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March 18, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:19:18

690 Call In Show Sun Mar 18 2007

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	Okay, well I guess we may just well get started.
	Thank you everyone for joining us shortly after 4 o'clock on Sunday, March the 18th, 2007.
	And I appreciate you stopping by.
	Thank you so much. I thought that we would start since we're starting to get the wounded coming back here from our deployments.
	And I use the word our, oh, so very loosely.
	Our deployments out there in Afghanistan.
	And so, of course, we're starting to get these thoughtful articles that are being written, which I think is worth just having a look at.
	I'll just touch on it briefly and then open up the topics to general praise of listeners and listeners.
	This is a guy, this is again from the sort of Maclean's magazine.
	We got it for free when we signed up for our internet, so I have a glance through it to the degree to which I can stomach the saccharine propaganda, particularly to do with the wartime stuff.
	It's interesting, and this is a description of a soldier who has returned.
	He is without a foot.
	He's got a prosthetic foot that goes on just a couple of inches below the knee down to his foot.
	His name is Corporal Barnwall.
	Everyone calls him Barney.
	This is the description. Corporal Barnwall is 26 years old.
	He is blonde and fit and drives a Ford F-150 pickup truck.
	My baby, he says.
	Growing up in Essex, a small town near Windsor, Ontario, Marnie was almost the fastest kid on the playground.
	Nobody could catch him.
	Lacrosse was his specialty.
	After high school, he thought about using his speed to chase criminals, but college didn't quite pan out.
	So, at 21 with three part-time jobs and an itch for something different, Barnwell stopped by a Canadian Forces recruiting office.
	During one visit, April 10, 2002, he signed a three-year contract with the Army.
	After basic training, he graduated as top athlete and top overall recruit.
	Barnwall was posted to CFB Petawawa, home of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment.
	He deployed to Bosnia in 2004.
	Kabul was supposed to be next, but his section was scratched from the mission.
	Barnwall liked the infantry, but he couldn't quite picture himself as a lifer.
	His plan was to sign a three-year extension, serve until 2008, then give college a second try.
	I still wanted to be a cop.
	He recalls lying on the green couch in his parents' living room.
	And then there is a description of his injury.
	He stepped on a landmine, lost his foot, and so on.
	But I think that it's interesting because naturally there is an extraordinary amount of emotional energy and effort that is put into praising these guys who are willing to kill for money.
	There is an incredible inversion of any kind of rational moral hierarchy that goes into praising the troops who will pick up guns and shoot at whoever their superiors point at.
	But I think it's really important...
	Sorry, I'm not going to make any kind of clue about the moral nature of this fellow.
	I don't really know him from Adam, but there are a few clues in the description of him that I think are important.
	So this is a guy who was a fast runner.
	So obviously he's athletic, right?
	So he's got a natural sort of physical athleticism, and he was a naturally fast runner.
	After high school, he wants to become a cop.
	Now, he wants to go to college, but here it says, but college didn't quite pan out.
	College didn't quite pan out.
	And that's an important indication.
	There's a general rule of thumb around IQ, which is a controversial but not insignificant way of measuring intelligence, that, you know, to get out of high school, you need about a 90.
	To get into college, you need about 100, which is about the average.
	To do university, you need about a 110.
	To do your master's, you need about a 120.
	To do your PhD, you need...
	130 or so. These are just general rules of thumb, right?
	This is not sort of an exact science.
	But if you look at this guy, he wanted to be a cop, went to college, and it didn't quite work out.
	And we don't know what that means, but it's probably not because he was too smart for college that it didn't quite work out.
	I think it's fairly safe to say, based on these sorts of indications, that This guy is below the average of IQ, below the average of intelligence.
	I don't think that's too controversial a statement.
	If you can't even make it in a local college in small town Ontario, then you're not the sharpest tool in the shed, so to speak.
	Now, he's a fast runner, so maybe he could have been a courier or something like that, but this is not a guy.
	Who has a lot of intelligence.
	Now, I don't know the degree to which army people at the front lines, I don't know of any studies of the standard intelligence, but if you look at the general statistics, particularly in the US Army, but this is the case also in the Canadian Army, that the people who were on the front lines tend to come from small towns.
	They tend not to have any education outside of the ridiculously bad education and propaganda, brain-mincing, soul-crushing machine of public schools.
	But these are not people who are particularly, on average, not particularly intelligent.
	Intelligent people would look at the odds, the cost-benefit of what's going on in terms of joining the military, particularly this guy joined after 9-11, right?
	So this is not exactly like he joined the military in 1993 when the Cold War was over and it was just a way to get some travel in.
	So this guy is not particularly bright.
	He may be a perfectly nice fellow, although I kind of doubt it, but he's not particularly bright because it would take a certain amount of intelligence to say, well, it would take a lot of intelligence, I think, to say, well, that's kind of killing people for money, and that doesn't look so good on The Sopranos, and you slap a costume on, it doesn't really change the nature of the interaction.
	That would take some brains.
	On the other hand, it takes a certain amount of intelligence to say, well, 9-11 has happened.
	If I go and do this, the odds are that I'm going to get deployed, and the odds of injury are not insignificant.
	I don't know how many tens of thousands of American soldiers have been injured over in Iraq, but it's quite a few.
	If I remember rightly, it's something like 20,000 have been injured to the point where it's had some significant impact.
	And a lot of these injuries don't occur on the battlefield and so on.
	But the odds are not insignificant when it comes to looking at this kind of stuff.
	So an intelligent person is going to look at those odds and say, well, yeah, I'll get some travel in and I'll get some training and I might get some education, but the risk of significant injury is pretty high.
	So this would not be a calculation that most people of even average intelligence would make that calculation.
	And when we look at the fact that it says here he graduated as a top athlete and top overall recruit.
	Now those two things are very interesting.
	A top athlete means that he is kind of like a...
	I mean, he's very limber, he's very fast, he's strong, and so on.
	These are all just sort of physical characteristics that he has.
	The other thing...
	I sort of get out of this, and if you've been in the military, you can let me know more about it.
	But a top overall recruit, what does that mean?
	Well, from my understanding, what it means is that he obeys orders without question.
	And he is obsessed in the way that only military people and totally anal people and obsessive-compulsive people can be with presentation, with a crisp, creased uniform, with spotless, spit-shined shoes, with a bed made so perfectly that it looks like a table tennis top that you could bounce a quarter on.
	That kind of inconsequential addiction To fighting the possibility of criticism, any kind of negativity, is, I think, pretty important.
	There is a description here of a guy who shows up for a photo shoot for the magazine, right?
	So he is a soldier who was injured, and he's showing up for a photo shoot for the front page of this magazine.
	And he says here, When everything was ready,
	he stared at himself in the bathroom mirror.
	It was his first time in full uniform since that November day.
	He stepped on a landmine.
	Again, that's a very interesting thing to look at, where the priorities are in terms of somebody's moral relationship to the planet and to other people.
	So a soldier who is perfectly happy, in fact, could be overjoyed, but at least is certainly satisfied that he's doing his duty, if he goes over to foreign countries and shoots uneducated people who have never done anything to threaten him, will gun them down in cold blood for money, And that he has no problem with, but if there's a crease on his uniform, by God, that is a transgression.
	By God, that cannot be allowed.
	That is just beyond terrible.
	And so when it says that he was a top recruit, what it means is that he's obsessed about inconsequential details to the point where he has absolutely no picture, no idea of the big picture of what he's doing.
	And I would say, and this is sort of the whole question around a choice and intelligence and circumstance and propaganda, and it's a very thorny issue, which I don't believe there's any particularly clear answer to.
	At least we won't have a clear answer until society is far more free.
	But I would say that...
	The praise that the intellectuals and the writers heap upon these brutes.
	I mean, this guy, and I would say at least all the soldiers that I've met, they're fundamentally brutes.
	They're not too bright.
	They're very athletic.
	They have no self, no identity.
	And they feel completely empty in the absence of a hierarchy.
	And this is talked about quite a bit.
	I actually talk about this in the novel that I wrote called Almost, about what happened to the German soldiers after World War I. But here's an example of somebody else who gets most of his arm.
	This is a description of his injury, and I'm sorry for it to be gruesome, but it's important to feel how gruesome it is and then to hear his description of his own injury.
	So this is another gentleman named Lowen.
	By December, nine months after the bombing, his is still a gruesome wound.
	The explosion shredded the underside of his forearm, destroying most of the muscle and skin and puncturing a hole in his ulna bone right near the wrist.
	The major nerve that controls the pinky and part of the ring finger was also severed.
	Chunks of the gash were so deep that doctors patched them up with pieces of muscle and nerves taken from Lowen's left leg.
	Seeing the injury for the first time, it is impossible not to stare at the fat, fleshy bulge near his wrist.
	It looks like a giant bee sting.
	This is his quote. For the first few days, I thought I was just in a bad dream and I was going to wake up and carry on like normal, says Lowen, sitting in the University of Alberta hospital waiting room.
	He is wearing camouflage fatigues and a matching green beret.
	A thin yellow patch, his official wound stripe, is sewn on the left sleeve.
	He says, Is that not more chilling?
	The psychic injury, the psychic wound, the psychic emptiness.
	The spiritual emptiness that this man has, that he feels worse about not being in the structured brutality of a military environment than getting his arm blown off, Do you see the people that we praise?
	And I know that this is not a group that would necessarily go this way, but this is more to a wider audience.
	These Sunday shows are, along with Ask a Therapist, the most popular thing that we do in terms of downloads.
	So I'm just trying to move this out to a wider audience.
	People who aren't that bright, who are spiritually empty, Who are more annoyed that they are taken away from the structured and brutal environment of the military where they get to kill people.
	They're more upset about being taken out of that environment than they are about having most of their arm blown off and this guy is still facing amputation because the arm's use is coming back very slowly and painfully.
	But this is the heroism that we talk about.
	Now, if it's true that these guys are not that bright, Which is no sin, of course.
	I'm not that bright at fixing my car.
	It doesn't really matter. If it's true that these guys aren't so bright, then I think we have a particularly difficult time of it insofar as they're not bright enough to understand this stuff on their own anymore than I'm bright enough to understand quantum physics.
	They're not bright enough to understand this on their own, and so what they're going to do is they're going to take their cues from those around them.
	They're going to take their cues as to what is acceptable and what is moral and what is right from those who are around them.
	Which is people like you and people like me.
	And people who write and people who argue and people who speak.
	They can't figure it out for themselves any more than I could take out my own appendix.
	So they're going to take their cues from the people around them.
	And so, in a sense, given that these guys obviously have empty, difficult childhoods, without a doubt, you don't end up with that lack of self just accidentally, and having a self is not a function of intelligence.
	It's a function of connection.
	It's a function of intimacy.
	So these brutes, who are only brutes insofar as they're physically athletic and not very intelligent, they're not brutes like evil, how is it that they become people who...
	Are willing to make these moral choices.
	And then the amazing thing is that we then praise them for their moral choices.
	These are people who can't make moral choices.
	They can't make moral choices.
	They're not bright enough. They might be able to make moral choices if moral choices were more commonsensical and more described in a way that made sense.
	But they themselves are not bright enough to invent morality all on their own.
	So they're going to take their cues from those around them.
	So who is it that really creates the soldiers?
	In my view, it's the intellectuals.
	Who is it who really creates the soldiers?
	Are people who should know better, but who praise the soldiers.
	And I'm not talking about the potential private soldiers in a free society who would defend you against invaders.
	I'm talking about these guys.
	Who say, Iraq?
	Yeah, let's go shoot some Iraqis.
	Afghanistan? Hey, let's go shoot some Afghanis.
	What have they done to us?
	Doesn't matter. I don't care.
	I'm not going to quit. I'm not going to go to jail.
	I'm not going to go AWOL. I'm not going to take refugee status, as one guy did.
	We talked about recently who fled the U.S. to come to Canada because he felt it was an unjust war.
	In Iraq? No.
	These are people who say, you tell me who to shoot, and I will shoot them.
	And he wants to be a cop, right?
	So he either wants to be somebody who's shooting people who can shoot back, or he wants to be somebody who's pointing guns at people who are legally disarmed, especially up here in Canada, who can't shoot back.
	The taxpayers, the livestock, the herd.
	So the reason that I'm talking about this, and this is something that has not been around in Canada for a long time, I think it's been around certainly more recently in the U.S. and still a big issue, War, most fundamentally, I'll put forward this proposition, it's not the only proposition that you could say about war, but I think it's an important one, especially for people who enjoy philosophy and who enjoy discussing ideas.
	War is fundamentally a conversation about virtue.
	Now, there's lots of economic stuff about war that you can't have a war without a state because there's war profiteering that only occurs because you can take the money from the taxpayers and put it into the hands of Halliburton and put it into the hands of the Carlyle Group and put it into the hands of other big companies like that.
