Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Sept. 18, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:07:55

2487 Asking For What You Want - Wednesday Call In Show September 18th, 2013

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Good evening, everybody.
	Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
	The 18th of September, 2013.
	B minus six days.
	Mike, B minus six days.
	B for birthday.
	That's right, September 24th.
	I will be doing an entire podcast in my birthday suit.
	Farewell, internet.
	But I hope you're doing well.
	I'm going to be 47 years old.
	I'm going to be 47 years old.
	I still feel we're at six.
	Although one of the interesting things about, as those of you who don't know, I went through chemo this summer.
	Going through puberty again is quite exciting.
	Having hair regrow in all the formerly funky bits of my body.
	All very exciting.
	I've never felt younger in about 35 years.
	So let's start with a wee topic.
	This is from Reuters.
	U.S. Navy was warned that the Washington shooter heard voices and not the kind of fall asleep to a podcast kind of voice that you're hearing now.
	Wake up!
	This is important.
	But let's just have a quick look at This guy.
	Well, first of all, the Defense Department Inspector General's report published on Tuesday revealed security lapses that allowed 52 convicted felons to gain access to Navy facilities because budget cuts had undermined vetting.
	The good news is that unconvicted war criminals such as Bush and Obama were not allowed access or did not actually set foot on a Navy base.
	But these are convicted felons.
	I say, well, you see, it's budget cuts that have caused the problem.
	Budget cuts is always the great answer for everything in the government.
	If only we had more money, you see.
	Remember how they doubled spending per pupil throughout the 90s?
	In 2000s, they more than doubled spending per pupil.
	And as we can see, with that massive amount of increased spending, how wonderful education has become in the United States and in Canada.
	So, oh, it's always just a lack of money.
	That's the problem.
	Police in Newport, Rhode Island, were so concerned about Alexis' behavior, he's the shooter, on a business trip there in August that they alerted Navy police.
	Alexis told police he believed people were following him and, quote, sending vibrations into his body.
	I don't believe that we're talking about the Beach Boys' good vibrations.
	I believe we're talking about something entirely composed of Nutella spread.
	He told police that he had twice moved hotels.
	To avoid the noise he heard coming through the floor and the ceiling of his rooms, and that the people following him were using, quote, some sort of microwave machine to prevent him from sleeping.
	This is a quote a Newport officer wrote.
	Based on the naval base implications and the claim that the involved subject, one Aaron Alexis, was hearing voices, I made contact with the on-duty Naval Station police.
	The Newport police report said Navy police had promised to check if Alexis was in fact a naval-based contractor.
	Asked for comment, a spokesman said that the Navy was looking into the matter without confirming any details.
	Good time to look into the matter, I would say, when you can stack bodies like cordwood a fine time.
	In addition, CNN reported that Alexis had contacted two Veterans Administration hospitals recently and was believed to be seeking psychological help.
	Well, I think that's all kind of important.
	There's a pattern to these things.
	Maybe if you're significantly less than 47, the pattern has yet to emerge from you, but I will lay it out for you.
	The government is black magic.
	The government is indistinguishable from religion.
	Statism is indistinguishable from religion.
	What I mean by that is religion is not answers that may be questioned.
	But answers which may not be questioned.
	Religion is a magic, pie-in-the-sky bunch of spaghetti-based nonsense that allows you to wave away questions with the absolutism of irrational dogma.
	Where do we come from?
	Adam and Eve!
	Got it!
	What is a tree?
	A tree is what God made it to be.
	What is the relationship between the genders?
	Well, you see, a woman is to man as a man is to God.
	Should be kneeling before him.
	I can't remember how that one goes exactly.
	But the questions that we have, what is good?
	What is right?
	What is true?
	What is false?
	Ten Commandments, God's Word, the Pope's Edicts.
	Earth is the center of the universe because it was created for man, and man is the center of God's creation.
	Why is stealing wrong?
	God said so!
	See, these aren't answers.
	They are barriers to exploration, barriers to curiosity, barriers to understanding, fundamentally barriers to philosophy.
	You have This giant gray Gandalf ghost that you can wave around to pretend you have answers for stuff and then those answers harden into dogma and anybody who questions or opposes them becomes blasphemous and suffers some pretty severe punishments.
	Those punishments have largely diminished to mere ostracism but for many people of course psychological studies have shown that ostracism Produces more pain than physical torture.
	It's very interesting.
	This is how we know a free society will work.
	Now, when we have a problem in society or questions about how things are to be done in society, we have a God called the state that we can invoke to pretend that we are solving problems.
	That is what the state is designed to do.
	It is to provide the illusion of an answer and to actively prevent real answers from being pursued, explored, and brought into being.
	The belief in a deity opposed and precluded evolution for many years, opposed and precluded the heliocentric model of the solar system, that the Earth was not the center of the universe or even of the solar system.
	And it still actively prevents the philosophical exploration of ethics in many places.
	Well, we already have an answer called the Ten Commandments or Moses' Law or the Pope's Edict.
	So why on earth would you need any more answers when you already have answers?
	That's like if you're driving home, you get home and somebody knocks on your door and says, I'll drive you home.
	You're like, dude, I'm already home, man.
	Why do you want to drive me home?
	And so we have a problem.
	There are lots of problems in society.
	Some tragic, some merely interesting.
	It would be great if there was little involuntary poverty.
	And voluntary poverty's fine.
	I took a 75% pay cut to do what I'm doing now.
	It's great, fantastic.
	I am not poor.
	I have simply made choices, right?
	The guys who are in Los Angeles who are actors hoping to break into waitering.
	No wait.
	Something like some relationship between the two.
	Those guys, they're poor.
	They're living stacked up like court would afford a room in low-rent apartments.
	And they are hoping to break into acting where you can make a fortune.
	The band's currently grueling their way through touring.
	I'm going to do a show on Friday with the great Joe Rogan, who spent five years in relative obscurity doing dive after dive in comedy, doing comedy, stand-up comedy.
	And That's fine.
	People pursuing their dreams and give up income, give up other opportunities, give up the slow and steady, you know, go up the career ladder to pursue their dreams.
	That's fine.
	I mean, kids born into poverty through no fault of their own.
	Oh, sorry, the stork just passed by the low-rent, government-run housing rather than the burbs with the right white picket fence and a car and a half in the driveway.
