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Aug. 27, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:05:06

2466 Freedomain Radio Sunday Call In Show August 25th, 2013

Stefan Molyneux takes listener calls and discusses accents, teaching critical thinking to your religious children, why atheists are angry at religion, approaching people with curiosity, free market efficiency in the use of resources, leaving an immoral job and having a life plan.

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	Good morning, everybody.
	I hope you're doing well.
	It is Stefan von Molyneux head.
	Thank you to everyone who listened to the Love It or Leave It, a rebuttal argument.
	I particularly enjoyed the GIS offenses, GPS offenses of people who were trying to narrow down exactly what kind of hillbilly accent I was going for, whether it was Appalachian or Blue Mountain or New York.
	And really, I'm not trying to offend anyone in particular.
	Everyone is fine.
	Everyone is fine.
	But it's interesting because I've made fun of a wide variety of accents before, including my own, and I believe a 19th century British Earl showed up at one point, and they didn't get too offended.
	So I'm afraid I'd just have to go with the Jeff Foxworthy line.
	He says, you know, you speak with a Southern accent, everybody immediately deducts 20 points from your IQ. It's just sad but true.
	But yeah, thanks.
	It was great.
	It was great fun.
	And it was nice to do something a little bit different.
	And Christina asked me after about three days to please stop using that accent because I found it quite enjoyable to work with.
	And unfortunately, though, because I'm a parent and I'm in printing, I've stopped using the accent.
	But Isabella has taken it on completely.
	And the weird thing is she's even coming up with southern slang.
	Like she knows what grits are, but she demanded them for breakfast this morning.
	And I now am no longer daddy, but yowl!
	So you've got to watch what you do around kids.
	Somebody asked me if she has my accent.
	Nobody but me has my accent.
	It is not organic to anywhere in the world.
	This is a guy who didn't want to rely on his personality to meet women when he was a teenager and thus fruitified up his accent to the point where it just sounds like something that comes from a 17th century British court.
	And, of course, the colonists, what do they know?
	Nothing different at all, but my accent is quite a menagerie.
	So, no, she doesn't have my accent.
	Actually, I never heard a Canadian accent.
	I started hearing a British accent before I heard a Canadian accent.
	I mean, there are some sort of Canadian accents, like the Newfoundland accent.
	I had a friend in theatre school who would report how in Newfoundland they ask whether there's any herring this morning, and they hear, no, I'm afraid, sadly, There's no herring this morning.
	And it went something like this.
	So there's a little bit of Eastern accent.
	Quebecois has the kind of accent that is literally like driving railway spikes into the ears of a French person.
	It is just really rough.
	It is rough on the ears of a true French person.
	I think it's the equivalent of a French cockney.
	And so they have a specific accent.
	And out on the West Coast...
	in Vancouver, they don't so much have an accent as they have a breathing style that's really noticeable.
	And it goes something like this.
	And there's a little bit of drooling after that.
	And they seem to use the word Cheetos and Doritos quite a bit around mid-afternoon.
	But other than that, there's really not much of a specific Canadian accent, particularly in Ontario and Toronto.
	Should I just do the whole show on accents?
	Or should we actually get to some listeners?
	Yes?
	No?
	All right.
	Fine.
	Hello, listeners.
	Go ahead.
	All right, Randy, you're up first.
	Okay.
	The question is, okay, I told my brother, my son, my older son, that I was now atheist.
	His response was, are you on drugs?
	Now, he still believes in the thing about there being spirits and feeling influence from the afterlife.
	He still thinks that his mother's spirit kind of hangs around him and kind of helps keep him on the straight and narrow.
	And so he basically said, he came to Brazil just recently.
	He said, well, you keep your beliefs and I'll keep my beliefs.
	So I don't know how far I'm going to get with him.
	That's the first question.
	The second question is with my ex-wife, but of course, Brazil is like in the United States where the mother is the best provider.
	And so my 11 year old lives with her.
	How would you recommend that I go over this with her and explain, well, see, you know, we've been teaching these wrong doctrines to him.
	How am I going to kind of help her change her beliefs?
	Is she very religious?
	Very.
	She goes there every Sunday.
	It's like she doesn't let my son play with any of the other boys on Sunday.
	Well, I mean, I tell you what, you're going to have a fight.
	You are going to have a fight, my friend.
	And if you are going to begin to instruct your son, your 11-year-old son, on critical thinking, you can't really instruct someone on atheism.
	Anymore than you can spend a lot of time teaching them that leprechauns don't exist.
	I mean, the focus on something that doesn't exist is the mere consequence of critical thinking.
	So, of course, what you want to do is to teach your son critical thinking.
	Now, you'd be amazed at how children can figure this stuff out very quickly.
	So, my daughter is four and she's quite fascinated With Bible stories, so of course I'm telling her all the Bible stories.
	And of course, you know, so with the one where God, you know, drowns everyone in a flood, I try and sort of make it as gentle as possible.
	But I was trying to...
	She said, well, how...
	He knows everything, so how can he get angry if he knows what everyone's going to do?
	And I said, yeah.
	I said, it's like if I put...
	A big piece of chocolate in front of you when you were two years old and didn't know anything about cavities and diabetes and fat or whatever it is.
	If I put a big piece of chocolate in front of you when you were two years old, what would you have done?
	She said, I'd have eaten it.
	And I said, yes.
	And would I have known ahead of time that you were going to eat it?
	And she said, well, of course.
	And I said, so if I put a piece of chocolate right in front of you knowing that you were going to eat it and then I got angry at you for eating it, would that make any sense?
	And she said, of course not.
	Through analogy, that's just critical thinking.
	You take the equivalent moral action or moral judgment and you apply it to some area which is familiar to your child.
	With your son, you can choose if you want to.
	Do you have a podcast where you go over that?
	No, but I guess I do now.
	But I would say that you want to focus with your son on teaching critical thinking.
	So instead of saying to him, you know, there's no God, which doesn't really teach anything other than a conclusion, you can start to say, well, I've been thinking about what's real and what's not real.
	And I'm not sure I was told everything.
	The right way.
	I think that's important.
	If you express skepticism as to how you were taught as a child, that gives your child permission to express skepticism about how he was taught as a child.
	So, expressing your own doubts and then saying, well, how am I going to figure out what's real and what's not real, what's true and what's not true?
	And that is a philosophical education for your son.
	And it is going to cause Conflict with your wife.
	And unfortunately, given that the world is the way the world is, there's no particular way to avoid that.
	If I were you, I would sit down with your wife.
	I don't think either co-parent, if there's a divorce or even if there's not, I don't think either co-parent should radically change anything significant in parenting style or in education without talking about it with the other parent, because otherwise it's sort of springing something.
	So I'd sit down with my ex-wife and say, listen, I've been studying philosophy, I'm really interested, and I'm going to start to teach him some critical thinking skills.
	You can give him some examples about what is truth, what is virtue, what is real, what is not real, what is the role of reason in truth, what is the role of empiricism in truth.
	And so you say, I'm going to start to teach him some critical thinking skills, and I'm not going to teach him anything specific about religion, but it may have an impact upon religion.
	And she may have objections to that.
	She probably will, in which case you can discuss them.
	But I do think it's very important that you give your child critical thinking skills.
	With critical thinking skills comes usually negotiation.
	Because when you say we are going to reason together or reason is very important, what you do is you automatically bypass aggression as the methodology for solving parent-child disputes.
	And so...
	You can teach him negotiation and critical thinking skills, which are the two primary ingredients for success in life.
	Critical thinking and negotiation.
	And they're two sides of the same coin.
	So I would really focus on giving him the skill set rather than giving him the conclusion, if that makes any sense.
	I think I am going to kind of set her off to one side and say, look, I've been going over some...
	Well, do you have like a...
	A series of podcasts where I could introduce them.
	I'd like to send this to my father and I'd like to...
	Did he drop?
	Well, I mean, everybody can choose whatever they want and there's a bunch of series of podcasts up there on YouTube or in the feed.
	I think the Introduction to Philosophy series is worth having a look through.
	I think the bomb and the brain stuff is worth sharing.
	It really depends on what you think the interests are going to be of various people.
	So I will leave to your discretion, if you've listened to 600 podcasts, I'll leave it to your discretion to figure out which ones to send first.
	But I think the intro to philosophy is probably pretty good.
	I mean, I was thinking of doing an introduction to logic, but I just think there's so much out there already that's really good.
	That's not really much point me adding to that.
	So I think we dropped him.
	Is he...
	Is he off?
	Yeah.
	So sorry about that.
	I hope that that works out.
	I really want to express my very deep admiration.
	Two things I want to say.
	One, I want to express my incredibly deep admiration for your changing course as an authority figure.
	That's not easy to do.
	That is not easy to do.
	To really approach your children with humility and say, I'm sorry that I was the vehicle for Historical lies, for the momentum of historical falsehood.
	I'm sorry that I was the vehicle for that.
	And I really intensely admire that.
	It's a very humbling and very humble thing to do.
	So I hugely appreciate that.
	The second thing, which I guess is not particularly uncommon in South American culture, is the extreme veneration of your first wife.
	I would caution you about that.
	You had a pretty abusive childhood.
	I assume it was unprocessed when you were young or less processed.
	Your second wife was the unprocessed victim of sexual molestation.
	In other words, she had not dealt with that.
	It seems to me very unlikely that you would have married an extremely virtuous and mature woman Coming out of an abused childhood when your second wife had severe emotional dysfunction.
	And I'm not saying this because I don't want you to feel good about your first wife, but I would approach it a little bit more critically.
	The reason being that if we elevate dysfunction in any sphere of our life to some sort of ideal, everybody else is going to fall short.
	And that's going to rob you, I think, of the capacity for love and intimacy later on in your life.
	So I would approach The idea or the question of your first wife, who, you know, gave birth to your first son and tragically died of cancer.
	And I don't want to rob you of any of the joy of your relationship, but I would not, from the outside, I would not assume that she was a paragon of mental health and virtue, and you may want to look a little bit more critically, just so you don't have an impossibly high standard, which nobody else can fulfill, and which may rob you of the capacity for love and intimacy further along.
	I mean, it's sort of like you saying to me, well, you know, when I was younger, I never exercised.
	And now I do exercise and I'm able to bench press 150 pounds.
	But when I was younger, I never exercised, but I was able to bench press 800 pounds.
	I would say that's not particularly likely.
	So that's sort of one.
	The second thing I wanted to mention about that, it is...
	With the passage of time, if you have a positive, generally happy kind of personality, and happiness has something to do with virtue and it also has something to do with just your personality, when you have a positive personality, as time passes, what happens is you tend to idealize things that happened in the past.
	You tend to think things were better than they were.
	You tend to think you were happier than you were.
	You tend to think people were better.
	But it is important to be critical of the past.
	If we idealize the past, we rob ourselves of the future.
	So, I just wanted to mention that.
	Alright, move on to the next caller.
	Kelvin, go ahead.
	Excellent.
	Alright.
	G'day, Steph.
	How are you doing, mate?
	I'm well.
	How are you doing?
	Yeah, very well, thank you.
	I'm only new to Free Domain Radio.
	I've randomly stumbled across one of your videos while I was just browsing YouTube.
	I ended up reading On Truth and also UPB very recently.
	It's been really interesting to start to think a lot more about things like secular morality and such.
	I was obviously doing a lot of reading.
	Where I live in Part of Australia called Tasmania.
	This used to be considered, you know, basically the Bible Belt of the state.
	There's a lot of Christianity here, as it was initially a Dutch settlement way back when.
	And hence your name is Calvin.
	Yeah, funnily enough.
	Actually, I was named after Calvin Coolidge.
	Oh, really?
	Oh, okay.
	Because, I mean, if you were a kid of a scientist, you'd introduce yourself as Kelvin.
