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Aug. 12, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:17:30

839 Sunday Call In Show August 12 2007

Stef confronts an abuser, the self-knowledge of determinism, and God as a parasite...

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	Well, hello everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Back after a fortnight, I guess since the last time we had a chat.
	Sunday, August 12th.
	Shortly after 4 o'clock, it's 4 p.m.
	Eastern Standard Time, plus assorted technical difficulties, bad sound on Skype, and annoying hold music on Gizmo.
	So, thank you so much for joining.
	I'm going to just do a short introduction, and then we shall go to...
	People who have questions, comments, issues, or problems, criticisms, or other ways that they'd like to fill the gaping void of podcasts that has been Free Domain Radio over the past two weeks.
	So, I confronted my first abuser, actually, in a public setting.
	I just looked down.
	I was actually abusing myself, and people were staring.
	But, so, what happened was, Christine and I went to see a tourist attraction and there was a family coming out of a car.
	There was this big burly fellow and his wife and two children about two years apart.
	I would say one of them was about eight or nine, the other one was about ten or eleven.
	And the children, I think it was the youngest boy, was whining and crying and obviously terrified.
	You know, you see so much of this when you actually see family's interaction.
	Let's take a look at the picture of Britney Spears' kids.
	Stress and tension and fear that goes on in these children's lives.
	Really quite terrifying.
	And the father was snarling at his youngest son, you know, saying, I've just about had it with you.
	You've been whining this whole goddamn trip.
	You know, we're going to turn around and go right back home.
	And you were just a rotten kid and, you know, was really snarling at this kid.
	And, of course, it really mars this, and this is one of the reasons why going out to any kind of tourist spot or places where there are children is, I mean, it's wonderful to see the kids and so on, but you always face this risk, and I don't think I've ever gone to a tourist attraction or a place where there's lots of kids.
	Without seeing at least one kid be verbally or physically maltreated in some horrible manner.
	It really does put a bit of a pall over the day.
	Suddenly you wander into the gulag of childhood that far too many children inhabit.
	Anyway, so we got out of the car and the mother was taking the boys towards the gate and the man was standing by his car.
	And I walked over to him and I said,''Are you okay?'' And he actually did seem a little bit abashed, and he said, yeah, I'm fine.
	And I said, you know, I don't mean to get into your business, but you know that that is not how you should be treating your children.
	And he's like, yeah, yeah, you know, but it was just, it's been a 16-hour drive, and they've been whining the whole time, and I said, well, I understand that.
	I really do. I understand that.
	But you can't be calling your kid a rotten kid.
	You can't be yelling at them.
	You're the adult. Like, yeah, but you've been in this car for this amount of time.
	But you still don't have that option, right?
	To bully your kids.
	And there was a sort of silence then.
	And he just sort of said, yeah...
	You know, like he was sort of like half between like, yeah, so what?
	And yeah, you're right.
	And then he said, I gotta go, right?
	And he sort of walked off.
	Now, I don't imagine that I've changed anybody's life and anybody's life's interaction...
	But it was actually a lot easier than I thought, and it was slightly less confrontational than I thought.
	And this guy obviously was a little bit back.
	I guess the only thing that I was hoping was that when people see some kind of public resistance, or you're humiliating your whole family plus yourself, and of course most importantly your children in a public space, that it's not okay.
	That it's not okay that somebody's noticing this, And of course, it's his history, it's his family, it's his parenting, and it's the whole cycle.
	I did have some mild compassion for this guy.
	Because he genuinely does believe that his children are treating him badly.
	Like, he genuinely does believe that he has the right to have a peaceful and uninterrupted 16-hour drive with young children.
	And when he doesn't get that, he genuinely does believe that they are...
	Acting badly. And he doesn't see that his verbal abuse of his children is exactly what he's criticizing in them, with the only difference being that he's an adult.
	And a funny thing, of course, is that I really can't understand fundamentally why people like this have children.
	When you have these kinds of family outings, and I don't know about you guys, but when I was a kid, I fucking dreaded these family outings.
	I hated them. And it's like, hey, let's go to the park.
	It's like, really? Do we have to go through this whole goddamn charade yet one more time where we go and have a, quote, great time?
	Because everybody's going to be stressed.
	Everybody's going to be worried. Everybody's going to be fearful and frustrated and angry.
	Things are going to end badly.
	It's like Christmas. I hated Christmas.
	Because that's when you're supposed to have the Hallmark card moments, the Kodachrome moments of bliss and togetherness and so on.
	I hate it. Whenever the standard of happiness was raised, my family always turned into a bunch of savage monkeys.
	Rabbit monkeys. And so whenever it was like, let's go do X, for me it was always like, God, why do we even bother?
	And for this guy, right, he has two kids, he's a wife, and he's like, let's take our kids to this tourist attraction.
	Let's get in the car for 16 hours.
	And of course, how are the kids going to feel about these kinds of family outings?
	Well, they're going to feel that it's very stressful and it's very risky.
	And I can see this whole trip in my mind's eye, because we've all been there, I think, at one time or another, hopefully not too often, but we've all been there where, you know, you didn't have to pee when you stopped, but suddenly you have to pee now, or you weren't hungry then, but now you're hungry, or, you know, you say something wrong,
	or you're getting bored, so you're having a game with your brother in the backseat, and Well, you get too loud, or you laugh too hard, or, you know, and then you get snarled at, and then you feel tearful, but then you're not allowed to blubber, and then things escalate, and it's like, why the fuck do these people have children?
	Can't understand that. If you don't take joy and pleasure in spending time with them, then why bother?
	I mean, it's the same question as why people get married to people they dislike.
	It's a grand mystery.
	But anyway, I mean, not that anybody's sort of got to do what I did, but...
	If you do see this sort of thing occurring, and it happens, of course, far too often, then you may feel that you want to say something, and, you know, you might want to pick the right time.
	I was sort of of two minds about whether to talk to this guy in front of his kids or not, and I decided not to because I felt that talking to him in front of his kids would send a positive message to his kids, right?
	But at the same time, he would feel the desire to attack me Because I would be then, quote, humiliating him in front of his children and feel the need to reassert his authority.
	And of course, I wouldn't be able to do anything, right?
	I'm not going to get into a fistfight and so on, right?
	And so, what would happen is they would then see somebody try to intervene on their behalf, who would then get chased away by an abusive father, which would make them, I think, despair all the more about the possibility of good surviving in a hostile and dangerous world.
	So... So I decided not to, but waited until he was a bit more on his own.
	And I think this is the first time that I've done this.
	Certainly Christian and I have seen this kind of behavior before, and we talk it out between ourselves, sort of how it makes us feel afterwards.
	But this is the first time that I've stepped up to a parent and talked to him about how he's treating his children.
	And I hope, I hope, that it will at least give him some food for thought.
	It really depends on the individual.
	Sometimes the smallest nudge can produce enormous changes.
	And he did, to his credit, to his tiny credit, seem abashed by how he was treating his children.
	Anyway, I just thought I'd start off with that story.
	Anyway, so that was sort of my minor incident.
	I've got some other stuff to talk about, but I'd sort of leave it open for questions and comments now, because we all have not had a chance to bounce ideas off the inverted radar edition.
	So, if you have questions or comments, you can either type them into the Gizmo chat window, or...
	Speak up. Hey, Steph.
	Can you hear me? I sure can.
	How's it going? Great.
	How are you doing? Not too bad.
	Not too bad at all. Yeah, I was just at the local Costco, which is kind of like a big, what do you call it, warehouse store or club discount store or whatever the other day.
	And they always have those ladies out there selling the sample, not selling, but just handing out free samples of all the food.
	And one of them was like, One of those little miniature bagel things that you bake and they're like covered with pizza sauce and stuff like that.
	And this one, you know, this big dude with his little kids, he was pushing them around and he had, I think, two of them were sitting up in the shopping carts, you know, little kid seat thing.
	And I didn't see it happen, but I guess he handed one of these bagel things to this little kid who couldn't have been He couldn't even have been two years old, I guess.
	And the kid, you know, put it in his mouth and it was too hot, so he dropped it.
	And then his other brothers were still eating there, so this little kid, of course, drops this bagel thing and falls on the floor and he starts crying and wants another one, but his dad said, no, you dropped it, time to go.
	And this kid just starts falling.
	And it just absolutely broke my heart, because I remember things like that happening to me when I was a little kid, too.
	And I'm thinking... Here's a guy who picks up a piping hot thing, hands it to this little kid, and then, for all intents and purposes, punishes the kid for when it burns him because the kid got all excuses about this thing, was expecting to have a treat, and then drops it.
	So now the kid's like, not only does he not get this treat that he was all hyped up about, but now he's starting to blame himself for doing it because he screwed up, right?
	Right, and what's strange, sorry, what's strange too about that and what the kid totally gets down in his little gut is that in the hierarchy of values, his needs rank below free food.
	Yeah. It's not even like, I mean, we all have the thing where you're holding the ice cream with two hands and the top falls off and, I mean, you're just left with this crappy little code, right?
	I mean, we've all had that experience, right?
	And that's one thing if it's like, oh, I only bought...
	Two bucks and I bought you your ice cream.
	I don't have any more. So, you know, maybe we can come back or we'll get you something at home.
	But this is free. What does he have to do?
	Reach over, grab another one and say, oh, I'm so sorry.
	And apologize. I'm so sorry.
	It was too hot. I mean, if I hand Christina a mug of coffee and it burns her hands because it's too hot, then clearly she should have been wearing gloves.
	And we can have that discussion over and over, honey.
	But, no, but I mean, it's like, I'm so sorry.
	I gave you something that was too hot.
	Right? So... But the kid now gets that his needs rank below free food, right?
	His needs and satisfying his needs and so on, and his father satisfying a desire, which the father himself provoked, in a sense, by saying, here's some free stuff, that he now ranks below free food, and that's pretty humiliating, too.
	Yeah, so, just going back into the scene now, I was, you know, I'm standing there just like, my little inner child is just You know, wailing away just in concert with this kid that's being wheeled away, and he's reaching out his cute little grasping hand to try to get another one, and he's just getting further and further away, and you can see the desperation in his face, and he's crying.
	And so I ran and grabbed him these things, and I caught up with the guy, because he was really cruising away from here.
	I actually had to kind of trot to catch up to him, and I said, sir, excuse me, and I just tapped him on the shoulder, and I said, you know, It's really, you know, it's too bad that, you know, your son dropped that.
	You know, maybe if we cool this one down a little bit, then he can enjoy it.
	And he's like, oh, okay, you know.
	And so he kind of like blows on a little bit, and then he holds it up for his son.
	He says, okay, now this is hot.
	Now, you know, be careful.
	And so the little kid holds it very gingerly, and, you know, you can tell he's being very careful this time.
	And he starts calming down immediately.
	And I'm just thinking, I mean, I felt good that I was able to To kind of help the kid, but at the same time, walking away from that, I just knew that this is the world that this kid lives in, and he's trapped there.
	Oh man, it just really shook me.
	Well, good for you, for acting, for sure.
	For sure. It's too bad that you couldn't get a larger pizza, microwave it to about 900 degrees, and give it to the father.
	But sometimes you don't have the right equipment on hand, right?
	Absolutely. Here's a gold bar.
	It's nearly molten. If you can hold on to it, it's yours!
	I'm just kind of wondering, is this kind of the world that I'm doomed to live in now that I'm going to be having these awful painful moments everywhere I go?
	Is this it? Is this what I've wanted?
	Oh, sorry. Didn't I mention that there might be a downside?
	Sorry, the truth now has become a hot pizza that you can't eat but you have to hold on to.
	Oh, crap. And you can't drop it, for God's sake, no.
	Look, I mean, sensitizing ourselves to the pain that's in the world is very hard, right?
	And that's why people become harsh and cruel and mean, right?
	These are the only two choices that you have, given that the world is a painful place to live in, a lot, right?
	Often, not totally, right? Because of the people and the way they treat the helpless, right?
	The world is a painful place to live in, and the only choice that you have is to be sensitive and feel the pain, or to become an asshole, right?
	Yeah. I mean, you either feel the pain of the people who are hurt, or you turn against them as if they're hurting you, right?
	And you then bully and dominate.
	You know, it's a painful choice, but it's still better than the other thing.
	Yeah, one thing I was really happy about with this interaction, though, is that I think this is the first time I've ever done anything like this, and it did feel good.
	I mean, even knowing that it was just kind of like a pebble in a huge ocean, it felt good tossing that pebble in there because I just felt like I kind of mopped up a little bit of suffering for a few minutes in one day, and maybe that interaction might help that guy to slow down the next time or something.
	I don't know. It did feel good doing it, and I'm glad that I have changed into the kind of person who would do that, because normally I would just turn around and walk away feeling like I had somehow been imposed upon by the whole interaction, like, oh, why are they bothering me or something like that.