	The half being a Prius.
	So, We would love to have that.
	We would love to have those who are sick get all kinds of medical care.
	Be great.
	Wonderful.
	We would love for those who can't read to learn how to read.
	We would love for those addicted to self-destructive substances, like politics, to get the help that they need.
	I do an intervention almost every day, almost every show.
	Try and help people out with that stuff.
	Be great.
	But every time a question comes up, All that people talk about, all that people want to do, is pass another law, create another commission, create another department, lobby a congressman, lobby a senator, you name it.
	Pass a law, give more force, concentrate more power.
	This is incredibly destructive, magical thinking.
	The government cannot protect you from crazy people with guns.
	The government cannot keep drugs out of prisons.
	They've turned society into a prison.
	Entire prison.
	Everybody's got a cell.
	When there are high walls and barbed wire and dogs, they still could not win the war on drugs.
	Governments cannot educate your children.
	By far the biggest differentiator between success and failure in a government school is the amount of education that goes on at home, which basically means the government schools are completely retarded, but you have a chance to learn something if your parents are educated and interested in your education.
	The government cannot bring peace to the world.
	Remember all these wars in the 20th century?
	All the wars fought to end war.
	Is it ended?
	Well, no.
	The only reason that war even remotely ended in the West was because nuclear weapons made it more dangerous to be a political leader and that everybody could get wiped out rather than you being the hero moving little colored monopoly blocks around on a map.
	The government cannot protect you from the perils of high finance.
	The government is addicted to the perils of high finance.
	The government cannot protect you from inflation.
	It cannot protect you from unemployment.
	It cannot protect you from sickness.
	It can do none of these things any more than reading the Bible.
	We'll teach you anything about evolution or whether or not you should do something as simple as wash your hands before operating on someone or eating your food.
	We really, really fundamentally must outgrow the illusions of answers.
	Look at science.
	Look at the incredible progress just over the last 200 years of science.
	It's completely mind-blowing because that is a discipline.
	The scientific method is a discipline which specifically denies, rejects, repudiates, and eschews faith, imaginary answers.
	The pretense of answers, which is really the bloody historical momentum of prejudice.
	The success of science, the success of medicine, the success of what's left of the free market.
	The free market facilitates free trade, which is by definition, praxeologically, is win-win trade.
	You trade five bucks for someone's pen, and nobody's forcing you to do anything, nobody's forcing the other guy to do anything.
	By definition, you must want the pen more than your five bucks, and the guy who's selling you the pen must want your five bucks more than the pen.
	Win-win.
	With price and demand as the fantastic mechanisms which move resources to the most efficient allocations.
	Those two disciplines, science and the free market, have produced such astounding gains over the last 200 years or so that we really need to learn from them.
	And both of those disciplines rely on facts.
	Both of those disciplines rely on testable theories.
	Both of those disciplines are objective.
	And there's no magic involved.
	Try having a business plan where you say, well, if we have significant losses in any particular quarter, don't worry, because Jesus will make up the difference.
	What, that's Jesus some investor?
	No, no, no.
	Jesus.
	He's going to be coming back.
	He'll be sitting on the board and he will, you know, I think he's at least got some pieces of silver on him.
	He will make up the difference.
	And people will say to you, well, that's insane.
	Go work for the Navy.
	In science, there is no big cloud miracle that can occur.
	In fact, there's an old joke about science.
	Where, you know, there's this huge mass of equations on a blackboard and there's one big cloud in the middle where it says basically, here a miracle occurs.
	And the other guy is saying, the guy who's not the inventor of the theorem is saying, let's break this one out a little bit.
	Let's break this one down.
	I feel a little confused by this step.
	There is no miracle in science.
	There is no miracle in the free market.
	Free market is objective.
	You make a widget for $5, you try and sell it for $10.
	You either sell it or you don't, because it's voluntary.
	You force people to sell it, or force people to buy it, then that's a whole different matter.
	You get the government to force people to buy it, you get the government to force people to fund it, you get some green dollars for pseudo-green energy, and then you milk it for a couple of years before going bankrupt and moving to Buenos Aires.
	But you either sell it or you don't.
	You either make money or you don't.
	You're either profitable or you're not.
	It's either sustainable or it's not.
	Basic facts.
	People buy it or they don't.
	And in science, your theory is either logical or it's not.
	It's either validated by the evidence or it's not.
	It's either reproducible by others or it's not.
	Those are the disciplines that work.
	That actually produce progress in human society.
	That actually produce all of the essential things that we rely on.
	Try running agriculture based on a whim, on a prayer.
	No.
	Fertilizer is better than bullshit for growing things.
	So I'm a little sick and tired of every single time We hear anything that is required of within society.
	Everybody just runs bleating to the government.
	It's worse than a waste of time.
	You send me anything that you have found that is a successful government program.
	Looking for a successful government program is exactly the same as looking for a loving relationship between a rapist and his victim.
	But send me.
	I've been looking at this stuff for 30 years.
	Maybe I missed a bunch of stuff.
	Maybe I overlooked something.
	But you tell me something.
	And this has to be something that was not being improved before the government came along.
	People say, well, air quality, the EPA, the air quality has improved.
	No, no, no.
	Air quality was improving long before the government came along.
	They just hitched their wagon to that star and pretended that was their solution.
	Is the welfare state working?
	Is education working?
	The whole point of the Federal Reserve, central banking, 1913, its specific and explicit mandate was to end the business cycle, to end dysregularity and highs and lows in the market.
	How's that working out?
	How is, I don't know if you remember way back in the day, Clinton met with I think the Israeli Prime Minister and Yasser Arafat at the time, and he had them shaking hands, you see, shaking hands on the lawn of the White House.
	God knows how much he had to bribe those guys for that handshake.
	Because he had brought peace to the Middle East, don't you remember?
	Don't you remember that?
	Brought peace to the Middle East.
	Brought cigars to Monica Lewinsky's hoo-hoo and brought peace to the Middle East.
	What a guy.
	How did that work out?
	How's that Middle East peace working out these days?
	First World War was fought to end war.
	Second World War was really First World War Part II. Or as one of the high-up generals in the French army said after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, he said, this is not peace, this is an armistice for 20 years.
	And he was right, almost down to the day.
	I know it's so seductive.