	Anyway, sorry, go on.
	Yeah, that would be better.
	Unfortunately not.
	Somebody had to laugh at that and it really had to be me because it wasn't going to be anybody else.
	Yeah, for sure.
	At least it's better than Calvin Klein.
	Anyway, you know, now more and more young people are being turned on to Atheism as opposed to Christianity, I guess because they see a lot of the abuse that goes on around here.
	There's a growing trend in the LBGT community or whatever it is, and there's a lot of public displays of violence against these people.
	It was around that time that a lot of people started turning towards atheism, which is kind of funny that took something like that, but anyway.
	I'm starting to sort of talk to people in the community, having been raised an atheist by my parents, you know, and I talk to a lot of these people, and they don't seem to be atheist as more anti-theist.
	I know that sounds a bit strange, but they focus more on attacking religion as opposed to organized religion, as opposed to actually Just sort of going, yeah, okay, it doesn't exist.
	All right, let's focus on building our own sort of form of ethics and such, which is why I found, you know, UPB and especially on Truth as well.
	I found on Truth just, I don't know, just otherworldly.
	It was amazing.
	It was an amazing read because it really opened my eyes to, you know, a lot of the deception that we face on a day-to-day basis.
	That was the best three days of writing I think I've ever had.
	Oh, it's amazing.
	Amazing, Reid.
	And you should be very proud of yourself.
	Look, I mean, I've sensed DFU from my family simply because of a few things going on there.
	But, you know, whilst my parents raised me to be atheist, you know, my father ended up becoming a born again.
	And my mother is just absolutely...
	For lack of a better term, batshit crazy.
	But anyway, I digress.
	I suppose what I really want to know is...
	I assume that you have fairly strong ties within your local sort of free-thinking community, perhaps.
	Is there anything that you try to bolster numbers or anything like that?
	Because what I really love to do is to be able to try and educate these people.
	And unfortunately, just sticking books out of their noses, that has an all-too-familiar sense of… Now, sorry, just let me interrupt for a second.
	Which people are you trying to educate?
	It's the people who are already claiming to be atheists.
	I don't think they really are.
	They're more interested in arguing about the finer details of religion as opposed to actually trying to formulate their own opinions on their own, quote, belief system.
	I want to try and put some information underneath their noses.
	Set them...
	Maybe try and get them to read things like On Truth, which I found so, I suppose, inspiring.
	And maybe also UPB, something like this.
	But I'm finding it really difficult to communicate with these people as they're so rebellious.
	Right.
	So your concern is that they're focusing on Attacking religion rather than promoting philosophy?
	Is that what you're saying?
	Why do you think they're doing that?
	Yeah, definitely.
	Yeah, so why do you think they're doing that?
	I guess because my theory would be because for such a long time, this area has been, I suppose, a Christian stronghold that their reaction is to sort of...
	I think it's a very reactionary way of approaching the task.
	Instead of going, okay, let's form our own...
	No, no, no.
	You're giving me sort of abstracts here, which I'm fine with in general, but I really want to ask very specifically, why do you think people...
	Like saying, why are they reactionary?
	Well, because they're kind of reactionary, sure.
	But why...
	Why are they drawn towards, let's just say, attacking religion?
	Why are they drawn towards attacking religion?
	You've read Untruth.
	You know that most people don't come up with these abstract ideals.
	What they do is they bounce off emotional trauma and call it some sort of philosophy.
	So why are they attacking religion from their own personal lives?
	I'm not really sure, to be honest with you.
	I'm not really sure.
	Of course you are.
	I mean, come on.
	Come on.
	Of course you are.
	I don't know.
	Were they raised by religious people?
	Look at your own experience.
	Well, not also.
	I suppose.
	Yeah, yeah, actually.
	No, that's fair enough.
	I suppose they relate.
	You told me you live in the Bible Belt of Australia and you're wondering why people are angry at religion.
	That's me.
	That's me.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I'm sorry, Tasmania is not in...
	I only know Tasmania from the Whirly Devil in Looney Tunes cartoons, so I don't actually know the geography of it.
	It's a little island, right?
	Yeah, it's a little island.
	That's cool.
	So why are people angry at religion?
	Yeah, because I raised in religious families, I guess.
	I suppose that makes sense.
	Because religion did them a lot of damage.
	Let me ask you this.
	Do you believe in Zeus?
	Oh, of course.
	Nah, yeah, yeah.
	Okay, you don't believe in Zeus.
	Are you angry at the ancient Greek religions?
	Well, no.
	I mean, just that fucking Zeus, man.
	I'd like to just punch him in his big duck dynasty beard.
	Oh my god.
	Are you kidding me?
	That guy makes me so angry.
	It just...
	And Hera, don't get me started on that, bitch.
	My god, what a monstrous group of...
	I mean, do you write blog posts that are angry at the ancient Greek religions?
	Those rat bastards.
	I mean, fornicating in the skies, having a big party up on Mount Olympus, doing all kinds of ungodly things, despite the fact that they're gods?
	Those bastards!
	I can't even imagine how you'd sustain some sort of rant about that, but are you angry at a religion that has never affected you negatively?
	Of course not.
	So what they're saying is, this religion has affected me negatively, and I'm pissed off about it.
	You know, I get this comment all the time, you know, what does it bother me?
	What does it matter if somebody's religious?
	They're not doing me any harm.
	Well, if they are religious, and let's just say they're Christian religious, I mean, I know Christian is a very broad term, but if they're Christian religious, if they have children, then they raise their children with irrationality and then turn them loose in society.
	It's like, well, what does it matter if a guy down the street tortures a dog and then has that dog roam around the neighborhood where my children are playing?
	What does it matter?
	Well, it matters because the dog's out of the house.
	The dog is in the neighborhood, right?
	So if you're going to raise your kids with like irrational superstition and fear of punishment and if you don't spare the rod and spoil the child and if you hit your children because of this interpretation of the biblical commandment and if you bully them and you threaten them with hell and tell them that demons are watching them and that they They can't ever touch their naughty bits with anything other than a cattle prod.
	Oh, actually, that might be good.
	Anyway, but the point is that if these people then come out into society, from a philosophical standpoint, they're feral.
	They can't think they're traumatized, they're beaten, their brains are like misfiring on all cylinders.
	It matters.
	I say, well, what if they don't have children?
	Well, very few religious people don't have children.
	Because that's one of the, you know, that's one of the commandments.
	Go forth and multiply, said Noah.
	And then the snake said, we can't, we're adders.
	Anyway, but, sorry, sorry, sorry.
	You know, what I do is with my jokes, let me tell you my whole philosophy of humor.
	I am continually an empiricist, and I want to test if there's God.
	Now, if there is a God, he's going to have a perfect sense of humor, and he is a vengeful God.
	So I make jokes to find out if there is a God, because I'm telling you, If there is a God, he's got a good sense of humor, and he's vengeful, I should be hit with lightning about 22 times a second.
	So this is my continual test as to whether there is a God or not.
	If he is a funny God, And if he is a vengeful god.
	If he's funny but not vengeful, then I don't care.
	I assume heaven's going to be one big stand-up comedy.
	If he's not funny and not vengeful, who cares?
	If he is vengeful but not funny, I don't want to go to heaven, because it ain't going to be funny, but it sure is going to be scary.
	So this is just a continual theological task that I perform, much to the detriment of my listening audience, and my friends, and my family.
	And my daughter, who even now rolls her eyes and knows when daddy's made a bad joke because his mouth is moving.
	Anyway, so yes, it matters.
	It matters what people believe.
	Let's say that people are religious and they don't have children.
	Well, I assume they live in a neighborhood somewhere, and then your kids are out there playing, and if they are authentically and genuinely religious, then they want to save the souls of godless children and bring them to Jesus.
	So they're going to be pressing pamphlets into your kids' hands.
	They're going to tell them about Jesus.
	They're going to this, that, and the other, right?
	It creates some kind of awkward conversations for parents.
	I mean, I know people whose kids are going to school, and it's really tough, because at school there are a lot of people who are Christians, and what do they do?
	What do these kids do when they go there?
	Everybody's talking about Jesus and God and church, and did you go to church, and what do you think of this Bible verse, and what do you think of that Bible verse?
	It's really tough for kids when there's a lot of religious people around, and they are not religious.
	And so, yeah, It matters.
	Not to mention the fact that, you know, certainly in the U.S., I don't know how it is in Tasmania, but after the 1960s, with the rise of heavily politically involved and motivated Christianity, the rise of the moral majority, and, you know, there was this kind of covenant between non-believers and believers, which is we don't bring our belief, or any beliefs around theology or atheism, we don't bring it to the government.
	And the Christians, I don't know who fired the first shot, but it probably was a Christian response to the growing secularism of the 1960s, but the Christians moved heavily into government and began to try and influence, and with a great deal of success, influence government policy regarding religion, and so did the atheists.
	So, yes, it matters because there's a state as well, and when you have a state and you have ideologies vying to control the state, I'm afraid it does matter.
	So, I don't think that it's fair to say, well, he just has his own private beliefs and And therefore, it doesn't matter.
	There is no way that religious beliefs remain private.
	You instruct your children, they go into the world.
	You interact in the world.
	You interact with other children in the world.
	You vote.
	You support political candidates.
	You donate to particular political causes.
	You donate to charities which further proselytize other people.
	You may donate to the Salvation Army, which, I mean, I saw once a very creepy ritual in the Salvation Army where they held up a newborn and dedicated him to God and dedicated his life To God.
	I mean, it was like half Aztec ritual, half freaky cartoon from hell.
	And so it matters that poor baby is going to grow up in a devote yourself to Jesus.
	We sold you off to God for the sake of a coffee and a donut at an auction at the beginning of your life.
	So it does matter.
	It does matter what people believe.
	Otherwise, we have to say that people's beliefs have no effect on their actions whatsoever, which is usually not the case.
	If people's beliefs Had no effect on their actions.
	They would never bother to propagandize anyone.
	But people's beliefs have a huge impact on their actions, and religious people know this very well, which is why they indoctrinate their children into religion, because they know that that's going to change how their children behave, and what they spend their money on, and how they vote, and what they have allegiance to, and how they think, or rather don't think.
	So propaganda is entirely used because people's beliefs drive their actions in very fundamental ways.
	So yes, I think it matters.
	Now, I mean, after we put the last rational stake through the heart of this ancient ghost, sure, then we can be indifferent to it.
	And we can say, well, yeah, they had some crazy religions in ancient Rome and ancient Greece, but they don't really bother me.
	Why?
	Why?
	Because people don't vote according to what Jupiter tells them to.
	I guess a few people with the planet, but they're kind of nutty.
	So yeah, it matters.
	It matters.
	My daughter is not going to...
	People aren't going to be saying, come to Saturn.
	Come and worship at the altar today.
	Pluto, God of the Underworld, or Disney, I can't remember, but the reality is it does matter because it's a heavily influential force within society and it is anti-rationality.
	And we know that the world can only be saved through reason and those forces which inject anti-rationality into the mix are dragging us back!
	Into the Stone Age, into the Middle Ages.
	This is, you know, it is a fight right now.
	And after you win the fight, and a generation or two later, you know, you don't see a lot of American kids saying, listen, I really want to go storm Pacific Islands and fight imaginary Japanese, because that war's over, and we can all relax about it.
	But when it's going on, of course, you are quite energetic about it.
	Sorry for the rant, but I hope that makes some sense.
	That's okay.
	I guess, I suppose what would be...
	What do you think could be a good way to try and rehabilitate some of these people?
	Or is this going to be a generational thing?
	I just gave you a speech on how there's a battle, and you're saying, yes, okay, I understand that there's a battle, and maybe I agree with that, but I still need to fix these people.
	Yeah, but...