	So there's an economic aspect for war, and I've talked about that.
	That's on my blog. But at a very fundamental level, that is only made possible by the moral conversations that we have about war.
	And when we have moral conversations about war, most fundamentally, what we're having is a moral conversation about soldiers.
	Because there's an old cartoon that I remember reading.
	The hippies used to have, I don't know, like a saying or a statement or whatever about war in the 1960s.
	And they would say, you know, what if they threw a war and nobody came?
	I mean, ahead of war, nobody showed up.
	Nobody volunteered. Nobody.
	Nobody would go. Well, there'd be no war.
	There was a sort of fundamental truth in that.
	And I just remember seeing a cartoon, I guess years later, in The New Yorker, I think it was, where some general was standing in front of a group of other soldiers, executives, and generals.
	And he was saying, on the other hand, gentlemen, what if we threw a war and everybody came?
	Which of course would be impossible too because then there's nobody to pay for the war, nobody to grow the food that the soldiers need to fatten themselves up so they can go and shoot people.
	But war, in its fundamental essence, is a conversation about morality, and the subject of that conversation about morality is the soldier.
	This is why so much propaganda is focused on the soldier, and this is why you get the taps and the rituals and the slow walk and the crisp salutes and the white gloves and the coffins and all of this, the 21-gun salute, and you get all of this ritual.
	Because the soldier is a beast of prey.
	The soldier is an amoral sociopathic predator.
	You can't call a soldier anything other than a hitman in any logical or moral or rational universe.
	And you don't need a lot of pomp and circumstance when people are really good, like when people live moral lives.
	I don't have to salute my wife every morning she gets up and Have a roll call and, you know, march around the backyard because she's a genuinely good and wonderful human being, doesn't need all this ritual.
	To puncture the ritual around the myth of the virtue, to puncture the myth of the virtue of the soldier is an essential task for those who are interested in opposing the spread of the most evil of human institutions, which is war.
	The institution that is so evil that it destroys everyone it comes in contact with, it corrupts the culture that engages in it, and it destroys the culture that it is inflicted upon.
	And the only way to break the back of mankind's addiction to war is to confront the fundamental moral judgment about the soldier.
	And if we confront that fundamental moral judgment about the soldier...
	Then we are doing far more, I think, to oppose human misery than just about anything else that we can do.
	I think that is one of the greatest things that we can do.
	Yes, we can fight the welfare state.
	Yes, we can do all of these things, oppose taxation and we can oppose foreign policy and so on.
	But all of that eventually has to come down to what is colloquially called boots on the ground.
	Boots on the ground is a metaphor for bullets in the brain.
	Boots on the ground is a metaphor for knives in the belly.
	And soldiers walking around don't do a damn thing.
	If you knew that their guns were made of chocolate, they wouldn't do anything.
	Boots in the ground doesn't mean anything.
	What it means is that it means stilettos through the eye.
	It means bullets in the bowels.
	It means shooting. I mean, war is obviously...
	And I know this is fundamental and obvious, but the way in which we dissociate the brutality and violence of war, the endless murder and the people slipping on their own intestines and the people who can, you know, hold their own arms in their...
	one arm in their other arm because it's been blown off and all this kind of stuff.
	We must dissociate it from that, right?
	So this guy has an injury.
	He stepped on a landmine. And we have a lot of sympathy.
	At least we're supposed to have a lot of sympathy for this guy.
	But fundamentally, and I think quite essentially, nobody is ever talking about the people that he shot.
	So this guy comes back to a first world country with all the antibiotics, with artificial limbs, with people who will give him intense and very good physiotherapy, with a government that is going to rob the taxpayers even more to pay for this guy, to buy him off, right, as a wounded warrior, as a fallen soldier, as a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And we, of course, in the United States, people get very upset about what happened at Walter Reed because there were some rodents running around the injured soldiers, the wounded killers.
	These are the same people, obviously, and tragically, who say, well, I mean, if somebody kills somebody else, we should just string them up.
	We should have the death penalty.
	I don't care a damn fig for any of these people who kill other people.
	But the soldiers, my God, we're treating the soldiers badly?
	Well, let's get some money over there.
	Let's get some resources over there, because they're heroes.
	But picture what it's like on the other side.
	Of the rifle sight. Picture what it's like if you get your foot blown off and you're some Afghani.
	And let's say you're a soldier.
	We don't have to make it too tear-jerky a thing.
	I mean, obviously it happens to kids and so on, but we can make it a more clear moral equivalent.
	And you get shot and you get your foot blown off and you're an Afghani, a Mujahideen or an Afghani warrior.
	What happens? Are you airlifted to Germany and then are you airlifted to a first world hospital?
	Hell no. You're dragged off to a cave where maybe, just maybe, you might have some morphine.
	Maybe. Maybe, just maybe, you might have some antibiotics.
	Maybe, just maybe, they'll just give you something to bite down on while they dig the shrapnel out of your broken body.
	Maybe, just maybe, you won't get an infection that runs riot through your entire system and causes you to die in screaming agony.
	or Or, if you are screaming, maybe just maybe people won't cut your throat for fear that you'll be hurt.
	So it's all very well and good to look at our own wounded and fallen soldiers and so on and feel all the sympathy in the world for them.
	But the people on the other side of the site are doing a hell of a lot worse.
	They're doing a hell of a lot worse.
	And these people put them there.
	Do people seriously think that if we weren't out there shooting Muslims, if we weren't out there shooting Afghanis, that the Afghanis would be over here shooting us?
	Do I think when I leave my house to go for a walk in the afternoon, as I did this afternoon, that I'm really worried that some Afghani sniper is going to shoot me?
	Well, of course not. But this is the life that they lead.
	So the last thing, of course, that I'll say about this, I mentioned this before, so I'll just keep it brief.
	We say, well, the difference is that we're good and they're bad.
	The difference is that we're good, you see, and they're bad.
	Our soldiers are noble and heroic, though they have an IQ of 90 and have no moral clue what they're doing, and they're just following what everyone tells them is a good thing to do.
	Our soldiers are the good guys, and they're those nasty, evil mujahideen, those Muslims, those crazy bastards, they're evil.
	And that's the difference.
	Our guys should get the best treatment in the world in the finest hospitals because they're good.
	The Afghanis should die bleeding in agony and cupping their own intestines in some frozen cave because they're bad, and that's the fate they deserve.
	But the fundamental question is, what makes...
	The Canadian soldier good?
	And what makes the Afghani soldier bad?
	And there's an easy and obvious answer to that, which is that the Canadian soldier respects human rights and isn't a religious crazy fundamentalist and doesn't force his women to wear a burqa and so on.
	And that's, I mean, obviously that's a very surface answer, but it doesn't really help you.
	It doesn't really help you.
	Let's say that the American or the Canadian soldier is a free market capitalist woman's right advocate.
	Well, did he come up with all of that stuff on his own?
	I doubt it. Nobody has.
	Did he invent democracy?
	Did he invent rationality?
	Did he invent the concept of the free market and any kind of positive benefits which may accrue to that?
	Do these guys who have an IQ of 90, are they the greatest philosophers the world has ever known?
	And they invent these staggeringly moral approaches to life in their own room?
	In between airings of the family guy?
	I don't think so.
	Somebody told them. Somebody told them what is right and what is wrong.
	They didn't invent it.
	And there is no gene in Canadians and there is no gene in North Americans and there is no gene in the British.
	That makes us more susceptible or more receptive to what we're told is right and wrong than anybody else in the world.
	And if it were genetic, it wouldn't be right anymore.
	Your height is genetic.
	Nobody says that height is moral.
	Or eye color. So we say, well our guys are good guys, and they're good guys because someone told them what was right and wrong.
	They didn't invent it. They can't validate it.
	They have no reference point.
	This is the only culture they know.
	Somebody told them what was right and what was wrong.
	And that makes them heroes because they believed what we told them was right and wrong.
	We told them, I don't know, equality between the sexes is right.
	And they went, okay. Who do I shoot now?
	That makes them good guys.
	But the problem with that, of course, is that the guys over in Afghanistan have also been told what is right and what is wrong.
	By their groups, their intellectuals, their priests, their political leaders, their spiritual leaders, whoever.
	So our guys are told a certain set of standards is right.
	That doesn't make them moral, that just makes them obedient.
	It doesn't make it moral if somebody tells you this is right and you obey them.
	I mean, if they do happen to tell you that something is right and you obey that, that makes you obedient and it's fortuitous.
	But it doesn't make you moral.
	You've got to understand morality to be moral.
	You've got to live in the realm of principles, not in the realm of obedience to social standards.
	So we call our guys good because they obey our standards.
	And we call the Muslim guys bad because they're obeying their standards.
	What they've been told is right and wrong.
	Now, do I believe that the virtues and values in Canada are morally equivalent to the virtues and values?
	In Afghanistan, of course not.
	I think our society is better.
	I think that we have more truth, we have more free markets, we have more liberation, we have greater equality.
	I think that's all good.
	But the soldiers don't know that.
	The soldiers haven't figured that out.
	They haven't reasoned that because they've been busy learning how to scale fences and kill people with their bare hands.
	So if you understand that we only call our soldiers good because they obey the social standards, then we must also, using that same logic, call the enemies, our enemies, the Afghanis, the Muslims, the Al-Qaeda, whoever.
	They must also be good, logically.
	Because they're just doing what they're told.
	They're just obeying their culture's orders.
	They're just conforming to what their culture says is right and wrong.
	Now, if we say, well, our guys are good because there's an objective standard of right and wrong, then you tell me what that objective standard is of right and wrong that praises as the highest virtue people who we kill for money.
	And I will walk away satisfied and thoroughly enlightened.
	That's it for my introduction, ladies and gentlemen.
	Look at that. Only half an hour.
	Not too bad. Thank you so much.
	I really appreciate that. I wanted to talk about that for a little while.
	I know I've touched on it from time to time in various podcasts, but I kind of wanted to bring it all together.
	So I now open it up.
	Before that, though, and I hope that I won't embarrass our good friend Rob by mentioning this, I was trying to contact him or get in touch with him.
	We missed each other this week.
	He's in California, and I'm over 40, so I go to bed at 7 o'clock.
	And so, never the twain shall meet, but I just wanted to...
	And we have some people who are listening to the show who have been very, very generous in their donations.
	Raj, last week, went above and beyond the call of duty.
	He donated three kidneys and two children.
	I don't know where he got the third kidney from, and I hope he's okay on that dialysis, but I just wanted to say that it's a wonderful gesture.
	I really do appreciate it.
	Obviously, every goodie that I have in my goodie bag is on its way, and I really appreciate that.
	And every goodie that I'm going to be coming up with over the next little while is also going to be going that way.
	So I just wanted to really, really say that.
	I mean, this is going to sound vain and weird, so I apologize for that, but I think it's important to say.
	I know that I'm worth it, like I know that the conversation that we're having here is worth it, but it is just enormously wonderful to have other people see how much that they appreciate its value as well.
	So thank you, thank you, thank you so much.
	And if you wanted to respond to that, and hopefully not to be too...
	Three kidneys Canadian is only a few fingernails U.S. You know, that joke would have worked about two years ago, but we're closing the gap, baby.
	You just keep putting those Patriot Acts in and we'll be catching up pretty quickly.
	Actually, I say the we, but of course we're still thinking of moving, so the we may not be particularly up there.
	Do you mind if I put you on?
	Would that be okay? It seems only fair.
	So, Rod, I'm just going to put a little Barry White on in the background, and let's talk.
	You're on. Howdy.
	Hi. How's it going?
	Good. How are you doing? Fantastic.
	So, take me through the decision tree.
	This is interesting, because if I can replicate this, I'll earn the planet.
	Well, I've been... I've been...
	Just wanted to fling as much cash at you as possible for quite a while.
	I used to donate a bit of money to LewRockwell.com and the Mises Institute because I've always had a desire to make a positive impact in the world.
	And since I'm usually kind of busy with my work and stuff and I don't have a whole heck of a lot of website creation talent and things like that, I just wanted to tell everyone I possibly could to go look at these sites and then support them financially if I could.
	Well, I certainly appreciate that and I also appreciate the fact that you're going to continue to be working so hard.
	I think that is essential and anything I can do to help support you on that, I'm more than happy to.
	Actually, that brings up a good point.
	I just had my annual review about a week ago, and it was definitely by far the most positive review I've ever had in my life on any job I've ever done.
	It was glowing, and I'm absolutely certain that a lot of that had to do with the increased self-confidence I have and just the way that I go about interacting with people at work.
	As a result of this conversation.
	It's making a humongous difference in my life already.
	I know that if I live to be 60 years old or even more, it's just going to be priceless.
	The difference that's made, just the different outlook I have.
