank you for your kind words. And then seeing people spout stuff like AJ was saying. I don't know who you mean by AJ, but good to see you. Monimer and Topazzo. Good to see you there in the old Twitch chat. And folks, I don't know if you know that we do have Twitch. So I am excited to mention that. And I'll throw that Twitch chat in the YouTube chat. Folks, if you didn't know, if you're watching on Twitch first, hit that follow button. We're excited about the future as this channel has been growing and we're pumped about that as we are fulfilling the vision of providing a neutral platform on a level playing field so everybody can have their chance to make their case. And we also want to let you know, Lysocracy, thanks for coming by. David Chadman, thanks for being with us. And then also BigDur66, thanks for dropping in as well as ExtraHigh. Thanks for coming by. But yeah, so we do have both Twitch and YouTube. So if you're on either of those, if you have a preferred platform, hey, you can choose. It's up to you. So you can pick and we're on both of them live at the same time every time we go on with the debate. So you won't miss anything if you follow us on either. And then be met hopeful. Thank you for coming by. And Bitcoin, buy coin. Thanks for being with us as well as you guys. I told you I've got big news. Let me show you this. Some of you already saw it while the debate was going, but I have to show you this because I'm just pumped. So in particular, what's the big news? Folks, we, if you have not known if you have been living in a cave on Mars with your fingers in your ears and maybe you didn't know that we have been running a crowdfund in order to put on this epic debate with Matt Dillahunty and Dr. Kenny Rhodes. Namely, Dr. Kenny Rose is a Christian apologist and Matt Dillahunty, atheist juggernaut debater. They're going to be debating this Saturday. It is official, folks, as we have hit our goal of thirty five hundred. We are pumped. So I am so thankful, folks, for all of your support. Seriously, I'm so excited about just the growth and the fact that we're increasing each time. So remember, I mentioned, I'm just honestly, I'm so pumped that we met this goal for real last time. We had set a goal of twenty five hundred. And we got to host Michael Shermer and Mike Jones. That was epic back in January. This time it is for this purpose, the purpose of Dr. Kenny Rose and Matt Dillahunty debating is we want to provide honorariums as a gift of thanks to our speakers. And this is going to be a main event type of thing. You don't want to miss it this Saturday night. And I want to let you know, though, we will keep doing it such that we're going to try to shoot for bigger, bigger main events. And we're going to what we really very absolutely will do is we do want to have a vote next time or you get to vote on what debate will try to set up. And I'm very serious like this strategy, folks, you guys think I'm joking, but it's like, hey, we just keep doing it. I mean, we did it again. And I want to say thank you so much, folks, for your support of this. You made it possible. And so I'm very serious. Someday we want to get like Richard Dawkins on for a debate. No joke. That's how we want to use the strategy. And we think we're going to keep getting better at it. So I want to let you know I'm pumped that we met that goal. Only two days left. You can still give. And I have to be honest, I want you to consider this. If you have not already thrown in, please do consider throwing in. You're like, well, why James, I have to be honest. I'm going to tell you something that's a little bit embarrassing, but it's it's still our second one. So we're, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm still learning how to become skilled in crowdfunding. Basically, I forgot to add in the costs for all of the merch that we'd be sending. I'm embarrassed to admit that. So basically the merch that we're sending, I think it totals. Let me see. I've got it. I've got it here, but long story short, we're OK. But the idea was that that would usually be built into the crowdfund where you would build in the costs of, like, let's say, merch that you're sending. And I forgot to build it in. And so the total for merch is it looks like it's going to be about nine hundred and forty dollars. However, there's a couple of things where it's like, don't worry, you know, we can be flexible. So there are a couple of things we're doing here. One is it is still open. So if you haven't given to it yet, we do want to say, hey, you know, you know, throw in a few bucks, it helps. The other thing is we're probably going to allocate the money that we wanted to use to make this event huge with advertisements. I've it's there's like about 70 bucks that's been used for advertising. So a little some of it will be used for ads. But then if I remember right, it's like maybe like two thirty. We're going to shift toward that. You could say those those merch costs. And then some people have said, hey, I don't even like it's not a big deal. I didn't do it for the merch. I just did it because I love the channel. And so it has it's down to about between those two things. It's down to about one ninety or I'm like, ooh, I it would have been. I just wasn't the best planner. It's rookie mistake. I admit, if you read, I read like a book on crowdfunding over the summer last summer. No