	Look, you don't fix people.
	Listen, you don't fix people.
	Let me give you another little speech here.
	I suppose it sounds like you're saying the battle's too big to really fight.
	Look, look.
	If you're a doctor and someone comes in unconscious from a gunshot wound, then you operate on the assumption that they want the bullet taken out.
	It's not some memento that they want stuck in their femur forever or something like that.
	And so when it comes to fixing someone who is bullet-ridden and unconscious, you just go in and do it.
	But that is the complete opposite of how things work with the sovereign human consciousness.
	You can't fix people.
	You can't go in and change their minds.
	You can't say, well, what weird alchemy, what words, what books, what podcasts, what mystery ritual can I perform that is going to wake people up?
	That's not how the mind works.
	We cannot go in and physically move the levers of other people's brains.
	We can't do it.
	We cannot do it.
	We have to be You know, prostitutes in fishnet stockings swinging our little purses on a rainy street hoping someone's going to stop.
	We have to make ourselves attractive.
	We have to be enticing.
	We have to be of value to people in order to change their minds.
	It is never a push economy when it comes to changing people's minds.
	It is a pull economy.
	People have to want to come to us.
	People have to want to come to reason.
	That's really good.
	I like that.
	Religious people understand this very well.
	What do religions first and foremost do?
	They control the fertile women.
	They proselytize women a lot more than men.
	They let men roam around a lot more because they know for a fact that men's sex drive and desire to procreate are going to bring them back to where the fertile women are, which tends to be where the church is.
	So what do religions have to sell you?
	Well, access to eggs and vagina.
	Which sounds like the worst breakfast special in the world.
	Or maybe the best.
	I don't know.
	Depends whether it comes with the requisite honey-dripped sauce or some sort of maple syrup.
	Okay, just give me three minutes.
	I'll continue the show in just a moment.
	Oh, actually, who am I kidding?
	Two.
	Now, one.
	Oh, actually...
	But you have to be enticing.
	And people are not...
	You can't approach people like they're broken and need to be fixed.
	That's immediately insulting.
	I mean, imagine going up to a woman and saying, listen, honey, right now you're totally ugly, but I will date you if you are willing to pay for a makeover.
	What do you think is going to happen?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	I see where you're coming from.
	Slap in the face.
	Slap in the face.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	So if you go to people with the understanding that they're broken or with the idea that they're broken, with the idea that there's something fundamentally wrong with them that needs to be fixed, We used to drive people away in droves, right?
	I mean, it's like the anti-axe or something like that.
	Like, if I rub some squirrel shit and roadkill on my armpits, jog in place for 20 minutes, then go up and try and give people hugs, I'm sure that's going to work well.
	No, right?
	You'd be kind of repulsive, right?
	And so, you know, it's like, I guess, going to a democratic convention in a Obama rodeo clown mosque.
	Things won't go very well from there, right?
	So...
	So, the first thing to do is, if you want to change someone's mind, you first of all have to understand why they're thinking what they're thinking.
	Right?
	I mean, it's basic sales.
	You have to understand your customer.
	You have to understand what motivates them, what drives them.
	You know, if a guy comes into your car showroom with seven kids, you don't steer him towards the sports car.
	Obviously, right?
	He's going to need some big-ass family wagon of some kind, right?
	And so, you know, whereas if a young 20-year-old guy comes in with his hairy chest, shirt open to the waist, tight pants or something like that, you don't steer him towards a minivan.
	I guess unless it comes with disco lights, wall lubrication and a mattress in the back.
	In which case, listen, contact me, I've got something to sell from when I was single.
	But you have to approach people with curiosity.
	Rather than jumping to conclusions as to why people are angry at religion, Just say, you know, I'm getting a lot of anger towards religion.
	I'm not disagreeing with you.
	I just want to make sure I really understand where it's coming from.
	Where do you think it's coming from?
	The only way that people will change their minds in any permanent and positive way is through self-knowledge.
	You know, we attempt to work these levers, like just get to change people's conclusions.
	But you know what that's like?
	That's like trying to turn a ship by pushing at the wake.
	It's never going to work.
	You know, it's like saying, well, if we fly through that contrail of the airplane, that airplane is going to change position.
	No.
	A lot of what people do is an effect of their childhood experiences.
	And if you can get them to make that connection, you give them power over a steering wheel they never even knew they had.
	And so curiosity and patience and to some degree kindness, but also firmness.
	But this philosophy is, I mean, we've lost this.
	This philosophy has become about academia.
	And academia is a fucking horrible push economy.
	Because professors can inflict whatever shit they want on you because they grade you and they give you your degree or not.
	And as I mentioned in the show, I just did a listener call.
	I'm reading this book by Ben Shapiro on propaganda in higher education.
	And of course, I experienced that.
	There weren't a whole lot of capitalists in graduate school educational positions in Socialists Canada.
	So, philosophy or the communication of ideas has gone to academia, and academia is a fascist-controlled propaganda mill, which statistically brings in people middle of the road and churns out Marxists and socialists.
	That's what it's for.
	That's what it does.
	It is one of the unholy tripods that props up the left wing in the West, right?
	I mean, the first is...
	The media.
	The second is donations from left-wing organizations or organizations interested in government control, which are generally unions, mostly public sector, to some degree private sector, and universities.
	Media, campaign contributions from leftist groups, and academia.
	This is what ideas have become.
	So we have this idea that ideas can be inflicted.
	Philosophy never came from academia.
	Philosophy, in its origins, was incredibly opposed It was a street-thug battle against the semi-fascistic sophists who controlled the educational system.
	And so the Socratic approach, which is really the foundation of Western philosophy, or I would argue philosophy as a whole, was all around curiosity.
	Let's pretend I don't have any answers.
	All I have is an endless series of questions.
	Oh, if that's the case, then what about this?
	Or if that's the case, well, what about this?
	Just a Socratic question.
	Oh, you know what justice is?
	Well, you define justice as this.
	Well, if that's the case, then this, which is clearly unjust, would be under your definition defined as justice.
	So let's keep asking questions, asking questions, asking questions.
	I mean, I don't know if you've ever gone to college, but Jesus Christ, on a stick.
	Did you ever get a professor asking you questions?
	Not anything useful anyway.
	Most of the time when I veered off track or tried to formulate my own opinions, I was sort of shut down, even towards the end of my degree.
	The professors, if they were following what philosophy actually is, would be asking you questions rather than giving you answers or asking you rhetorical questions, which they're designed to win at, while forever holding.
	They hold hundreds of thousands of dollars of yours hostage.
	It is a shakedown.
	Because if you go to school and you don't get your degree, you spend three years, that has cost you probably a quarter of a million dollars in three years of your life.
	I mean, you get, that's a jail sentence and a fine if you don't get that degree.
	And so this is an entirely unequal, anti-philosophical, anti-philosophical milieu.
	And so, yeah, they have great power over you.
	They have the power to Of course, you two end up wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of your life and have to explain for the rest of your life why you only got three years of a degree or why you graduated with a D or whatever it is, or didn't graduate.
	And this is the exact opposite.
	That kind of power is the exact opposite of what a teacher should be doing.
	A teacher should be curious, should be stimulating through your thoughts, should be teaching you methodologies rather than conclusions, and should never, ever be indoctrinating you.
	I'm always very clear when I'm giving my opinions as opposed to when I'm giving facts.
	I'm always trying to be hyper-modest about, you know, I'm not an expert.
	I don't know anything about this.
	I don't know much about that.
	I can give you my opinion, but this is not the same as an argument.
	This is not reasoned through.
	Right?
	Because I want people to be very clear that a lot of what I do may be to stimulate people's thought, but it is not to give them answers.
	In academia, so you went through academia, so you're basically thinking, okay, well I have good ideas, and so basically how can I be a professor to other people?
	But you can't be because you're not holding them hostage.
	You're not holding their time and money hostage.
	You don't have the power to give them a passing or failing grade.
	So they don't have to obey you.
	And because you've got the academic model of instruction, Your first impulse is kind of fascistic, and I don't mean that you're a fascist or anything like that, but it's like, well, how can I change people's minds?
	How can I make them change their minds?
	How can I change them?
	But that is a fascistic, top-down, central planning, control approach that comes directly out of academia, and therefore is the complete opposite of what philosophy is, which is about being curious and stimulating thought in other people, giving them some doubts and some questions and some methodologies to enable them to pursue critical thinking even when you're not around.
	But, you know, let's say you have the power to change someone's mind, some other asshole is going to come by tomorrow and change it back.
	Right?
	I mean, you've got to make people stronger than that.
	Anyway, sorry for the rant, but I hope that makes some sense.
	No, no, no.
	No, it's fine.
	You've actually been quite helpful because I think this is the sort of, I guess, eye-opening experience that I was looking for by calling in today.
	So you've been very helpful.
	So thank you very much.
	And I'm sorry that I talk about stimulating people's thought and then go on these five-minute rants without asking you any questions, but let me ask you, I mean, is this going to be something that you can use moving forward?
	That's kind of important to me.
	Yeah, yeah, definitely.
	Oh, I was just so blind to this until you mentioned it, as soon as you mentioned You know, that you can't go about this by trying to fix people and really pointing out the potential origins of this sort of approach that I've been taking.
	It makes perfect sense to be completely honest with you.
	So yeah, I guess I have to go back to the drawing board and maybe just use some more of that curiosity that you talked about a lot actually on Truth.
	So yeah, thank you very much.
	I really appreciate it.
	First question to changing people's minds.
	How was your childhood?
	Oh, I've noticed you do a lot of that, actually.
	How was your childhood?
	And why?
	Why do I ask that?
	Because I actually am interested in facts.
	I'm interested in evidence.
	And the facts and the evidence are incontrovertible.
	That almost everyone's thinking is an ex post facto justification to avoid the trauma of childhood.
	And so many modern adult childhoods are traumatic.
	I mean, statistically...
	Childhood is getting worse and you can't understand what people think until you understand why they think it.
	Why does somebody become a leftist versus a rightist?
	Why did they become conservative versus liberal?
	Why did they become democrat versus republican?
	It's not because people have an unbiased view of the facts.
	You know, the very diversity of human thought when it comes to philosophy and religion and politics It's a sure indication that nothing empirical or fact-based is going on at all.
	I mean, try and find a biologist who doesn't accept evolution.
	You'll find a few, but I mean, try and find a physicist who does not accept Newton.
	Try and find a physicist who doesn't accept Einstein.
	Because it's fact-based and empiricism-based, all reasonable people come to pretty much the same conclusion, right?
	Whereas whenever you look at a field where there is a wild diversity of opinion, each of which claims to be rational and empirical, you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are dealing with the effects of childhood trauma.
	Because nobody's starting from a blank page, looking at all the facts and evidence and coming to...
	If they were, then the conclusion would be almost unanimous, as it is in science, as it is in medicine.
	There's no medical doctor that I know of who doesn't believe that antibiotics...
	I mean, they may say it's prescribed too much or too little or whatever, but I mean, of course, the overprescription of antibiotics comes out of the fact that we have a daycare system which puts all these germ-ridden disease-ridden children together in a small room and then wonders why we have to overprescribe antibiotics!
	But, you know, there's no person who's a doctor who doesn't believe that the blood circulates around the body.
	Because it does.
	So whenever you look in a field where there's wild divergence of opinion, each of which is claiming to be absolute facts, all you're doing is looking at the broken glass, shattered reflection of wrecked childhoods.
	So if you can't deal with the childhood, you can't change people's minds because that's where it's coming from.
	Awesome.
	Keep me posted.
	I hope it's...
	And I hope that as now a strong atheist, you will be referred to as the Tasmanian Devil.
	I feel that that is necessary.
	And what I want to see is photographs of you, or in fact movies, of you spinning your way through trees and chasing any desert birds.