	It's so seductive to imagine that we just need the government to do something and the problems will be solved.
	It is a dangerous, dangerous delusion.
	It is like praying rather than going to see a doctor.
	Except if you're sick and you pray rather than go and see a doctor, most times it's just you who'll die.
	But when you run to the government, imagining that somehow giving them more power And having them steal more money, and having them throw more people in jail, and having them have more weapons, more bombs, more aircraft carriers, more bunker busters, more depleted uranium, to wreck the genetic integrity of an entire nation.
	When you do that, yes, it's you who will suffer.
	But all of us rational people are crowded in with you lemmings.
	Running straight off the cliff, and we can't get out, we can't get away.
	So maybe listen to reason, rather than prejudice.
	And let's turn this thing around.
	Thanks, everyone.
	Ready for the caller?
	Right, Brady, you're up first.
	Brady, Brady, quite contrady.
	How does your garden grow?
	Hi, can you hear me?
	Yes, can you hear me?
	No.
	Just kidding.
	Go on.
	I do want to start off by saying I want to thank you because I came across your information maybe a year or more ago.
	And in the meantime, my life's changed pretty considerably.
	I was in the military.
	I since left the military.
	I was working for the government.
	I since left working for the government.
	And my understanding about how the world really works, you know, I went from, I don't want to drop any names, but a certain radio talk show host out in Texas that happens to be a little bit crazy, in my opinion, to somebody who is a lot more grounded.
	So I really appreciate what you're doing.
	Thank you.
	Last week?
	About an issue I was having with a friend of mine.
	I don't know if you remember it.
	Can you remind me?
	Yeah, I'm a competitive shooter.
	Like, I shoot target rifles and pistols.
	I've been doing so for a while.
	And I've been having some...
	Emotional problems with a friend of mine that have been, from what I can tell, self-inflicted.
	Wait, wait, sorry.
	Are your friends...
	Sorry, your issues are self-inflicted with regards to your friend?
	Well, no.
	My friend hasn't done anything to me.
	You know, a comment, but it was...
	My understanding was in jest.
	And so a lot of the...
	Issues I seem to be having are all internal.
	No one has done anything to me on purpose to make me feel really horrible.
	So basically the email, I'll explain it here again.
	I've been a competitive shooter for about six years.
	Since I was old enough to know...
	Hold on a second.
	Sorry.
	Since I was old enough to know about them, I've wanted to shoot...
	Rifles, pistols.
	I've been really excited about it since I was a little kid.
	And when I joined the service, I started shooting on a competitive pistol team and I got pretty good at it.
	And in the last year since I left the service, I've been shooting what in the United States and Canada is called high power service rifle.
	Basically, you shoot at a target at three different ranges and the idea is to shoot a little tiny group and get really good scores.
	And I had a friend of mine start with me last year.
	And my other friend wanted to start with me this year.
	So I went out of my way to get a rifle belt for him and find one for him and his son.
	His son's 13.
	And I was really excited.
	I'm shooting very well this year.
	I won some trophies and things like that.
	And lately it's been more of a chore rather than a joy.
	I've been having some real emotional struggle because this guy's been shooting for three months and he started kicking my butt.
	And really, I feel like I should be happy for the guy, but I can't get over how upset it's made me.
	And like I said, he didn't do anything to me.
	He just shot really well.
	So I was wondering what Your thoughts might be on this.
	I've had some problems with this in the past, if you want to explore that.
	Yeah, there's a great quote from Gore Vidal, an American writer, who said, It is not enough to succeed.
	Our friends must also fail.
	Why do you like shooting?
	You said from when you were a little kid, why do you think you were drawn to shooting?
	It's an individual competition, and by that I mean It's not like basketball where you have to pass the ball around or football where you're dependent on other people to do certain things.
	You know, like the guy blocks and the other guy throws a ball to whoever's downfield.
	This is all me and my rifle shooting at a...
	No, I get it.
	I get it.
	But I mean, so is high jumping, shot put, javelin throwing, you know, you name it.
	There's tons of sports, individual running, long distance running, hurdling, you know, just these are things where it's just you.
	So why do you think it was shooting in particular?
	Way to put me on the spot there.
	Hey, that's what this show is for.
	I mean, people don't get, you don't come on the show to get near the spot.
	The spot is your dance chamber.
	Well, I mean, I don't know.
	It's an acceptable answer, isn't it?
	I mean, I like it.
	I like guns.
	I've built a lot of guns.
	Well, let me ask you some questions.
	Is gun use in your family?
	I'm sorry, you broke up a little bit.
	Is gun use in your family?
	Oh, did we lose him?
	No, he's still there.
	Yeah, is gun use in your family?
	Yeah, my dad was in the Navy SEALs, and so we had guns, but I never really got to start shooting until I was 18, so maybe it was because it was forbidden.
	My mom didn't want me to have anything to do with it.
	Your mom didn't want to have anything to do with guns, so she married a Navy SEAL. Right.
	You know, I hate singers.
	I just hope that Engelbert Humperdinck is single.
	I've just never said Humperdinck on the show before, and I really quite enjoyed it.
	I see your point, and my mom didn't want me to have anything to do with guns, and I went working in a gun company.
	Now, do you love your mom?
	Yes, I love my mom, but I'm having trouble with her right now.
	Okay, but when you were a kid, you looked up to and loved your mom, right?
	Until she left.
	When did she leave?
	When I was 11.
	Right.
	Why did she leave?
	Did she finally figure out the gun thing?
	Did she finally figure out what?
	Why did she leave?
	I don't know.
	She was unhappy with my dad.
	She found another guy.
	I remember standing in the driveway On Midsummer's Day, watching her just walk down the road.
	She had nowhere to go.
	She didn't know where she was going to go and she just left.
	Wow.
	And you don't know why she left?
	Not exactly.
	I know that she...
	We've talked about it a little bit.
	I've tried to approach this subject with her.
	In fact, we haven't talked much in the last few months because I've wanted to talk about this.
	My dad gained some weight.
	We were having some financial difficulties.
	They might have had a fight.
	There was another guy involved that was staying at the house.
	I think all those things that I remember when I was 11.
	Wait, sorry.
	Did your mom have an affair with someone who was living at your house?
	Yes.
	Yeah, she did.
	I'm sorry, I really do want to get to the gun thing, but I just gotta pause a little on that.