joke, I really did because I was like, OK, we're going to try this. And so I've been, you know, trying to get ready for this for a long time. It's been about a year. And I that was like one of the most basic things is they're like, make sure you build in the costs of the merchandise that you'll send. So long story short, do want to encourage you if you haven't yet, I'm going to throw that link in the old live chat and then something that we wanted to do tonight. And we we think that we're going to have to make it known verbally. And we're going to do it for there's going to be a debate this Thursday that all host and then there's going to be a debate on Friday that all host as well. So tomorrow and the next day, Lord willing, that's the plan. Where if you want to give a super chat, you will be able to do that. Although you'll also have the option if you want to throw into the crowd fund. Let's say like just speaking out of off the cuff. Let's say if you threw in like while we depending on how many questions we have, we're trying to figure that out. But long story short, I put one in the crowd fund already. So if you look at the crowd fund, and I'll actually show you this just because it might be confusing, where if you throw into the crowd fund, you can also ask a question. Instead of doing it via super chat. So let's say you threw in like five bucks. We said it tonight. There's a perk in the Indie go go. If you put in like five dollars, you could in that case ask a question. Just like if you put in a five dollars super chat, except instead of 30% of it going to Google, you'd be giving it to Indie go go where Google doesn't get it, which is nice. So that's something that we want to do. And so yeah, long story short, I'm pumped about that and do want to encourage you like folks, we really do appreciate all of your support. And so Bo Smith, thanks for making it as well as Pedro HM. I'm glad you made it. But let me tell you more about this in particular. I'm going to throw that link for the crowd fund into the old live chat. And that right there, which is now in the live chat and ready for you. We do want to encourage you like, Hey, you may might as well like click on it. Throw a few bucks in there as that really does. Like I said, it helps, especially because I forgot to build the merch into it. And then Let's Farm says, is the merch still available? It is still available. So we do have those options. Like if a person still wanted to get a coffee mug or a t-shirt, you can. And if you want to throw in even just a few bucks, that helps a ton. So we are excited, though, only two days left. So if you want to give to this, you could say that this is our stretch goal. Because last time we did it where we had a $500 stretch goal for basically we're using the funds and we haven't done it yet. But now that COVID is the restrictions are pretty much gone. We plan on this summer. I plan on asking Matt Gillahunty if we can do an in-person debate there because that's what our stretch goal was for. And so that promise is still going to be kept like that. I'm still I mean, assuming Matt's OK with it. Like I don't want to sign up for a sign him up for an in-person debate when he hasn't I haven't talked to him about it yet. So assuming Matt's OK with it, that's the plan. And so that was our stretch goal we did last time. This stretch goal, I would just like to say is you could say this time. It is maybe $190 stretch goal to go beyond what we've raised. And basically because I'm embarrassed to say I made that mistake of not building in the merge costs into the crowdfund. So seriously, it does still really make a difference if you want to give to the crowdfund. Seriously, it really does help a lot. So only two days left, though, you guys. So in other words, tomorrow and Friday and it's closed up. All right. So that's why I'm like, hey, like jump in now. Like, what are you waiting for? Like, we're excited about it. And so I do want to encourage you and say, hey, like, we're excited about it, but there's only two days left. So if you've been waiting, if you're like, I've been thinking about maybe throwing into this crowdfund, you still have a good reason. And it really does help me. And so we really do appreciate your generosity in making these projects happen. And so, like I said, I'm seriously, I'm like thinking like maybe in the future, really do want to shoot for the stars in terms of like Richard Dawkins or maybe someday Sam Harris, like no joke. And so we do appreciate that support. Third finger from the right says, smash that like button. I do agree. We do appreciate that. And then Lesandro's books. Thanks for coming with us or coming by and and hacks. Good to see you. By the way, I did see your payment for the, what is it called? Indiegogo and hacks. Thank you so much for your support. I do appreciate it big time. So and then B three. Januck, thank you for coming by. We're glad you're here as well as a lot of, let's see, there are a number of new faces I feel like tonight. And we're glad you're here. So we hope you feel welcome. Like I said, no matter what walk of life, maybe you're a Trump or maybe you're a Biden or whoever you are, no matter where you stand, we are glad you are here. And so let's see. Bo Smith says, I do all my super chest in an Ironman costume. I iron my cape too. That's what I'm talking about. Official and let's see