	That's very interesting and I've certainly found that to be the case after I did a couple of years of therapy that my relationships, they either got better or kind of got gone and it certainly had a direct fiscal impact and it's always tough to quantify but there is the happiness and out of the happiness and confidence comes the prosperity, the financial stuff that I think is positive.
	Can you think of sort of specific areas or is it more diffuse than that within your work where the philosophical conversations that you've been involved in have had that sort of positive effect?
	Well, it's definitely been in...
	It has a lot to do with the self-confidence thing.
	I guess it's just being able to approach things rationally or more rationally than I used to.
	I used to get Really caught up in, you know, feelings of embarrassment or, I guess, you know, just lack of confidence in putting forth my ideas and things like that.
	And over the last year, I've been able to, I guess, be a little more assertive, I think that's the best way to put it, in, you know, defending ideas that I believe are worthwhile and letting go of the ones that I realize are just kind of minor.
	But, I mean, I know that the assertiveness has paid off several times, you know, in very tangible results where we've, you know, I'm an engineer, so we do, you know, we're doing design work a lot, and, you know, a lot of times we have these meetings where I guess we'll just be kind of brainstorming, throwing ideas around and stuff, and there are certain people in the company who have a very strong tendency to just toss out anything that doesn't appeal to them immediately, so...
	I guess with a little increased tenacity, you know, and some assertiveness, I've been able to help get some really good ideas through that, in the end, a lot of people end up liking.
	So that's just one of the ways that it's working.
	Right. I mean, the great thing about philosophy is it really helps to depersonalize, and I know I'm famous for the rants and so on, but still, it really does help you depersonalize the ideas, right?
	So if you're not well-schooled in philosophy and there's no reason why anyone would be, I mean, it's not innate, any more than it's innate to think the world is round— If you're not well-schooled in philosophy, then it becomes, I must get my ideas in there.
	I must get my way across.
	I must get my methodology.
	And it's personal. And then, of course, if it's rejected, you feel like you're sort of emotionally collapsing in on yourself, and then you get angry or frustrated or whatever, right?
	But if it's like we are a team within reality looking for the best solution, here's my idea, and this is true in philosophy, in ethics, in psychology, all these kinds of things, that here's an idea, let's see if it's any good.
	It's you comparing your thoughts to reality, not trying to dominate or be dominated with regards to other people, if that makes any sense.
	No, that's exactly it.
	Absolutely. And, you know, again, this is just a...
	A byproduct of what is going on just in my personal life.
	I mean, it's, you know, honestly, in the last couple of years, last couple of years before I really got into the free domain stuff, I mean, I had a little bit of progress with the Mises Institute website especially.
	Just, you know, there were certain articles on there that would kind of unlock things in my mind, little flashes of light.
	But when I started on the FDR stuff, it's just been, you know, floodlights, you know.
	But the years before that, I was really getting into a bad spot.
	I mean, I was, I can say, pretty safely say that I was pretty horribly depressed.
	And in fact, I went to some therapy for just a few sessions and I actually ended up worse off than I was going in just because the lady who was doing my therapy actually suggested that since I was having troubles reconciling my My agnosticism with my, you know, my family's theism that her suggestion to me was to go back to believing in God just because it's easier or something like that.
	And it was just like a whole mess up right there.
	Yeah, the problem is you're not living in your fantasy.
	The problem is you're not living in your fantasy.
	So this half and half is no good.
	Go all the way back into fantasy and you'll be fine.
	Get back in the cave. That's right.
	Just be completely stupefied and you'll be fine.
	Honestly, this conversation you've been having from day one has just resonated in me just profoundly.
	I can't even begin to explain to you how much every podcast gains traction in my mind, so it's really great.
	It's worth every penny I've given you, and it's going to be worth every penny I will in the future.
	I appreciate that. How did you feel after, did you feel any sort of biased remorse or anything like that after you gave this, I mean, the biggest donation I've had so far?
	How did you feel after that?
	I mean, I have a sort of theory about it.
	I don't want to sort of cloud it, but how did you feel sort of after you sent it off and then when the e-check cleared and so on?
	What was your emotional experience after donating?
	All I was doing was It was completely gratifying.
	I think it was at the end of last year, I sent one about half that big.
	It was the same experience then.
	I knew then that I was doing something that I really wanted to do.
	As soon as I hit the pay button, I felt great.
	I still feel good about it.
	I'm not looking back and thinking, oh gosh, what did I do that for?
	I feel like it's one of the best things I've ever done, you know?
	Steph, I'm so sorry. I slipped a digit.
	Actually, two. Oh, crap!
	I knew I knew! Recall!
	Recall! No, but it's just like when you say, is there any bars or more?
	It's like exactly the opposite.
	As each stage went by, you know, first deciding how much and then hitting pay and then...
	Watching the e-check clear is just like a better feeling, you know, each time.
	So, you know, it's great. It's going to continue to, I hope so, in the future.
	Yeah, absolutely. I mean, whatever there is a value for you, I certainly appreciate it, of course.
	I do sort of have a vague theory, which is completely non-empirical.
	And I've sort of noticed that my life has improved the degree to which I dedicate time and effort to philosophy.
	I mean, this is a basic sort of thing.
	Of course, the reason that I do this is because it helps me, and through that it sort of helps other people in terms of clarity and confidence and so on.
	And I think that the rational people have spent all of history getting beaten down by irrational people who are just absolutists and bullies.
	So one of the reasons I sort of found my way to a particular place where I felt that I could start to become more assertive in a non-aggressive kind of way And so I felt that I really wanted to hand out a couple of sharp swords to the rational people because we're always getting beaten up throughout history, right?
	The most rational people are always the ones who get screwed because...
	Everyone's frightened of the irrational people, right?
	This ties back to why we praise the soldiers, because they're pretty scary, right?
	So we praise them.
	And people generally will always side with the most brutal rather than the person who's the most right.
	So I really wanted to try and share that kind of stuff.
	I have sort of noticed, and...
	Greg, of course, has also been really generous with his donations.
	It's good. I'm getting a good demographic of people I need to talk to.
	But for me, I think that I've sort of noticed that there has been real breakthroughs for people in their life.
	And I know that this sounds totally self-serving and cheesy, but the important thing to remember for people who...
	Or thinking of donating and thinking, oh, that stuff he's just trying to get me to donate is that, you know, what I ask for from people in terms of donations is nothing compared to the time that I'm putting in, right?
	Like, I'm not sort of sitting here in a hammock saying, hey, donate to me.
	I'll be, you know, I need more margaritas, right?
	Bring on the dancing women and the boys, Brazilian boys with coconuts.
	I'm just foreshadowing to the vacation.
	I've noticed that the same thing occurred with Greg.
	It's a commitment, right?
	Obviously, you're placing a certain value on it that's not abstract and that has real traction within your own life.
	And you're saying, well, there's things that I could have bought with this money, but I'm not.
	I'm going to donate it to this.
	The more time that I invest in it, the happier I am, without a doubt.
	And this is, of course, why people say, well, is it a big sacrifice to quit your job?
	And it's like, no, not really, because the more that I invest in it, the happier and the better.
	And it makes it more real to sort of put some real skin in the game, at least for me.
	So to invest in the hardware and the bandwidth and all that kind of stuff and the time and the tools and the logos and all that kind of crap.
	To me, it really helps me move forward in my life to put some real traction behind this kind of stuff.
	I've noticed that with some other people who've donated that shortly after they donate, and again, there's lots of alchemy that's going on here.
	This could be complete coincidence.
	It also might be wishful thinking on my part.
	But the thing that I sort of noticed is that donation is followed by a breakthrough.
	Because, as I said before, your unconscious listens to how important philosophy is to you.
	And that's why I say to people, you know, 18 bucks a month you can subscribe to this show, and then at least philosophy is as valuable as half a cup of coffee a day for you.
	But if you say, well, I really want to be a philosopher, I really enjoy philosophy, I really want to live with integrity, I'm going to listen to all these podcasts, but it's like, ooh, 50 cents a day?
	I don't know about that. Well, the problem is then that your unconscious picks that up very clearly, right?
	And says, oh, okay, so we're just kind of playing around here.
	And then you kind of don't get anywhere in a way.
	And I think that actually leads you, it ends up sort of you being worse off.
	So anyway, I know it sounds self-serving and so on, but I think that there is some real value in that sort of why I was asking that.
	No, you're absolutely right.
	And it is, it does, I know for me at least, it has served almost as like a spur to action because In the early days of listening, I came in with a few little donations here and there, and I remember it seemed like soon after I would donate, then, you know, I would drop a bad friendship or I would, you know, kind of commit myself more to a good friendship, things like that.
	Right after the one last fall, I decided not to go home for Christmas, and I went up to see my cousin and said, oh, and by the way, the, the, oh gosh, The ability that I had to make a positive influence on my cousin's life over the Christmas break is just priceless to me.
	She has had a just ridiculously awful life, childhood, and she is making progress now that I'm certain is going to completely change the course of her life.
	And that directly came from my experiences here.
	Again, I still feel like I'm just getting a tremendous bargain here and any penny I can possibly fling at you.
	Pennies are painful, but I certainly do appreciate any pennies I can drop on you from a great height.
	Look at the philosopher dance.
	Is there anything that you can share a little bit more about what occurred with your cousin?
	Because I certainly do remember you talking about that before and was quite interested in what might be going on.
	I don't want you to say anything you're not comfortable with, but is there anything that you can share in that realm?
	Well, she's actually very open with this, and that's one thing that's great about her is that she's never lost her ability to be open and honest with people.
	And she had a very troublesome childhood where actually it was her mother is my father's sister.
	And if you remember from, you know, the stories of my own childhood, you know, my dad was the one with the chemical imbalances that would cause him to fly off the handle pretty easily.
	Luckily, he never physically harmed me, but just the kind of psychological war zone that I lived in was pretty ridiculous.
	But her life was that times ten.
	It was really awful.
	Her father was pretty sure he's an alcoholic.
	Her brother was, I think, diagnosed with her older age.
	He's older than her by, I believe, Oh gosh, must be almost ten years maybe, eight or ten years.
	Anyway, he was diagnosed with maybe schizophrenia, but at least Tourette's syndrome.
	Not only did her, you know, her mother of course kind of psychologically neglected her and stuff.
	Her father was physically violent to the family.
	And her brother, you know, the podcast that you recently had about the older brother who abused his younger sister, it sounded like an echo of my cousin's life.
	And so she's really going through all of it, you know.
	I mean, it's just a complete blender.
	And when I was up visiting her and her husband over Christmas break, you know, they have Their relationship is kind of a strange combination.
	In some ways, they're very open and close and honest and empathic and compassionate.
	In other ways, when they get into arguments, they just dig in and it's just the fur flies.
	I started just talking to her about the family stuff that I've been learning about and she just immediately started just grasping things like It was amazing watching it happen.
	And she started communicating with her mother and she's talking about going into therapy and stuff like that.
	And then she kind of got a little bit caught up in the whole defooing abroad process because my mother has kind of a close relationship with this cousin.
	And so of course when I stopped talking to my mom, then my mom started talking to my cousin.
	And I got some of the My cousin forwarded some of the emails that were going back and forth between them, and I am just absolutely shocked at how well my cousin is handling it.
	She is assertive.
	She's not falling for any of the trickly manipulation schemes and stuff like that.
	She's really just, I mean, she's fifth-degree black belt already.
	I mean, she's actually passed me in some ways.
	It's just shocking.
	It's amazing to me to watch this happen, and she's been an inspiration to me all over again.
	Again, it's like by me putting out these positive things to other people, it comes back, it reflects to me, and it builds me up even more.
	Gosh, it's like an amplifier.
	It's fantastic. Now, does she have kids yet?
	No, she doesn't. She's actually a year younger than I am.
	Right. So, I mean, this is another fantastic thing that you're doing, right?
	I mean, you are now creating a different childhood for her children, right?
	I mean, they will grow up in a completely different planet, right?
	It may not be heaven, but it sure as hell isn't going to be hell.
	And that is an incredible thing.
	And of course, then their kids, this is how this stuff multiplies.
	I mean, everybody wants to bring down the state, and that's fine.
	Good luck. But for me, it's this incremental, positive personal changes through I'm just making a note now.
	Podcast 700. Okay.
	But yeah, I mean, you're doing an amazing thing there.
	I mean, you're creating a whole new world for people.
	They're going to grow up in you, breaking the cycle.
	They're going to grow up in a world where if she goes to therapy, and I'm sure she will, and she continues with this process, then she's just going to be a different mom.
	She's going to have a different relationship with her husband, which is going to transmit to their different relationship with their father as they move forward.
	And it's an amazing thing.
	That is changing the world.
	For me, that is really changing the world.
	And there's nothing wrong with the Mises podcast.
	I enjoy them as much as the next person, but that's not going to change the world, right?
	It's going to get you into political arguments and economics arguments, but that's not going to be the kind of stuff wherein the world gets reshaped in a sort of more virtuous and more benevolent light.