	Who was the guy living at your house?
	I don't even remember his name.
	He was some guy that was a trucker and he was like a transient and didn't have anywhere to go.
	He was a drunk and I guess my mom was mad at my dad and decided to sleep with him.
	But why was he at your house?
	Okay, Brady, so why was this transient trucker guy living at your parents' house?
	I don't know.
	I don't remember.
	I don't even remember his name.
	Right.
	I remember he was there and he caused some problems and my mom left with him.
	That's what I remember.
	Right.
	Right.
	And so, but you left your mom when you were a little boy, right?
	That's what I remember.
	Yeah.
	I'm not trying to disagree with that.
	I'm just – if you want a possible answer as to why you may have been interested in shooting, well, we try in general to do the things as men that get the women we like.
	So if you love your mom and your dad was a shooter and he got your mom, then you're like, okay, well, the way that you – like, we imprint on this, right?
	Because it's different in every culture and it's different in every subculture.
	You know, in some subcultures, you know, you've got to get a motorbike to get a girl.
	In other cultures, it's a convertible.
	In other cultures, it's – The Dungeon Master's Guide.
	In other cultures, it's a skin-tight catwoman suit.
	I know in mine it is, for me.
	But whatever it is that you see as being a successful mating strategy is what you will pursue or what you will be drawn to.
	So it's like, okay, well, the guys who have guns are the guys who get the girls because the first guy I saw who got a girl was my dad.
	He had a gun, right?
	Does that make any sense?
	Absolutely, yeah.
	It makes total sense.
	The military background of my dad's whole side of the family and, you know, the military not only have guns.
	Yeah, I mean, it's like, I love a man in uniform is one of the, I think it came out of the Second World War, probably something by the Andrews sisters, but that's the idea.
	Like, women love the man in uniform, so let's go get a job in uniform kind of thing.
	What they generally love is steady jobs, no firing, and secure pensions, but it's one possibility as to why you would have been I've been drawn to this, that it's simply a successful mating strategy displayed by your dad, which you then naturally will pursue because you're going to assume that if your dad got your mom, who you like, and he's in a society where they're generally approved of, then you're going to do the same thing to get a woman.
	Anyway, I just want to sort of point that out as a possible beginning to this thing.
	But do you want to go back to your friend thing?
	Absolutely.
	It makes sense.
	So, I appreciate it.
	Okay, so your friend is doing really well at shooting, despite the fact you said he's only been doing it for three months, and you've been doing it for decades?
	Well, no, six years.
	Half a decade.
	Oh, you've been doing it for six years?
	Right.
	So you're 24?
	28.
	I thought you got your gun when you were 18.
	Well, I started competitive shooting six years ago.
	That's what I'm talking about.
	But you did shooting for four years before that.
	I bought my first pistol at 21, so I guess really 21, but I'd done a little bit of shooting prior to that.
	And your friend says that he basically never touched a gun before?
	No.
	This is one of the things that I understand as well, is he used to...
	Do archery target.
	And he used to shoot pistol targets.
	I think he's only been doing it for three months.
	It's my attempt to rationalize or justify my emotional response to the situation.
	I understand that he's been shooting for...
	He's in his 40s.
	I'm 28.
	He's in his 40s.
	He's been shooting for 30-plus years.
	I think he said he bought his first rifle at Oh, so, wait, wait, so you have six years of experience and he has 30 years of experience.
	Right, and I understand that, but that still, like, I went through that part of it, but I still don't understand why I feel this way.
	No, but I can tell you then why it bothers you so much.
	Okay.
	And it's related to, that's why I asked you why you first got into it when you were a little kid, right?
	So if success at weaponry is a mating display, this guy's peacock feathers are way bigger than yours.
	And nobody likes to be the beta male, right?
	We all struggle to be the alpha male.
	We all struggle to be the guy who's the rock star, the guy who's Al Schwarzenegger, the guy who, you know, Wilt Chamberlain can snap his fingers and have stacks of women fall from the ceiling.
	So we all have that drive within us, which is why we're talking on this rather than yelling at each other across a swamp, you know, in caveman days.
	We all want to be the alpha male.
	And if in your mind, based upon your dad and your mom and all that, and the early imprinting of what it meant to be sexually or romantically successful as a man, this guy has got a bigger dick.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	That makes sense.
	Well, just, I mean, am I way off base here?
	No, I don't.
	You can tell me if I am, because, like, don't, I mean, the amount I know about gun culture is...
	No, I think that that's, I think that's where a lot of the...
	You know, like, jealousy was one of the...
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I think that jealousy may have been one of the issues.
	Um...
	Absolutely.
	And, um...
	I don't know.
	It's one of those things that, you know, I'm 28 and I'm still single, so the guns did help, I guess.
	Are there women at these events?
	I had a really good...
	a few.
	Emphasis on the word few.
	Is it like a libertarian slash Dunstan Dragon's convention?
	Is there like the only women there are like barmaids?
	Right, I guess.
	I stopped playing Dungeons and Dragons a while ago, so I never got to one of those conventions, so I wouldn't be able to compare them.
	But yeah, there's sometimes there's some women on the range, and of course, and then there's that, if that's part of the issue, I guess I can explore that part of it as well, is that I have always had trouble playing Approaching women, talking to women, and in fact, I just had a conversation about that today.
	It's like there's a pretty girl.
	She looks like she's interested in me.
	I can't do anything about it.
	Why not?
	I don't know.
	I always come up with an excuse for it.
	Oh, come on, you know.
	You can't not know.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	I don't mind if people call up and say they don't know about really obscure personal issues or personal issues that are really hard to grasp.
	This is not one of them, right?
	Why are you cautious around attractive women?
	You've already told me, so we can narrow it down to the things you've talked about in this conversation.
	Okay.
	I'm not as good as my friend.
	Nope.
	That's the right answer.
	Why are you cautious around attractive women?
	Because my mother left me.
	Left?
	Yeah.
	What happened to your dad?
	I was afraid that I was going to get left again.
	I mean, your mom didn't just leave your dad.
	Your mom had sex with another man in the house.
	Maybe even in the same bed.
	God help her.
	And then she wandered off down the road with nowhere to go.
	Leaving...
	Her husband and her children behind.
	This is completely terrifying to contemplate.
	You know that can happen.