	Well, and you're breaking a pattern.
	Right, you're breaking a pattern, and I don't know that it's going to do that much to change the parents, because once you've started torturing and being cruel to the kids, I mean, but what you've done for the kid is...
	Here's another way of behaving, right?
	All that kids need to see to give them choices in the future is another way of interacting.
	And if they see that other way of interacting, then it's like the grit in the oyster that produces the pearl, right?
	Because then the next time that their dad is cruel to them, they'll remember that nice guy who acted differently and was kind, right?
	So it then doesn't become an absolute.
	I mean, it's amazing.
	And I remember this from when I was a little kid.
	Nice people, right?
	I remember like the five nice people I met before I was 10, right?
	Like clear as day, right?
	And that had a lot to do, I think, with...
	And of course, the difference between myself and my brother in some ways could well come down to the fact that he was raised for the first month or two by my mom, and I was raised...
	For the first month or two by a very kind and loving surrogate who actually liked me so much that she named her child many years later when she had her own baby.
	She named him, thank God it's not Steph, which is weird.
	I think it's Gaelic. No, she named him after me because we had a real bond, right?
	So one of the ways in which my humanity was probably enhanced relative to my brothers is that, you know, my sort of cold and narcissistic mom and angry was the one who he tried to imprint with over the first couple of months of his life whereas I didn't go through that because my mom was hospitalized for depression after I was born and didn't really spend much time around me at all for the first couple of months and I know that it was sort of a very famously affectionate woman who took care of me and that probably had a lot to do with turning me into the slightly gay individual that I am now.
	So these things can have an enormous impact on children And, of course, it is the best that we can do, right?
	I mean, so, I think it's definitely worth doing if you get a chance.
	Hey, Steph, do you want to have a chat with my little friend?
	She's nine years old. Sure, absolutely.
	If she has a question or whatever, that would be fine.
	Now, the question is, as far as danger goes, First of all, you don't come up and say, I don't think you want to go up to somebody who's abusing his child or her child and say, unless they're actually hitting.
	If they're actually hitting the child, like physically, just call the cops.
	I mean, again, it's not perfect, but it's the best we can do.
	But that's criminal. I mean, if you saw somebody hitting someone in a wheelchair, you'd call the cops, right?
	And if you see somebody hitting their child, you call the cops.
	You call the cops.
	And... But if you see somebody verbally abusing their child, it's a little bit more tricky.
	The one thing I will say, though, is that if you don't feel confident approaching that person, don't do it.
	Right? Because you don't want to...
	You don't want to give... To a kid who's being abused, you don't want to give the impression that goodness gets destroyed.
	Right? That standing... Even as an adult standing up to his father is going to get destroyed.
	Right? So...
	And of course, if you want to call the cops, if you can see a car, right, and you can get the license plate, then you don't even need the person to stay, right?
	You get the license plate, you call the cops and say, well, I saw the family, this is the license plate of the car they own, this is what they did to their kids, and you really need to go and talk to them, right?
	And as far as verbal abuse goes, The one thing I will say is that if you feel confident in the approach, it seems to me, I can't guarantee it, of course, right, but it seems to me highly unlikely that somebody is then going to turn and start verbally abusing you.
	Hello? Hello?
	Hello. Hi, how's it going?
	Good. You're nine years old?
	Yeah. Okay, now, are you like nine and a quarter?
	Are you nine and a half?
	Are you nine and three quarters? I just turned nine.
	Wow! Big leagues, big time.
	And how does it feel being nine?
	Do you feel taller? No.
	Can you see over countertops yet?
	I've always been able to see over countertops.
	Really? Even like bank countertops?
	Don't go to banks as a kid, right?
	Okay, you're not used as a distraction during a stick-up.
	So how does it feel being on the internet?
	I don't know, not really different from anything else.
	Not really different from anything else?
	And do you like school?
	Yeah, kind of.
	Kind of? So do you like part of school and not like part of school, or do you like the whole thing?
	I like part of school.
	And what subjects do you like in school?
	English and social studies.
	And what do you not like?
	Math. Math!
	Ew! Okay, spit with me now.
	Patooey! Math!
	Patooey! Patooey! There you go.
	Oh, actually that landed in my ear, so that's kind of gross.
	But that's okay. I asked you to do it, so that seems only fair.
	And have you always disliked math?
	Yeah. What about science?
	Pardon? What about science?
	Do you take science at all, or is that later on?
	Yeah, I take science.
	I like that a bit.
	A bit. Now, do you guys have to do this thing?
	I think when I was your age, we had to do this thing where we cut open these frogs and it was really, really horrendous.
	We cut them open. No.
	You don't have to do that? No.
	What about, do you look at plants under microscopes, or what do you do in science when you're in school?
	Well, since we're kind of young, we put sugar in water and see what happens in a couple weeks or something.
	You know what? I really should know this.
	Perhaps you can give us a little science lesson and you can tell us what exactly happens to sugar and water in a couple of weeks.
	After a few weeks it will turn to sugar glass.
	To sugar glass?
	Really? Yeah.
	I wonder if that's how they make those little candy houses.
	Maybe. Candy. Very cool.
	And what else do you learn in science?
	We mix colors and water.
	Oh, yeah, so you can see the color spectrum?
	Mm-hmm. Oh, cool.
	And what are you reading in English?
	Like, all different things.
	Like, I don't know, stories?
	Do you read, like, whole books, like, whole novels yet, or is it mostly?
	We actually read one last year.
	What was the name? Little House on the Prairie.
	Oh, yeah.
	You know, that was a TV show when I was, I guess, about your age.
	And do you read any poetry, or is it mostly just stories?
	We read some poetry, but it's for work.
	And are you taking notes right now so that you will have the ability, when you go back to school in September, to write the essay that every child on the planet has to write?
	When they go back to school every September, which is what I did with my summer vacation.
	No. You don't have to do that essay?
	I don't think so.
	Really? Okay, I don't want to worry you because I'm not saying that I know you have to do it.
	But I know that when I was a kid, every single September, we'd have to come back and we'd have to say what I did with my summer vacation.
	And I didn't usually do a whole lot with my summer vacation, so I have to make stuff up.
	You know, like I became a mermaid, I wrote a unicorn, I learned how to fly, I can now breathe fire, but I won't.
	You know, just that kind of stuff, and I was just curious if anybody would ever notice, and they didn't actually.
	So I don't know if they read them. But do you have to write stories, or do you have to write essays in English?
	Yeah, we can write stories and stuff.
	And what do you like to write about?
	Dogs. Dogs?
	And do you have a dog? Yeah, I have a dog.
	How long have you had a dog for?
	I've had it since I was born.
	Since you were born?
	Wow, that's a long time.
	Since I was born. Since you were born?
	Okay, so it's like a dog that your family had?
	Yeah. And what other pets do you have?
	I have a horse and a cat.
	You have a horse and a cat.
	And I'm guessing that you ride the horse, you don't use it for like plowing.
	No. And do you ride?
	Do you jump? Do you dressage?
	Do you just ride for riding sake?
	My niece likes to ride horses as well.
	No, we just like ride and I'm just kind of a beginner.
	I used to be on the lunch line and I just started off the lunch line this year so we don't really do anything.
	And what do you want to be or do when you get bigger?
	I want to be a singer.
	You want to be a singer? Wow!
	Very cool. You know, you might want to look at this on YouTube or maybe you've seen it.
	There was a girl who was on the British show.
	It was a British talent show.
	It wasn't... I don't think it was the British American Idol or whatever.
	There was a girl on it.
	You should look this up on YouTube.
	She was like six years old.
	And she sang very nicely.
	So have you tried competitions or that sort of stuff?
	I went into the talent show.
	Oh cool, how did you do?
	We did pretty well.
	And what did you sing?
	Rush. You sang Rush?
	The band Rush?
	Yeah. No, it was Ally and AJ. Ally and AJ. Oh, I'm afraid I don't think they go to my demographic.
	Do you remember the song now?
	I don't really remember.
	Well, I'll tell you, if you like, and I'm not asking your name or anything, not because I'm rude, but just because I don't want to ask someone's name over the internet, but if you'd like, and I don't want to put you on the spot, I don't want to pressure you, but this is a show called Freedom Aid Radio, and it's actually about philosophy, but occasionally, I throw in what could be loosely described as singing, and if you would like to sing to an audience of about 30,000 people, You're more than welcome to belt out a few lines or the whole song of what you like to sing.
	No. I'm not a big fan of singing in front of people that I don't really know.
	Right, right. Do you know any Queen?
	Pardon? Do you know any songs by the band Queen?
	Because I could get you started.
	No. I kind of know we are the champions, but I'm not a very good fan of them.
	Well, that's okay. You're still young.
	You have much to learn. So that's great.
	And do you like to sing, like, country music, or do you like to sing rock, or do you like to sing opera, or what is it that you like to sing?
	Pop. Pop music.
	And who's your favorite singer?
	I mean, you haven't heard me, but who else is your favorite singer?
	Hilary Duff. Hilary Duff.
	I've actually seen a movie with Hilary Duff in it, so I think you and I are on the same page there.
	She's actually a very good performer.
	I think too skinny, though. I liked her when she wasn't so skinny a little bit more.
	Now she looks kind of like a skeleton with nice hair.
	Now, is there anything else that you'd like to say to me, or any questions that you might ask?
	I know that you were just sort of like a microphone with foot in front of your face, but is there anything else that you'd like to ask or to talk about?
	Not really. Well, I do appreciate you stopping by, and there are a couple of podcasts on this show for kids, and I'm sure that your friend or relative who put you on will point you to them.
	But listen, I hope that you can learn to like math a little bit more, because There's a lot more of it to come.
	You don't get to escape math for quite some time.
	I wasn't a big fan of math either, and I liked English and social play.
	I'm good at math, but I don't really like it.
	Well, that's great. I wasn't good at math, and that's why I didn't like it.
	So I didn't know that you could be good at math and not like it, because I generally like the things that I was good at.
	Thank you.
	So do come back and have a chat with us again, if you like.
	And if you'd like to bring your singing microphone, we'd be more than happy to hear.
	Not today. Not today.
	No, no problem. Listen, this is totally on the spot, right?
	So I totally understand it.
	And if you did know some Queen, I'd get you started.
	But I'd probably... You and I, we may sing in different keys.
	So that's just an important thing to understand.
	All right. Well, thanks very much.
	I really enjoyed chatting with you.
	And best of luck with your singing.
	All right.
	And if we have any other listeners at the moment who have questions or comments or issues that are G-rated, that would be good.
	No, Christina, that's not G-rated.
	No, I don't have any.
	Okay, thanks very much.
	I really do appreciate it. And if we have the next comment or question from listeners, that would be excellent.
	Okay. Okay, bye!
	Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
	Bye. Well, that's cool.
	Now I feel like we can't talk about big people issues.
	Okay, Harry Potter. Straight or not?
	Okay, because, you know, he is in an all-boys school.
	Actually, no, it's not all-boys, but it's a body school.
	Hey, Steph? Hello.
	Hi, can you hear me? I sure can.
	This is Graham. I'm a big, big fan.
	Hi, how's it going? Good.
	Yeah, she was just listening, so I asked her if she wanted to jump in and out a bit.
	No, that was great. Just have her vocally warm up next time.
	And I'll tell you what, I'll promise to learn Hilary Duff's entire over.
	Okay. I'll follow that.
	Hilary Duff mostly sings in Latin, so it's really tough.
	She just turned nine. That's very cute.
	Well, do tell her thanks for talking to us.
	And then she can listen to this when she's older and say, oh my heavens, I had no idea how much I was going to destroy my future career opportunities by appearing on this show.
	I can't believe you didn't tell me what danger I was putting myself in.
	Graham, did you have any questions or comments that you'd like to bring to bear?
	Not anything that I can think of at the moment, but I'd just like to say, great job.
	I like it all. Well, thanks so much.
	I do appreciate that. Feel free to jump back in if you do have any other questions or comments.
	Oh, cool. Stuart, do we have any other questions or comments from other people?
	Other listeners. And the rain came down.
	Is that her song? When the rain comes down...
	Do apologize to your friend for me.
	Somebody has just confirmed that it is, but because I like that person, I'm not going to say who it is.
	That gentleman who knows Hillary Duff.
	Hillary Duff. Greg. Just kidding.
	It's in fact bad. I don't know.
	Are you still recording? All right.
	Sorry, if somebody could just hit the record button.
	I'm just going to flicker it up on my screen.
	I'm not sure if I'm recording or not.
	Recording a conversation.
	Excellent. All right, so if anybody has any questions, we don't have to have a terrifically long show today.
	If there's not a lot of questions around, that's no problemo.
	Yeah, Greg, are you on the line?
	Yes. Hey, Greg, how's it going?