	Oh no, that's Wile E. Coyote.
	Anyway, I'm really sorry because of course you've probably heard Tasmanian jokes your whole life.
	The only thing that's worse from being from Tasmania is being from Transylvania.
	And that's no good.
	That's no good.
	So, you're from Transylvania.
	It's late at night.
	You're not sleeping, are you?
	Anyway.
	So, have yourself a great day.
	Thanks so much for calling in and best of luck opening people's minds.
	I'm sure you'll do a great job.
	All right.
	Thank you very much.
	Thank you so much.
	Thanks, Mom.
	See?
	No lightning strikes yet.
	There is no God.
	Or he ain't funny.
	Or he ain't vengeful.
	All right, Alec, you're up next.
	Yeah, Mike's like, I wish I could mute this bastard's button.
	I know when the jokes are coming.
	I know when the jokes are coming.
	Please let me save him from himself.
	Actually, I was chatting.
	Mike's up here for the weekend.
	I was chatting with him yesterday, and I made some godforsaken joke outside under a clear sky, which I thought would be a pretty good opportunity to be struck down.
	And I said, you know, I've got to get a little app with a rimshot, you know, ba-doom-ch.
	And Mike said, actually, it should come with a sad tuba noise.
	Wah, wah, wah.
	And then followed by some sort of zombie groaning undead thing.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	Next caller.
	Go ahead.
	Hello.
	Can you hear me?
	I can.
	Hi.
	Hello.
	I can hear you.
	I can hear you running.
	Yes.
	Ah, great.
	Okay.
	Good.
	Thanks.
	So, yeah.
	Hello, everyone.
	Hello, Steven.
	Also, hello, Chris, aka Mr.
	Spools, who's Yeah I have been on your show a year ago and well actually let me first say I'm from Germany and I've been brought up by an English mother so hence my accent just for anyone who's curious.
	Whereas I was English brought up by a German mother.
	English mother, German father.
	So hopefully we fit together well.
	Go ahead.
	And yeah, I called in the show because I think you even argued on RT Media that day that we need to quote you wealth, wealth, wealth to protect the environment.
	And in that show I brought up, it's supposed to be a paper, it's called the Jeeveson's Paradigm.
	And I would like to share it with you guys.
	Let me first post it here in the chat so everyone knows what I'm talking about, and let me quickly just quote the abstract.
	The Givens paradox is based on the observation that an improvement in the efficiency with which a natural resource is used is often associated with an increase in the consumption of that resource.
	Similarly, the paperless office paradox is based on the observation that the development of a substitute for a natural resource is not always associated with a decline in the consumption of that resource, and in fact may occasionally lead to an increase in the consumption of that resource.
	These two paradoxes call into question whether technological advances alone will necessarily lead to the conservation of natural resources.
	I don't know if you remember, we also talked in that show about the Kindle and if the Kindle actually would reduce printing and books and destroy forests entirely over the world.
	I was really happy that I found this paper because it actually makes reference not directly to Kindles but to electronics and emails and all that stuff and shows pretty clearly more or less that the paperless office is a myth.
	No, it's not a myth.
	Sorry to interrupt you.
	What you have to remember, I really invite you to focus on this and I'm not going to quibble with the paper, let's say that it's all true.
	I've worked in business for many years.
	Let me finish.
	I've worked in business for many years.
	Why do businesses need hard copies and files of everything?
	Why do they need that?
	The reason they need that is because they're afraid of being audited.
	The reason they need that is because we live in a government-controlled tax system, we live in a government-controlled legal system, and so everybody wants a hard copy of everything, or at least certain aspects of people do.
	So a resource, definitely, if there is a more efficient use of resource, the use of that resource will tend to increase.
	I understand that.
	If there was some way that we could produce oil at a quarter of the cost, Then people would probably drive more or whatever.
	I mean, yeah, I certainly accept and understand all of that.
	But if you can provide to me an example of how resource usage is not affected by the state, I would be fascinated.
	Let me just give you a couple off the top of my head.
	Here in Canada, electricity usage is highly subsidized.
	Which means, of course, when you subsidize something, you get more consumption of it.
	So resource use is highly subsidized.
	Roads are highly subsidized for just about everyone.
	Therefore, people use roads a lot more than if they had to pay for what they drove on, right?
	You get your car.
	Now, of course, people do have to pay for gas, and they pay a tax on the gas, which goes towards the roads.
	But that's quite different from paying based upon usage and congestion and so on for using roads in particular.
	And I know this because, you know, I have the choice between a free, quote, free road and a tall road not too far from where I live.
	And I think, well, if I've got to drive so many kilometers, it costs me this much and it can curb my usage.
	For certain industries, the government provides subsidized power.
	Also, in Canada, it is not legal, or at least it wasn't some years ago, it is not legal to generate your own power.
	So they're called nugs, non-utility generators.
	And what they are is if you have a big factory, obviously you would much rather generate the power right next to your factory or on-site to your factory so that you don't have the energy loss associated with shooting it across 100 miles of cable.
	And it's illegal.
	At least it was some time back.
	It may have changed, but it's illegal.
	And therefore, because the government has a monopoly and wants to get the income, they will forbid...
	People from generating their own power, and that, of course, causes untold amounts of environmental destruction and power wastage, because you've got all these giant cables everywhere, all over the place.
	So I would sort of...
	Go ahead.
	No, go ahead.
	No, so you're associating that...
	I mean, you say that it's mainly a government regulation issue, that we have this paradox.
	I haven't read the paper, but if you look at how we use resources in the world, it is incredibly dictated by government.
	And I'm just talking about the obvious ones and the big ones.
	So Jeff Tucker's got a great article about Toilets that used to flush well that now flush so weakly that if you've had any kind of decent dump, you have to have two flushes at least to make it work.
	And then you've got to scrub whatever crap remains on the rim and then flush again so that you don't gross out whoever's coming down next.
	So there's an example where it's like, hey, look, we're saving water.
	It used to flush X gallons.
	Now it flushes only half.
	But you end up having to use like three times for a lot of what it is that you're doing just because it doesn't work.
	Or, you know, we've changed the showers so that they now basically are like doggy drool from that dog in Rio to try and get a shower.
	Whereas it used to be, I mean, man, you could give yourself a tattoo with those laser beams that came out from the water pressure that you used to get when I was a kid.
	And so what happens is now you have to have longer showers to get clean.
	So, again, you sort of see this everywhere.
	You see this in the specifications for laundry, for detergent, for what you can do in your dishwasher and so on.
	There's so much control over resources, and I don't know that there's any particular studies that have shown that this causes a net reduction in resource consumption.
	In fact, it seems that as the government gets more involved, which is kind of what you'd expect, resource consumption tends to increase.
	And, of course, resources get systematically and regularly destroyed By the government, right?
	The cod fishery on the east coast, a 400-year resource destroyed in about 10 years by government increasing quotas to buy votes.
	Lumber out on the west coast of Canada is regularly the entire forests are destroyed because the government will only sell logging rights, not land rights.
	And so the logging companies have zero incentive to replant.
	That's sort of taken over by the government, which does it in its usual crappy way.
	Fish stocks are unowned.
	Oceans and rivers are unowned.
	Lakes are unowned.
	And therefore, there's no incentive to maintain the value of these things.
	The government in America owns one-third of America.
	The federal government owns one-third of America.
	And therefore, the incentive to keep it sort of clean and productive and all of that is severely diminished.
	And I'm no expert on it.
	It's just off the top of my head.
	So I have no doubt that...
	There is, you know, resource consumption is going up, but I also have no doubt that a lot of that is driven by government subsidies and controls.
	Yeah, I think we all can agree on that, of course, yeah.
	So, your opinion a year ago Do you still have that?
	How do I have to understand it when you say we need wealth to protect the environment?
	I mean, do you talk out of a perspective when we live in a hypothetical, utopian, anarchic world?
	Or do you mean that still in current circumstances?
	Because, I mean, I think it's very clear that...
	Well, it doesn't matter.
	It doesn't matter what the case is.
	Under current circumstances, we will not get wealth.
	Under current circumstances, we will not achieve wealth.
	I mean, middle-class income has been stagnant or declining for 40 years now, and that doesn't even count the massive unfunded liabilities and national debts that occur, which means that we have had a catastrophic drop in income.
	And when people don't have any money, I mean, just tiny examples of whatever.
	But we don't have to worry about whether we're going to have any wealth, right?
	Government regulations in the U.S. had maintained themselves at the levels of 1948, which when it wasn't exactly a moonscape of smoking silkwood destruction in the U.S., then the U.S. would have a GDP of over $53 trillion rather than the $15 trillion and change that it has right now.
	In other words, it would be about three and a half times wealthier than it is now.
	Now, the average income in the U.S. is like $30,000 to $35,000.
	So if people had $175,000, and this is just regulations, doesn't count taxation or debt or the military-industrial complex or any of the other wealth-killing things, the crappy education that people started receiving in the 60s when it became functionally impossible to fire teachers and all that sort of stuff.
	So if people had an average income of $150,000 to $175,000, there's no doubt that they'd be buying more stuff.
	I mean, that's what you do with that kind of income.
	But there's also no doubt that people would have far more money to invest in things that kept the environment clean, in scrubbers, in filters, in all this various stuff.
	So with that amount of wealth, I mean, all you have to look at, was there a lot of environmental pollution concerns in the Middle Ages?
	No.
	You know, the only environmental pollution concern that people basically had were crows eating their seed crop, causing them to You know, eat rats and babies over the winter, which actually happened.
	There was a lot of whaling going on at those times.
	The main resource of oil was from whales and from animals from the oceans.
	Surprise, surprise!
	But the free market at least solved that.
	The supposed evil robber barons of the 19th century gave people a wonderful thing called kerosene, followed by electricity, followed by Thomas Edison's 190th attempt at creating an incandescent light bulb, which worked.
	So what that means is that people used to light their homes with whale oil, of course.
	And then they found kerosene and then lights, and so people stopped hunting whales for that.
	But of course, the whale...
	Industry is entirely controlled by governments, so there's no private ownership of oceans or whale stocks or anything like that.
	And so you get the usual crap.
	And of course there's a lot of superstition that drives this kind of stuff, like the Chinese superstitions about tiger balls giving you fertility.
	Trust me, I've tried rubbing them on my scalp, but it doesn't work.
	I mean, it's fun.
	Don't get me wrong.
	But I also found very, very important, detach them from the tiger first.
	Very essential to this particular approach.
	Otherwise, well, you get cuddled in very aggressive ways, which I actually quite like too.
	So anyway, I mean, a lot of superstition and bad science and homeopathy and crap like that drives all of this kind of nonsense.
	But, you know, like a million sharks are killed every year.
	Why?
	Well, mostly for like No, okay.
	I think with extra wealth we would have the resources.
	We know for a fact, of course, that environmentalism came about after societies got wealthier, and we know that more primitive societies or poorer societies have almost no interest in environmental.
	So we know that concern about cleanliness of the environment is a feature of a wealthy society, and I see no reason to believe that that would not be an increasing feature or interest of an increasingly wealthy society.
	Yeah, what we see is mainly that someone coined it to bright green and light green movements, and what you would say before industrialization came about would be the dark green movements, which basically say that civilization, specifically industrialized civilization, It's the root of all evil.
	And I mean, this is kind of the line which is followed, I think, and which has to be considered.
	Especially, I mean, here in Germany, it's crazy.
	They are extremely heavily subsidizing clean energy, so-called.
	Yeah.
	Solar energy and wind energy and everything, but it's enormous.
	It's really a crazy and scary propaganda machine when you actually see that everything is still based on fossil fuels.
	You need the infrastructure.
	Based on fossil fuels and it's actually quite resource intensive just to build up all these, so to speak, clean energies.