here. Noah Levina, thanks for coming by. We're glad you made it better late than never, Noah. But yes, Brooke Shavis says, if you're able to donate even a couple of dollars, please do every dollar help support the channel. And it is true. We do we do the thing is like, if we see like this strategy continues to work, then for real, we're going to be like, hey, we can take bigger risks. And so if you guys want to see bigger and battered debates for real, throw into that crowd fund for the price of a cup of coffee, you really can help. And so seriously, few bucks, you can do it and it helps a lot. And so I want to let you know, though, Thursday and Friday, I will mention to you that during the stream, I'll make it clear because you guys maybe didn't see it in the live chat. I want to make it clear that if you want to do a super chat at that time, a way to do it, and I'll show you right now is if you go to Indiegogo. So I'm going to load it right now and show it to you on the screen. And you'll be able to see the super chat option, which tonight didn't really not a lot of people heard about it. And that makes sense because I didn't actually announce it in the stream. But let me know of you guys if this actually makes sense, because my hope is that we might be able to hit that stretch goal between tomorrow and the next day, as well as tonight, even. Well, you can sign up for anything helps in terms of signing up for the Indiegogo. But we let me show you this because you might be confused. So let's say this coming Thursday, you're like, I'm excited because there's going to be a debate, which, by the way, it's going to be John Maddox and it's going to be. So John Maddox and actual Socialist Trash has signed up. And so let me show you this. And I'm going to make it bigger. Two seconds. So Thursday night, you don't want to miss it. Be sure you're here on screen. You can see it right now where do you see where it's it's got the normal tiers? So it's got like the three dollar one. And then right by the three dollar one, there's a five dollar one. Do you see it there? Let me know. And it says Super Chat for JF versus Lance. And you can see nobody signed up for it, because like I said, I didn't get to mention it during the stream and it's hard to explain. And I don't want to do it. I don't really like doing it when the debaters are like waiting to debate because I'm like, just get to the debate already. Like that's even what I'm thinking. DeBosk, glad you came by. Pancake of Destiny says, I can debate every communist you can find. Thank you for letting me know that. And I can even demonetize your stream by showing my face. That's funny. I like that. And but yes, let me know. Do you see it on screen where it says Super Chat for JF versus Lance? On Thursday, I'll put one up that says Super Chat for Maddox versus Actual Socialist Trash. That's what he calls himself. I don't call him that. I mean, I do, but only because he makes me. And it's going to be epic. You want to see that it's going to be great. So that's tomorrow night and it's going to be a late night debate. So want to say, though, yeah, for real, folks, you can in that way, instead of doing a Super Chat on YouTube, if you want to throw into the crowd fund, it's a dual purpose. You could say it's a trifecto purpose, because one, you're still getting to do a Super Chat. So you would just throw in the donation. You just buy in at that perk level. And then you can just tag me in the chat and say, hey, James, like I bought in, I bought in at the Super Chat for tomorrow, it'll say Maddox versus AST. You can say, I bought in at that perk level and here's my Super Chat question in the live chat. And then I can read it. And so you're still getting the Super Chat and at the same time, you're helping the crowd fund, which definitely helps a lot. And at the same time, Google doesn't get 30 percent of it. Because I don't know if you guys know, Google does get like 30 percent of Super Chats, which is like, and geez, like Google, don't you think you're doing all right already? But and hacks. Thanks for coming by. And then is there anybody that I haven't seen in the old chat? Pretty much caught up. But yeah, so we are excited about that. And so does that make sense, though? Let me know if it makes sense in terms of like, oh, OK, so you go in, you you jump into the crowd fund at that perk level or that tier level or that reward level of like the Super Chat. And then just say, James, like I put in at that tier level in the YouTube live chat with your question. Does that make sense? Let me know if that doesn't make sense. And then sorry, I'm asking like 100 times, but it really does help just to get your feedback and knowing that it's clear, you could say. But yes, this was a juicy debate for sure. And then this one coming from my name is Ritzo says, don't take the stream down immediately. I want to listen at work in the morning. Oh, yeah, this stream will be up forever. Like that's my plan at least. So. Yeah, it'll definitely be here. And General Balls X says, Google has enough money. They should should only be taking 10 percent. I agree. I mean, they survived long enough with super before Super Chat's ever existed. Right. So they could, you know, if they want to just do 10 percent. And I mean, they're all. But yeah, so. Ritex says, I want to start a crowd fund. Crowd funds are neat. And we are