	You know that's possible.
	And you also know that that's the kind of woman your dad attracted and that he's your template for how to attract a woman.
	Which means he's your template for the type of woman you are going to be most likely to attract, right?
	Right.
	And then the interesting part about that is, now, go forward about 10 years from when my mom left, and I was actually engaged to a woman, and she left me in the same manner.
	She actually dumped me on the internet while I was in Texas.
	She dumped you where?
	And she was on the East Coast.
	She dumped you where?
	On MySpace.
	She dumped you on MySpace?
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, your mom dumped your dad on his space like his house.
	And thank God that she did.
	No, my God.
	I mean, imagine if she hadn't.
	I mean, imagine if you had gotten married to this lunatic, right?
	Well, as far as I'm concerned, she did me a favor by doing that now.
	Oh, no kidding.
	Six years later.
	No, listen, it's like sometimes dating is like you step in the forest and you hear a click and you're like, is that a mine?
	Oh no!
	I'm gonna go in a puff of red dust, red cloud of me!
	And they're like, oh, I only a stick.
	You know, so yeah, the fact that she dumped you on Myspace, man.
	But this is who you are drawn towards because this is your template, right?
	Right.
	So until you start working on these connections, then it's dangerous for you to date.
	It's very dangerous for you.
	Without dealing with the past, dating is almost invariably a photocopy of your parents.
	I mean, just inevitably, in the same way that you speak English because your parents spoke English and you grew up in a Christian household because your parents were Christian, you are going to be drawn to the type of woman your dad was drawn to.
	In the absence of self-knowledge, all we ever do is photocopy history.
	And I think you've really got to start working on this stuff.
	I mean, you say you're 28, right?
	I agree.
	You don't have forever.
	I mean, men have a biological clock, too.
	And...
	It is, you know, your fear of women is probably keeping you from a disaster, but it's keeping you in stasis as well because you're not actually dealing with stuff, you're just avoiding the triggers and then probably getting frustrated about that, right?
	Yeah.
	I've been single for, well, it's been six years almost.
	Right, since you got dumped on Myspace.
	Right.
	And the way I justify it for myself is, well, my money's mine, my time is mine, but I feel like I'm missing out on life also.
	And fundamentally...
	Well, what do you want out of a relationship?
	Sorry, what is the plus that you would be looking for to get out of a relationship?
	What do you feel you're missing?
	I don't know.
	You know, intimacy...
	Well, what does intimacy mean to you?
	Do you mean sex or what?
	Yeah.
	Sex, okay.
	What else?
	Sex.
	It's been a long time, I guess.
	No, I... I can imagine.
	So, okay, you want sex?
	You can have sex without a relationship, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
	You can have sex without getting married.
	You can have sex without commitment, if you want.
	Um...
	But what else?
	Well, really I'd like children one day because I understand that that's the path to the future, and I don't like the way the present is, and I don't like the way history's been.
	So I think maybe part of why I haven't been getting into a relationship is because I don't think I'm ready to try to be as successful children as I think that you've been.
	Right.
	Well, yeah, I mean, until they come up with the man pouch baby vat, you are going to need a woman for that.
	I'm sure Google's working on something along those lines.
	But, um...
	Okay, so you want to have kids.
	So, what kind of woman do you think will be a great mom to your kids?
	And where are you going to find her?
	I'm...
	I don't know.
	I mean...
	Well, that's why you're single.
	Right.
	Because you're like saying, well, I really want to get a job as an engineer.
	Well, how do you become an engineer?
	I don't know.
	Well, you're never going to be an engineer then, right?
	And I'm not trying to be nasty here.
	Like, I'm trying to really be helpful and concise, right?
	So if you want...
	I know that.
	If you want to have kids, then the very first thing you want is someone who's going to be a great mom to your kids.
	I mean, take it from me.
	As somebody, I think that my wife is like the best conceivable mom that I can imagine.
	And I'm incredibly fortunate to have the joy of raising kids with her.
	So you have to look at where do nice women, warm women, helpful women, women who can get by on a little sleep and still be positive, women who are happy and women who are, you know, I don't like complex.
	Complex to me is always a synonym for crazy.
	I want to act inconsistently and randomly and I want to follow whatever mood I am in at the moment.
	And I'll just call that complex, you know?
	It's like, yeah, sometimes when I hit the gas, my car goes backwards.
	No, no.
	It's not broken.
	It's complex.
	No, it's just fucking broken.
	- There's an interesting part about that as well.
	My friend who started shooting three months ago with me in this particular sport, I've known him for four years here pretty soon.
	He's got an amazing wife.
	He's got a what?
	A really amazing wife.
	The lady is incredible.
	She's successful.
	She's raised great children.
	Nice lady.
	Tries to have a smile on her face.
	There's the type of lady I'd like to And that plays right into this emotional...
	Well, dude, if you think his wife is really great, what's something you could do?
	You could ask her if she knows any women who would be good for you.
	And you can say, I really like you.
	I think you're a great wife and a great mom.
	And so I assume that the people you know are nice people, similar to you.
	Do you have a clone twin?
	Do you have a twin?
	Do you have friends?
	Do you have, you know, friends of friends?
	Can you put the word out, I'm looking to find a nice girl.
	I'd like to settle down at some point.
	But I don't know where to find...
	Well, there's someone who knows, right?
	Right.
	Well, and of course now doing that is...
	It's really appropriate.
	I just moved up here...
	Where I'm living now within the last six months.
	So getting to know the area, this is a good way to explore it as well.
	Yeah, no, I mean, when you move to new places, you've just got to be the icebreaker.
	You've just got to go talk to people, meet people.
	You've got to just elbow your way in.
	Because everyone's already got friends.
	You've got a new friend for, right?
	It's risky.
	But you've just got to elbow your way in.
	And, you know, you can ask – I mean, there's some things where it's more or less likely to meet people.
	Nice women.
	And I'm just going to go on a really tiny tirade here, so I'll be brief, and it's probably all bullshit, but anyway.
	Bars, not a great place to meet nice women.
	I think if you join a sports league or a sports team, I think that's where I met my wife.
	And I kept offering to be her luge partner, which she found...
	A little bit unusual because we were in a volleyball club, but I said luge, man.
	Luge plus volleyball equals a baby with a head for a basketball.
	I don't know.
	You can go to cooking classes.