	Everything that wastes money is bad for the environment.
	Because money is a representative of energy and resources.
	That's what money is.
	Money is a representative of energy and resources.
	And so everything which wastes money, which the government is spectacularly good at, everything which wastes money is incredibly destructive for the environment.
	How do we know that recycling costs more energy and resources than it saves?
	Because nobody pays you for your garbage.
	Because the government has to come and pick it up using heavy subsidies.
	I mean, that's how you know for a fact.
	How do you know that solar energy costs and wastes more resources than it provides?
	Because it's not cost-efficient.
	Cost-efficient tells you whether you are using fewer resources or more resources.
	And when you're using more resources than you're saving, it's called a loss.
	And when you're using less resources than you're saving, then it's called a profit.
	And the price system and the profit system immediately and very powerfully directs people towards the most energy-efficient ways and resource-efficient ways of getting things done.
	And of course, you know, the German government may rail against Fossil-based energy systems, but of course the reality is that the roads are subsidized.
	The roads are basically free.
	And it's like, hey, here's free roads to drive on.
	Wow, I can't believe that people are still using a lot of fossil fuels.
	I mean, it's ridiculous.
	It's all just populist nonsense designed to gain votes.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	So money is a representative of environmental destruction.
	Well, I would say that profit and loss are very important metrics when it comes to figuring out whether resources are being used efficiently or not.
	So, I mean, when you have a huge drop in the price of housing, as you had recently, well, I guess not that recently now, four or five years ago in America, when you have a huge drop in the price of housing, what does that tell you?
	It tells you that way too many houses have been built relative to sustainable demand.
	Way too many houses.
	Ten percent Of the entire stock of American houses are currently unoccupied.
	These don't even count the ones where people can't sustain the mortgage, where people are in their houses, haven't paid their mortgage, but have yet to be evicted, which in some states is a multi-year process.
	So, American housing, given that there's been a 30 to 40 percent drop, we can assume that American housing, in certain areas at least, has been overbuilt by 30 to 40 percent.
	Can you Imagine or calculate how much environmental damage and how much environmental and energy use was wasted in the creation of those houses which are now not only unoccupied but decaying because they're not being maintained and people are going in and stealing the copper pipes and the pipes are bursting in winter and the windows are being broken and so this multi-hundred billion
	dollar waste Of incredibly precious resources.
	I mean, the wood, the metal, the bricks, the roofing, the time, the labor.
	I mean, cutting off the human waste from the people building that stuff.
	I mean, the amount of waste of resources just in the housing sector, just in the United States, just over the past five years, is catastrophic.
	And the housing boom and bust, as I've argued before in this program, is almost entirely driven by the government.
	So here you have a massive waste of resources.
	Look at the amount of consumption that's driven by inflation.
	Why do people spend money now rather than later?
	Because later their money will be worth less.
	Why is inflation occurring?
	Because the government is printing too much money.
	All central banks around the government drive money printing counterfeiting in order to maintain political power because when people get more money they feel richer and when you artificially stimulate the economy people feel like they're doing better and therefore they will vote politicians back in And so the amount of consumption, the amount of waste of resources driven merely by monetary policy in the world is truly staggering.
	I don't know if you've ever seen or heard of these giant empty cities in China.
	They've built entire cities to stimulate, quote, productivity to To get votes, to get the allegiance of unions, or I guess not unions in China, but to get the allegiance of the construction industry and so on.
	They've built entire cities, which are like 98% unoccupied.
	You can see sort of the very sad 60 Minutes or John Stosser report on the empty malls in China, where you get like one customer who's lost every day in these horrible stores.
	There's this massive waste of resources.
	Why is that occurring?
	I mean, what capitalist will build a city in the middle of nowhere where nobody's going to come and live?
	Capitalists are not retarded that way.
	I mean, they may be retarded philosophically, but they're not retarded when it comes to profit and loss.
	Who is paying for these giant empty cities in the middle of nowhere?
	How much environmental destruction was wrought in the creation of these cities, which are now decaying?
	It's not like you lose a ball in the woods, you come back two weeks later and you can still use it.
	I mean, every year that somebody doesn't live in a house probably destroys its value 10 to 15 percent.
	And makes it that much less likely that people are going to want to move in.
	Like, they're trying to sell houses in Detroit.
	They'll give you money to move in.
	The government will pay you money to move in.
	People aren't taking them.
	There are houses in Detroit that cost $1 that have been on the market for a year and a half, and nobody will take them.
	And think of how many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars probably were wasted and consumed in the production of a house that has now rotted to the point where it's worth a dollar and nobody will buy it.
	It's not even worth a dollar because nothing's worth anything until the money actually changes hands.
	So, again, these are just some examples.
	I'm not even mentioning the amount of waste that governments produce.
	I mean, imagine the paper waste and the energy waste that the IRS department or the NSA department or the CIA or the FBI or all of that.
	I mean, how much paper and environmental waste do these horrible, unnecessary counterproductive departments consume?
	And the last thing I'll mention, which I won't even go into any detail on, because I've got lots of presentations on it, like Iraq, a decade of hell.
	Let's just talk about war.
	How much environmental destruction is wrought by the military-industrial complex, even when it's idle?
	I mean, the Iraqi war consumes as much oil in a day as the entire population of India, over a billion people.
	And, I mean, it has completely wrecked the ecosystem and environment of Iraq for literally the end, until the end of the world, because the depleted uranium shells that they've been firing have a half-life longer than the life of the planet.
	And so, I mean, this is why you've got so many cases of leukemia, particularly among children in Iraq, and their entire infrastructure and environment has been completely wrecked by this war.
	And so my concern is always that the environmental movement is a cover for increased control of the state.
	And my argument would be that if you started with a blank slate, if you started with clear thought and a dedication to empiricism, you would never suggest that the government should be used to solve environmental problems.
	The government...
	I mean, environmental problems are fundamentally driven by the problem of the commons, which is where unowned resources tend to get exploited by everyone.
	And the government is the ultimate unowned resource, which tends to get exploited by everyone at the expense of the environment.
	So the first thing you'd want to do is start assigning private property to everyone you could find and diminishing all unowned property in society.
	And that gives people sustainability as an economic driver.
	If somebody owns the forest and the land, they will replant.
	If they only get the timber rights, they'll clear-cut and bugger off.
	And governments want that because companies want to just clear-cut and bugger off.
	Because it's more profitable for them, so they'll love a government who does that for them.
	It's just the Mother Earth weeps into her navel when that kind of stuff occurs.
	So when I see environmentalists who have a clear understanding of property rights, of the role of state in creating waste in society, then I have a huge amount of respect for them.
	And there are a few of them out there.
	But when I see environmentalists who are just like, well, they're environmental problems, so we need to give a small minority of people more guns, more power, more violence, and that's going to solve everything, I know that basically they're just tools of the ruling class used to create fear to drive people more into the arms of the ever-growing army of fascists that control ever-increasing aspects of our lives.
	And so, environmentalism, yay!
	You know, environmentalism as a cover for increased fascistic statism?
	Well, fuck them and the horse they rode in on.
	Okay, um...
	It's sometimes difficult to follow you, but...
	Yeah, sorry.
	Sorry, because you dozed off, right?
	No, I certainly didn't.
	It's just sometimes...
	Yeah, well, so how can I understand it when you mean Wales protects environment?
	You talk about the wealth which is not related to any government regulation, right?
	Well, and I'll just finish with this point.
	Do we have another call?
	Yeah, we do.
	Okay, so let me finish with this point.
	Because the question is, what does wealth represent?
	Wealth represents an increasingly efficient use of resources.
	That's what wealth represents.
	An increasingly efficient use of resources.
	Therefore, when wealth is increasing, the efficient use of resources is increasing.
	Now, that doesn't mean that the overall use of resources is decreasing, but it means that each resource is being used more efficiently.
	I mean, so a very brief example is a guy in a factory.
	A guy in a factory who works eight hours a day, who doesn't have a machine, is going to produce 20 bucks worth of stuff.
	You give him a lathe or you put him on an assembly line, suddenly he's going to produce $200 worth of stuff.
	And that's going to be profitable even when you take into account the cost of creating the machine in the factory and so on, right?
	Which is why guys like to work in factories rather than their basements to make cars, you know, or whatever it is, right?
	So the eight hours and the calories that he's using to produce stuff, you get ten times more out of it when there's a factory rather than him just working in his basement.
	Plus, it is environmentally efficient to ship all of the parts to the factory and have them all built at once rather than ship all the parts to every various person who's going to build it and then ship the assembled thing back.
	Bringing everyone together to a hub where they can create something without having to ship everything all over the place is environmentally and economically efficient.
	So increased wealth means increased efficient use of resources.
	And when resources begin to be overused, you see a, quote, destruction of wealth, right?
	So if oil is suddenly five times the price, people are going to get a hell of a lot poorer.
	And what that means is that, I mean, oil would be, I mean, in a free market, oil would be reduced in price because it was, Getting hard to extract, because the amount of energy it would take to extract a barrel of oil would be significantly higher than it was in the past,
	which would signal that the resource was reaching the end of its lifespan, and therefore you'd have a soft landing where the price would increase over time, and that would make it more profitable to pursue alternatives, whether that would be orbiting space satellites gathering solar energy, or whether it would be going to mine asteroids or I guess there'd be no oil on the moon or Mars because they never had any dinosaurs.
	I'm just waiting for the emails of coming in and saying, have you not heard of the Martian dinosaurs?
	Here's some photos of shadows caught by the lunar lander or the Mars lander that indicate that there are Tyrannosaurus rexes eating the ghost of Ray Bradbury on Mars.
	Anyway, so increased wealth means increased use, efficient use of resources and people Somebody put this on the video I did with Redmond Weissenberger recently from Mises.ca about environmentalism.
	Everyone's an environmentalist.
	Nobody wants to live in garbage.
	Nobody wants to drink water that tastes like buffalo piss.
	Everybody's an environmentalist.
	We all like grass and pretty views and birds around and so on.
	Everyone's an environmentalist.
	When people have enough money to spend, they will make sure that they maintain the value of their land.
	When poverty increases, people's environmental instincts for protecting the environment decrease and the resources available to contain pollution decrease.
	Increased wealth is just increased efficient use of resources, and I think the best that we can hope for is that resources are used as efficiently as possible.
	That's the friendliest environmental thing that I can think of, while making the case for people not to be mindless consumerists.
	What I desperately want is for people who use resources to receive the full cost of those resources.
	That's what I want.
	Here's another example of ways in which oil is subsidized.
	I mean, the oil regimes which produce Oil, at low cost, produce it because they completely repress their employees and workers.
	I mean, do you think Saudi Arabia allows a lot of flourishing free market unions to form so that workers on the oil farms can increase their pay?
	No!
	Do they allow foreign workers to come in and compete with domestic workers to drive up the price of labor?
	No!
	One of the ways that oil is produced cheaply is like your Apple products.
	It's through the local repression of workers.
	That's entirely government driven.
	Every generation of iPods has more features and costs less money because the poor workers in China are paid like 12 cents an hour You get 12 years in jail for even trying to
	form a union in China.
	So I want people who consume oil, I want them to pay the full cost.
	So not only is the government repressing local workers, which artificially decreases the cost, but they have to have a lot of weapons in Saudi Arabia to suppress their own workers.
	Where do they get these weapons from?
	From the United States.
	Where does the United States get it from?
	By taxing their own citizens.
	And so people are not paying for the true cost of something like oil.
	I don't know if it'd be higher or lower in a free society, but it doesn't really matter right now.
	It's definitely lower than it would be if people had to pay the full cost of repressing local workers and keeping foreign competition out of their local labor pool.
	So it's just all very complex and horrible, but it's all, almost all of it to me gets traced back to people with guns who call themselves the state.