	Right. No, exactly.
	And on the whole point about children, too, I've kind of mentioned this before as well.
	There's a young lady at work that I frequently have lunch with and she's just had a child.
	The conversations we have there, I'm not sure if it's making as much of an impact there because she's still kind of mired in the whole family thing.
	She's actually Asian, so of course the Asian family is very well ingrained.
	But still, from the feedback that she's given me, it looks like Her boy is probably going to have an incrementally better life as well.
	It's just thrilling to be able to see how this positive stuff that's originating here in this conversation kind of flows through me out into the world.
	It's literally creating a better environment for me to live in.
	It's fantastic. And, of course, it's always been baffling to me when people say, well, I don't know how an atheist can think that life has any meaning.
	When we're able to achieve things like this, how could you conceive of a life that could have more meaning, in a way?
	Yeah. In fact, back when I used to believe in God, or I was a waffling agnostic, I thought life had less meaning than I do now.
	I mean, now, for some reason, the perspective that I have has given me I cherish life more.
	I'm fascinated by it more.
	The colors are brighter.
	The tastes are more lively.
	Everything is different.
	It's a meaning that you're not inheriting from a priest.
	It's your story now.
	I try not to give too many believe this, believe that.
	It's just all about principles and about keeping the conversation going.
	It's why I do the dream analysis.
	The dream analysis is about provoking depth.
	It's not about having syllogistic answers to things.
	And there's a real richness and meaning in all of that.
	And so we're full of false meanings, which are the fantasies that we're told about from other people.
	But when we start to work these principles for our own selves, then there's just such a great degree of power and effect that we can have in the world, positive effect that we can have in the world.
	It's just it makes life delightful, really fundamentally delightful.
	And I have, you know, other than spending time with my wife, there's no more fun that I have doing the podcast.
	Right.
	I mean, it should be illegal.
	And that kind of...
	When you're happy and when you're having a positive impact on the world, I don't know what people are looking for in terms of meaning, but I can't imagine that they would want a lot more than that.
	Yeah. You know, the podcast you had recently on the Why I Do What I Do, you were describing how, you know, you're just kind of a...
	You're a sensual...
	I don't know, what did you say? Sensual slut or something like that.
	Whatever it was, you were describing how you just You would look out into the world and see the trees, and you would feel the bump in the road through the car seat, things like that.
	Podcasts like that, they chisel smiles on my face that don't leave for weeks.
	I've had moments when I step out of the car, I'm listening to one of your podcasts, and I pause in the parking lot on my way up to my apartment And I just take a deep breath and I feel the air filling my lungs and realize that my lungs are doing exactly what they were designed to do and the air feels cool and crisp and I start feeling things and it's like a meditation constantly almost.
	It's just fantastic.
	Well, I appreciate that. And Jonathan has just posted and said, it's a quote of mine, I think, philosophy is like having a ferret in your pants when you're trying to get your picture taken.
	I think that, I'm not sure that was the same podcast, but it does sound like one of those vaguely unhelpful metaphors that I come up with.
	So again, when I look forward to the maybe 50 years I have ahead of me, every day of those 50 years is worth the donations I've given you so far.
	Look, keep us posted about, I have a theory that donations come back, you know, that when you get traction in your life with regards to, when you accept the sort of value philosophy in the way that we talk about it here, that it comes back.
	I know that my, you know, I spent 20,000 bucks and two years in therapy, totally came back because now I can live off my wife.
	I mean, sorry, it totally came back insofar as I got better paying jobs.
	I was able to take on more responsibility and more confidence.
	And so on. But let us know what happens when you get a raise.
	And certainly for me, it's like I totally believe that I'm going to make more money doing this than I ever have in my business career.
	And that's not a small...
	I sold a company twice.
	It's not a small thing to say that I'm going to make more money doing this.
	But I absolutely have no doubt that that is going to be the case.
	So for me to sort of say, well, I surrender myself to philosophy and I'm just going to give up $160,000 a year to do this, it's no sacrifice.
	Because I do believe that it's going to come back more.
	And I have no problem with the whole ethics of prosperity and so on.
	So... Just keep us posted and let us know.
	That's sort of a theory that I have, right?
	Yeah, and I'm also gaining a completely new perspective on just my career in general.
	Right now, I'm working in a job where I don't particularly enjoy so much my company, the overall vibe of the company, so to speak, but it's not bothering me so much.
	I have certain priorities in my life right now, and I've Just following those priorities.
	But the overall perspective that I have on what do I consider success and what do I consider as profiting?
	It used to be all about money, but now there's a lot more about how happy.
	Whether or not I get a raise, it's as long as I'm doing something that I enjoy.
	Actually, when I'm working with FDR, I'll get right on it.
	Thank you so much again for what you did this last weekend.
	I hugely appreciate it. And to all of the other people who've donated.
	We're not quite up a year yet, and it's this generosity of people who are making this possible, and I can only tell you that it will be better.
	The show will be even better when I can work on it full-time.
	I don't mean more of it.
	I actually think there'll be a little less of it, but that may not be the end of the world for people who like to sleep and shower and do all of that kind of stuff.
	So if you have a question or a comment, an issue or a problem, or just want to know what the hell we're talking about here, please feel free to click on Request Mike, and I'll see if I can get him for you.
	Anybody? Do we have anyone?
	Oh, yes, here we go.
	Okay, we do have some. Okay, we are going to...
	Go back to the five and dime.
	Jimmy D? I think you're right.
	Hello? Hello, can you hear me?
	Yes, I can hear you. Oh, yeah.
	Sorry, I just came into this room and I'm very curious to see what it's all about today.
	What's the purpose and what are you trying to achieve?
	This is a show that is dedicated to philosophy and to the rational examination of ethical, artistic, moral, social, economic and familial relationships, principles according to philosophy based on rational syllogisms and so on and we sort of run the gamut from all of the topics that I've sort of mentioned and trying to find ways to live a life of integrity We're good to go.
	But we do try to bring these principles home to familial and work situations so that you can live a life of greater integrity and greater rationality, and consequently we've sort of found out a good deal of greater happiness.
	So that's the idea behind the show.
	So my talking a little bit about this idea of freedom, do you believe that in general people are free?
	No, I don't believe that people are free.
	I think that they should be free, and I think that people have the capacity to be free, but I don't think that people are free.
	I sort of go with Plato, or I guess with Socrates in this area, that there's this old myth you've probably heard, I'll just touch on it briefly, that...
	Plato said that most people are looking at what they think of as the world, but what they're actually doing is they're looking at the shadows on a cave wall that are cast by animals or people walking in front of a fire.
	They're not looking at the people. They're not looking at the fire.
	They're looking at the shadows on the wall, and they're thinking that they're looking at something real.
	And they then get enslaved to these illusions.
	And this is not something that's innate to human nature.
	This is something that is inflicted upon us, usually when we're children, when we're told about We're told about gods and we're told about the virtue of our society.
	We're told about patriotism.
	We're put in government schools where we're taught that the government is good and wants to help us and so on.
	And we're not taught any of the basic truths about life and the basic truths like that there's no god, the basic truths that the government is based on a system of coercion, that taxation and so on is based on a system of coercion.
	And that there's no particular virtue in family.
	I mean, families can be good.
	There can be very good people in families.
	But your mother is not good because she's your mother and your father is not good because...
	So we have all of these ideas about virtue, that it's about obedience to the state or it's about obedience to the priest or it's about obedience to our parents.
	But none of it is true.
	None of it stands up to any kind of rational analysis.
	And because people believe all of these things, they end up living a life where they're just chasing these ghosts and not really having any freedom, but rather just being enslaved to lots of different things, their appetites to social structures, to priests, to parents and politicians.
	Okay, so you say that none of this is true.
	Do you know what is true?
	I think so.
	I mean, I know that the odds of, you know, jumping into a Skype cast and hearing somebody talk about what they think is true in defiance to all of these social norms, I totally get that the odds of that are tiny, and I'm totally aware that you may think that I'm talking out of my armpit, but I'm not. So I think that we have worked out some pretty good ideas of what is true, and we have a pretty...
	Active forum where we're discussing a fairly new approach to philosophy where we try and work from first principles using the scientific method to really rigorously try to figure out what is true and what is false and then apply those principles in our own life and sort of see what happens.
	And it's been, I think, pretty great for most of the people who've given it a shot.
	Okay, so what...
	Can you give me an example of something that is true?
	Sure. Two plus two is four.
	I get no problem with that.
	The world is round. Absolutely down with that.
	That logic is valid.
	The empirical external world exists independently of our consciousness.
	Wishing doesn't make anything true.
	Belief doesn't make anything true.
	Faith, God help us, doesn't make anything true.
	But the way that we know that things are true is we use logic and we use the scientific method, right, which is a combination of logic in theory and testability in practice.
	So it is true.
	I'm sorry, go ahead.
	Well, you said a couple of things there that I, you know, For example, you said that the world exists independently and things like faith doesn't make anything true.
	Are you 100% sure that these statements are correct?
	Well, I'm not going to try and convince you what I think is the case, but I can certainly guarantee you that you believe that the world exists independently of your consciousness.
	I can guarantee you that you believe that for sure.
	Well, are you sure about that?
	I'm absolutely positive. And I can prove it to you in like one sentence if you like.
	Well, be my guest. Sure.
	You're talking to me, right?
	Yeah. So you're using your voice to communicate intelligible words to somebody else.
	Naturally, you're accepting that the Internet is real, you're accepting that your voice is valid, you're accepting that your microphone is working, you're accepting that I am an independent consciousness at the other end of this data stream, so you're having a conversation with me.
	I absolutely guarantee you that you believe that a world exists independently of your consciousness, because if you didn't, you wouldn't be talking to me.
	Well, you know, there are certain parts of my mind that may believe all those things, but maybe there are other parts that don't.
	So do you believe that I exist independently of your consciousness?
	I believe that you exist independently of my consciousness, yes.
	But then again, no, I believe that your consciousness and mine are No, they don't exist independently of my consciousness,
	and neither do I exist independently of yours, because your consciousness and my consciousness are different aspects of the same consciousness.
	Excellent. And what is that same consciousness?
	What is the third consciousness that we share?
	Like you say, we're two parts of a bigger whole, right?
	Like two pieces of pizza, or part of the whole pizza?
	Yeah. So what's the whole pizza?
	You can't put it into words.
	When you start talking about consciousness, you're talking about a domain that's non-dualistic.
	You know, it's...
	Even asking that question doesn't really have much meaning.
	You can't define it, but you're sure of it.
	Is that right? That's right.
	You can know something at a particular level.
	Definition is a dualistic thing.
	It applies to things that exist in time and space.
	There are other dimensions besides time and space.
	Such as?
	Sorry?
	Such as what?
	As I was saying, you can't talk about these things meaningfully, but you can experience them.
	There's a difference between talking about something and experiencing something.
	Well, no, not necessarily, insofar as there are lots of people who are schizophrenic, and there are lots of people who are psychotic, who have visions, and we know that those visions don't exist in the real world.
	So although they're having a very vivid, subjective experience, it is an illusion.
	It is, and of course, if you take drugs or you whatever, right, you can...
	Do these kinds of things to mess with your consciousness.
	If you take a LSD and you believe that there's an elephant in your front yard, you believe it very strongly and you believe it very vividly, but it's not true.
	So there is a way to differentiate what goes on in our minds with what is actually occurring in the real world, and we do that through testability.
	I would turn to my wife and say, do you see that elephant in the front yard?
	And if she said yes and she hadn't taken the LSD, then I would be a little bit more certain and then I might go out and try and touch the elephant and see if the elephant made a noise or something and I'd smell if the elephant had left some deposits on the yard or something.
	There's ways to actually test for the presence of these sorts of things.
	If you're going to claim that something exists that is greater than the sum of you and I's consciousness, what you're doing is putting forward a theory, a proposition, like any scientist or any philosopher who's putting forward, or a mathematician.
	You're putting forward a proposition.
	But if you can't define what you're talking about, and if it's impossible to make any sense out of it, but you say, well, I've experienced it, that doesn't mean anything in terms of proving anything, right?
	Anyone can say that about anything.
	Yeah, it doesn't mean anything to you, because you've got obviously no idea what I'm talking about.
	Well, no, it's not that it doesn't mean anything to me.
	It doesn't mean anything at all.
	Like, you're just saying, I believe in X, and I say, what is X? And you say, well, I can't define it.
	But then what you're saying, I mean, I'm just talking scientifically, right?
	I mean, you have your own experiences and so on, but I'm just talking from a philosophical or logical or scientific perspective.
	If you say, I propose that X exists, and I say, what is X? And you say, I can't define it, and there's no way to test it, then X by definition doesn't exist, right?
	I mean, because you can't define what it is, and there's no way to test or prove it.