	You know, if you want to find someone who's going to be a good mom, then she may, in fact, be interested in cooking, at least probably more so than if you want to set up a Breaking Bad-style meth lab.
	So I would, you know, find photography classes.
	I don't know.
	Like anywhere where there's some sort of – join a choir, join an amateur – Play, you know, the acting squad or something like that, right?
	Playhouse or something.
	And these are places where you're going to, I think, find nicer people than the typical places where people go, which is sort of like meat markets and so on, right?
	So, and what, you know, my suggestion is that, I mean, you're still young, so you don't probably really get that whether you succeed or fail, you're going to die anyway.
	And the worst thing that you want thrown on top of you is six feet of dirt plus regrets.
	So when I have been attracted to a woman, although it scared the living crap out of me, I would go up and say, I'm very attracted to you.
	I would like to go on a date.
	Would you like to do X, Y, or Z? I'm sure Looge was involved as well.
	But the important thing is just to go and talk and go and ask.
	There are no points in life for not asking for what you want.
	There are no points in life for being indirect, for crossing your fingers, for tossing your hair and hoping that someone's gonna come and talk to you, for being passive.
	There are no points.
	You go to the same place whether you get what you want Or you don't.
	You get thrown in the ground forever and ever.
	Amen.
	Whether you ask for what you want or wait for it to come to you.
	So my suggestion is go to where women are who are going to be nice and reasonable and all that kind of stuff.
	Not these sort of shallow vainglorious vixens that so infest urban areas.
	But if you find someone attractive, tell them that you would like to go on a date with them.
	And don't cop out and say, you know, let's go to a club with some friends.
	You know, like it's some sort of...
	I mean, nobody's...
	We're not idiots.
	We know that there's a mating display.
	We know that there...
	I mean...
	Once I was going, I used to live in downtown Toronto, and I was going to pick up some Japanese food for dinner.
	And I got my food to go, and I saw this woman sitting, I think, four tables away, on my left-hand side.
	And she was eating alone.
	And I thought she just had a really great look to her.
	Her aura.
	I don't know what you're going to say.
	And...
	So I took my bag of food and I walked over and I said, listen, I noticed that you're eating alone.
	I'm eating alone too.
	Would you like to eat alone together?
	And she sort of laughed and she said, sure.
	And so I pulled up and we started chatting.
	We ended up going out for a while.
	Didn't work out.
	But the point is just that I don't look back and say, oh, I remember that woman in that restaurant.
	I can't believe I never said hi to her.
	I don't think that I've ever been really attracted to a woman and not asked her out.
	And that doesn't mean that they all said yes, but you're gonna be dead either way.
	And I think that also when you get older, the stuff that you look back on that you were scared about when you were younger just seems so silly, so ridiculous.
	Oh, like I thought, what if that woman had said no to me?
	Well, so what?
	What if she says yes?
	What if she says, no, I'm in a relationship right now, but I got a great friend who would like to meet you.
	And it is really important in life to ask for what you want.
	Like, I wanted to do this with my life.
	Which is like the...
	The seventh thing that I wanted to do with my life.
	I wanted to do this.
	And I can't do this without asking for help.
	Because I'm quite partial to food and shelter.
	It's cold up here in Canada.
	And so I ask, I ask, I ask, I ask.
	FDRURL.com forward slash donate.
	Will you help out?
	And I try to make it entertaining and not pressure, pressure and all that kind of stuff.
	But I have to ask every day.
	Now, lots of people who do shows, they kind of ask implicitly.
	Because they basically know that they're not in the business of delivering their thoughts to the listeners.
	They're in the business of delivering people to advertisers.
	They're like a big conveyor belt.
	People to advertisers.
	People to advertisers.
	So they need you to listen.
	Because otherwise the advertisers won't pay them as much and blah, blah, blah.
	But I have to...
	Because I don't have any advertisers.
	I don't sell anything.
	I have to ask directly every day.
	Now, if I had said, well, I don't like it.
	It's imposing.
	I don't want to ask.
	Blah, blah, blah.
	Well...
	Then I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing.
	Which, you know, occasionally when donations are low seems like a fine idea.
	But you just have to ask for things in life.
	And we don't like to ask for things in life because there's lots of jerks out there in the world who when you ask for something will use it as a one-up.
	Will use it as a status thing.
	Well, oh, I'm going to say no to you and I'm going to enjoy saying no to you and I'm going to withhold from you and I'm going to whatever, right?
	And those people should not rob you of what you could have in life just by asking for it.
	Don't let jerks who look down on you for wanting or needing something prevent you from getting what you want or need.
	We don't actually need to do much to fight bad people in the world.
	We just kind of have to ignore them and it works out.
	But ask around.
	Ask where the nice women are.
	Hopefully they're not all at church.
	But ask where the nice women are.
	Go where the nice women are and talk to them.
	And if you're interested, ask them out.
	I mean, I wish there was something simpler, but just do that.
	We can't place our self-esteem on the yeses and nos of others.
	Because most of life is people saying no.
	Most people who listen to the show never kick a penny in to help support it.
	And most people who listen to the show brush past it and I don't know if they come back or not.
	What were the stats on Elysium, Mike? - Oh God, most people dropped off within the first two minutes or so. - Yeah, 'cause I got a video called The Truth about Elysium.
	Elysium, the Matt Damon movie.
	Hour, 47 minutes?
	Longer than the actual movie?
	Yeah, it's longer than the movie.
	And it's got like 75,000 views.
	Part of me says, wow, 75,000 times two hours?
	That's like 150,000 hours of pure concentrated philosophy being injected like squid venom into people's brains.
	And then Mike pointed out to me that you can in fact find out on YouTube when people drop off the video.
	And most people got to, hello, this is the truth about, oh my god, this isn't the real movie.
	I thought some of the truth about Elysium and it's now 47.
	Oh my god, it's the movie!
	There's a picture of Matt Damon right there.
	I'm in.
	What?
	Who's this guy?
	That's not Matt Damon.
	He's even dissing public school teachers.
	He's certainly not Matt Damon.
	Actually, so does Matt Damon because that lefty parasite sends his own kids to very expensive private schools because the government schools, you see, aren't lefty enough, right?
	So...
	What the hell was I talking about?
	You're gonna die.
	You were encouraging me to go talk to women.