	Okay, so to bring my call in here to an end, I really wish and hope that the listeners and you also have a chance to read this document because I think it is very interesting.
	And I do agree with many things you say, and yeah, there would be just one closing thing which I would add, and that would be that I do have the general impression or feeling that there is still the notion that we as a human species are obliged or we have to manage or maintain or take care of The
	world and in any way, if you're completely Austrian-free economics or under a governmental regime or whatever, but there's always this notion that we have to take care of everything.
	And of course, that notion comes from religion.
	I mean, we have it in the Bible, right?
	That everything is below the human, the man, below man, actually.
	And that would be just my closing thought, that maybe that is also part of how we could achieve a more sustainable way besides of creating more wealth in whatever way.
	Yeah, I mean, look, I don't think that you're saying much other than having a wish list.
	You know, yes, it would be great if X, Y, and Z happens, but, you know, it'd be great if we could live to 200 years.
	Now, let me get back to my life, right?
	But I mean, I'll just give you one other example.
	Just look at a national debt.
	What is a national debt?
	A national debt is, like any debt, is a stimulation of consumption in the present at the expense of consumption in the future.
	I mean, that's all it is.
	If you borrow a hundred bucks to buy a pair of Nike shoes, then you are stimulating consumption and production in the here and now at the expense of consumption and production plus interest in the future, right?
	All national debts are the stimulation of consumption in the present at the expense of the future.
	And any environmentalist who is concerned about the overuse of the Earth's resources, who does not recognize the degree to which government, fiat currency, debts, bonds, whatever you name it, whatever the government is doing to stimulate economic activity in the here and now at the expense of the future, It's not an environmentalist, but a propagandist.
	Not understanding the degree to which government control of the money supply stimulates, artificially stimulates, production and consumption in the here and now.
	And almost all of it is a malinvestment.
	A malinvestment is a waste of environmental resources.
	Malinvestments occur in the private sector, but they occur pretty quickly because companies go out of business.
	And you may say, oh, I want to open a fish and chips shop In Morocco or something, and maybe they've got no tradition for it, they don't care about fish and chips, then it goes bust.
	Well, then you've malinvested your resources, but you pay personally.
	Only the government can produce generations-wide malinvestment of resources.
	And malinvestment of resources is another way of saying rape and pillage of the earth forever.
	The resources once used, you're not going to put a house back into the ground or something like that.
	You're not going to unburn a forest.
	It is a permanent waste of resources.
	And so environmentalists who don't have any clue about economics or fiat currency or national debts and the degree to which that is a true rape of the earth that occurs worldwide are simply propagandists who should shut up and learn some damn economics before they go spouting off about their care for the earth.
	If you want to care for the earth, you've got to learn.
	You know, you've got to learn.
	I view most environmentalists like all the people sending me, you know, snort ground up unicorn horns to cure your cancer bullshit.
	Shut up.
	Do some science.
	Do some science.
	If you're such a genius at curing cancer, get some investment.
	Do some double-blind experiments and save the goddamn world.
	I read it on a blog somewhere, so I'm going to send it to you.
	These are idiots.
	They clog up.
	They're like plaque in the arteries of the human condition.
	They just clog up the world, confusing everyone, causing people to die.
	I mean, people should not be giving out cancer advice unless they've really got proof in the pudding because people might listen to them and actually die.
	And environmentalists who really care about resources should learn some economics and particularly should learn some free market economics and should focus on the real problem, which is the artificial and unsustainable malinvestments created by government fiat currency, in particular government regulations, government control of the economy, government subsidization of various this, that and the other.
	And if they're not doing that, then they are very dangerous tools of the ruling classes who are going to get legislation passed, things like controlling Greenhouse gas emissions and so on that will literally cause the death of hundreds of millions of people, but they don't give a shit about it because it's all about preening themselves,
	patting themselves on the back for being such moral exemplars and such paragons of virtue that they don't actually want to bother themselves with learning about anything factual or anything real or anything that is empirically based or anything that is morally based.
	They just basically want to think of themselves as great guys no matter how many people get killed in the process.
	And, you know, like this guy quoted, global warming is real.
	And it's like, well, you know, I'm sorry, but there has been no global warming for 16 years.
	Its reality is open to question, because not one single model predicted a plateau in global warming for 16 straight years with no end in sight.
	And they've done every trick in the book to hide that warming, as has been revealed by a wide variety of scientists.
	Hey, it doesn't mean it's not true.
	It doesn't mean that it's not anthropogenic.
	Maybe it is real.
	Maybe it is anthropogenic.
	But boy, if you don't address the fact that there's been no global warming for 16 years, and you call anyone, you know, insane and crazy for having doubts about a 16-year plateau that was never predicted, well, then you're just a propagandist, and frankly, you're an intellectual asshole.
	So, thank you.
	Not you.
	Not you, kind listener.
	And I'm not putting you in this category.
	But I get very annoyed when Go ahead, Ryan.
	Stefan?
	Yes.
	Can you hear me?
	Yes.
	Look, he just wasted resources right there.
	I said yes.
	Oh, no.
	Let's jump right into it.
	Okay, so don't waste any more by talking about it.
	Go, go, go.
	We've got 12 minutes, 11.
	So, basically, I'm calling about my current situation.
	I basically jumped ship from the corporate world two years ago after being in it for about 10 years.
	And the reason I finally I just wanted to point out that you get the generic statement of the day.
	Which is, I've been making my way doing various things.
	You know, if that doesn't sound like somebody who's taken to a life of crime, you're either taken to a life of crime or you're in politics, but I repeat myself.
	But I love that.
	I've been making my way doing various things.
	Are those things well-greased goats?
	I don't know what the hell you're talking about, but go on.
	Out of the criminal element.
	A little bit of this, a little bit of that.
	Who wants to know?
	Yoga and health and nutrition and life coaching.
	But it's very different than what I was doing.
	The ladies in yoga class, I would definitely say, good on you, mate.
	I remember taking yoga and I was just like, I know I should be spiritually involved with my downward dog, but I'm thinking about Something to do with dogs, with some of the other ladies in the class.
	Because the other thing, too, is they surround you with mirrors.
	You can't not look at some naughty bit that is very shapely.
	And, of course, mostly it was my own.
	But, anyway, go on.
	Yeah.
	Yes, I've had two coffees.
	Who wants to say something about it?
	Go on.
	Yeah.
	So, the next thing I'm thinking about is, you know, trying to...
	Like, I have a lot of friends that are still in the quote-unquote fire...
	Industry, they're all stressed out, they're all hating life, and this, that, and the other.
	Fire, finance, insurance, real estate, basically, you know, all the corruption and politics that you've been talking about.
	Oh, so in the fire industry, I was thinking a little bit of this and that, mostly arson, because my friends are in the fire industry.
	So, sorry.
	I just wanted to double check, you know, exactly how many criminals were confessing on the show today.
	That would make two, but go ahead.
	So basically banking.
	Yep.
	Yeah, so I guess, to make a long story short, I'm sort of at a crossroads because, and this might dovetail a little bit with another caller, I think a couple calls back, with, you know, trying to help people see the nature of their cages.
	They're all just kind of stressed out.
	I feel like, you know, having gone through the whole dog and pony show, I've been there, done that, and I saw the nature of their cage, and I just kind of Got out of it.
	So I have all these friends that are sitting there in their stressful jobs and you know everything is kind of crumbling around them and they'll even admit to the fact and they kind of do see the nature of the cage but they just won't take the you know they just won't cut the rope they won't you know do what it takes to sort of free themselves so you know basically I have a constant struggle of how you know how much of a duty do I have to help Do I have people along that path?
	Or should I just not really care and just do my own thing and move to Asia or India and do yoga and something like that?
	Or do I have some sort of...
	Oh yeah, because you won't come across any irrational people in Asia or India.
	But how are you living?
	What are you living on?
	I'm just living on basic...
	I'm living on...
	I made some money...
	In banking.
	I mean, everyone made money in banking up until 2007.
	So I anticipated quitting.
	So wait, so you're living on savings?
	Savings, yeah.
	Dipping into 401k type money.
	And what are you going to do when that runs out?
	I mean, assume that's not going to be able.
	You can't live on that for the rest of your life.
	No, I mean, I want to get into health coaching, life coaching, and eventually maybe teaching yoga or something like that.
	But that's what I have a passion for.
	I also have a passion for philosophy, but there's not a lot of money in philosophy.
	I've never heard that.
	Not a lot of money in philosophy.
	Wait, let me write that down.
	Not a lot of money in philosophy.
	Now, listen, we've got to finish this because I haven't paid my electrical bills.
	No, I'm kidding.
	Okay, so you're willing to live off savings and to accept a significantly lower standard of living in the future to follow your passions, right?
	Exactly, yeah.
	And are you going to get married?
	Do you want to have kids?
	You sound like a youngish guy.
	I'd like to someday, but I'm not willing to take a different course career-wise, for instance, get back into banking so I can make a bunch of money and have a family.
	I'm sort of putting my career and my moral passions ahead of...
	I don't know about the health thing, but you're going to get paid nothing for teaching yoga, right?
	Thank you.
	Yeah, I realize that.
	The thing is, I have a pretty low overhead.
	It's crazy.
	I used to have a nice car.
	Well, I know you have a low overhead because you're a single guy.
	That's why I'm asking about the wife and kids thing, right?
	Right.
	Because when you have a wife and kids, you're not going to have low overhead, right?
	Well, right.
	But I think there's ways to do it so you have a lower overhead than your typical American family.
	Oh, I love it.
	American.
	Typical American.
	I just like the venom dripping off that sentence.
	I'm guessing you don't have a high view of the typical American family.
	But how are you going to keep your costs low?
	And what are your costs?
	Do you anticipate if you have, say, a stay-at-home wife and two kids?
	What are your costs?
	How are you going to keep your costs low?
	I'm just curious.
	I'm not saying you're wrong.
	I love talking about people's money.
	I do.
	I think money is fascinating.
	I really do.
	It's such a primal—people want to talk about sex.
	I want to talk about money with people.
	I want to know what all my friends make, what their budgets are, how much they spend, how they save.
	I'm fascinated by it because it's the one thing that we all have in common.
	Not all of us are having sex, but we're all eating and need shelter.
	I'm always curious.
	I'm just curious.
	What do you think you can get your costs down to and how?
	For instance, homeschooling, staying relatively healthy so you're not in the doctor every other day.
	Homeschooling will drive your costs up relative to two people working and putting your kids in a government school, right?
	Because you've got to pay the taxes either way.
	But what you're doing is taking the earning potential of one person and applying it to homeschooling while still paying the taxes for government schools, right?
	Yeah.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	So, I mean, yeah, basically, I think I maintained a pretty low overhead by not having a car.
	I live in the city, just use public transportation.
	I don't go out to eat a lot.
	I don't drink.
	I mean, all those things kind of add up.
	Those are just some simple examples of keeping costs down.
	I like to read.
	I just do simple things.
	I do yoga, which is pretty cheap.
	Essentially, the reason I do all that is because I want to Yeah, ultimately sort of take more of a principled approach to things because the 10 years I spent in banking were not a principled approach.
	I was just blinded by greed and some things that I thought that I wanted.
	But it turns out the things I thought that I wanted were part of my conditioned existence.
	No, and I get that.
	When I was younger and I'd hear that people said, well, we made money in banking, I thought that it was just like you made a profit.
	But actually, now that I understand banking, you are actually just making up money in banking.
	Like, I made money in banking.
	Yes, I was overnight with the photocopy.
	I cranked it all out.
	And look at that!
	I made some money!
	I mean, it may look like Monopoly money.
	It has Donald Duck instead of the Queen.
	But hey, it's money.