	That it exists or doesn't exist.
	You've had some subjective experiences and that's fine, but that doesn't have any relationship to that which exists in reality, if that makes any sense?
	It does make sense.
	The way you're reasoning at the moment, you're putting a lot on...
	The way you're reasoning, you're basing a lot on scientific ideas.
	You see, scientific ideas may not It may not be valid or may not be true.
	Because you have assumptions that, for example, the world exists independently of you and it has all these processes that work in a particular way and you believe causality works in a particular way.
	For example, billiard ball A hits billiard ball B and billiard ball A causes billiard ball B to move off.
	This is the basis of scientific thought, which you believe in, but all of that may be completely false.
	But how would we know that it was false?
	How would we know that it was false?
	Okay, I can give you a way, if you're willing to do it, to experience another perspective.
	This isn't going to involve LSD, is it?
	Because I promised my wife that I'm just kidding, go on.
	No, no, no. Now, what you do is you need to split your awareness up into two directions.
	See, at the moment, in general, people are looking out into the world and they see relationships, what appears to be relationships, and they start linking things in the world and that's the basis of their logic.
	Now, instead of just looking out in the world, Get half of your awareness and start observing your thoughts and your emotions while you're doing all this.
	And try and remember your thoughts and your emotions.
	Now, over a period of time, you'll discover something very startling.
	You'll discover that every time you think something, that that thought actually happens out in the world out there.
	And every time you have some sort of an emotion, it influences something out in the world.
	Now, you'll start to realize that somehow your thoughts and your emotions are linked.
	They are actually linked into what's happening in the world out there.
	I think I understand, but can you give me a sort of more concrete example?
	A more concrete example...
	Yeah, you said if you haven't thought...
	Sorry, go ahead. You go ahead. I think you understand what I mean.
	Yeah, what you've got to do is you've got to see a relationship between what you think and what happens into the world.
	And then you realize that what you think actually ends up happening out in the world.
	It's just like a dream. No, I do understand that, but can you give me an example?
	Because you obviously have accepted this for many years, so can you give me an example of how this has occurred in your life?
	How it's occurred? Well, for example, if I, for example, get upset and then...
	All of a sudden, my wife might come out of the blue with a piece of cake and say, look, here's a piece of cake.
	Why does that happen?
	It happens because something in me has created the cake so I can eat the cake to suppress my upset.
	All these things are linked.
	Let me interrupt you for just a second, because I think I understand where you're coming from.
	And I certainly don't mean to posit a duality like the only thing that means anything is what's out in the world and nothing that occurs within our own souls.
	I mean, I very much believe in introspection and part of the show that I run.
	I do dream analyses of people because I do believe that the instincts of the unconscious and the metaphorical side of the human consciousness is incredibly valuable.
	So I don't mean to sort of sound like a cold, calculating science guy who never looks inward.
	So I'm fully with you on that.
	I think that you're making statements of knowledge that, at least based on the evidence that you're giving me, might be premature.
	For instance, maybe every time you feel down, you sigh a slightly different way, and your wife, having lived with you for many years, knows the sound of that sigh, and she's like, oh, I know what's going to make him feel better is some cake.
	Hey, I'm not going to disagree with that.
	I'm a total sugar junkie myself.
	I'm actually just thinking about cake and drooling all over the microphone.
	I'm going to get a short circuit, I think.
	But it's certainly possible that these causes and effects that occur could occur through sensual and unconscious manners.
	You sigh, your wife says, oh, he's down, or Or, you know, every time around the anniversary of his mother's death, my husband gets kind of down, so I'm going to bring him a piece of cake.
	And you're not necessarily aware of that process, and so it seems psychic, or it seems...
	But I think that you're making statements about causality, that I want cake, somebody brings me cake, that...
	There could be more simple explanations for other than a super-consciousness or a psychic relation to everything that occurs in the material world.
	They're just possible. I'm just saying there could be.
	And I think that until those are all exhausted, I think you're going to have a tough time with the thesis.
	Well, from my point of view, I'm totally convinced that we basically are living in a dream.
	You've had dreams at night, and the thing is, when you have the dream, you think that what's happening in the dream is real, and that it has nothing to do with you.
	But as soon as you wake up, you think, well, wait a minute, that was a dream.
	My mind has created that without me realizing it at the time, which means there are processes happening in your mind and in mine that we're not aware of, and that are doing things, you know, Sure.
	And that are creating a world for us that we don't even realize is happening.
	Well, wait, wait, wait.
	I'm sorry to keep interrupting you, but I just want to make sure that I'm getting what you're saying.
	Because it seems to me that you're putting two things together.
	The first thing is that you're saying there are things that happen in our dreams at night that have some relationship to the outside world.
	Absolutely. I totally agree with you.
	No, I didn't say that.
	I didn't say that, Ty.
	I said... You know, when you have a dream, right?
	When you have a dream, your mind is creating that dream, but you don't realize it's creating it.
	Sure. That's what I'm saying, okay?
	So, is it my understanding then that I am a character in your dream?
	We're both characters in each other's dreams, basically.
	And how would you prove that?
	What would be a criteria by which that thesis could be disproven, right?
	Because you know, you're a logical fellow, right?
	Well, you see, we have to be very careful with the word proof, because we're using the word proof very loosely.
	A few moments ago, you used the word much more accurately.
	You said, I can prove to you 2 plus 2 is 4.
	When you're using the word proof in that sort of a context, it has meaning.
	But see, sometimes we use the word proof and it has no meaning at all.
	For example, if I said to you, the chair I'm sitting on is comfortable and you say, prove it to me.
	Well, what does that mean? The word proof doesn't have any meaning in that context.
	The only way that you're going to realise my chair is comfortable is if you came and sat in it yourself.
	Well, if I said to you, you know, the world is a dream and I've discovered that, there's no way I can make you realise that unless you investigate that yourself.
	And how would I know then?
	Okay, I understand. First of all, you can actually determine whether a chair is comfortable.
	You can hook up EEGs to people and you can find out if their pleasure or pain centers are being stimulated.
	I think what is true is that a chair that may be comfortable to one person may be uncomfortable to another person, right?
	So the same chair might be great for me, but might be not so good for a friend of mine who's 300 pounds or who has a bad back or who prefers, because he's an Indian mystic, to sit on a bed of nails.
	There is more objective ways to, I think, figure out if a chair is comfortable than you may be giving credit for.
	But you use the word investigate, which to me is a rational process, right?
	You have a criminal investigation, you have a scientific investigation.
	So how would I go about investigating whether the world is a dream or not?
	Okay, it is very easy, but it's not...
	Sorry, it's very simple.
	It's a very simple idea, but it's not easy to do.
	What you've got to do is look...
	Monitor your thoughts and your emotions as much as you can and try and remember them.
	See, people have a forgetting problem.
	They forget things all the time and they don't know they're forgetting things.
	In essence, people don't know themselves.
	This is one of the things that Socrates said.
	We don't know ourselves and we're trying to go around trying to make sense of the world when we don't know ourselves, how our thoughts and emotions work, for example, what makes us angry, what makes us happy, all this sort of stuff that people don't realise and then we're trying to make sense of the world.
	It's impossible. We only have half the picture.
	So what you've got to do is look at your thoughts and your emotions and remember them and then experience things in the world and remember that.
	Then you look at all those events, your thoughts, your emotions and events in the world and you'll see a very startling pattern.
	You'll discover every time you have a thought that it's actually manifested in the world.
	Every time you have An emotion that's created something in the world.
	It appears as though things work the opposite to what people think it does.
	For example, if someone has a car accident and then they get upset, they think that their car accident has caused them to be upset.
	But actually it's the other way around.
	It's the upset that's caused the car accident.
	It's completely the opposite to what people think it is.
	Hang on, let me just interrupt for a second, because I think I'm getting clear on to what you're saying.
	And I don't think that you and I are in disagreement.
	Certainly if somebody wakes up and they stub their toe, and then they notice that their gums are bleeding, and then they get a letter from the IRS about a tax audit, and then they're going to be upset, they have a fight with their wife, they yell at their kid, they go storming out into the driveway, they're already angry.
	They go and have a car accident because they're frustrated and not paying attention.
	Absolutely. This stuff to me is all perfectly rational and sensible.
	I have no problem with that at all.
	I think you and I would be in perfect agreement.
	My wife is a psychologist and she's a cognitive psychologist so she's very much around thoughts create experience in very many ways.
	But I think that that's a long way from saying we live in a dream and our thoughts create reality in the way that I could say, I wish I had a sheep on my back and it can come about.
	We can't affect external material reality directly through our thoughts and feelings, but our thoughts and feelings have an enormous amount of impact We're good to go.
	So that's what you get coming back.
	I mean, I certainly agree with all of that, that there's a lot of echoing and back and forth in social interaction.
	But at a fundamental metaphysical level, our thoughts cannot create or destroy matter.
	Our thoughts cannot move pictures around the room.
	Our thoughts cannot cause a car to materialize in our driveway.
	But, of course, positive thoughts can cause other people to like us so much that they'll give us a car, if that sort of makes sense.
	But we can't directly affect reality in a material and energy sense, but we can certainly have a great deal of influence on the interactions and the quality of those interactions based on our attitudes.
	Because you think that matter is somehow separate to your thoughts.
	You have made that assumption and you have taken that as true.
	But you're taking it as true as well.
	And again, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but we can't go much further.
	You're accepting that it's true because you're talking to me using matter, right?
	You're speaking into a physical microphone using your vocal cords, which are producing sound, which is coming into my headphones.
	You are talking to me using external matter.
	So if you say that I'm assuming that external matter exists, you are doing the same thing exactly.
	You can't say that you don't believe that external matter exists because you're using it.
	Even if I believed otherwise, you would not allow me to communicate with you unless I played by your rules.
	By my rules? What do you mean?
	Do you think I'm making up the rules of sound and of auditory capacities?
	Yes, you are. You're saying to me, you can communicate with me, but you only do it through the computer or through voice or through whatever means you accept.
	If I came directly into your thoughts and placed bodies into your mind, you would not allow it.
	I think that would be the coolest thing ever.
	I really would think that would be the most amazing thing.
	It would certainly save me a lot of time posting my podcast if I could actually just wander around the astral plane and deposit thoughts in people's heads.
	That would be fantastic.
	But I've not found a way to do that.
	I think it would be the coolest thing in the world if my wife and I could communicate telepathically.
	I think that would just be fantastic.
	Look, before I leave, I just want to leave you with an idea.
	You say that your thoughts and your emotions don't affect the physical world.
	Well, let's actually put that to the test.
	If you're married, for example, try having sex, for example, as much as you can in a week and then look out for certain events that may happen in your life.
	And then go without sex for, say, six or seven months.
	Then see what happens to you and look at the difference.
	Okay. I mean, I think I'd need to see some controlled scientific studies before I gave up on sex for six to seven months.
	But if I understand that you're talking about the theory of attraction, that it goes beyond mere interpersonal stuff, I'm certainly aware of it and I think it's very interesting.
	I might try and podcast on it this week.
	I certainly, and I'm sorry, we've got somebody else who's waiting to chat.
	I really do appreciate you jumping in.
	CharmaineRadio.com is the philosophy podcast and I'm sure that you will have a fun time listening to it.
	And if you do listen to it and you have objections, deposit them directly in my brain.
	I'm telling you, if you can do that, you can take over the whole podcast and you're like the coolest thing ever.
	Thank you so much for coming in and joining us.
	I really do appreciate it. And we have somebody else who is waiting to chat-o-rama.
	Somebody else who sadly can't do this whole brain deposit thing.
	Oh, did they go away? They came, they went.
	They came, they saw, they conquered, they vanished.
	So, we have a space open on the call-o-rama, and you are more than welcome.
	I think that...
	What was that?
	We had a jog? He already did that in the Jenny podcast.
	Where is our good friend Jenny?
	Jenny! Jenny-ism!
	You know, if you've ever seen that old Seinfeld where they get Kenny Rogers' chicken and Kramer gets addicted to it at the end of the show, he's just sitting out in the window going, Kenny...
	Kenny! Jenny!
	Jenny! That's what we need, right?
	8-6-7-5-3-0-9-9.
	That's right. Alright, the singer is back, so not me.
	This is the person who's listening.
	Let's try and get her in.
	Or him, could be.
	Let's not pre-guess. And Skype, I think, has just had everyone vanish on me.
	It's always fun when it does that.
	Just hang on there, Mr.
	Pink, and we will.
	I'll have you in in just a second.
	As soon as Skype returns to me, the listener list, it's playful.
	You know, it comes and it goes. Ah, here we go.
	All right, so let's see if we can't find Mr.
	or Mrs. All Caps.
	Ah, there you are. I'm not sure why you're not showing up in my list of people here.
	here.
	Can you see him?
	Him, her?
	Hmm.