	Not too bad. Is that too loud?
	Oh my god, you sound like a decade older.
	Are you okay? It's probably this internet connection.
	Happy belated birthday, my brother.
	How are you feeling? Hey, thanks a lot.
	I feel...
	Relaxed! I feel pretty good.
	That's great, Jim. Where are you right now?
	Incognito. Oh, Incognito.
	I love that place. No passport, no taxes.
	No, I'm pulled up temporarily right now back in Chicago.
	And we'll be leaving here around the 1st of September.
	Wow. And what are you doing in Chicago?
	Just cleaning up some loose ends and hooking up with the Chicago folks on the 25th since you welched out on us.
	Absolutely, absolutely.
	I'm sorry about that. It was too hard to pull it all together.
	Well, I should just say that.
	There wasn't enough response, so...
	Well, that's very nice. And have you figured out what you're up to next?
	Since you're now relaxed, I thought I'd ask the question that's going to make you the most tense immediately.
	Yeah, that's a pretty tense question.
	No, actually... I've got a few ideas I'm chatting around, but I'm not too sure which one I'm going to go with.
	As has been the pattern with this whole process, I was much more sure Six months ago than I am now.
	But I have three different voices in my head, and I don't know which one's the real one.
	But that's huge progress, isn't it, right?
	Because it's down from the cost of thousands.
	That's true. That's excellent.
	I mean, that really is narrowing it down quite a bit.
	If I could get down to three...
	One thing I learned about that on one of my last days in London was that...
	No matter how loud the music gets, it's never loud enough to drown those voices out.
	That's right. I saw a t-shirt the other day.
	Some guy said, yes, I do hear voices in my head, but some of them have some pretty damn good ideas.
	Another one said, I don't suffer from insanity.
	I enjoy every minute of it.
	Yeah, I'm starting to get to that point.
	Right, right, right. Well, that's the surprising thing about the philosophical journey.
	Originally, in terms of my business career, philosophy really helped me in the beginning because it made me more reasonable, a better manager, and more assertive, and so on.
	But the problem is that when you keep going on into wisdom, that bell curve seems to take a bit of a dip, right?
	And you just can't.
	Like, you can't. You don't want to spend your life managing idiots after a while and dealing with idiots.
	So that's quite a different situation.
	Yeah, the threshold for lunacy goes way down.
	Yeah, for sure. I mean, real lunacy.
	Not the kind of lunacy that I have.
	Other people's lunacy, let me put it that way.
	Right, right, right. I mean, I had my original plan, which was to go back to school and study something different and do that for a while.
	And then I had a backup plan, which was just go somewhere else and get a job.
	Then I had my The third plan, which was actually a relatively new plan, but all of them are like other people's ideas that I've kind of internalized for myself.
	Right, right, right.
	Right.
	And so, which doesn't necessarily mean that they're bad ideas for myself, just that I'm not sure.
	Right, right.
	And figuring out how to get sure is kind of where I'm stuck right now.
	Right, right.
	Not so much figuring out which one's the right idea, but figuring out how to tell.
	Right, right, right, right.
	So... So in the meantime, I'm just sort of...
	I don't know, just kind of...
	Just trying different things out, I guess.
	Right, right. Well, eventually your unconscious will panic and give you a solution.
	Get a job, you idiot!
	Must eat! Must eat!
	No, I mean, I make a joke, but there is some, right?
	I mean, growth occurs from extremity, right?
	I mean, the personality is an extraordinarily inert thing.
	It makes husbands look relatively active.
	And so we don't change until, right?
	So it's good to float in this space of not knowing what to do, right?
	Because then your body will eventually panic and...
	It gives you a direction that will actually work, right?
	Right. I mean, it sounds weird, but I've noticed that a number of times with people, right?
	Because most people, what they do, it's like people who date, right?
	So they feel anxiety about not dating someone, right?
	So then they'll just start dating someone saying, well, I'll do this until the right person comes along, which effectively precludes the right person from coming along, right?
	Right, it's an avoidance mechanism.
	Yes. Staying in that state of not knowing is the fundamental path to growth, right?
	Because, I mean, that's what bothers me about the determinists or the blind free willers or the people who are religious, I mean, the people who say the government should solve this or that.
	They're not willing to sit in a space of, I don't know, right?
	Because as long as I was an objectivist and believed in the minarchist potential of voluntary taxation government, I didn't come up with the DRO thing, right?
	But it's only when you sit there and don't know for a while...
	That you start becoming creative.
	So the place where you're sitting in of not knowing what you're going to do, it creates anxiety and most people try and deal with that anxiety by acting, right?
	Or just saying, okay, well I've got to pick something.
	I'm going to pick ABC or I'll try this and that effectively cuts the whole process off before they get to where they need to get to.
	So I think it's very good what you're doing now.
	Well, sometimes it doesn't seem so.
	No, of course. That's why people don't do it, right?
	Right. It's really uncomfortable.
	It's really uncomfortable, and then you feel like there's a stretching rubber band, you know, and it's going to snap, and then you're going to, like, sail off into space or homelessness or something.
	So it's tough, but it's worthwhile.
	It's following the arrow all the way down, right?
	Yes. Yes, that's right.
	That's right. So that's kind of where I'm at right now, so I'm just going to kind of take it easy and do a little bit of just reading and thinking and that sort of thing.
	I hope something comes up soon because I'd hate to have to burn through everything before it Well, before my head finally screwed down straight, I don't know.
	Well, I mean, when I took that, I guess almost two years off to write, I've burned through a lot of money doing that, mostly because not even so much the writing or anything, it's just the crack.
	I've burned through a lot, but I mean, I got an enormous amount of benefit out of it.
	Unfortunately, I mean, fortunately or unfortunately, probably more fortunately, I didn't sell any books as a writer.
	Or at least not that many.
	Certainly not enough to live.
	I got revolutions published and so on.
	And I wrote almost in The God of Atheists.
	But, yeah, but of course, through that process, I met Christina because I just had a book published and she said, you know, hi, or whatever, what's new?
	And I said, oh, I just got a book published.
	And she's like, you're kidding.
	I thought she was a janitor. Because she was actually just wanting to know where the washrooms were.
	Well, as long as you don't end that sentence with baby, right?
	That's right. I just got a book published baby hardcover.
	But, yeah, that's right, because it's like three phallic jokes writers can make, right?
	Something about pencils. Not stubbies, neither.
	But, I know, but I was in motion and I was doing something and Christina said, wow, an unemployed writer.
	I'm tingling. Because, you know, she's just used to working with people like that.
	But, I mean, that's sort of where it led, right?
	I mean, I would never have had that topic of conversation, right, if I had said, I work in software.
	Well, you know what happens to women then, right?
	Hello. Hello.
	You still on? Yeah, I'm still on.
	It's just a bad echo, that's all.
	Yeah, so, I mean, and I... And of course, I was very interested in dating because I was burning through so much money and Christina looked pretty loaded, so that was pretty key for me.
	Although, you know, I'll tell you, it's not good to say, can I move in, in the first 20 minutes.
	Although you can say, are you going to finish that sandwich because I haven't eaten in three days.
	Do you have a functional shower?
	You have a functional shower.
	I like the word functional in that.
	That makes that joke so much funnier.
	I have a shower, but I broke it.
	I have a functional shower.
	That's great. That's great.
	Don't be funnier than me. It's my show.
	Sorry? Best pick-up line ever, yeah.
	Yeah, I was going to say Crank Ironhooker, just in case somebody was wondering, but I don't want to bring back that debate even remotely.
	Now, you had something that you wanted to say about determinants, because you posted some excellent sort of thinking points, and I've been sort of rubbing the three remaining brain cells together to see what I could come up with, but you had some stuff to talk about with that.
	Thinking points. Remind me, is this a post of mine?
	Uh-huh. Which one?
	You are so close to enlightenment, Greg, it's chilling.
	I'll give you that in 12 minutes and you're going to burst into an ervanic flame.
	No, it's just that you were talking about, you know, that we still need to sort of figure out the basic motivations of people who are determinants before we can sort of go a whole lot further.
	I think that was you. Wasn't that you?
	You white men are all the same to me.
	I don't know. It might have been Rod, too.
	But, yeah, we could chat about that.
	And I also want to talk about your free will theory as well.
	Oh, sorry. Go on. Oh, the book is beyond talking.
	It has to be absorbed. Right, right.
	You have to work it into your skin like a fine baby powder.
	Right. No, I think the argument you were making in that recent podcast on...
	It's the Diamond Plus one?
	Yeah. Alright, let's tease people.
	Go on. And maybe you'll want to paraphrase it, because you're the guy that came up with it, but you had posited that free will was a kind of defense reaction to...
	Well, to the exploitation that's inherent in mysticism.
	Right. Sorry, I just want to interrupt you for a sec.
	Somebody's just joined. We have some music in the background, and we also have some echoes, so whoever's joined, if you could just turn your mic off.
	Sorry, go ahead. Oh wait, it's back.
	It's back. It's back. It's back.
	Alright, sorry, go in. Right, and what some of us were kind of chatting about was that, this was maybe a couple of months ago, in fact, that determinism actually seems more like a defense mechanism than free will does,
	because in sort of the same way that You talk about the psychological angle of defending your parents and that sort of thing for their actions so you can believe that they're good.
	If you're a determinist, that adds another arrow to that quiver of Defenses for your parents, right? There's no blaming them because it was all determined, right?
	Well, I agree with that, and I've gone down that road a little ways.
	The reason I turned back, which doesn't mean it's wrong, it's just the signpost that turned me back, was I generally only classify defenses as those things which react to stimuli.
	So, we've had a number of people who will sort of come by the boards and say, you know, geez, I listened to a couple of these Steph's podcasts about the family and man, Steph hates the family and he's trying to set up a cult and whatever, right?
	Like, that to me is defensive behavior and the stimuli is some, what I would call, morally objective views on the family that sting someone to their core to the point where they'll come in and start, you know, flaming and trawling and whatever, right? So, that's the defense.
	But determinists don't seem to be reacting to something, right?
	They seem to be initiating something.
	And so, to me, it's not quite in the same category as a mere defensiveness, right?
	So Christianity, in a sense, like when a Christian comes on, or I get these things more on YouTube than anywhere else, where Christians come on and say, you know, you've misinterpreted when Christ said he brought a sword, he just meant he had a penis, or whatever they say, right?
	I mean... That's sort of a reaction, but when somebody posts a I Love God video, that's not quite the same as a defense, right?
	I mean, yes, it's true that they're defending their families for inflicting these crazy beliefs on them, but determinism doesn't quite seem to be a defense in that way.
	It seems to be more of an initiation.
	Well, in the sense that you're saying...
	Do you mean by that that they're...
	Well, and the analogy...
	Sorry, just to make it a little bit more clear.
	The analogy that I've sort of been working with is that determinism is just a scientific form of religion.
	Or a pseudoscientific form of religion.
	Insofar as... Religion will posit a particular belief, right?
	And then you say, oh, okay, well, if this belief is true, then these are the logical consequences that follow, right?
	And then all of the logical consequences of that belief that follow are rejected, right?
	So, for instance, right, I mean, the standard argument which can be made, well, one of the many standard arguments that can be made against the theistic morality is to say, well, God knows everything, right?
	Yes. Well, then God knows what we're going to do in the future.
	Yes. But if God knows what we're going to do in the future, how can we be punished for doing it because it's foreordained?
	Right? And that's just determinism, right?
	I mean... And furthermore, how could he have any free will to change it himself?
	Yeah, but I mean, even if we take that aspect out, because, I mean, that is the closest analogy to a determinist argument, right?
	Because determinists say that what we're going to do is foreordained, right?
	And then the logical consequence of that is that nobody has any moral responsibility, right?
	So when you say God knows what you're going to do in the future, the logical consequence of that is, well, then we don't have any moral responsibility.
	And there's no point even debating anything, right?
	God becomes a sinkhole for all that responsibility.
	Well, but what happens is that when you say to a Christian or any religious person, if God knows what we're going to do in the future, then we don't have any responsibility, then you get these incredibly convoluted and, frankly, really annoying explanations.
	You know, God is outside of time, or, you know, well, God knows, but we don't know, and therefore we must be able to choose, right?
	So there's these incredible convolutions that are injected into this omniscience.
	In the religious world, the omniscience is God, and in the deterministic world, the sort of, quote, omniscience is the absence of free will and the behavior of atoms and energy that is all foreordained, so to speak.
	So what happens is people put this omnipotence or this inevitability.
	Omnipotence is the same as inevitability.
	If you add consciousness to inevitability, you get omniscience.
	So the...
	Right, because if...
	Go ahead.
	Because if you could consciously know everything that's going to happen, I mean, the only way you could consciously know what's going to happen in the future, everything that's going to happen in the future, is for inevitability to be true.
	Sure, absolutely, right?