	Anyway, but I'm telling you, as someone who's made these kinds of transitions, you don't have a plan.
	I'm telling you this, if you want to have kids, having a little more money is not a bad thing.
	A lack of money is a lack of freedom in a lot of ways, and you don't have a plan yet.
	What I mean by that is, I was chatting with my yoga teacher back when I was single, in the usual pathetic, mewling way.
	Hey, let's just chat, because you're an interesting person.
	And she was telling me she teaches 18 classes a week.
	18 classes.
	She does like aerobics, she does yoga, I don't know, jumping jacks, shot put, I don't know what else she was teaching people, but she taught 18 and she was broke.
	She said, I've worked it out at an hourly rate.
	It's like four bucks an hour or something like that.
	I mean, it's a rough life to teach.
	Maybe, I guess Richard Simmons makes a little bit more, but he spends it all on body glitter and Liberace.
	So what I'm saying is that right now, I think it costs a quarter million dollars to bring a kid to adulthood.
	Now, of course you can bring that down.
	You can bring that down by half, or maybe you can bring that down by two thirds, but then you're still talking almost $100,000 per kid.
	And, you know, living in a city, yes, you can save some money on a car, but that's not economically astute.
	Of course you save money on a car, but you pay that extra money in housing.
	You know, you live in the country, you can save a lot of money on your housing, but then you have to have a car, right?
	There's no free lunch, right?
	It's not like in a city.
	It's exactly the same as living anywhere, except I don't have to have a car.
	No, because everybody's like, well, I can save money on a car, so I want to move to the city, which drives up the price of housing.
	Anyway, so I just want to...
	I mean, I would spreadsheet it if I were you.
	I mean, I'm just a really annoying one for that kind of stuff.
	Like, figure out your costs, figure out your expenses, figure out how much it's going to be to have kids, figure out what you and your wife are going to need to make and all that kind of stuff.
	And that would be my suggestion, that you're a little bit prior to a plan.
	And...
	You know that old thing, a failure to plan is planning for failure.
	I mean, so I would really focus on it.
	The thing is, like, I can't predict what the future, like how society, the means of society will take place.
	So, for instance, I'm big into Preventative care, like treating people in healthy ways before they go to the hospital as opposed to after they end up in the hospital.
	So, yeah, there's not a lot of money in that right now, but it doesn't escape the principle of the fact that it's a better approach to life because people avoid the hospital.
	Oh, come on, man.
	You've got to understand the irony of this.
	What you're telling me.
	I don't know if you see it or not.
	What's the irony?
	Well, the irony is that you're telling people that they should very proactively manage their health by planning ahead for the unknown.
	And then I ask you for a plan and you say, well, I don't know what the future is.
	Do you get the irony?
	I don't know what the future of society's priorities...
	I can't predict that.
	No, I get that.
	But at an individual person's level, you're saying you should really proactively and preventatively plan for your health.
	And people say, well, I don't know exactly what my health...
	It's going to be in 20 years, and you're going to say, well, of course not.
	Of course you don't.
	But that's why you need to plan proactively.
	I mean, the fact that we don't know the future is exactly why we need to plan.
	A rock rolling down a hill doesn't need to plan because it's going to end up where it's going to end up.
	It has no choice, right?
	But you need to have a plan so that you can adjust it.
	You don't just get into a plane and start flying around.
	You might have a flight path, and then you say, well, there's a big storm in the way, so you have to fly around it or turn back or something like that.
	But you have to have a flight path which can then be adjusted.
	And so if you have a plan which involves having a non-standard occupation and also you want to have the highly resource and time intensive process of getting married and having kids, I'm just saying that you need a plan.
	And what I'm saying for that is a lot of people who get into alternative lifestyles give alternative lifestyles a bad name because they basically say, well, my alternative is to put on a blindfold and to dance Hippy-dippy through a field of tulips, hoping that I'm going to land in some wonderful, fine-smelling place.
	And, you know, if you want to live an alternative lifestyle, I think that's great, but don't pretend that that needs more planning than a career.
	Like, if you still had a career in banking, you'd have a plan, I'm sure, but if you're going to go off the beaten path, you need more maps and more GPS resources, because you're not following a well-trodden path behind a whole bunch of other people.
	And this may not be what you're calling about, and I'll get to that in a sec, but...
	I just really want to point out that you need a plan.
	I think it's a good point, but when you say an alternative lifestyle, it's only alternative because of the conditioning we've been subjected to.
	Everybody, of course, wants to live in a healthy way, for instance, and they want to stay out of the hospital, but yet we just stuff ourselves.
	With McDonald's, we go to shopping malls, we live a stressful life, and that's because of our conditioning.
	I don't agree with you that everybody wants to live in a healthy way at all.
	I think lots of people are basically so disgusted with the world and with themselves that they're doing the slow suicide thing.
	I don't think a lot of people want to stay in the world very much.
	I don't think a lot of people really want to do what it takes to stay healthy.
	I think that people, in the same way that people heavily in debt are consuming it in the present for the sake of a nihilism in the future, they don't have any empathy with their future selves.
	I think a lot of people make very bad lifestyle choices because they kind of don't want to be around for the long haul.
	Now, they may get shocked and appalled when that happens, but, you know, so what?
	I mean, they still knew what was going to happen.
	So anyway, I just wanted to point that out, just so you don't get too frustrated when you keep giving people good advice and they don't take it.
	You know, like, how many dieters lose weight and keep it off?
	You know, 5% of dieters, you know, like 10 years later have kept the weight off.
	I mean, you know, people, you know, enjoy your cheesecake.
	That's fine.
	But recognize that, you know, lots of cheesecake and no exercise is just a way of checking out of the world, which is, I think, what some people are basically unconsciously driven by.
	But anyway, go ahead.
	I think that's a good segue into this other point I'd like to delve into, which is, you know, the fact that, I mean, you kind of mentioned, well, people don't want to really live in this world.
	They have no futures, you know, and that, I guess, that...
	It brings up some sort of feeling of empathy within me, and I see it all around me that people are stressed out, and maybe you're right, maybe people are kind of just giving up, but I don't think people are born with that sort of innate quality.
	I think it just, again, is a part of our conditioning, something wrong with society, a part of the evil in society.
	Yeah, I agree.
	We're all born with a fundamental enjoyment of life.
	Like my...
	My daughter loves her days so much, she just does not want them to end.
	We've got some friends staying here and she's just having such a great time that I'm offended because I'm incredibly petty.
	And so if my daughter is really enjoying having other people around, that is a direct insult to me, which obviously I'm going to bring up after these fine people leave.
	But she's having such a wonderful time.
	Like last night, she's basically forced herself to stay awake.
	She can do that by continually moving her body when she's supposed to be going to sleep.
	And trying to get my daughter to go to sleep is like slowly disarming a bomb.
	You know, stop moving this leg.
	Stop moving that leg.
	Stop moving this arm.
	Stop moving.
	Cut the red wire.
	Cut the yellow wire.
	Watch the timer.
	And she won.
	She managed to keep herself awake.
	So we went back downstairs and she got to chat with and play with more people.
	And so she's having such a great day, she never wants it to end.
	We hear other parents say, oh yeah, my kids come to me at sort of 8.30, tug in the rear saying, I'm tired, can I go to bed?
	And then my wife and I spontaneously burst into desperate Samuel Jackson, go the F to sleep style tears.
	Because she never wants her day to end.
	I mean, that's how pleasurable her life is.
	And I'm going to have to, obviously to write this balance in having the guests over, I have to tell my daughter that they are in fact Reptilian-based shapeshifters that are here to seduce her into evil.
	And that way, she'll be relieved when they go back to being as happy just with me, which will restore my fragile ego to some sort of sustainable, delusory state.
	But anyway, I just probably shouldn't be sharing this on the air, but I just wanted to mention that.
	So yeah, I agree with you, Pete.
	We're all born with the capacity for incredible joy.
	And I hope that my daughter grows up never even comprehending the question, does life have meaning?
	Because if you're enjoying yourself, you don't need meaning, right?
	Meaning is what you'd use to stave off depression.
	But anyway, go ahead.
	So basically, that's exactly what I'm...
	What I'm sort of tapping into is that, you know, everyone started out with that sort of innate quality and no one ever ends up, you know, just wanting to be a couch potato and do nothing and live off the state, you know, or whatever it is in this conditioned existence.
	So basically I want to make my life about reversing those effects and I see it as a battle of Good versus evil.
	Like, where did this conditioning come from?
	Helping people to understand that, you know, kind of goes back to the goodwill hunting, it's not your fault kind of concept.
	Sure.
	And tapping into that.
	But I just struggle, you know, how to go about that.
	People can, you know, even admit that they see the nature of their cages and they still refuse to address In a meaningful way.
	So basically, if I am going to go down that path, is it worth it?
	Is it going to be effective?
	Are there ways to approach it that I haven't thought of?
	To maybe get people's ears and not...
	The thing that you have to do...
	Sorry to be annoying.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	So on and so forth.
	The thing that you need to do is to embody the values that you wish to communicate.
	Which means that If you're saying to people, you have to give up chaos, and you have to plan, and you have to look down the road, and you have to have forethought, and you have to have empathy for your future self, now excuse me while I go and drive to my next yoga class in the car that I live in.
	That's not going to work.
	You are not going to be able to change people's minds fundamentally unless you take the medicine you wish to prescribe first.
	And that's why I'm being annoying and saying, have a plan.
	Doesn't mean you're going to be right.
	Doesn't mean the plan's not going to need to be adjusted, but have a plan.
	If you want people to think ahead and to sacrifice the pleasures of the moment for the sake of empathy for their future selves, you need to do that yourself first in every conceivable way.
	Don't be the fat guy who's telling people to lose weight.
	Don't be the smoker saying, I have a surefire way to quit smoking.
	And don't be the guy without a plan saying to people, you need to plan.
	Right?
	Every virtue that we wish to Evoke in others, we must first embody in ourselves.
	There is no teaching like doing.
	Teaching without the doing is just hot air.
	Doing without the teaching is fine for you, but not that great for the world.
	But if you do first and then teach, you have a kind of credibility that can't be reproduced any other way.
	And so when it comes to your future, to your finances, to your plan, hey, look, I applaud you for what it is that you're doing.
	I'm not saying that everyone who stays in the banking world is evil.
	I mean, I guess there are janitors who clean banking offices.
	But I mean, I applaud you for what you're doing.
	I mean, you're living more consciously, you're living more curiously, you're living more internally.
	But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, right?
	Which means don't have a, quote, alternative lifestyle and then reject some of the stuff that make non-alternative lifestyles work, like planning, like forethought, and so on.
	And if you're living off your savings, you understand that you are eating the economic equivalent of junk food.
	Which means you're taking pleasure in the now at the expense of the future.
	And again, don't get me wrong.
	I've spent time living off my savings too.
	I took a first round at leaving the business world to write novels.
	I spent a year and a half living off savings.
	So I have no problem with that whatsoever.
	But it's not sustainable.
	Well, I mean, before we go too far down this road, I'm basically rebooting my human capital in a different way.
	So it's not like I'm just sitting around waiting for something to happen.
	Yes, but it's going to be lower.
	It's going to be lower human capital.
	It's going to be lower human capital, unfortunately, and it's an indictment of our society.
	Helping people stay healthy is going to be lower human capital than banking.
	I mean, that's tragic.
	I mean...
	How awful is that?
	Unfortunately, McDonald's makes more money than organic farmers.
	It's just the way society is at the moment.
	But if you want people to plan, you must first of all plan.
	That which we don't plan for doesn't happen.
	That which we don't plan for doesn't happen.
	And if you want to be a stay-at-home Dad or have a stay-at-home mom, you want to homeschool your kids and so on, you need to plan for that.
	And that takes resources.
	That's going to cost money.