	Sorry, we have somebody here who is on the...
	Oh, it says offline. She's offline?
	Oh, oh, we have two.
	I see, I see, I see.
	Okay. My mistake.
	Yes, you're on. Life is a name of loving.
	If you're attempting to deposit thoughts directly into my brain, please enter 25 cents.
	Life is name of loving, also known as Pink You.
	You are on. You are off!
	Oh, playful. All right.
	I'm just going to check my PayPal because people, actually, I'll absolutely say people have deposited thoughts directly in my brain.
	Oh, okay.
	Absolutely. We will try and find the next person who's coming up.
	Sorry about all of this.
	Here we go.
	Yes, sir.
	Somebody who had just recently come on wanted to talk.
	Go ahead. Yes, hello.
	Can you hear me? Yeah, sure can.
	How are you doing? Yeah, I'm doing great.
	Have you seen this movie, Groundhog Day?
	Yes. Yes.
	I feel like my life is exactly like this movie.
	It's just routine all over the place.
	Well, why haven't we talked before then?
	I feel like we should have talked before.
	Well, this is our chance.
	This is our chance. Okay, let's see if we can break the cycle.
	I'm sorry, just before we go on, I think your speakers and your microphone are going together.
	I think we're getting a bit of a loop.
	If you could just turn your speakers down a little bit.
	Now I'm all ears. Tell me your troubles, brother.
	All right, so it goes like this.
	It's like I feel like I'm in a constant routine.
	Whatever I do is not making me go forward.
	Like, I'm constantly stuck in one sort of dimension and I can't seem to get a grip on life in terms of exploring the beauty and exploring the other dimensions.
	I just don't feel the satisfaction right anymore.
	Right. Now, did you feel satisfaction at some point in your life before?
	Well, I can't really say I did.
	I can't.
	It's just I don't see the beauty.
	It's just a mechanical process in a way.
	Right. So you feel like you get up and you go to work and you come home and you eat dinner, you watch a bit of TV, you go to bed, you get up.
	It's like the same day over and over.
	That's sort of what you mean. Your life doesn't have a lot of shape.
	It doesn't have momentum.
	You don't know where you're going.
	When you think, where am I going to be in 10 years?
	It's kind of like, well, I'm going to be here, but grayer, right?
	I'm going to be here, but older.
	So it's like you think life is like a revolving door.
	You're trying to go through it to get from one place to the next, right?
	So from your youth to your middle age to your marriage to your kids or whatever, right?
	You're trying to go through this revolving door, but the problem is there's no exit on the revolving door and you just feel like you're stuck in this revolving door going round and round.
	Is that sort of what's going on?
	My thought exactly. Right, right.
	I try to resort to philosophical type of books and it just seems to make matters worse.
	It's It's not getting anywhere.
	I'm still on my couch reading a book.
	Right, right. Now, what is it that would be your criteria for having a life that had broken out of a kind of dismal cycle?
	Like if you were to call in next week and you said, I am now standing on the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, I'm buck naked and I'm having an affair with Pink.
	Would that be the way that you would know that you had broken a cycle?
	Like, what's your testability for this?
	How would you know that you had broken a cycle and that you were living the kind of life that you wanted?
	What would that life look like?
	I've always, in a sense, envied those writers like Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, their ability to go on the road, to dream of life, and all this dimensions, and try to actually remove it.
	They are looking for rocks and these are the ones that you can't find.
	I think the sub is going down, because you keep kind of fading out into this burbly underwater thing.
	So I'm going to just...
	I heard Jack Kerouac, so I'm going to just mention it.
	I'm so sorry I can't get more information from you, but you'll have to wait until the Soviets stop jamming your sub.
	But first of all, Jack Kerouac lived a miserable existence.
	I mean, I know that it seems cool, but if you read On the Road with real careful attention, it's a completely psychotic book about a totally miserable and dissociated life.
	And he died young and he was miserable and never had any fundamentally satisfying relationships.
	So that kind of stuff is really dangerous.
	I'd be careful about saying that the opposite of boredom is chaos.
	That is a very dangerous premise to have.
	The opposite Of boredom is not chaos, right?
	And I know that that may not be in the books on philosophy that you're reading, but I would say that if you have a standard called, well, I have this mundane life, so the only way to make it non-mundane is to go and jump off a cliff, well, it certainly won't be mundane to jump off a cliff, but it may not be the best solution for your issue.
	The way that I've sort of tried to work this kind of stuff, and this is just my opinion, I don't have any magic answers, is that I think that you need to figure out what is going to be an acceptable, rational, valid, and good challenge for you to take on.
	And I think, for me, it's been, I mean, I'm just about to quit my job and Go and do this internet philosophy thing full-time.
	God help me and see what happens.
	That is a challenge that I think I can pull off because I've been running this podcast and it's been becoming quite successful for like a year and a bit or whatever.
	So I've got some experience under my belt and that's what I've been working towards.
	And to me it's a good thing to do because I think philosophy is a very important thing to talk about.
	And it's possible for me to do it, and I think I have some skills in this area, so I think that can work.
	And so that has made my life very exciting.
	Sometimes a little too exciting, but that has made my life very exciting.
	So what I would say is that probably what's going on for you is that you don't have a goal that is...
	I hate to use this word, so I apologize for it.
	You don't have a goal that's moral.
	And what I mean by that is not, you know, you've got to quit your job and go feed starving kids in India or anything like that.
	But I think you have to figure out what is good, goodness.
	What is goodness for you? What is virtue?
	For me, it has a lot to do with being courageous in the face of adversity, with trying to be positive in the face of disagreement, with trying to get people dislodged from their mental habits and their addiction to fantasy, which we all have.
	I don't know the degree to which you have it.
	That to me is like a moral and good thing to do, and I'm willing to make a lot of sacrifices to get there, right?
	I mean, not really that much of a sacrifice, because I like it very much.
	I would say that you need to have a vision of your life that encapsulates What it means to be courageous or to live with integrity or to have virtue.
	And for you, it might be quitting your job and going on the road like Jack Kerouac and keeping a diary.
	Maybe that's what you do to get there because, you know, life is not around forever and every day that we spend not being happy is a day that just drops off the truck and we don't ever get to drive back and pick it up.
	So I would say that if I would...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, this is the thing I'm looking for.
	I can't seem to work out the courage to do that, in a sense.
	Right, right. And I fully understand that.
	And what I would say about that, and I'm sorry, again, I'd like to ask you more questions, but I'm just getting every third word.
	But if you lack the courage, which we all have that problem, courage is a scarce commodity in this world, so don't feel bad about that.
	But the only way to overcome fear is with desire, right?
	The only way to overcome fear is with desire.
	And we all know this from dating, right?
	So there's some girl that you want to ask out, and you're terrified of asking her out, of course, because it's nerve-wracking, unless you're, I don't know, Joe Studmuffin, which I can't speak to.
	But you ask this girl out, and you're very much afraid of doing it, but the only thing that gives you courage is the desire for it.
	And the idea of living a life as a philosopher without having to do all of that traveling and eating hemlock to me is a great opportunity, so I have fear of quitting my job, leaving my career and doing this, but the desire overcomes that fear.
	And so that's the challenge.
	You have to give yourself a goal that is going to energize yourself, that is going to make you want to do it to the point where courage isn't as much of an issue.
	You can't will courage. You can't just say, well, I'm going to change my life and I'm going to will it.
	Because you have to have a goal that says, okay, I'm terrified to cross these mountains, but on the other side is a land of milk and honey where all the women look like my wife.
	So you have to find something that is going to make you motivated in terms of desire.
	And I would say that you need to find some goal that is going to make you feel enriched and it's going to make you feel like your life has real meaning, it has real value.
	And that usually has something to do with courage around virtue.
	And the way that I use the term virtue, I'm not going to get into it here, but it's not a boring, droning, Catholic, Mother Teresa kind of duty and obligation makes you not even want to get out of bed.
	But if you'd like to go to freedomainradio.com, there's a whole series of podcasts there you can listen to that I think will help you at least understand about a different way of looking at virtue, that it's something that's powerful and fun and highly motivating that can get you out of this cycle.
	The only way thing that's going to get you out of this revolving door is smashing through the windows.
	and the only way you're going to smash through the windows is if there's something that you so desperately want on the other side of that that you simply can't stand going around one more time can you just try that one more time you You're just cutting in the head a little bit.
	Yeah, I'm just saying, for me, myself, Personally, you've been a lot of help.
	And for all the others, I think, and how is it possible to make a donation to the cost?
	Oh, absolutely. I don't like to talk about that.
	Just kidding. I love to talk about that.
	To make a donation, there's a couple of ways you can do it.
	First of all, I need my car waxed and my lawn.
	So if you live anywhere in Mississauga, Ontario, just let me know.
	Plus, Christina would like a quiet evening after.
	No, not in New York.
	Just kidding. To go to the website, freedomainradio.com, there's two ways that you can donate.
	Well, three, I guess. If you've got a visa, and if you live in New York, I know you have a visa, then you can click on the PayPal account.
	You don't need a PayPal account.
	You can just donate money through your visa.
	Totally safe. They're a world-renowned company.
	They've been around for like 10 years, so it's a totally safe way to donate me some money.
	Secondly, if you have an eGold account, then you can transfer money that way.
	That's also on the main page of the website, and I really do appreciate it.
	Do call back in when you have more than, I don't know, two yogurt cups and a piece of string connecting you to the server just because I'd like to ask you some more questions, but it's getting a bit soupy.
	So thank you so much for calling in.
	Do keep us posted. And again, thank you.
	Thank you. I appreciate that.
	Look forward to your donation. I really appreciate that.
	It means even more now than it did before, because I have to make a certain amount of money.
	Otherwise, I have to go live in the garage, and that's cold.
	And echoey, so the podcast quality would go down.
	All right, so if we have somebody else...
	Is this Gentleman Bank?
	Yeah, somebody wanted to talk about The Soldier?
	Yeah, sure, we can go all over the place.
	No need to follow a sequence.
	There's no need to do that because I'm not going to fight tangents.
	It would be absolutely wrong.
	How do we talk on this thing?
	Your Jack Kerouac reference needs rebuttal.
	Is that you talking? You are a Brit now resident of the USA, n'est-ce pas, Canada.
	Well, I'm sorry. If you want to type my Jack Kerouac rebuttal in, I would be more than happy to listen to it.
	If I've got something wrong about old Jack, I certainly would be more than happy to correct myself.
	So if you can hear this, Mr.
	B-H, feel free to correct me about Kerouac.
	So let me know. All right.
	Do we have anyone else currently waiting now?
	Good heavens, this could be a shorter show.
	This could be a shorter show.
	Last chance, people.
	Last chance. Christine is going to come in.
	Oh, did we have someone in?
	They're in. They're out. They're up and down like the Assyrian Empire.
	All right. Enough Python now.
	Skippy, bush kangaroo, chimper at me.
	Hello. Hello.
	I tried last week, but you couldn't hear me.
	Ah, well, I can hear you now fine, so welcome back.
	Okay. Well, I have a question about animal rights.
	Animal rights. Let's go for it.
	Yes. You talk about universally preferable behavior for humans.
	And animals have their own universally preferable behavior, I think.
	But sometimes there can be a conflict because what the animals want is not the same as what we want.
	We like to eat them, for instance.
	So you could have, for instance, a chicken, and the chicken will certainly not be further to be eaten.
	But we do. How do you resolve such a conflict?
	Well, you've absolutely zeroed in on something that I don't have any good answers for.
	And I will do a bizarre epileptic thrash around, and you can tell me whether I hit anything or not.
	Because animal rights is one of these tricky issues that I don't have any clear answers for.
	This is sort of what I think, and this is how I live.
	And this could be the worst thing in the world if we find out that...
	The universal consciousness that this earlier gentleman was talked about was entirely composed of chicken brain than we, of course, are the worst evil genocidal Kentucky Fried assholes on the planet.
	So I'm just going to talk a little bit about it and then you can tell me what.
	But this is not a fully formed position or anything like that.
	So first of all, I don't believe that there's universally preferable behavior for animals because animals don't have theories of morality.
	They don't have the consciousness to create ethical systems.
	So I don't think there's such a thing as universally preferable behavior.
	There is such a thing as universally preferable behavior for nature, which is that if you have the power to exploit other living creatures, then you should do so.
	That is absolutely a universally preferable behavior.
	For nature.
	Right or wrong, I'm not even going to argue, but there's no question that human beings are the most successful species on the planet, at least until global warming drowns us, which it's not going to do, but...
	We are the most successful creatures on the planet because we have most advantageously engineered ourselves or evolution has engineered us to the point where we can most successfully exploit other animals.
	There's no question that if the chickens had evolved first that we'll be sitting in the chicken matrix providing them with food.