	So then the Christian says, everything is inevitable and God knows what's going to happen and we have no choice, right?
	That's the argument they're making.
	But then they say, but we do have a choice.
	Because we don't know what's happening.
	We're not God and this and that.
	And there's a complete disconnect, right?
	And so there is this sense of inevitability around the Christian ethos, right?
	That everything is written and God knows what's happening in the future.
	But you're still completely responsible for what you do, even though what you're going to do is inevitable, right?
	And it's, of course, that really annoying convolution that is so annoying.
	To me, right? I mean, and I'm sure to others as well, right?
	But the determinists do exactly, they mirror the Christian argument precisely.
	That everything is predetermined, but we still have choice.
	But it's not really choice, but it's like somebody's whispering the play into our ear as we're, you know, like it's all just nonsense, right?
	It's like, there could be a million determinists, but it's out there who've never posted on the Freedom Aid radio boards because they really believe in determinism.
	At the moment, somebody posts and tries to change your mind and so on, right?
	And of course, this is the round and round and round that you go, right?
	With theists or with determinists, right?
	So a determinist says, Everything is foreordained and we don't have any choice.
	It's like, okay, then I'm not going to debate with you.
	There's no such thing as morality.
	You can't love your wife. You can't punish criminals or whatever.
	And even if you do or you don't, you can't change anything, right?
	You're basically just yelling at a rock that's bouncing down a hill.
	Go left, go right! It doesn't make any sense, right?
	How can that not be a psychological defense mechanism?
	Well, I don't know that it's a psychological defense mechanism.
	I think it's a psychological attack.
	The two are at least distinct in my mind.
	A defense mechanism lies dormant until somebody triggers it.
	But an attack mechanism is something quite different.
	Oh, sorry, somebody has just joined who's playing music.
	Okay, does anybody know who that is now?
	I'll be more than happy. Oh yeah, see here we don't have the capacity to join or not.
	Okay, thanks. Sorry, if you could just not play music, this is a philosophical conversation.
	Or at least play better music.
	So, a defense mechanism lies dormant until it's triggered, right?
	So, I mean, a guy who's stepping into a restaurant or a bar with some hot chick on his arm thinks he's all that, right?
	But, you know, then the moment she opens her mouth and starts talking about the joys of tarot card reading Scientology and astral travel, right, then anybody with any brains is going to say, okay, so you've just got like this retarded Cupid doll on your arm, that's pretty sad, right?
	So he's going to feel all up in his coolness until somebody points out that it's not really that cool to date retarded people who know how to put on makeup.
	So he's going to feel good until he's criticized, then he's going to react.
	So bringing the girl in is his one-upmanship.
	That's more of an attack, to put other people down, to feel.
	That's his initiation.
	And then if you criticize his brain-dead blondie, then he's going to react to you in a hostile manner.
	So those two are sort of distinct phenomenon.
	And to me, a defense mechanism requires a trigger, but something which is an attack, where somebody comes in and tries to put other people down.
	And to me, this is what determinists are doing.
	They're coming in and they're trying to pretend to be smart.
	Christianity or religious people, they just pretend to be deep by creating contradictions.
	A really smart mathematician doesn't say 2 plus 2 is both 4 and a fish simultaneously.
	You're supposed to unravel that because he's just so intelligent.
	You know, like, somebody doesn't have you listen to three minutes of silence and say, that's a song that's all about the space between the notes.
	You know, something like that, right?
	I mean, that's just a retarded way of trying to appear intelligent.
	Not a big fan of John Cage, are we?
	Sorry? I was just making another joke.
	Not a big fan of John Cage, are we?
	Right, right. Or is it what some comedian said, you know, had a Philip Glass record?
	It turned out there was a scratch in the record and it got stuck, but I couldn't tell for three days.
	There's a really obscure joke for you there.
	So when they come in and they say, well, everything is predetermined, well, of course they're solving a problem, right?
	They're solving the problem of free will by saying everything is predetermined, right?
	So it's like, okay, great.
	So that's your solution. But they're coming in and then you say, okay, well, these are the consequences.
	And they say, no. Everything is predetermined but we still have choice and it's still you can debate and bring evidence and try and change people's minds even though they can't.
	Like it's just a paradox, right?
	It's just a paradox and it's a paradox that they feel that they have resolved in some weird manner but it's still a paradox and it's considered to be a mark of great intelligence to have penetrated that and what they do is they try and explain it to you.
	Sorry, let me just finish this and I'll give you all the time in the world.
	They try and explain this to you, right?
	So you say, well, obviously there's no morality if everything's predetermined, right?
	And then they'll try and explain it to you and say, yes, there is morality because of X, Y, and Z. Oh, okay, so we have a choice.
	No, we don't have a choice. It's like, but you're ascribing all the attributes of choice, right?
	So this guy on the board posted this critique of free will and said, here's the argument for determinism and used things like values and philosophy and morality and choice and this and that, right?
	It's like, Well, then stop using the words, right?
	It's like speaking to me in Mandarin, saying there's no such thing as Mandarin.
	I mean, I can't take it seriously.
	So what they do is they just present a paradox.
	Well, I've tidied up the unknown cause of free will and the fact that it is freaky that atoms can choose.
	But so what? I mean, so human beings have free will and no other creature does.
	But that doesn't mean anything. I mean, a fish can't fly.
	It's not just a worse flyer than a bird.
	It can't fly at all, right?
	I mean, it's the opposite of flying underwater, right?
	I guess it's flying underwater or whatever, right?
	There is such a thing as a mammal with a duck bill, right?
	Right, right. But, I mean, they come in and they just present this paradox, right?
	The same way that Christians come in and present a paradox, right?
	And then they say...
	This paradox is resolved.
	I have resolved this paradox.
	And you ask for their explanation.
	And you just go round and round in circles.
	And it's just the appearance of intelligence.
	And this is deeply insecure people who are intellectually, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, who are intellectually bullying and sadistic, right?
	So they want to come in and they say, I have solved the problem of the ages.
	You know, and they don't come in with humility and say, well, you know, I mean, when I put forward universal moral propositions, I know that I'm attacking the problem of the ages.
	And with all due humility, I come in and say, well, here's my syllogisms.
	Here's what can be attacked. Here's what can be undermined.
	Here's the choices. Here's the consequences.
	Here's the reasoning, right? With all due humility, because I know that I'm putting forward the secular proof of morality, which is, you know, the holy grail of philosophy.
	So, I mean, with all due humility, right?
	And just come in and say, oh, morality is solved this way, right?
	As if this hasn't been the big goal of thinkers for thousands of years, right?
	To have ethics without a deity.
	But these people come in and say, oh, you know, everything's determined, right?
	As if this hasn't been a massive debate for thousands of years, right?
	And then you say, okay, well, you must have come up with something really amazing to be able to really contribute something to this reality.
	This problem, but they haven't, right?
	All they do is they say, everything is determined, but all the consequences of free will are still present, but everything is determined.
	And that, of course, is just a stupid paradox.
	And that's why I have little patience with the determinants anymore, because I just find them to be...
	They're exactly the same as theists, in my mind.
	They just put forward a whole bunch of bullshit and don't recognize the paradoxes and never admit...
	False. Never admit any problems with theory, right?
	Never say, you know, I do wrestle with that.
	I do wrestle with this problem of ethics in a deterministic universe.
	They just, oh no, there's ethics in a deterministic universe.
	It's like, Jesus, you know, like have some humility and recognize that this is a difficult thing to swallow that you're putting forward, right?
	But they don't ever do that. They just come in and waltz in and tossing off all of these absolute statements and then changing their story.
	But that's exactly what religious people do.
	And of course, it's exactly what status do as well.
	You just haven't taken hold of the skeleton key of compatibilism yet.
	Right, right. No, I have had the compatibilist debate with Francois, I guess about a year or a little bit more back.
	But unfortunately, I just haven't found the right psychological or pharmaceutical club to beat my brain into those kinds of fragments that I can accept that kind of theory, you know.
	That's not beating your head against the wall, that's just putting a live grenade in your mouth and hoping enlightenment is going to hit.
	Yeah, that's true.
	So, in a nutshell then, in your view, determinism In a sense, it's still a defense mechanism, but it's an initiation because it's like an intellectual flashbang thrown into a room that disables anyone who might want to argue with them.
	Yeah, I mean, I think you're right.
	And first of all, I know we haven't spoken in a while, but it's so cute to hear you use the phrase, in a nutshell.
	Greg, Greg.
	The optimism is staggering.
	It is just staggering.
	I think it's wonderful. Christina also says the same thing.
	Well, I could be saying, but...
	Oh, I'm waiting for that.
	I'm waiting for that. Um...
	Yeah, I mean, but there's a defense mechanism...
	Sorry, and I didn't put that...
	I will try and do this relatively succinctly, but there's a defense mechanism against a long-running and perpetual insecurity within our own personality, right?
	So, if I date some woman just because she's, you know, hot or whatever...
	Not that she'd date me, but I mean, let's say in some parallel universe.
	If I dated... She'd marry me.
	But if I dated some woman who was hot just because I wanted to impress the guys, then that would be my defense against a permanent feeling of insecurity.
	So that's a perpetual state of insecurity that would cause me to initiate that kind of one-upmanship on other people.
	So that's like a known constant, right?
	The same reason that when I walk, I know that the known constant is gravity, so I try not to fly, right?
	But there are other things which are provoked by particular and usually surprising things, right?
	So when people start listening to my podcast and they think, oh, it's about philosophy, it's about this, and they get DROs, they get families, they get personal stuff, they get you have to act, and they get really upset because that pushes them closer to that insecurity, right?
	So in a sense, the initiation of stuff is the defense against the perpetual insecurity, whereas the defense is the reactions against very specific things that bring you closer to that, if that makes any sense.
	So then... Given that explanation of determinism, how is that any different than what you were describing of free will in that podcast?
	Oh, well...
	No, I see what you're saying.
	Well, if somebody is insecure about his own intelligence, right?
	Look, I mean, we're all insecure about our own intelligence.
	I mean, if you're intelligent, you're insecure about your own intelligence, and that's good, right?
	That's good, right? I'm insecure about my ability to survive on a diet of chocolate, right?
	Although that would be nice, right?
	So that's okay. I mean, insecurity and this not knowing and knowing how little you know relative to the total sum of human knowledge and blah, blah, blah, relative to how much people will know in the future, that insecurity is very healthy.
	It's rational, I think. And, like, I'm insecure about crossing the road, and that's why I use the lights, right?
	That's helpful, right? That's healthy, right?
	But when people come in with something like determinism or with something like mysticism, where they want to exploit other people's insecurities, So when somebody comes in and says, well, everything is determined, but there's still free will. A person who has a reasonable amount of confidence will say, I don't think that's right.
	I don't think you've really got that nailed just yet.
	You cut out for a second there.
	Sorry. A person who is...
	If somebody comes in and starts saying that everything is determined, but we still have choice in morality...
	Then somebody who's intellectually confident, or at least not too insecure, will say, oh, I don't think you got that nailed, right?
	Because that doesn't follow. Whereas somebody who's insecure will go, well, I guess that doesn't really feel right, but this guy seems really confident.
	And he seems to have all the answers, and he's not expressing any doubts, so maybe he's right.
	So those kinds of people, when you come in and you start talking about stuff like that, Then you basically weed out the secure people, right?
	The people who've got confidence in their ability to think.
	And you end up having to hang around the insecure people who say, Gee, you know, you're just so smart.
	I don't understand it, but it seems cool to me.
	You obviously know what you're doing, right?
	And so the attack that comes through mysticism and through statism and through determinism and so on...
	It's a desire to make yourself feel smarter or more competent or better, because you feel insecure about yourself, right?
	So that to me seems more of an offensive kind of thing, like the guy who sticks a knife in your ribs saying, give me your wallet, is not confident about his ability to earn a paycheck, right?
	Because it would be a heck of a lot of an easier way to get money, right, to do it that way.
	So that's like a lifestyle that ends up, you end up attacking other people because of your own insecurities, right?
	Whereas the defense is against that, and I won't go into the whole theory in the podcast because it's quite involved, but the fact that mystics prey on people by promising rewards means that we have to lengthen our capacity to process promise and effect,
	cause and effect. And of course, my theory of free will is largely centered around free will being our ability to balance long-term values I think that there is a, you know, you have an attack and you have a defense, right?
	So if there's a bad guy in your neighborhood, you'll install an alarm system in your house, right?
	The bad guy in your neighborhood, and you assume it's, or maybe it's just a bad neighborhood, right?
	So that's the attack, and the defense is the response that you put in, right?
	So I would say, at least the theory that I'm working with, is that the predation that comes out of mysticism It provokes a need to validate mysticism's claims of rewards by lengthening our ability to process cause and effect, which resulted in our ability to make choices.