	Are we negotiating for your pay again?
	No.
	Anyway, so the point is that I'm right and you should get laid.
	No, you should just go and ask.
	Just go and ask.
	And don't let people who may make you feel bad for asking get in your way.
	Let me ask that, and I'll just close it off.
	So that's all tied into that full circle.
	I mean, it makes sense, but I just want you to close it for me.
	That full circle is...
	The guy beat me.
	I felt bad about it because his peacock feathers were brighter than mine.
	And he got the better wife, right?
	He got the great wife.
	Right.
	So, yeah, that connects dots that go back a long way.
	I mean, he's the alpha, but in this scenario, you're not even the beta, right?
	Because the betas cluster around the alpha and get the leftovers, and the zetas are the ones who are just like the general pool of people waiting and single and all that kind of stuff, right?
	So yeah, he's got the whole alpha thing going, and you feel resentful towards the alpha thing.
	And that resentment is healthy.
	And I actually remember having the thought that, can't I just be good at one thing?
	Yeah, and I think it's really important to be good at one thing.
	I would just argue that it's really important to be good at virtue rather than shooting targets.
	And the virtue is the courage and the honesty and the integrity to go after and get what you want out of life.
	There are no second prizes.
	There's no backup plan.
	There's no plan B. You know, you say, well, I'm going to go to art school, but I'm going to have a plan B. You know, like I give myself a couple of years and then plan B or whatever, right?
	But in life as a whole, there is no backup plan.
	There's no plan B. There's no in my back pocket.
	There's no substitute for the thing itself.
	And so go get what you want.
	Go ask for what you want.
	And go and have a plan and execute on it to get a woman who's going to be great for you.
	And be selective.
	You have this show.
	You have values.
	You have a great way of evaluating people philosophically.
	I've done a whole podcast on how to find a nice girl.
	Do it again.
	Yeah, I mean, go get...
	A whole bunch of marriages have come out of this show.
	And one or two nice girls...
	No, I'm kidding.
	And that's because...
	I hope that I, I sort of show that you just, you just gotta ask and you just gotta, people will, people will probably help you.
	You know, a lot of people feel bad about asking for help.
	Do you ever feel bad when someone asks you for help?
	Like if someone stops, you're waiting for a bus and someone stops and asks for directions.
	I always feel bad if I don't know.
	I'm like, oh, I'm so sorry, I'm not from around here, or I take the bus everywhere and therefore I'm retarded about street names.
	All I listen for is dings like some Pavlovian dog.
	So most people will really want to help you.
	But you really do have to have the vulnerability to ask for stuff.
	So just ask the women around.
	Say, oh, you're a great woman.
	You look like a great wife.
	You're a great mom.
	Where can I find someone like you?
	I'm 28.
	I'd like to settle down.
	Nobody uses MySpace anymore, so I'm pretty safe that way.
	And, you know, just go get it.
	All right?
	Yeah, thanks very much.
	Keep up the good work.
	I'm glad to be a subscriber.
	Oh, you're a subscriber.
	Shit, I should have been nicer.
	Well, big kiss.
	Thank you so much.
	I really appreciate that.
	Have a great night.
	And keep me posted if you can.
	Let me know how it goes.
	Thank you.
	All right, take care.
	All right, Matthew, I guess if you want to go ahead.
	Okay.
	Can you guys hear me okay?
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Okay, so I don't know how much you heard of my...
	You grew up in a religious family.
	Ah, yes.
	Okay, good.
	So, yeah, I grew up in a religious family.
	I was very excited about evangelism, and I cared a lot about that.
	But when I went to college, I was exposed to these ideas, and I realized that I was kind of insulated from really different ideas that kind of caught me off guard, and I kind of changed a lot.
	I kind of About two years ago, I kind of became an atheist and kind of started really thinking for myself and stuff like that.
	So it's been very liberating, but also been kind of painful.
	The kind of social collateral damage and the deconversion process can be pretty painful, but I think Overall, it was good.
	My question, though, is...
	Just before you get to your question, and not to make light of, obviously, a very difficult transition, but a song lyric that we were playing around with earlier today comes to mind.
	You can think if you want to.
	You can leave your friends behind.
	Because your friends don't think.
	And if they don't think, well, there are no friends of mine.
	Yeah.
	That's good.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, I think I've really been realizing that.
	Even though...
	A lot of my friends...
	I mean, all my friends that I grew up with were pretty much exclusively Christians.
	And it's been really interesting to try to...
	They're really the only friends that I still have.
	And I'm trying to get some other friends.
	But it's been really interesting for me to try to somehow maintain these relationships.
	Because they're still really good people and I still really like them a lot.
	But one thing that I've really been...
	I've been listening to your show.
	I've been thinking about self-knowledge and Reason and evidence and objectivity as a worldview.
	But a part of me is very wary of really...
	I mean, I agree with a lot of things and I accept a lot of the things you say, but it's really difficult for me having come from that environment of being told what is right and what's true.
	And then later on discovering that, hey, okay, that was actually wrong.
	Oh, Matthew.
	Yeah, hello?
	Matthew.
	Yeah?
	Could I make a tiny request?
	Sure, yeah.
	Would you mind getting to a question?
	I love you dearly, but I do need you to get to a question.
	For sure.
	My question is, I was wondering if you had, let's see, If you knew any alternative viewpoints that you find antithetical to your own that I can kind of look at for myself to kind of see the counterarguments of the things that you say.
	Are you looking to find...
	Cultural or philosophical or media-based perspectives in opposition to, say, anarchy and hard atheism.
	Yeah.
	And anti-spanking and...
	Are you looking to find things that may be opposed to things that I'm saying?
	Can I make a suggestion?
	If you stop listening to this show and turn on almost any other conceivable show, pick up almost any other conceivable book, or just turn on the TV, And you will find just about everything antithetical to what I talk about.
	Now, I'm sure that's a bit of a facetious statement, but are you looking for very specific recommendations to oppose the perspectives that I put forward?
	Yes, more specifically, it should have been more specific, but specifically philosophical in terms of objectivism and those kind of things.
	If you knew any more, like a worthy adversary in terms of philosophy in that regard.
	Sure.
	Look, I mean, if you want the diametrical opposite of stuff that I put forward, you can go to final Bumbuddy Plato and Who wrote very passionately and powerfully for the need for a hierarchical totalitarian dictatorship to run society.