	So, nature advances, if you want to use the idea that we have consciousness and a mind as an advance over, say, an amoeba, and I think it is, you know, in terms of greater complexity and the ability to, I don't know, do something like this, rather than talk about philosophy, I think it's an advance. Nature only advances through both cooperation and exploitation.
	And the cooperation is the more of the relationship that we have with the livestock, wherein certain species are kept alive and flourish because of human interaction, and certain species don't, of course, where they're less useful to us.
	I mean, there's no possibility of the cow becoming extinct, but the greater spotted owl, who knows, right?
	I mean, that does seem to be the case.
	So, I find it that the only reason we have the ability to exploit animals, exploit being used in the non-Marxist sense, just to use for, you know, in the same way that, I don't know, I exploit the carpet so my feet aren't cold.
	But that has only really come about because nature has this coopetition thing, right, where animals both cooperate and compete with each other.
	And there's no possibility of having any kind of ethical system with regards to animals because they don't have ethics.
	In fact, nature doesn't really have ethics.
	Ethics had to wait for human consciousness to come along.
	But certainly, from a pure biological standpoint, the universally preferable behavior is to maximize your resource consumption And not worry too much about that which you are exploiting with the understanding that we have as a conscious and sentient being that, you know, like the rabbits in Australia, I remember this when I was a kid.
	Rabbits got loose in Australia and they ate all the grass and there were just like billions of bunnies and you couldn't put your foot down anywhere without treading on some rabbit.
	And then they starve to death because they ate all the grass, and we don't want to be that, and we can actually sort of foresee the consequences of that.
	No, no, they spread the disease. I'm sorry?
	They started to spread disease, myxomatose.
	The nice bunnies? Really?
	To kill the rabbits. Oh, the human beings started to spread disease.
	Yes. I see, I see.
	The rabbits. Right.
	And I mean, we, in some ways, and the last thing I'll say is that, of course, it really depends on your definition of success as well.
	Some of the most successful species are insects.
	I mean, what, 80% of the biomass in the world is insects.
	And what is it that some biologists said that if there is a god, he seems to be inordinately fond of beetles, of which there are like 800,000 species, plus George, Paul, Ringo, and John.
	And last but not least, of course, the most successful species in terms of longevity and in terms of just you can't swat them with a fly swatter are bacteria.
	And viruses, of course, have lasted forever and incredibly successful, can survive incredible cold, and so on.
	And so I eat – I'm not too much of a carnivore.
	My wife's a vegetarian. But I will eat meat from time to time.
	I work out at a gym.
	I just can't get the energy that I need from vegetables and cheese.
	So I will occasionally eat meat.
	I do think that it's something that an all-meat diet is both from a health standpoint and from an environmental standpoint somewhat irresponsible.
	So I think that animals are a resource that should be harvested in the way that we...
	You've got to eat something, right?
	Even if you kill a plant, that's a living being that you're killing, right?
	So I think that we should use animals as a resource.
	I think we should treat them as humanely as possible, and we should kill them as painlessly as possible.
	But I don't believe that there's a social contract that we can enter into as far as animals go.
	So that's my total nonsense position as far as animal rights go.
	So enough of me. Let's hear from you.
	Well, I think there is a difference between animals.
	Because when you look at the higher primates, they seem to have a kind of ethics...
	Professor De Waal has done studies on that.
	So it depends.
	Well, I'm sorry to interrupt you right after I told you to speak, but there's a difference between having mutually beneficial behavior and the altruistic reciprocity that occurs in primates.
	There's a difference between that and having a theory of ethics, if that makes any sense?
	Well, we can't know if they have a theory of ethics because they can't talk, of course.
	So that would be a little difficult.
	The only thing you can do is observe their behavior, of course.
	But that would be no different from aliens visiting Earth and watching humans, for instance, which couldn't understand our language.
	Well, but I mean, if aliens wouldn't be able to fly to Earth unless they could agree on a destination which would require language on their part, so they would understand the concept of language, and they would understand that we used language, they just may not be able to understand the content.
	Well, okay, but they would probably study our behavior and deduct some things from that.
	And so it's not so easy to say they have no universally preferable behavior.
	There's no evidence, and you're quite right, there's no evidence of universally preferable behavior.
	They might actually be engaged in the psychic chicken soup that the other guy was talking about.
	If you are speaking about ethics, the behavior, they have...
	If you ask a primatologist, he studies the behavior.
	You are talking about preferable behavior.
	Yes, but universally preferable behavior, which is an abstraction.
	Universally preferable behavior is an abstraction.
	Like we would say that human beings prefer to sleep.
	That's a description, that's not a prescription, right?
	That's just a saying, human beings prefer to sleep.
	Whereas saying human beings shouldn't kill other human beings is a prescriptive form of behavior.
	And certainly we can look at the great apes and other animals and see quite a degree of cooperation, and they care for their young, and they mourn the loss of their mates, and they certainly have rich and emotional lives.
	But there's no universally preferable behavior that you can reason about with a monkey, right?
	At least that we know how to do.
	Well, okay. Then the next thing is you say we can exploit animals.
	Yes? Well, all animals exploit animals.
	That's not anything that's particularly human beings.
	Animals, okay, because we are a higher species than, for instance, the primates, the other primates.
	No, I wouldn't agree with that.
	I mean, a shark is a more primitive species than me, but if it's hungry and I'm around and the only thing to eat, then the shark is going to exploit me.
	I mean, all animals exploit it.
	It's a matter of power, not of sophistication.
	Okay, a matter of power.
	Now, for instance...
	We develop an AI, an artificial intelligence and that would be dangerous when we continue in your line of thought because that would have probably much power over us and then that would be able to exploit us Well,
	sure, but the difference is that an advanced robot of some kind would have the ability to enter into a social contract with us.
	It would have the ability for us to reason together about mutually beneficial rules of behavior that we could agree to stick with or deviate from and accept punishment for that deviation from and so on.
	So I think the difference is that once you have the capacity for language, and this is something that if somebody has an IQ of 60 or whatever and commits a crime, they don't have the moral responsibility because they don't have the capacity to understand the concepts, they don't have the capacity to process the language and to understand the consequences of their behavior and so on.
	So I think the difference is, and this is just off the top of my head, so please, you could be totally right.
	This is just my thought, that a super-intelligent robot would not have the right to exploit us any more than a very intelligent person has the right to exploit a person of average intelligence, because universally preferable behavior, like don't steal, don't kill, don't rape, don't assault, Those don't take a lot of IQ to sort of process, but they do take a certain amount of conceptual ability and language skills, which so far only human beings have.
	We would never be so stupid relative to a hyper-intelligent robot that we would be unable to comprehend the basic rules of morality, if that makes sense.
	Then you take a difference of IQ Well, sure, absolutely.
	There is a difference of IQ. There is a certain level at which somebody cannot really be considered morally responsible, a human being, for his or her actions because the brain is not functioning well and so on.
	Temporary insanity is sort of another defense.
	Yeah, I accept that.
	I mean, I'm no legal scholar, but that seems to be a fairly reasonable provision to have in a legal system.
	Okay, that was all I had to ask for now.
	Well, thank you. That's a very, very interesting question.
	You can go to the board.
	I know I've seen debates in there before, but I don't feel particularly well-versed in this kind of stuff.
	So if you'd like to go on the Freedomain Radio board, there's some very, very smart people who are very interested in debating this more.
	Thank you so much. I appreciate your time.
	That was a very interesting topic.
	If you listen to this later and you find that I'm totally talking out of my ear, then call back in next week or come to the boards and let me know.
	But I don't have any of this sort of stuff nailed down.
	I've spent my time on other things.
	Thank you so much. It was an excellent conversation.
	Somebody has asked, would it be ethical for highly evolved flesh-eating aliens to eat us?
	If there were millions of years ahead of us in evolving, we would be cows or even insects compared to their many evolutionary standards.
	Again, this to me comes back to the social contract capacity, the reasoning and language capacity.
	It doesn't take a lot of IQ to understand that you shouldn't kill other...
	People with whom you can enter into a social contract.
	And again, I use the term social contract in a very loose kind of way.
	So that's sort of my approach to it.
	But again, I'm no expert in this area by any stretch of the imagination.
	So in the conversation, we're down to chimps inventing poo gloves.
	So I may have missed something a little bit here.
	I did? Did I miss something?
	Can we do just a few minutes, if you don't mind, sweetie, on what to look for in a good therapist, and then we'll close up?
	Sure. Okay, this is to turn it over to the brains of the outfit.
	I suspect that there have been some questions recently about how to find a good therapist.
	I certainly got one on Ask a Therapist, and I'm not sure if it's been floating around on the board as well.
	You know, I think what makes a good therapist is different for different people.
	I think the most important thing that you need to have with your therapist is a good rapport, an ability to exchange ideas without feeling that your therapist is...
	Is humiliating you or shaming you in the therapy sessions or judging you?
	Sometimes a therapist will need to ask questions to understand your perspective.
	That doesn't imply that you're being judged, but to help you to understand where you're coming from.
	So it's always, always, always important to have a therapist who is open to discussion and debate.
	What else makes a good therapist?
	There are, here in Canada, and I'm sure in other places in the United States and Europe as well, and maybe Asia, who knows, probably, there are regulated therapists and there are unregulated therapists.
	And that just, that of course has everything to do with government standards.
	So whether or not you're seeing someone who is regulated or not regulated doesn't mean that the individual is more or less qualified.
	There are people here in Ontario with PhDs in psychology who have not gone through the registration process and they're practicing as therapists.
	Does that make them any better or worse than those who have gotten their registration?
	No, it doesn't.
	So, although with registration here at Canada, the United States, with registration, at least you have people who have to follow certain ethical guidelines and principles, and if you have any legitimate complaints about these people, you can certainly take it up with a complaints committee and prevent any further public harm, if that's the case.
	I don't know. What else?
	What else do people...
	There are many, many different schools of therapy, and literature supports different schools of therapy for different types of illnesses or ailments.
	If you're looking at clinical depression, interpersonal therapy or cognitive behavior therapy treatment modalities have had excellent feedback or have had excellent empirical support in terms of positive outcome.
	There's my own belief about sort of the traditional Freudian psychoanalysis.
	Again, take it for all it's worth.
	I don't particularly think it's very useful.
	It is a very, very long term if you're going to do the psychoanalytic approach.
	It could be 10, 15, 25 years with an analyst.
	Well, you know, just take a look at Woody Allen.
	If you want some evidence of whether or not that type of theory or that type of practice is beneficial.
	There are many kinds of approaches.
	I don't mean to say that anyone is better than another.
	Again, it will depend on the relationship that the individual develops with the therapist.
	That therapeutic relationship is very, very key because what plays out in the individual's Our own personal life ends up recreating itself in the psychotherapy and a good therapist will be able to pick up on the cues and the clues from the individual to help him or her understand what's going on and what his or her behavior, what effects his or her behavior has on the receiving end.
	And we get to work those things out in the therapy process and that's one of the most powerful things about therapy.
	No, not really. Steph's asking me to go into this into a little bit more detail.
	I'm not sure that I know how to without...
	Steph, do you have any ideas?
	I was lying down, taking a rest, handed over the reins.
	Yeah, I mean, there's this counter-transference, the transference, and the stuff that you do.
	Well, I mean, if you have trust issues in your life based on your history, then when you get into a therapeutic relationship, you will, and correct me if I'm wrong, you know this a lot better than I do, but if you have problems trusting women and you get into a relationship with a female therapist, there will come a time where trust will become an issue with your female therapist.
	And the whole point of, well not the whole point, a central point of therapy is that your therapist will be aware that that is going to happen and will be conscious of that when it does happen and will make you aware of what you're doing to make it happen.
	And then she will try to correct you.
	No, but I mean, that's an important thing.
	So much of what goes on in people's life is unconscious, right?
	So if you're an angry person, then other people will just get angry.
	If you're an angry person, at some point you're going to get angry with your therapist.
	And your therapist will be aware that that's coming and will be aware and will be sure to say to you, okay, what you just said to me there was evidence to me that you're angry at me.
	Now, as an angry person, the first thing you'll say is, I wasn't angry at you.
	I'm not angry at you.
	I think you're a great therapist.
	Like, you'll deny it, right? Because that's what angry people do when they're caught, right?
	That's what bullies do when you catch them is they say, well, I was just, we were practicing the luge, sir.
	So a competent therapist will be aware of these kinds of things and will, through her own awareness of the interaction, will tell you what the interaction is like on the other side.
	What is it like being on the other side of you?
	What is it like being on the receiving end of you?
	And even though you will deny it, she will continue to reiterate that point until you get what it's like to be on the other side of you.
	And that's the basic empathy training that so many of us didn't get when we were younger.
	So I don't like to be corrected by female authority figures, obviously, because my mother was such a bully and a brute, right?
	So at one point, when I was vociferously agreeing with my therapist about something that I didn't really have any opinion about, she said, stop trying to control me.