excited that it's honestly been just a thrill that they've been going so well, as we want to say, thank you all for supporting the crowd fund so much. Seriously, it does mean a lot. So. Thank you, guys. Thank you for everything. I am going to I'm excited that I think it's still bright enough bright enough outside. I think I'm going to go for a short, short bike ride. I love getting out for some bike rides when it's nice. And it's great for me after I've been sitting for two hours. I was like, oh, I said, get to get that fresh air because I know people said, J.F., you're sweating, you're sweating, J.F. Nobody's sweating more than me right now. I'm actually pretty warm. So, but yeah, manic pandas, we. Says Google earns every cent of that 30 percent. That's actually, I got to be honest, it is true. I mean, they could just say, no Super Chat period. It's no longer available. And I really have no complaint because it is true that like they came up with it and it's their platform. And I do have to say, I know a lot of people, they complain about YouTube and maybe they're plain complaints are justified. I don't know, but I will say this. YouTube has recommended a ton of our videos. In huge amounts, like I, yeah. So. YouTube's helped us grow a lot. I can't complain. And I'm also a little surprised. We haven't gotten a strike yet. Isn't that crazy? We haven't gotten one. Even on, I've got another channel where I used to put my lectures when I would teach and it's just my name, like James Goose, but basically I got a strike on it. And it wasn't because of content. It was because they said I was a copyright infringement. And I was like, I don't know how I did. But long story short, I'm like, that's weird because I hardly ever use that channel because I don't ever, I don't usually like put my lectures up. But long story short, I was like, what? But not one for this channel. I think YouTube likes us. I think YouTube smiles upon this channel. Believe me, I think they do. So Brian Griffin says, do you think that aliens know about earth and choosing to avoid it? That's a juicy question. I have no idea. Let's see. I'm open to aliens existing. I'm pretty agnostic. So I'm like 50 50. I'm like, I don't know. And whether or not they did exist. I mean, let's say they existed and maybe they were a lot wiser than us. Then I can see why they'd avoid birth. Like I kind of it's a little bit hard to believe that they would be that. So a lot of people are like, oh, maybe they're so technologically advanced. It's like, yeah, but I don't know if that means they're wiser or like more moral. Right. I mean, like we are. Can we see it? Well, I mean, like it's an empirical question. Is it the case that, for example, the United States or the globe earth? As we become more technologically advanced, have we become more moral? I don't know. That's something you could empirically task. Like our people may be more charitable, things like that. Do they help the poor, give help out people? I don't know. And I know that I think I had read. OK, so there are different things I've read. One is I haven't read the book, but I know that Stephen Pinker argues that I think it's called Enlightenment now. He argues that like things are getting pretty a lot better. Probably part of it, a lot of it being technological advance. But maybe you in that book, I don't know, I've read it. But maybe he cites research in terms of like people behaving better. I mean, so, for example, like maybe maybe there's like less wars. But I read elsewhere and I can't remember where it was. I read that and this is an old source. I don't remember what the source is. So I don't know if it's credible. So take it with a grain of salt. I'm not saying this is the case, but I read that like given the amount, the number of countries that exist, the proportion of wars being started is, if I remember right, I think it was they're saying going up. So I don't know. I just don't know. I mean, it's just so anyway. Hannah Anderson, good to see you. Thanks for your support of the stream and the channel all the time. That means a lot. And then Tripper Liquor, good to see you. Glad you made it. And but I'm going to let you go. I want to say thanks for coming by. Lewis Giles, good to see you. And Reso out of Gore, good to see you as well. So thank you guys so much seriously, though. I do appreciate you. We love you guys. Seriously, thanks for all of your support of Modern Day Debate. We're excited about the future, folks. This debate is happening this Saturday and it's because of you. Seriously, thank you so much for all of your support. It does mean a lot. And we're excited about the future in terms of like this strategy as we learn and we get better at it. It's just going to keep getting better. So thanks everybody. Keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable. Take care and we'll be back. The plan is tomorrow night and Friday night and Saturday night. It's going to be crazy, folks. So thanks everybody for all your support. We love you. Feel free, hit that like button on the way out and hey, share this content. If you have a friend that likes topics like this, feel free to share and be like, hey, this channel is a nonpartisan channel. They just post debates on juicy topics. And maybe your friend will be like, oh, I like juicy topics. So thanks everybody for all your support. I love you guys. Take care.