	It does more than lengthen it, though.
	I mean, it actually distorts it to the degree that it turns...
	I mean, our natural capacity to balance long-term and short-term benefits, it corrupts that into a self-destructive force.
	Well, it's certainly dangerous, but the theory that I have is that what happened was people figured out that they could lie to people about cause and effect.
	Give me your money and I'll get you good crops, even though somebody has no ability to get you good crops, like a priest or whatever.
	As soon as somebody figured out, and of course lying is pretty constant in nature, as soon as somebody figured out that they could get resources in the present by promising benefits in the future, I think that was the first thing that happened, because that evolutionarily would be the case, that that would get people to give them That we get priests and kings, priests in particular, to give them resources.
	And of course, we project our personalities into the world, which makes it seem alive in a primitive state and so on.
	The first thing that happens is somebody starts preying on someone by promising them stuff in the future and return for stuff in the present.
	And of course, it's not just a carrot, it's a stick.
	So they say, "You give me money now, you give me your cow now, and you'll get 10 cows in five years, and if you don't give it, then they'll all die in a year." So you just threaten people with those consequences, but then the defense of that is to start processing longer-term cause and effect to validate these claims.
	So I think that the initiation of it was the predation on people through the promise of rewards.
	And then in order to validate those rewards, You had to lengthen, like I think it almost created free will in a sense, that predation, if that makes sense.
	Well, what you're saying then is that free will is a kind of defense mechanism itself.
	Sure, yeah, it is a defense mechanism in the same way that if a new predator comes along that can reach higher in the trees, the monkeys sleep higher in the trees, right?
	I mean, they just respond to that, right?
	And there's nothing artificial about it, it's just that that's one possibility about the genesis of free will.
	Because we know that that kind of predation through falsehood is pretty common in nature, and that would be the first benefit, right?
	The first benefit is preying upon others.
	The second benefit is defending against that preying, right?
	That's sort of the reaction, right?
	Right, but aren't you just really articulating a form of biological determinism there?
	No, I don't think so.
	If the determinism provokes the free will, what benefit would it give you in a Stone Age society?
	You had no freedom anyway.
	So the question is how on earth did it come about?
	Chimpanzees certainly don't seem to have it any more than they have sophisticated language and conceptual abilities beyond the rudimentary and preceptual.
	Well, what exactly is it, in concrete terms, that we can actually point to a chimpanzee and say, that doesn't have it, and then point to a child and say, that does have it?
	Well, verbal language.
	Okay, so...
	Abstract rationality, right?
	Abstract rationality.
	Okay. So, in that...
	And that capability is also the capability for free will.
	Well, sure, because you can't have free will unless you can predict the consequences of your actions beyond the immediate, right?
	Oh, okay.
	Yeah, that makes sense. That makes perfect sense.
	Sure. That actually sounds rather Randian.
	Yeah, I mean, she says that the choice is to think or not to think.
	Right. I think that there's some truth in that.
	I remember a long explanation in Peacoff's book about the capacity for evaluating long-term benefit and consequence not present in most lower mammals.
	Yeah, I mean, the obvious example is smoking, right?
	If you like to smoke and you have no idea that it's bad for you, you're never going to quit, right?
	The question, though, is, is that capacity to evaluate those long-term...
	costs and benefits.
	Is that a predicate for free will or is it as a result of free will?
	Well, no, I would say that is free will.
	I would say that is free will.
	And, of course, we have the choice.
	If you're feeling titty and you pick up your car keys, you can either sit there and think, well, there's going to be consequences to what I'm doing, I could hit someone, I could get arrested, I could crash my car, I could whatever, right?
	Or just wake up tomorrow with that cold dread of having done something dangerous and thinking about how bad things could have been or whatever, right?
	You can either do that or you can just say, you know, fuck it, I'm allowed to do whatever the hell I want and I'm, you know, I'm going to pull a Lindsay Lohan and just, you know, do whatever I want, right?
	Fame gives me immunity from everything or whatever, right?
	Well, taking a step back too, I mean, it requires the capacity for evaluating a long-term consequence Just to be able to get behind the wheel of a car, whether you're drunk or not.
	That's true, of course, yeah, and there are levels, right?
	Otherwise, how do you know what this machine is going to do and where it's going to take you?
	Right, right, right. Yeah, I mean, Lindsay Lohan was chasing someone in the car, right?
	So, I mean, I know that you're all up on this Lindsay Lohan stuff, but...
	Because I know that...
	Oh, yeah, I'm totally plugged in, man.
	Of course, you and Hillary. But, to me, the reason is, of course, you can always look to people who...
	Who act in a pretty irrational, short-term, quote, deterministic manner, right?
	I mean, the guy who, every time anybody looks at him funny, he starts to fight.
	Well, that looks pretty determined, right?
	But that's because he's not exercising his choice to look at the longer-term consequences.
	And free will is a muscle, like anything else, right?
	And free will is like health, right?
	I mean, if you exercise free will and you defer immediate gratification for the sake of longer-term gains, right, dieting or whatever...
	Then you're exercising your mind to be able to view longer-term consequences.
	It's a muscle. You use it or you lose it.
	Free will, I don't think it's just an innate attribute.
	If you look back at yourself a couple of years ago, in terms of the freedom that you had to make decisions about your life that would benefit you in the longer term, it's quite different from what you have now.
	Back then, you were much more happy.
	You were secure. You had an income.
	So just look at all the benefits that philosophy has brought to your life.
	That's way better. I can't believe you responded to that email.
	Man, oh man, caught another one.
	Hey, I don't want to be the only one who ends up unemployed.
	I want buddies.
	Don't put down alone on this ship of philosophy, baby.
	Sorry.
	Who wants to jump in with a comment?
	I don't think he specifically said that he's going to support everything that I've said, so I'm not sure we can do that.
	Yes, Rod, go ahead. So the question that always pops up in my mind when I'm pondering this whole determinism thing, or someone brings it up, is that...
	I just don't... I don't get what the point of it is.
	It's like, if determinism is the answer, then what's the question?
	And if we can figure out what that question is, maybe that might help us understand the motivation behind positing something like that.
	Well, I think, I mean, there's a factual motivation, which is people want to explain.
	And they always take this as science explains the universe and so on.
	I think there's a psychological motivation for me, though.
	I'll just touch on it briefly and let me know what you think.
	This space of sitting in the unknown is very uncomfortable for people, right?
	So people invent governments because they don't know how society is going to organize itself in the absence of violence, right?
	And people invent gods because they don't know where the thunder comes from and they don't know where the world comes from and they don't know what the purpose of their lives is, right?
	And they won't sit in that place of not knowing.
	And we don't know what free will is from a biological or a scientific standpoint.
	And I've always maintained this, right?
	Yeah. Determinism could very well turn out to be true, right?
	And free will is just another illusion, right?
	But there certainly seems to be quite a lot of evidence against that, and certainly my own personal experience of that, right?
	It's sort of the difference between saying, like, the world looks flat to me when it's actually round, but determinism is saying the world doesn't even exist, right?
	That's just a whole lot different for me.
	It's not just a matter of perspective.
	But maybe. It turns out to be the case.
	Everything's predetermined. But I think that determinism...
	are not secure enough to sit in that space of not knowing.
	That space of not knowing is quite uncomfortable, right?
	Because everybody is just a know-it-all on the planet.
	And philosophers, as Socrates onwards, have said that the value is in not knowing something.
	Because when you don't know something, you look for answers, right?
	And I talk about this in the book, Entre's Journey of Relief.
	Available at lulu.com.
	So I don't think that determinists can sit in that space and say, well, yeah, there's atoms, there's physical forces, there's energy.
	How on earth can that Think and have free will and have choice.
	How can atoms have choice, right?
	I mean, nobody knows, right?
	And I don't know. You don't know.
	Nobody knows. But staying in that space of not knowing is very helpful.
	And I don't think that they have the maturity or the self-confidence to be able to say, I don't know.
	So I'm guessing these are people who were punished a lot when they were kids for not knowing stuff and, you know, given unreasonable expectations and so on.
	But, yeah, I mean, that to me seems like the most...
	Then they just retard the progress of the species enormously.
	One thing that I always wonder about is that it always seems to me like I get the feeling when I'm talking to someone who's defending determinism that I just get this image in my mind of it being just the perfect alibi.
	Because any action under determinism, there's absolutely no moral content to it whatsoever.
	So, you know, if You know, my parents beat up on me and stuck me in a cave or cage and poked me with sticks, well then, there's no harm in going over to dinner with my parents because there's absolutely nothing that they could have done differently, right? Well, and I agree with you on that.
	Sorry to interrupt. It seems like it's a last-ditch attempt at forgiving, I guess you could say, abusive people sometimes.
	And I'm sorry to interrupt, and I'll just touch on this very, very quickly, but I would agree with you if determinists said there was no such thing as ethics.
	Yeah. But they don't.
	Well, some do.
	Well, those are the people that you just don't want to talk to at all, then.
	I mean... Well, I don't want to talk to...
	The hard determinists do say that.
	They say that that's a...
	An illusion, right?
	That ethics is an illusion of everything that you do.
	Well, they say it, but they don't live by it, though, because ask them why they're not just going out and taking money from people for their living instead of having to earn it.
	Oh, they'd say it's because that's the way I'm culturally acclimatized or whatever, right?
	Yeah, sure. But the other thing, of course, what I was...
	I think I... I'm sorry, I was just trying to remember that.
	I think I had one email exchange with a guy about that, right?
	And, of course, because my sort of theory of ethics is around this university for preferable behavior, That's when I started working on him with this, right?
	So he said, there's no such thing as ethics.
	And I said, so do you believe that there's no such thing as universally preferred states?
	Right? Like, to not kill...
	He's like, yeah, there's no such thing as universally preferred states.
	It's like, but do you think that determinism is universally true?
	He said, well, yeah. And so I said, well...
	Do you think that believing in the truth, rather than believing in something that is false, like free will, is better?
	Like, is it better to believe in the truth, or is it better to believe in a falsity?
	He said, well, it's better to believe in the truth.
	And I said, is it better to believe in the truth just for you, or is it better that everyone should believe in the truth?
	He said, it's better that everyone should believe in the truth.
	And I said, so you do have universally preferable behavior, which is to believe the truth, right?
	And so, once we had established that truth was better than falsehood, that adherence to the truth was better than rejection of the truth, then, of course, we have a foundation for building ethics, at which point he stopped responding.
	Yeah. Well, you can also say, like, what made you settle on stringing a bunch of sounds together that formed the English language that I'm able to understand and things like that.
	Yeah, I said, you know, you can always type back in Wingdings, right?
	And the guy says, what the hell?
	And you say, well...
	I don't believe that using language is a good idea.
	It's always a good idea, right?
	So I can't debate with you if you're not going to use English or a language that we agree on, like, well, then you have another universally preferred, right?
	So, yeah, those people for sure, I would say that those people have probably done some bad themselves, you know, and one of those bad things they've done is teaching people that ethics is invalid, right?
	It doesn't exist. That's a pretty bad thing to do, right?
	To go around saying, And undermining people's confidence in ethics and virtue is pretty corrupt.
	So those people have probably become more hardcore determinists because of bad things that they've done in their life.
	But maybe the compatibilists are just...
	Maybe they're trying to forgive other people or whatever.
	In which case, though, just give up the idea of virtue and so on.
	But everybody gets deep down that if they bring up determinism as a value, then they already have a hierarchy of values.
	Truth is better than falsehood and so on.
	And there's I mean, certainly in our conversation, it's very easy for us because of our definition of virtue that we're working with, the one that's floating around that seems to have taken a lot of punches and stayed intact, that they can just be taken down in, like, five minutes.
	And that's pretty humiliating, right?
	Like, if I'm trying to learn Mandarin and I'm still not very good after six months, I don't feel like an idiot, right?
	Because it's a tough language for, you know, a skinny white guy like me to learn.
	But if we are, in fact...
	If somebody's argument for determinism that they've held onto and propagated for ten years can be brought down in five minutes, ooh, that's pretty bad, right?
	Yeah. Well, in a lot of those cases, too, those folks haven't really constructed those arguments themselves.
	They're just echoing what they've read in other books.
	And to the untutored, they seem pretty smart, right?
	Yeah, sure, sure.
	Because they're like, wow, so everything's determined, but we still have free choice?
	Wow, I guess that must be like quantum physics, because they don't get it, right?
	So to people who aren't confident, who aren't particularly intelligent, they sound smart, right?
	In the same way that the people who aren't tutored on the nature of government, Somebody's saying, like I was reading about Shaquille O'Neal the other day, because I'm always down with the shack and what he's up to, but he's concerned about childhood obesity, right?
	So he's not starting up a fat camp for kids, although I think he's doing a reality show about that.