	And she said it quite sharply.
	And this was some time into our therapy, so I was already out of the fetal position and was fairly heavily medicated, and I had this little doll thing that I carried in my pants.
	Anyway, we don't have to get into all of that.
	But she corrected me quite sharply, and it was really startling.
	And we spent a couple of sessions just on that moment.
	Like, we spent three hours talking about that particular moment where she was saying something, and I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, no, that's true, but, but, but, right?
	Because I was trying to swamp her.
	I was trying to sort of short-circuit her and get control of the conversation again, but I couldn't say, I hate to interrupt you, but, right?
	This is stuff I all learned later.
	So she sharply corrected me, which was nerve-wracking for me because it brought back stuff from my own history.
	And yet she was aware that she was doing it, and we talked about it, and how she felt to be on the receiving end of that unconscious impulse within me to take control of the conversation by really agreeing too much with someone to try and gain control back.
	Again, I can't remember all of the details, but...
	She was aware that we had established a trusting enough relationship that she could correct me without me being too upset and we could talk about it.
	And then I got a real sense what it was like to be on the other side of me.
	Now, we all know that to some degree.
	We all know what it's like to be on the other.
	But when you're acting in an unconscious manner, we don't know what it's like to be on the receiving end.
	That's the whole point of the unconscious thing.
	So a good therapist will be aware that that is happening and will tell you what it's like to be on the receiving end of you and then you can step through all of the detail and the complexity that goes into producing that interaction so that you can begin to pull it apart and begin to reshape it into something more productive.
	You see, I'm actually quite good at doing it in therapy but I'm not very good at explaining it the way Steph just did.
	Whereas I'm very good at explaining it, but I'd be a really bad therapist.
	It's like, no, it's like this.
	See, I'm going to have to interrupt you again. What else makes a good therapist?
	Empathy, warmth, humor, just a nice personable person.
	I get a lot of people who come in and say, well, I went to see a therapist and she was rude or he was cold.
	I had one person come and say to me, my therapist fell asleep during our session, so I can't imagine that that would be a good therapist.
	Make sure your therapist is alert.
	If anybody has any specific questions about their therapy or their own experiences in therapy and they want to ask them, I'd be happy to take some questions.
	Okay, I'll do it.
	I'll do it. Yeah, I'd just like to respond to the previous caller before you about if aliens came to Earth and they were looking for high intelligence.
	If they were seeking high intelligence, they may probably seek the dolphins rather than us because they may judge on how you react with the environment that you're in, how much damage that you do to it.
	I mean, the dolphins seem to be in harmony with their environment.
	They've done no damage to it, where we have.
	So, I know we've got these same size brains, and it's quite possible they would see the dolphins as a higher form of life form than us.
	Now, the other form of consciousness, I've often wondered, Well, we are an electrical and chemical brain, or an electrical and chemical computer.
	The Earth is also electrical and chemical.
	Is it possible that the Earth has got consciousness?
	And also, is it possible that the Internet one day will spring into consciousness because of the sheer amount of electrical connections there?
	You know, I wonder sometimes what consciousness is, and how would you judge If there is consciousness, I don't know if anybody would like to add anything to that.
	Well, that's a very interesting question.
	I don't know. I don't know for sure.
	Of course, consciousness remains something that's very hard to study.
	I mean, we obviously couldn't be smarter than our own consciousness, so it's hard for us to study ourselves.
	But the one thing I'll say about the dolphins is that we have a tendency as a species, and it does come a little bit out of the environmental movement, which I don't loathe or anything.
	I mean, I think it's fine. I just wish it was a whole lot less interested in using government power to achieve its ends.
	We have a strong tendency to sentimentalize the animal kingdom, especially cute, smiley animals like dolphins.
	The only reason that dolphins don't further exploit their environment is because they can't.
	Because they can't build nets, because they don't have opposable thumbs.
	Dolphins are not wiser or smarter than human beings.
	Neither are budgerigars, neither are all of the other cute creatures that we sort of have an affinity for.
	It is the nature of biological organisms to exploit the environment around them to maximize their own reproducibility, and we are very good at doing that.
	If dolphins had evolved the opposable thumb or if the dolphin had wandered out onto land instead of the whatever it was that ended up with us being there, The dolphin would be doing exactly what we're doing.
	The one thing I would say is that we do need to get rid of the government so that we can have a much more balanced relationship to our own ecosystem and I certainly agree that we want to look to the longevity of the resources around us and that means privatizing them and not having them open to this sort of public exploitation where people don't have the responsibility of ownership.
	But there's no question that dolphins would exploit nature as much as they humanly could, so to speak.
	And they only don't because they can't.
	There's no sentimentality in nature, though there is within us.
	And I don't...
	I mean, there's electrical energy and so on.
	That's true, of course, of a power station, that there's electricity and chemistry.
	Consciousness has some pretty specific characteristics, though, around the ability to conceptualize, to use language, to reason, and so on.
	And there's no evidence of that spontaneously being created.
	I mean, it took, what, five billion years of evolution for human beings to come around, and that was with very purposeful kind of mounting the ladder of complexity up through the evolutionary chain.
	I don't think that it's going to just spontaneously happen any more than, you know, a cloud is going to spontaneously form into an exact replica of Mount Rushmore.
	I don't think that accident will produce consciousness.
	I think that it is only evolution that has produced consciousness.
	Yeah, I've often thought of us as...
	I mean, perhaps the Earth hasn't got consciousness, but perhaps it's a system that has an autonomic consciousness.
	In other words, like the brain controls breathing and the heart.
	Maybe there's an autonomic system within the Earth, and due to our size, we would only be a bacteria.
	Compared to the Earth and maybe if we upset the ecosystem too much it may turn against us via the autonomic system and eject us from the Earth.
	Well, it could happen, but the thing I would be concerned about, and I get a sense of this from you.
	I'm not going to guess that it is or isn't the case.
	You can let me know. The thing I'm a little concerned about is you seem to feel that we're not part of the natural order.
	Is that true? Because you seem to say us and nature, or us and the earth, or us and the ecosystem.
	Human beings are completely part of the ecosystem.
	We are doing exactly what human beings are designed to do.
	We are doing exactly what all living organisms are designed to do, which is to intelligently exploit the resources around them.
	And we are completely and totally part of nature.
	A jumbo jet is completely and totally part of nature.
	It is composed of all natural ingredients.
	Everything that is created, plastic, is completely part of nature.
	The house that I'm living in, this microphone, the internet, is all completely part of nature.
	We are in the ecosystem.
	We are not separate from the ecosystem.
	Unless I'm missing something very obvious, which is of course more than possible.
	But I do get the feeling that you see human beings as estranged or alienated from the natural world or from the ecosystem or from nature or from the world.
	I don't really quite understand that because we are a product of nature and we have some pretty specific characteristics relative to other species, but I don't see that we're separate from nature or separate from the world, unless I'm missing something.
	I'm just guessing that's sort of where you're coming from.
	Does that make any sense to you?
	No, it doesn't. No, I'm actually coming from there.
	I sort of know we're a part of the ecosystem and we're a predator and we're top of the pecking order.
	Predators have always kept the DNA healthy.
	It takes off the weakest.
	I know that we've evolved probably where we aren't doing that now, but that's not the issue.
	When you look at nature, if one part becomes more dominant than the rest, there's normally something that happens to reset the ecosystem again.
	In other words, if there's millions of buffaloes charging across America, then something would happen to reduce that.
	And I think you do see this resetting happening quite a lot.
	As I said, whether the earth may do this through weather, through, you know, whatever, you know, whatever.
	Well, it certainly could happen.
	And the thing I'll just sort of end up by saying, you could be right.
	And of course, where there is a great proliferation of species, there's greater possibilities for the transmission of disease and so on.
	So that does happen. And I, you know, I think this is sort of my basic opinion.
	I mean, I'm very much keen on the natural world.
	I love hiking in forests and so on and not so much the bears.
	But the thing that I think is important to remember is that nature is a total bitch.
	Nature is a total bitch.
	When we didn't have our hands around the throat of Mother Nature, she was kicking our ass.
	We had a life expectancy of 20 years at the time of the Roman Empire, less than 2,000 years ago.
	A toothache could get you killed because of bacteria.
	We had the Black Death, where half of the population of Europe was wiped out in successive waves over the course of 150 years from the end of the 14th century.
	That I think it's possible for us to sentimentalize nature because we have managed to subdue nature.
	But nature, you know, unfettered free nature, is a total bitch.
	And nature will kill you for stubbing your toe if you break skin and a particular kind of infection comes in and you don't have antibiotics.
	I don't really care how fast...
	The car's going, I'm going to bail, because I know for sure if I go over the cliff edge, I'm dead, whereas I'll take any chance.
	So for me, yeah, we're on a bit of a risky endeavor as far as managing our ecosystem and our environment, and there are certain aspects of pollution that are new.
	But pollution really, to some degree, has to be defined as that which is damaging to human life.
	And in that sense, there's no pollution On the planet that matches what went on in the Roman Empire or in the Middle Ages.
	So for me, yeah, we've got to keep an eye on things and we do have to marshal our resources and use our intelligence and use the power of the free market to make sure that resources are extended.
	But for me, it's like nature is fine now because...
	It's like the church, right? The church is more peaceful now because it's been tamed, right?
	And we can sentimentalize nature because...
	We're not dying of being touched by somebody who scratched their nose and thus gave us the bubonic plague or the rats that came off the ships or whatever.
	For me, there's some risk in where we are, but the alternative was definitely going off the cliff.
	Of course, you or I, if you're over 20, Would not probably be alive to have this conversation if human beings hadn't decided to wrestle nature down to the ground and sort of have her serve our ends, which I just think is a good thing all around.
	For me, it would be kind of hypocritical to say that it's not better because I really enjoy all of the products of technology and so on.
	So that's my sort of two cents on it.
	The strength of the human race is the diversity of our genetic makeup, you know.
	When we had the plague, there was one village in Derbyshire, which is in England, where nobody got the plague.
	And all around them, people were sort of dying.
	But in those days, villagers never really travelled far.
	So for hundreds and hundreds of years, people were just staying in that one small area.
	And recently, a lot of American scientists and doctors have been coming to this village, going to local graveyard, obviously with people saying that they could do it.
	And digging up the old bones, extracting the DNA from the people that were alive during the plague, and then tracing people that are still alive living in the area with the same genetic makeup, so they're actually linked by family.
	And it was on television.
	They've still got the...
	I'm not sure it's a virus. They've actually got the plague virus still.
	And they showed you under this microscope.
	They got a little drop of blood from one of these connected family members, the people that didn't die during the plague.
	And one drop of blood on the plague and it just died completely, you know, it just wiped it out.
	So these outcrops of genetic diversity is our saving grace, really, from these things that have come in the past or they might come in the future.
	Right. And even though we have challenges and so on, there's no other time in history that I would rather be alive.
	So for me, and I don't know, I'm not getting this sense from you, but a lot of people who are really interested in the environmental stuff have a certain sense of impending doom, you know, like, oh, we're a cancer on the world and so on.
	And yeah, I mean, I don't know.
	I mean, just for me, there's no other time in history that I would rather be alive.
	I think the opportunity is just to have this kind of conversation and this kind of interaction and so on.
	For me to be able to make a living as a philosopher from the Internet, I mean, it's incredible, right?
	So there's no other time that I would rather be alive.
	And so I'll take my chances, in a sense, with what we've got rather than worry too much about how things could be better.
	The things I can see happening...
	In the future, I'd say, is terraforming of planets.
	You know, they will find something that grows on Earth and then genetically change it slightly and send that to a dead planet, you know, maybe like sort of Mars, and it'll start there to sort of grow and it will, over probably 500 years, change the atmosphere.
	And then they may even genetically change people.
	They can suit the atmosphere and gravity better, you know, so they can start a new race there.
	Well, I think that would be pretty cool.
	I hope that happens in my lifetime because I certainly would be interested in having a go at that.
	Well, listen, we've been running for about two and a half hours, which is usually about the length of the show.
	So thank you so much for coming by.
	I really do appreciate it. If anybody had any last final death-defying statements, I'm certainly willing to listen to them.
	Other than that, though, we will stop off for this week and we will pick up again.
	No, not next week. Three Sundays from now.
	Yes, I'm going to go on vacation, so I'll see you in a little while.
	I'm going on Friday. April?
	Easter Sunday? Easter Sunday, back to the bunnies.
	And what will I do?
	No, don't worry, there'll still be some podcasts.
	Mostly me going, I didn't mind you, I'm on the beach.
	But yeah, you guys can always get together on Sunday and have a chit-chat and realize just how much you can get a word in edgewise without the big chatty forehead going on and on and on.
	So thank you so much everyone for listening.
	I really do appreciate it and have yourselves an absolutely wonderful week.

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