	I'm sure it's possible with what it is that you're doing, but if you don't have a plan, you won't even fail.
	Things won't happen, if that makes sense.
	I have a plan.
	I've done Excel models up the wazoo and in the back of my mind I always have plans and ideas and I'm always pitching stuff to friends and everything else.
	I'm in the midst of basically doing this health coaching I mean, I'm planning, I'm active, I'm in it, but like you said, right now, the way our society is structured, there's just not a lot of money in it.
	So if I go back to banking and finance, then I can have the car, a nice condo, and the family, but I feel that then they've won.
	Basically, I'm not living out my, I guess in yoga terms, you'd call it dharma, like how I'm going back to the dark side, and that could be A plan, but it's selfish and it's immoral.
	Yeah, and look, if you go back into banking, you don't get the family.
	Your wife might get the family, but you won't.
	Because the hours in banking are not short.
	If you're any kind of professional in the banking world, you're working at least 50 hours a week.
	And studies, uh, Australian studies have come out showing that, you know, dads who work 55 hours or more a week, uh, it has significant negative effects on their sons.
	Interestingly, not on their daughters, but on their, their sons are more aggressive for more problems with ADHD, impulse control and so on.
	Why?
	Because they're growing up feeling undervalued.
	I mean, if you, if you work a lot, all your kids know is that you prefer something else to them, right?
	Like, and then you can say, well, but I worked so you could have A bicycle, or you could have your own room, or you could have an Xbox or something, but kids would rather have their parents than those things, fundamentally.
	They take those things as consolation prizes to not having parents around.
	And so, if you go back to banking, your wife may get the family, but you won't.
	What you will get is all the problems of having a family and very few of the rewards.
	And so, I don't think that having a family life and having A very demanding career is compatible because time is a zero-sum game.
	Every hour you spend at work is an hour you're not spending with your family, an hour you're not spending getting to know your children, and an hour you're not spending an unstructured fun time.
	So that's sort of, and this to me is just part of the plan.
	You say, well, I go back to work, get the family, but you don't, right?
	You get a lot of expense, you get a lot of hassle, you get a lot of sleepless nights, but you don't get all the fun stuff with the family, at least very little of it.
	Right.
	Yeah, I mean, so a lot of the stuff that you've been sort of pointing on has gotten back to like kind of personal things.
	But my main point for Colin was just more of the global consciousness reality of, you know, creeping towards a 1984-like society.
	I mean, it's kind of It's scary to me when people are just completely asleep and trying to live in this kind of society.
	So that's more, I guess, to the point of this call, regardless of personal issues or personal endeavors, just trying to wake people up and see what it is that's been conditioning them for all these years.
	And that's great.
	I mean, you know, being the professional hyper-electrician matrix unplugger is a very noble occupation, and I certainly applaud you for that.
	What was it that made you change your mind?
	I mean, to leave that, you know, money-based world of sociopaths to what it is you're doing?
	Was there a particular moment that that occurred?
	I mean, there wasn't one moment, but it was just, you know, gradually, especially as you move up the ranks, you start to see what's under the hood.
	So, you know, as an analyst, you don't really see too much.
	You're just at the grind.
	But then as you kind of move up and up and up, you know, obviously you get a better picture of what's really going on.
	And you just rise up to the world.
	So it was a good experience to sort of see how the world works.
	But now, you know, now that I've seen that, I, you know, feel like I have a moral obligation to, you know, not only remove...
	My son's environment, but also be a force on the other side.
	Because if I don't become that force, then, you know, what's the same?
	Like, when good men do nothing, evil prevails or something like that.
	So I think it's important to take up that battle, but it's just very disheartening because it's really, as you mentioned on a couple calls earlier, it's just like you can't really change people's minds.
	It's almost impossible.
	No.
	No, that's true.
	But we have better tools for changing people's minds than ever before.
	You know, it's interesting because we can, for the first time in history, actually think about changing the world.
	And I'm just using this as a shorthand.
	I know you can't change people.
	I'm just using this as a shorthand.
	But do you know one of the reasons why improving the world seems so daunting at the moment It's not because the world is crazier, it's because our opportunities for improvement have never been greater.
	If you have no cure or way of preventing smallpox, then you're managing symptoms, but you don't think, I'm failing to eliminate smallpox from the world.
	But once you have a vaccine or you have a cure, then suddenly the opportunity of Getting rid of smallpox becomes your goal.
	And you measure yourself relative to that goal, but only because you've had an improvement.
	You've had an improvement in medicine that gives you a vaccine or a cure for smallpox.
	Then suddenly you're not managing symptoms, you actually have the chance to eliminate smallpox.
	So the goal, due to your advancements in technology, your goal has stretched far beyond what it was before.
	Now with the Internet, we have the capacity to radically affect people's thinking In a proactive, hopefully entertaining and enjoyable way that we never had before.
	The mainstream media would bar anybody with what we're talking about from getting anywhere near any kind of microphone or any kind of TV station or TV studio or anything like that or any kind of newspaper or whatever.
	They just keep you from that.
	You can't talk about atheism and anarchy in the mainstream media.
	We just can't, of course.
	So what I'm trying to say is that in a very real sense, opportunity brings despair.
	This is something that we experience the despair, but we don't see it relative to the opportunities that are there.
	I don't despair about my ability to fly to the moon, because I have no ability to fly to the moon.
	I don't despair about my ability to breathe underwater.
	I can't breathe underwater.
	And so when we extend possibility, we increase despair.
	Because despair is when you fail to reach essential goals.
	Now, the internet has given us the capacity to reach humanity in an unprecedented, direct, unfiltered, no gatekeepers kind of way.
	To speak truth, not even to power, but to speak truth to each other, which is much more important than speaking truth to power.
	Speak truth to power.
	Power says, screw you, I got power.
	What do I care about truth?
	You have your truth.
	I'll keep the guns and counterfeiting.
	Thank you very much.
	But we can speak truth to each other rather than waste our time yelling truth up the bell rope of power.
	And by speaking truth to each other, we can effectively unravel power.
	Philosophy has a chance to spread through the internet in a way that is completely unprecedented.
	Never occurred before in history.
	We have the capacity to truly illuminate people in a way that's never before been possible.
	And therefore, our goal posts have enormously shifted and we feel far further behind than we ever would have before.
	I mean, in the past, if you wrote a book on philosophy and it sold 5,000 copies, I mean, you'd be like in the top five philosophers of the year, right?
	Now, I do a video that only gets 5,000 views.
	I'm like, well, that sucks.
	Let's do better than that, shall we?
	And so the goalpost has moved enormously.
	The goalpost has moved enormously.
	And through that, we are going to feel despair.
	And that's natural.
	That's natural.
	I mean, if you're a football player and you think bringing the ball to the middle of the field is winning, great.
	Or if you're on a really long hike and you think you're almost home and you check your GPS and you've still got like five kilometers to go, your goalpost has moved and you feel...
	I didn't realize how much further it is.
	And so I think it's important to understand that when we increase opportunity, we increase sorrow.
	And that's good because that means that the sorrow and the despair drive us further to close that gap between where we are and where we could be.
	But where we could be in the world is so vastly different than it was even 10 or 15 years ago.
	The potential for philosophy to reach people is so much further than it was, say, 10 or 15 years ago.
	That now, instead of hoping to sell a couple of thousand copies of a book, or hoping to influence a couple of thousand students over the course of a career as a philosophy professor, now we have the opportunity to reach everyone in the world, at least those who speak English.
	And lots of people who don't, who get translations and so on, right?
	So instead of maybe a few thousand people that we hope to influence, we now have billions of, I don't know, how many people speak English in the world?
	Two billion?
	A billion and a half?
	A billion?
	Something.
	I mean, there are a billion Christians or whatever, but it's a big-ass number relative to what it was 10 or 15 years ago.
	And so for me, you know, Bob Marley's saying, I'm playing for mankind, right?
	He said he's playing for mankind.
	That was his yardstick.
	And I am trying to speak to mankind, and you are trying to speak to mankind.
	And we have this incredible...
	I mean, we have lasers powerful enough to write scrolling, illuminating texts on the very face of the moon, which was impossible before.
	That's how visible we can be to the species if we do it right, if we do it well.
	And so the fact that we have these incredible opportunities is also why we feel sometimes such despair, because we actually can save the world.
	We actually can save the world through eloquence, through reason, through evidence, through engagement, through entertainment.
	We actually can!
	Save the world.
	We have the cure to the greatest disease in our hands and we have the methodology to transmit it to the world.
	That's unprecedented.
	The greatest disease is irrationality and its greatest symptom is anti-rationality.
	And we have the power to end that, to cure that, to apply the non-aggression principle to parenting, to end spanking, to end aggression against children.
	Never before possible.
	And so that's one of the reasons why I'm so energized and motivated to do what it is that I'm doing and why I also feel the despair of how slow it can be to spread.
	And I mean, this show is doing very well as far as very abstract intellectual podcasts go.
	I think relative to a lot of podcasts, it's doing well.
	But I wanted to do better.
	I wanted to go further.
	I wanted to reach more people.
	I wanted to be more engaging, more shareable, more enjoyable, without compromising.
	I mean, you can always get things to share if you compromise, right?
	You know, cute cats and falling kittens.
	And hey, look, a philosophy video that went to 2 million views or whatever.
	But without compromising the essential message, I wanted to spread as much as possible.
	The fact that I can speak to a third of mankind is very important to me.
	And of course, when you can speak to a third of mankind and you realize that far fewer than a third of mankind is actually listening, there is despair, and that despair drives me to try and close the gap by dealing more with current events.
	It's not my particular favorite topic, but it is something that gets people interested, at least in a show or two.
	So I understand that, that sense of despair, but understand that it arises from the unprecedented opportunity for reaching everyone with a computer and Who speaks English?
	Absolutely unprecedented throughout history, and let's remember that the despair is driven by the opportunity which should drive us for, I think, greater excellence and a greater awareness of how much impact we can have in the world.
	Yeah, no, I think that really puts it in really good context because I will get disheartened on quite a number of occasions, just, you know, whether it be a casual conversation with a friend or just, you know, watching something that, you know, some mainstream media thing that everyone seems to be on board with that just is completely nonsensical.
	But it's just all these things that are disheartening.
	But I think that's Sort of a good way to put it.
	The reason why it's disheartening is because we're so close to changing people's minds, and maybe with a little bit more effort or attacking it in different ways, it can happen.
	Yeah, I mean, there wasn't a lot of atheists who were really frustrated with religion in the Middle Ages.
	I mean, the goal of an atheist in the Middle Ages was, wake up today.
	Job one.
	Do not get burned at the stake.
	And if you achieve that to do, it's a pretty good day for an atheist in the Middle Ages.
	Mental note, do not get drawn and quartered.
	We don't have that anymore.
	Now we can actually say, I hope that we can drive the expansion of rationality and a commitment to reason and evidence even further.
	You know, boy, if we think we have despair now, you know, the don't get beheaded by a priest thing was, you know, the to-do list of the medieval atheist.
	That was kind of important.
	You know, medieval, ancient Greek philosopher, you know, do not have a hemlock aperitif for my afternoon tea.
	That would be my big plan.
	Do not get sold into slavery was Plato's big plan when he was attempting to effect political change in Syracuse.
	That was his big plan.
	And he did actually end up getting sold into slavery and had to fight his way free.
	So we have, you know, greater opportunities than any other thinkers throughout history.
	But of course, the goalposts get ever bigger.
	And so I think it's really important to keep that in perspective.
	Yeah, yeah, exactly.
	All right, cool.
	I appreciate the insights there.
	Thank you.
	I appreciate that.
	Thank you for everything that you're doing.
	Again, Roy, I should make a plan, but I should also make a plan to have some lunch.
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