	What he's doing is he's going to Florida, or he lives in Florida, whatever, and he's saying to the government, he's trying to get this thing going where they reinstitute physical education in high schools, right, as a mandatory education.
	So to the untreated person, he seems like, wow, that's a really good thing for him to do.
	Get those kids moving and keep them from getting diabetes and heart disease later in life.
	What a philanthropist, right?
	So to people who aren't suited in ethics and the reality of government, he doesn't look like somebody who wants to point guns at a bunch of kids and their parents.
	He looks like a really nice guy, like the people who advocate welfare.
	To the untutored, it's like, wow, they really do care about the poor, right?
	It's not like they're using guns to entrap people in a life of crime and despair.
	They're not advocating a gulag for the poor.
	They really care about the poor.
	And to the untutored, the compatibilists in particular look like reasonable compromisers.
	They don't have the mess of free will, but they've kept all of the values of virtue and so on.
	To people who aren't trained or tutored, these people look smart and virtuous and wise and good.
	It's just that once you spend ten minutes on each of their arguments, you realize that...
	They're not.
	They're not. They're the opposite, right?
	And they're not the opposite until you tell them, right?
	Shaquille O'Neal probably thinks he's a great guy for doing this, right?
	And if you sit down with him and say, you know, dude...
	You don't settle a basketball game outside of the Bronx with gunfire, and you're trying to settle this by using guns, right?
	And if he goes, oh man, I totally didn't get that, that's terrible, I'm going to stop and apologize, that's great, but if he keeps plowing on, right, then he's no longer such a good guy.
	Right, perpetuating the myth.
	But getting back to the free will question again...
	All right, but that's four bucks.
	That's all you get. Go on.
	I knew I'd get one in there somewhere.
	Greg got back.
	Go on.
	Because you had gotten to the point where you were at least it sounded to me like you were equating rational consciousness With free will, as one and the same, essentially.
	Well, I mean, it's... Yeah, I mean, you have to be able to balance long-term and short-term gains and consequences and losses in order to be able to make a choice.
	And to do that, you have to have rational consciousness, for sure.
	So then it couldn't...
	free will as an aspect of humanity couldn't be...
	I don't see then how it could be what you were arguing in that podcast as a kind of a reaction formation to mysticism.
	Why?
	I mean, if a rodent develops wings to avoid ground predators, it has developed a physical attribute as a defense mechanism.
	Oh, so then you're actually saying it was like an evolutionary step, then.
	Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well then, what you're saying is that biologically, mystics predate rationalists.
	Sure. Which we know is historically the case, right?
	Now, again, I'm not saying that I know whether it was evolutionary or just you know like the way that you can just become smarter in your life that people just figured I don't I mean I would doubt that it's evolutionary but for sure I would say that the predation of mysticism predated rational free will well historically yes sure but does that necessarily mean that the capacity for both was not also present at the same time both mysticism and rationalism Well,
	sure, sure. Look, I mean, we know that mysticism...
	Mysticism is like taxation, right?
	I mean, if taxation is virtuous, then you should give 100% of your income to the government.
	But the problem is then you die, right?
	Because you can't eat. No food, no shelter, right?
	So the same thing. Like, if the next life is great and God is good and he wants to meet you, right, then you should kill yourself, right?
	That's, you know...
	I can't figure out why Tammy Faye went for radiation treatment.
	It doesn't make any sense to me. But, um...
	Which makes ideas like that self-evidently non-virtuous, if virtue is the preservation of your own life.
	Right, so here we have the mystical imperative of death is better than life, and we have the state imperative that violence is better than rationality, that surrendering your resources to your superiors is better than anything.
	Right, which is sort of a consequence of the first.
	Right, so any society which believed all of that would instantly self-destruct, right?
	They'd all pull a Jim Jones, right?
	And company.
	And they'd all kill themselves. And I'm sure that there'd be a large number of those comet-worshipping nutbags throughout society who've all just jumped off a cliff like lemmings and died.
	So those beliefs don't tend to last very long, right?
	So with the predation of mysticism must come the skepticism of rationality.
	Like you kind of pay lip service to it, but you kind of don't believe it, but yes you do, but you know, but this is a paradox that then provokes our need for rationality to evaluate and to understand, right?
	Must come.
	Well yeah, because I would say that those societies which swallowed mysticism and violence wholesale just self-destructed.
	So you're not saying that...
	Rock it!
	Break it down, brother!
	Woohoo! Just when I was about to annihilate your entire argument.
	Yeah, sorry, I'll turn it off in a second.
	I've got you to switch your friend if not.
	Oh, somebody's put on a pole right now.
	Down my hand, I'm going to cross it.
	Let me put on my parachute mask.
	Yeah, I think my pants just lared.
	All right, so somebody put us on hold.
	Did anyone just try?
	Just think so.
	Play this again.
	Oh, great.
	Now we can't get it.
	Well, this could actually go on for quite some time.
	Thank you.
	Ah, that's good. Who did that?
	Greg, did you lose your train of thought?
	I know you're hoping beyond hope that I did.
	You didn't? Okay. Oh, you should see the dance.
	Ow, my back. Sorry, go on. All right.
	So, where was I? Oh, yeah.
	Mysticism predates rationalism historically.
	Provokes rationalism.
	Provokes it. But in order for that to be true, both have to be present in a biological sense in the organism that's inhibiting the behavior, right?
	For sure, yeah. So someone is trying to peddle mysticism and all of the The consequence of self-destruction that comes with that and the natural reaction to that is rationality as a self-defense mechanism.
	So then what you're saying is not that Not that it must be there in the sense of that there's some plan in mind historically,
	but more in terms of In order for the situation that exists now to exist, this must have been what the case was.
	Yeah, you can't have mysticism without some capacity for rational consciousness, right?
	I mean, chimps don't have mysticism, right?
	Chimps don't have priests and so on, right?
	Because they don't have that capacity.
	Human beings had to have had a breakthrough in mental capacity in order for mysticism to be a viable predation strategy, right?
	Right, and at the same time that that...
	Go ahead. Okay, sorry.
	I was just going to say that that same breakthrough that brought that capacity also brought the capacity for rationality.
	Right, right. And then you get a scale-up effect, right?
	So the priests who concoct tales that are completely self-destructive wipe out their whole society if people believe them, right?
	So along with mysticism has to come skepticism in order for society to survive, right?
	Well, they're just competing forms of the next variation in evolution, right?
	And so, whichever one is more successful is the one that's going to survive long term.
	Sure. Look, I mean, and I know this is just, I mean, this is based on the lab called STEP, right?
	Which is that I would not have 838 podcasts if we were already living in Libertopia, right?
	Right, right, right. I mean, the irrationality of the world is what provoked me into sort of a ferocious rationalism, right?
	So, and again, this is just my sort of theory.
	I mean, there's no particular proof yet, but I think there's some logical consistency in this as a possible way of understanding how mysticism is the sort of provocation for rationality.
	I guess what's eating at me then, though, is a sort of chicken and egg question.
	Well, I don't think...
	See, but rationality can't provoke mysticism.
	Well, I don't think...
	I mean, rationality bothers people who already are mysticists, but rationality can't provoke mysticism.
	Say again? You cut out a little bit.
	...mysticism. Like, the free market doesn't provoke subsidies, right?
	Doesn't provoke the government, right?
	Well......the government in order for people to fight the free market.
	The free market is despite...
	But rationality doesn't provoke mysticism.
	It already has to be there, and it has to be a vested interest in mysticism.
	To begin with, right?
	Rationality is, I mean, what we use, what we develop to defend ourselves against irrational attacks, right?
	Right. Rationality is like the body's defense mechanism, right?
	Or the mind's defense mechanism. And so all you're really saying then is that it was the characteristic that was first...
	expressed and thus provoked the expression of rationality in response to it.
	And we know this for sure, I'm sorry, but we know this even within the realm of mysticism, right?
	So, the mysticism which said everybody kill themselves and go meet, you know, Gog Magog or whatever, that mysticism died out, right?
	The mysticism which said, give me five bucks now and you'll have three cows in five minutes, that mysticism also died out because it was so transparently not true, right?
	So, even within the mystical realms, you had to find So you had to say, well, God is the best thing ever, but you can never see Him.
	He only speaks through me. A mysticism which said, there is a God and He will speak to you individually, that's all I need to say, that mysticism wouldn't work as far as praying on people.
	Because people would just go have their own conversations with God.
	They wouldn't need a priest.
	And the last thing is, once you can push the rewards beyond death, then it becomes completely unverifiable.
	Once you can tie the rituals into birth and death and marriage and children and all the major events, then it becomes easy to remember.
	Even within the realm of mysticism, there had to be a certain...
	And of course you have to say that death is the best thing ever, but it's immoral to kill yourself.
	You have to come up with all these balances.
	You have to refine mysticism to the point where it can...
	Any kind of predation that's too intense will kill off The host, right?
	So you have to find a balance, you have to make people tortured about sexuality, but not hate sexuality to the point where they won't reproduce, because otherwise you won't have any kids to prey on in the future, right?
	So you can't make it sterile, right?
	So there's a whole lot that goes on even within mysticism that is around fine-tuning the predatory mechanism of mysticism, as there is in statism, right?
	As we see when the government gets too big, it'll try and cut back in certain areas and so on.
	But within all of that, there is still the capacity and the growth of rationality.
	So these two characteristics, then, of the human mind, mysticism and rationality, really have two different goals in mind.
	One being exploitation, the other being cooperation.
	The two fundamental...
	No, reputation. Mysticism and rationality have different goals in mind in the same way that a lion and a gazelle have different goals in mind, right?
	Right, but we're the same species.
	Well, yeah, but I mean the whole problem with human beings are their own ecosystem, right?
	In a way that no other species other than ants are, right?
	The people I fear are not lions.
	I don't fear lions and tigers and sharks.
	I feel like tax collectors and jailers and those people, right?
	But biologically, there's really only two strategies available to any organism, right?
	That is exploitation or predation.
	And on the other hand, cooperation or...
	Well, production, right.
	That's ours, right? Say again?
	Production is ours, right?
	That's the big difference between us, right?
	Production. Yeah, production is ours.
	You said there's predation or what was the other one?
	Cooperation. Predation or cooperation.
	Yeah, there's whatever, right?
	But we have production as a way of creating...
	We create resources, right?
	Rather than just eat what's there.
	You plant your crops.
	You don't just sort of run around eating berries or whatever, right?
	We have the capacity for production, which is so much more...
	Valuable and powerful than just eat or be eaten, right?
	Which, fundamentally, though, is really a cooperative effort.
	Sure, yeah, for sure. You can do it alone, but it certainly is enhanced to do it in a group setting.
	Right. You're far more successful as an organism if you have other organisms, like-minded organisms, willing to cooperate with you to do this, right?
	So, in the same way that...
	One guy trying to mine iron ore out of a mountainside, he's going to die before he finds any.
	But a thousand guys...
	Someone else has got to be producing to make it worthwhile.
	Right, exactly. Or either that, or maybe he wants to hammer himself a plowshare or something of his own.
	It's going to take him his entire life to make his own set of tools.
	Whereas, if he's got...
	A team of people that are willing to help him, then not only can he make his own set of tools, but he can make tools for the entire tribe.
	So that's one strategy for survival for the organism as a group.
	The other strategy is the predation strategy, which is it's every man for himself.
	We all just kind of Grab what we can get, and whoever survives, survives, right?
	Sorry to interrupt for just a sec, but there's no society that conforms to either of those specifications.
	All societies are combinations of people who produce and people who pray.
	Okay. Right?
	Even a primitive Stone Age society is going to have a king and a priest, right, who don't produce but pray upon their own people.
	That's true. So, the human society is an ecosystem of predators, of parasites and of producers, right?
	Okay. And if the predators are like the warriors and the parasites are the priests and the producers are the poor bastards like us who produce stuff that they manipulate or steal or whatever, right?
	And so, there's this tension, right?
	So that the warriors will just go kill people, but if they kill everyone, they'll actually have to pick up a hoe and do some damn work, right?
	That's not going to work too well, right?
	So, whereas the manipulators have to lie about cause and effect to get people to give them stuff out of fear of consequences, right?
	Negative consequences for failing to comply with the mystic's commandments.
	But they also have a problem, right?
	In that their claims can be verified, right?
	If they move the rewards to beyond death, then logically people would want to kill themselves, but then if everyone kills themselves, the priests also have to pick up a plowshare and do a damn bit of work, which they don't really want to do.
	That's not the point. So there's this tension.
	There's the predator and the prey, and there's a tension between them.
	So the predators are always trying to catch the prey, and the prey are always coming up with defenses against the predators.
	But you can't escape the Stone Age tribes, so you have to come up with intellectual defenses.
	around hoarding stuff for yourself despite the fact that you have to come up with skepticism about the claims to put forward in order to...
	and I would say that's sort of the root of rationality.
	So are human beings then the only organism that actually co-mingle all three of these strategies in one species or can we think of an example in another species where the same is true?
	I don't think there is.
	I mean, I don't think there is. The only other species, I think, that wars on its own kind is the ants, but of course they don't have priests, right?
	Do they war on their own kind, or just interspecies wars, like red ants versus black or whatever?
	Well, I'm no expert, but that's sort of my understanding, is that they're the only other species that attacks.
	Although spiders do that too, to some extent.
	Spiders and praying mantis, right?
	Well, that's for reproduction though.
	That's not for food.
	Well, I guess the two are sort of co-joined.
	But they're the ones who actually have sort of mass combat against.
	But it doesn't really matter whether other animals do it or not.
	We certainly know that human beings do.
	Alright. So I guess the question is, who are we to say which strategy is the right one?
	Or the wrong one.
	Well, that's UPB, though, right?
	Well, sure. But why should people who prefer predation over cooperation, why should they subscribe to UPB? Well, they claim to, right?
	That's the issue, right? It's the hypocrisy that's the root of corruption in this area, right?
	As it is in all intellectual areas, right?
	So, I mean, it's the old example of taxation, right?
	I mean, if taking money through force is a virtuous action, then everyone should get to do it, right?
	Because they say it's virtuous, and they don't say, well, it's just virtuous because I have the gun.
	They say it's virtuous because it's the right thing to do, right?
	And so the priests say, well, obeying God is virtuous and everyone can have a, you know, God talks to people and so on, right?
	So it's just the consistency.
	The consistency is the weakness in all of these predatory strategies.
	And it's the lying that makes them fundamentally so wrong, right?
	That they claim these universal values that, you know, upon five minutes examination turn out to be, you know, criminally non-universal.
	And of course, if they put them forward as, you know, if they were honest, then it wouldn't work.
	So it's the lying that's the problem.
	The disconnect between what is said and what is done.
	Yeah, I mean, the blatant hypocrisy, right?
	That's the part that can survive.
	And that's a problem...
	why? Well, because they're saying these are universal rules, but then they don't follow them.
	Okay, just using those as a tool of exploitation.
	Well, sure, yeah. I mean, it's the date rape thing, right?
	I mean, if somebody puts something into your drink and then, you know, rapes you, that's not good, right?
	Because, you know, they're not saying it's universal, right?
	Right, in an Igian sense, right?
	Yeah, yeah. Sorry, we had somebody who had a comment or a question.
	Carl, you want to... Oh, hi. Can you hear me, Zach?
	I sure can. Sorry, sorry, we took so long, but...
	Oh, that's all right. I didn't want to interrupt Greg.
	Yeah, that's it. Sure, this is Carl talking.
	Hi. Hi.
	I was thinking...
	The conundrum of causality, causality seems to exist in the universe, and everything seems to be caused physically, physical reality.
	Actually, let me jump from that.
	The success of cooperation is something that people discover over time, and people profit.
	Cooperation requires rules like morality, and people profit.
	Human beings who cooperate in society, the social order profits, An individual profit by cooperating in society.
	Unless they profit from self-government, they profit from morality, as long as a predator doesn't manage to kill the whole thing.
	Well, I'm sorry to interrupt you just as you're starting, but it seems to me that the Nazis were highly organized and cooperative in the killing of the Jews.
	So cooperation is a double-edged sword, right?
	I guess cooperation meaning non-credation.
	I mean, it would require the moral principle of thou shalt not kill or whatever.
	Well, sure, but I mean, then it's cooperation with moral rules, right?
	Right. Sorry, can I just, for the remaining people who are on, I have no idea whether or not I'm recording this call.
	I know I've got some of it, but I don't know if I've got...
	Much of it. So if people could just hit the record button, it's right above the...
	Recording conversation.
	Thanks, I might ask for that. I don't know if I've got...
	I don't know if I've got that anymore.
	I don't know. Sorry, I'm just looking at the file signs here.
	It's not growing, so...
	I don't know if it's still kicking around or not.
	But anyway, now that we've got recording, whoever's got it, if you could just sort of email it to me, that would be great.
	Yeah, so, sorry. Cooperation plus ethics is great, right?
	But cooperation without ethics...
	Yeah, absolutely, with ethics, with rules, with non-predatory rules, that that leads to the division of labor and the much higher production and material wealth, and so forth.
	So I had a couple of comments about one or two other things, if you don't mind.
	You mentioned Can I be totally annoying?
	I'm so sorry. Let me hang up and come back in just so I can make sure the recording starts again.
	I'll be back in like literally five seconds.
	Sorry about that. Okay. Before we go...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Before we go on with Carl's new direction here, I asked him if I'd be able to jump in with one more thing on this evolution thing.
	And I think it's just a little bit of a different spin or a different perspective from the evolutionary model that might Help to refine this a bit.
	I think the thing that we were sort of missing with the evolution model was that, just say, for example, that you have a population of this one kind of beetle or something like that, and 5% of the beetles are bright red and the rest of them are the color of the leaves around them or something.
	And as long as there are no predators around, To that really hunt by color, by visual or by seeing color, then all these beetles will have a pretty uniform, you know, the ratio of hereditary expression of these colors will stay relatively the same or constant.
	5% red and 95% green leafy color.
	Right. But now if a predator happens on the scene that has eyesight that can pick up the red, then...
	I mean, not the red. Yeah, I guess I got the ratios backwards.
	Okay, most of them are red, 95% red, 5% green, I should say.
	So now a predator happens on the scene and they can pick up all the red stuff but not the green stuff, suddenly the population of the beetles is going to, of course, get smaller.
	But the population is going to dwindle quite a lot initially where all the red ones are being wiped off by the new predator but then later on the green beetles will start to take over the ecosystem under the new cover of their camouflage.
	Right. And so you'll go from a population that is a certain size with only a small fraction of them being green Very smaller size, and then it'll grow again with all these greens, and the reds will be pretty much wiped out.
	And I think that that might be a new kind of twist or a model to look at this stuff, the evolution of this defense mechanism, because it seemed like we were coming at it from, in the conversation earlier, we were coming at it from the side of the predator provoked this reaction instead of the It's not really a reaction.
	It's a quality that has always been there.
	It's just never been really necessary until the predator shows up to hunt the ones who don't have that quality.
	Is that making any sense?
	Well, I think that's true, except that the color thing is fixed, right?
	Whereas the rationality and predation of mysticism grows, right?
	It's sort of, I mean, to use my favorite word, asymptotic, right?
	You know, like in northern England, there were the moths that were lighter colored and there were the moths that were darker colored and they all sit on these tree trunks.
	And then the pollution started turning the tree trunks darker, right?
	So all the lighter moths got killed or eaten by the birds and the darker moths survived.
	But that's not quite the same relationship that goes on between the sort of farming the productive through exploitation, the mystical exploitation or violence Predation that goes on because there is an ever-escalating consciousness requirement that goes on, right? So the stories of predation have to get better and better and then the rationality to figure those out has to get better and better.
	So I think it's a little bit different because color is pretty much fixed, right?
	Color gets optimal and then it stops whereas this kind of stuff cycles on itself and it escalates and gets larger and larger.
	So I agree with you that the metaphor is a useful introduction but it doesn't have that same Mutually provoking within a single generation, within a single day or two, right?
	Somebody can come up with a new, oh, I just got a vision from God that says X, and then other people are like, huh, okay, well, that's a really, he's threatening me with really big consequences, but they have to be far enough off that I can't validate them, and compared to the other God, and, you know, like, that can occur very, very rapidly, and it's not quite the same as color, which, once it reaches its optimal state, doesn't, like a tiger's stripes doesn't change, as long as its environment remains relatively stable.
	Sure, but I guess, you know, our minds are flexible enough that we don't have to rely on generations of tweaking to get there.
	But, you know, even if we were to just kind of speed up the clock a bit on this, the biological side of this, we would see, if we just take our time frame and refocus it on a much larger scale, like, you know, not quite geological ages, but, you know, quite long,
	It's a very similar mechanism, I think, in the biologicals, where you'd have, you know, you'd have the predator that would have, at first they would have eyesight that was just able to discern the really bright reds, because that's all it would need, is to be able to feed just fine on that.
	Well, then when they killed all of those, they'd have to have, you know, the predators that don't have the super keen eyesight would start dwindling because they, They only got the brightest of the bright reds, and now that they're all gone, well, these guys don't have anything to feed on anymore, so then the predators that have,
	you know, even sharper senses, they can go for the borderline reddish-greenish, and so on and so forth, and you'd see over many generations, you have predators with keener and keener eyesight surviving better, and the beetles with the better and better camouflage surviving, and I think that It has the same model as what you're saying, it's just we have to take our time frame and stretch it out because the biological clock is a lot slower than the mental or whatever you'd say.
	Well, but I think, and I agree with you again, that it's very close, but I think there's a fundamental difference which might explain our incredible capacities in this area.
	Insofar as in all biology, There is a limit on the perfectibility of any organ, right?
	So in biology, you could come up with some eye that could see all conceivable spectrums plus infrared plus x-rays plus plus plus, right?
	But that would be too much of an expenditure of energy and resources and the time to mature that kind of eye and the possibility of that eye going wrong There would be an upper limit, right?
	So as soon as the predator can see well enough to get his prey, the eye stops developing.
	The prey will hide some more, the eye will get a little better, but there is an upward limit to the sort of excellence aspect of biology.
	That's actually where I was going with this, and that's why I think that we might be missing a little bit on the flavor of what I was saying, but I just want to restate that Or maybe I just didn't get there completely, is that with the predators in human society, they do only just get to the point where they can feast off of us at a comfortable rate without having to, you know, refine their model any better, their model of predation.
	And then when there's a, you know, that's what I'm thinking, is that if we get to this kind of a holding or a status quo or a Something where the predators and the prey, or the hosts, the parasites and the hosts are living at sort of a tenuous stalemate, but then all of a sudden there will be a shifting of power where there is an increased amount of predation.
	Maybe there's some form of technology that makes it easier for governments to To tax or something like that, you know, the advent of communications or something and make it easier to keep better records on how much taxation we're doing, things like that, or the lapper curve or whatever.
	Well, it's in those times when the predators make a sudden, you know, leap and ability to consume or to eat the rest of us, then that's when the societies that end up flourishing are the ones that have a greater preponderance of Thinking individuals, whereas before it was just kind of limited by the technology that the predators had or the ability that the predators had.
	I guess it would be kind of like when the new world opened up and the free thinkers were the people that said, you know, I can survive better in a wide open frontier than I can in this area that I'm in right now, in England or in Europe or wherever.
	I'm going to go strike out on my own and see what I can make of it.
	Well, that was like an impulse, like a bashing on the side of the pressure cooker that blew the lid off for a while in favor of the free thinkers, I think.
	And then it took a while, but the predators soon caught up to that and figured out how to shackle all these people in the frontier, too.
	Right, or if somebody figures out how to domesticate the cow, then suddenly there's more to prey on, right?
	Or if somebody figures out how to do crop rotation, there's more food, right?
	So production, the reason that production remains so low throughout human history was that production would simply be stolen, right?
	Because the more you would produce, the more society would then shift to being the ruling class, the preying class, right?
	And that's why production would simply increase your enslavement, right?
	And so that's why it remains so low, right?
	So I would say that what swelled the class was production, and then the class would get big to the point where it multiplied and then consumed the host, which meant that, you know, the Egyptian empires would fall and then the Greek and Roman empires would fall and our empire will fall and so on, right? So the predators or the parasites multiply when there's an increase in production, right?
	As we can see that as the capitalist economy...
	It's getting more and more powerful in terms of its production.
	We're just swelling the ruling class, right?
	It always gets bigger, right?
	And so production just causes your own demise, which is sort of the negative that comes from that.
	But there doesn't seem to be any limit on the excellence of the human mind, right?
	Whereas there is a limit on how fast animals can run or how high they can fly or how long they can hold their breath or the colors that they can adapt to.
	And I think that's why we've gone so nuts in terms of our abilities, right?
	So wildly out of proportion with the rest of the animal kingdom because this is the organ that doesn't require a massive amount of additional energy to create a huge amount of additional excellence, right?
	Oh, right. So every other organ, it requires...
	So a giraffe's neck is limited by the fact that the giraffe's heart has to be strong enough to pump the blood up to the brain.
	So the giraffe's neck can only get so long before it runs into its physical limitations.
	The carbon-based muscle firing of a cheetah can only get so fast before it simply can't run any further.
	Or if the muscles get stronger, then it requires more animals to eat that it could conceivably catch, even with the additional speed.
	So there's a limit on every biological organ except for the human mind, which is why I think we just took off so wildly.
	And of course the fact that we have a much shorter cycle for evolution and that occurs within the human mind, within the human species.
	But this is why we're such an anomaly in the universe, is that this is the one organ that doesn't require ten times the energy to get five times as good.
	And we can get hundreds of times as good.
	I don't consume more calories as I get wiser, if that makes sense, right?
	Yeah. I think, more accurately, I think you could say that it's the one organ that has yet to reach its limit.
	I think there must be a limit to what the human mind can do, obviously, but it's just that we're still comfortably in the zone of we haven't reached our second wind yet or whatever, you know, where there's plenty of stride left in us.
	Right, right. I think you're right, but I mean, compared to the linear and diminishing returns that come from every other organ, The mind is just way out of space and like we hit some threshold of complexity that can build on itself without requiring additional calories.
	And of course what we do pay for it in terms of is the horribly long time it takes for children to reach maturity, right?
	The latency period where the brain is still developing.
	It is just this one miraculous organ that can multiply its capacities dozens or hundreds or thousands of times without requiring incredibly extended increases in energy.
	And of course, one of the big things that occurred was that we stood up.
	That's one of the things that makes the brain possible, right?
	Because when we were on all fours, Our bodies were very hot, right?
	Because the sun would beat down upon the backs, and so you needed a lot of water to cool the body.
	As soon as we stood up and stayed upright, then the water and the cooling mechanisms were much less required because we would expose less of our skin to the sun, which meant that there was additional water available to create and nurture the brain, which the brain requires a lot of water, right?
	And oxygen, right?
	So, I mean, it's just those kinds of little things, but it did create an organ that has no upward limit Relative to every other organ, it effectively has no upward limit that we have reached yet.
	And even if we reach our upward limit tomorrow, it's still, you know, millions of times more powerful than any other relative organ that human beings have.
	Right. And then when we take the production of our minds and things like that, there is actually quite a bit of low, I guess you could say, energy requirement that goes into it, but that's been solved.
	Externally through capitalism, because capital is the reservation of production without consumption, and that's what allows people like Einstein to sit in front of a chalkboard all day instead of being out in the field having to do his thinking with his stick in a piece of dirt.
	Right, and this conversation to occur, of course, right?
	Yeah, obviously. All of this stuff does require a great deal of energy, but it's not Directly inside the organism energy.
	It's stuff that has been able to be taken outside of the organism and reserved in the form of capital.
	I think it's not entirely accurate that it's done without energy.
	It's just that we've figured out ways to externalize the storage of that energy.
	Does that make any sense?
	No, that's right. The mother cheetah cannot store up her running energy and pass it along to her children so they can run twice as fast, right?
	But human beings, through language, have the capacity to not have to reinvent the wheel, right?
	So our minds can accumulate.
	I mean, obviously, we didn't invent the English language or the internet or any of these kinds of things because that was Al Gore's job.
	But we have the capacity, in a sense, to store up the running energy.
	Our running gives us more running to give our children.
	They can run even faster.
	And that's another reason why.
	I mean, human knowledge is doubling every 18 months.
	I think actually every 12 months now that we've got these conversations going.
	So that's another sort of capacity that we have.
	So, yeah, I think you're right.
	I mean, the biological metaphors work to a degree, but then there's just something about the brain that we don't understand about how it does...
	All of these absolutely incredible things that it can...
	In certain situations, such as pattern recognition, it can work, you know, thousands of times faster than the most powerful computer with only 150 to 200 synaptic jumps.
	I mean, nobody knows how the hell it does that, but it's just an incredible organ.
	I'm sorry, we hijacked somebody.
	We hijacked Carl. Yeah, I'm sorry.
	I didn't go pretty far into that.
	So, Carl, yeah... I'm sorry for taking so long.
	This actually segues into one of my other questions.
	I mean, the question, of course, what do we do?
	I think we'll get the second wind, Rod, or maybe it's the third wind.
	The second wind with capitalism, the third wind is really getting rid of the predators, you know.
	Not just setting up another republic that will turn into an empire, but, you know, getting rid of the predators once and for all.
	And that requires, and of course, what do we do?
	And, of course, Seth goes over this in his book.
	The predator, with his mysticism, he gets the sanction of the victim because the victim is really afraid of, you know, what's the priest going to do to me if I speak the truth?
	So he can't speak the truth. But then that becomes, and the real fear of our childhood then from the past becomes the vestigial, irrational fear of adults who really don't have to fear speaking the truth.
	And so, of course, as Stephanie said, you know, the most important thing is not to lie to other people, which is honesty.
	And my question on that is, I always thought of honesty, kind of, maybe from objectivist influence, starting from the self, and then you need to be honest with yourself, and then you will not want to lie to other people who can possibly avoid it.
	Of course, it reinforces the honesty if you actually translate the physical reality by speaking the truth to others.
	So just your comments on that.
	Yeah, no, I think the honesty is key.
	I don't like to flog people over the head with virtue or you must or you should or this or that.
	I mean, obviously, it'll make you happier if you're honest with people.
	The reason that it's so important is that honesty is the opposite of exploitation.
	Honesty is what we need.
	The predators are hidden.
	The predators are hidden in lies.
	And they know that they're lying.
	Because the moment that you point it out, they change the subject.
	It is required to stop people from getting killed.
	It is required to stop wars.
	I mean, because all of that is hidden under a veneer of ethics, right?
	So the lies...
	The truth is so important because it's the medicine that saves us, right?
	I mean, that saves our personal lives and, incidentally, the world, right?
	So it is essential from that standpoint, but I don't like to sort of, you know, finger-wag at people because that's just a bad way to teach ethics, right?
	Well, except the...
	But, yeah, speaking the truth is like not giving the moral sanction, or the sanction of the victim, as it were, you know, to others.
	Right, and I think that we want to spend more time unmasking falsehoods than we do...
	I'm not saying you, but a lot of conversations around ethics are like, well, if this weird situation occurs, should I lie then or not?
	Or, you know, if the priest has kidnapped my wife and, you know, all this kind of stuff.
	It's kind of lifeboat ethics.
	Yeah, the lifeboat stuff. And that's all nonsense, right?
	We have more than enough sickness to get through in our lifetime before we get to the really obscure ailments, right?
	I mean, we've got a plague on our hands We don't have to worry about the possibility of West Nile virus in 10 years, right?
	I mean, we've got people dropping down all around us.
	We've got wars and violence and predation more than we could ever handle in a lifetime.
	And so I think that I know people get, oh, I've got to tell the truth.
	It's like, oh, the first thing I need to do is, you know, call up the guy I lied to when I was 12 and tell him I'm sorry and so on and so on.
	It's like, well... Maybe, but I think that the most important thing to do is to deal with the most egregious lies in the world and unmask them as the predations that they are, the lies of the state and of God and of the family, and we'll have our hands full with that for the rest of our lives.
	I'm just curious, though, if you agree that the virtue of honesty begins with honesty in your own mind, honesty with yourself.
	Well, if you can tell me, I'm sure it does, but I'm not sure.
	I just want to make sure I understand what you mean by that.
	I mean, you say in the book, I'll quote it, the most important thing in life is not to lie to other people.
	Honesty is the most fundamental virtue.
	Honesty is a virtue, again, is honesty in your own mind so you know reality, so you know the truth.
	And then integrity, perhaps, is bringing that into the world.
	And you have integrity because you speak the truth to others, but you're honest with yourself.
	And your honesty also does apply to others.
	I just see it as starting.
	People who lie to themselves will.
	It's part of lying to others.
	Yeah, no, there's a beautiful line out of Hamlet, spoken by the old fool Polonius, but he says, obviously, he says to his son Laertes, he says, Above all, to thine own self, be true, for then it shall follow, as night follows the day, thou canst not be false to any man.
	And for sure, knowing thyself, knowing yourself and being honest with yourself means that you're less likely to be unconsciously manipulative of others through your own emotional defenses and so on.
	For sure, you have to know the truth and really know it.
	Not just sort of know it intellectually, but you have to know it and feel it.
	You can't just lecture people into being good or to being better.
	You have to be passionate about it.
	You have to care. You have to do it out of love in a weird kind of way, if that makes any sense.
	And for sure, you have to have tasted...
	I mean, the way that we spread the truth is we love the truth.
	And the way that we love the truth is we get the beauty and joy of the truth in our own lives.
	And that's how we become compelling in getting other people...
	I mean, if I find that chewing a particular root...
	It cures tooth decay or whatever.
	Then I love the fact that I don't have tooth decay and I'm healthy and I'm not going to die at the age of 20 from some damn tooth infection.
	Then I'm going to love that wonderful feeling and I'm going to want to share it with people.
	And yeah, they may spit on me and hate me and call me evil for doing it, but I know that if they just start chewing the throat, they're going to feel so much less pain and they'll have all the joy that comes from good health.
	And that's really where it's got to come from, but you have to experience that yourself first, right, in order to really become compelling.
	And that, I think, does require you to live it for yourself.
	I'm sorry, go on. Well, exactly.
	You need to, and rather than lecturing people, which usually doesn't work, just living the truth in action and then speaking the truth incidentally or, you know, forcefully when necessary, but just exhibiting the principles, I think, leading by example is really what works.
	Yeah, I mean, if I found this magic root that prevents tooth decay, then...
	I mean, the first thing I've got to say to people is, I don't have any tooth decay, and man, it feels great.
	Now, some people will then say, well, how do you not get tooth decay?
	Because my teeth are killing me, right?
	And then I can tell them.
	But if I just walk around lecturing everyone, then they'll be less likely to sort of...
	Especially if my own teeth are falling out, right?
	I mean, then I'm not going to be very believable, right?
	Right. I have one more quick thing.
	I think I'm on here. You mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, why people like that man who was yelling at his children, why do they have children?
	Actually, you probably know the answers, but they haven't examined their own unhappy childhood.
	They don't see how bad it was.
	They're just doing what's expected and repeating the patterns automatically without conscious deliberation, really.
	Yeah, I think that's true.
	I'm sorry, did you have something else?
	Or they want to do better, or I want to give my children a better childhood, but they fall automatically into the old patterns of domination because they just can't...
	They don't have the patience or the thought or knowledge to do it otherwise.
	Right. Well, I think that's...
	And you've read the book, right?
	So you know that there's this bit about the transmission of knowledge in a culture, right?
	That there's just photocopies, right?
	And I think that these kinds of people, they have kids...
	Because the kids are of value, right?
	That's what they believe. And they love America because America is of value.
	And of course, they're told to love America, so they love America.
	And they're told, or everybody seems to believe, that having kids is of value, so they just go and have kids, right?
	They don't sort of say for themselves, what is it that I want out of this 20-year investment of time and energy and money, right?
	It's just like, well, what do you do?
	You have kids, right? You get married, you have kids, right?
	They're just sort of photocopying the values that are in the culture without asking themselves.
	And then, of course, that Frustration at their own emptiness they then take out on their kids, right?
	I think I remember literally deciding in my mind when I was about 10 years old that I was not going to have kids.
	That I didn't want to put them through the school system.
	I didn't want to put them through all the humiliation, the lack of control over one's life.
	And I see that parenting often corrupts certain people and I see people who don't have kids often as being, seeming a little bit freer and just doing what they want and not being as domineering as the people who've had kids and Oh, for sure.
	If you don't know how to rationally and benevolently raise children, you absolutely should not have them.
	For the same reason that you should not become a prison guard, because it's going to mess you up.
	you're going to do things that you regret you're going to be tortured by guilt you're going to live in fear and you're going to become totally oppositional to philosophy and introspection because that is going to lead your children to condemn you which you can't bear so absolutely if people don't know how to raise their children in a rational, productive and that doesn't mean perfect nobody's perfect, right?
	but in a more or less healthy manner they absolutely should not have kids they'll hurt the kids and they'll become a real cancer in the world both with regards to their own children and with regards to our collective pursuit of truth as a whole right I got just one more question Are you going to have a little party in Toronto sometime?
	Well, yeah, actually, I was talking to Greg, just trying to sort of persuade him to come swinging up, and we may have a barbecue in September, which, you know, we'd be happy to have people come by who are in the neighborhood.
	It would be great to meet you all, and you could realize exactly why I'm a philosopher and not a cook.
	So that would be fun, and I'll keep you all posted on that on the boards.
	Okay, great. Well, that's all I have to say.
	Well, thanks very much. Unless anybody else has any real yearning burnings, we can close off the show for today.
	Do you have anybody else have anything that they're dying to get off their chest?
	No, no, perhaps not that.
	All right. Well, thanks again. I appreciate everybody who did vote for Freedom Aid Radio and the podcast awards and book sales are chugging along.
	I certainly appreciate those who've ordered it.
	You can order them in bulk and save some money if you want to really please everybody with end-of-the-summer gifts.
	And thanks, everyone, for calling in today and for being patient as I don't podcast, but I'll be back on this week.
	So thanks, Emil. And I will talk to you all soon.

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