	Part of this was his own mysticism and part of it was the horror at the Athenian democracy's murder of his great mentor Socrates.
	But he basically said...
	Well, you know, this freedom thing where the rabble have a say is clearly disastrous since it gives the best men in the world a tasty draft of hemlock to down their To drown their sorrows in.
	So we need the philosophers to become kings or the kings to become philosophers or something like that.
	And so we need a society which is strictly hierarchical where people tell you what occupation you're going to have.
	They tell you the kind of freedoms you're going to have.
	And children are raised by the state.
	And there's none of this screwing around with all of this free choice because people are so irrational and so herd based and so destructive.
	That when everyone is equal, the fools overrun and eat the brains of the intelligent.
	I say that speech with some passion because I have some sympathy for it at times, without a doubt.
	But read your Plato.
	He is fantastic when it comes to opposing what you and I would consider to be some fairly essential liberties.
	If you want to read Aristotle for a truly hierarchical view of women and slavery, Aristotle, a great philosopher in many ways, but two weak spots, his contempt for women and his justification of slavery, not exactly unimportant when it comes to virtue.
	If you want to, I believe that I have dealt with the is-ought dichotomy.
	The is-ought dichotomy has been around for a while.
	It was very explicitly Formulated by David Hume.
	It comes out of the Scottish Enlightenment.
	And he basically said there is nothing in the world that dictates how the world ought to be.
	Well, we shouldn't kill.
	Well, there's nothing in nature that says you shouldn't kill.
	In fact, nature is basically driven by...
	Two things.
	Killing and getting laid.
	That is nature.
	I mean, there's this great quote.
	I can't remember who said it.
	It said, you know, if you look at a beautiful summer glade, you know, with the crickets and the birds and you see thousands and thousands of tiny animals and plants all just trying to get laid.
	And that, of course, is a lot to do with it.
	It's why you hear the beautiful crickets.
	It's why you hear the frogs.
	It's why you hear the cicadas and so on.
	So he says there's nothing in the world that tells us how the world ought to be.
	We ought not to steal.
	There's nothing in reality that says that.
	These are things we can impose if we want, but let's not pretend they're in reality.
	So if you want to view UPB with great skepticism, you can read David Hume.
	If you want to view reality...
	With great skepticism, then Descartes, I think Second Meditations is the place where you really want to go, where he basically says, okay, maybe I'm just a brain in a tank and all of my sensory input is controlled by some nefarious demon who's seeking to control and obscure everything that I see.
	And this is, you know, the famous I think, therefore I am.
	If you want to have extreme skepticism with regards to reality itself and the senses and so on, then you go to Descartes.
	I'm trying to think of other oppositions.
	I mean, St.
	Augustine is a great guy to go to if you want to read skepticism.
	With regards to atheism, he, of course, you know, the great challenge of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages was that they worshipped the ancient Greeks.
	I mean, who'd been kept from being destroyed in the Dark Ages by the Muslims?
	They just called Aristotle the philosopher.
	Like, he wasn't like, well, one of the philosophers, the philosopher.
	But, of course, they didn't know anything about Jesus.
	They didn't know anything about...
	Any of the modern Catholic teachings.
	And so they had this particular challenge and problem, which was that there was a lot of atheistic thought in the ancient world.
	And Socrates' big crime was twofold.
	One was corrupting the youth and the second was not believing in any gods of being an atheist.
	And so the Catholic Church wrestled a lot with atheism in the Middle Ages, and there's lots of great repudiations of atheism, and I think there is nine proofs for God put forward by a lot of medieval scholastics and so on that are well worth reading.
	I mean, very important.
	You want to test yourself against the very best.
	If you want to really fit yourself into a Prussian-style Germanic hierarchy, then there's no better person to do that than Immanuel Kant.
	His higher reality, his new aminal reality, as he called it, which is very similar to Plato's world of forms, is absolutely well worth examining.
	Because this always goes hand in hand.
	This is my sort of master thesis.
	This also always goes hand in hand with Dictatorship.
	A higher realm always goes hands in hand with dictatorship.
	Because if the truth is inaccessible to reason and evidence, then it has to be imposed by hierarchy, which is why every time you see people proposing higher realities, they always end up proposing dictatorships.
	Hegel is really quite fascinating for his sort of world spirit and this sort of grandiose, again, Germanic view of how history works and all that.
	If you really want to get great criticisms of capitalism, of course, you go to Karl Marx and people like that.
	He's a sourly brilliant writer and well worth reading.
	Marx and Engels were excellent polemicists, excellent propagandists.
	Closing lines in literature, political literature, than the Communist Manifesto.
	Workers of the world unite.
	You have nothing to lose but your chains.
	That is as fantastic a bumper sticker as you're ever going to find in this stuff.
	I wish I could offer you some good critiques of objectivism, but the critiques of objectivism tend to be penned by tiny-minded little bitches.
	Who just think that dumping sour and acerbic adjectives on her smoky grave is enough to disprove her ideas.
	I have not seen a good, academic, clear criticisms of objectivism.
	And this, I think, just goes to show the strength of objectivism.
	If objectivism was truly ridiculous, then it would be very easy to point out.
	But what people do is they say, well, Ayn Rand, she took Social Security when she was older.
	And she thought that the Palestinians weren't the equals of the Jews, and she was down on homosexuality.
	Ergo, Nick Cage's hair is a bird, and therefore, she's wrong.
	It's tragic, but this is natural when you don't have good critiques to offer.
	Anyway, there's tons more, but there's some very brief places that I think you could do, and it's a great thing to do in a read opposing way.
	Read stuff that is opposite to your viewpoint is very important.
	This is why I think anarchists, atheists, particularly the real atheists, not those mealy-mouthed agnostics, I mean, we're just smarter.
	We're not smarter because we're just, I think, born that way.
	Otherwise, we'd be Lady Gaga's backup dancers.
	But we're smarter because you just...
	The more weight you lift, the stronger your muscles get.
	In other words, the more opposition to your movement, the more opposition to your progress, the stronger you get.
	And the more your ideas are in conflict with society, assuming that they're rational, the more your ideas are in conflict with society, the more pounding opposition you get and the stronger your brain gets.
	So whenever you're tempted by a particular viewpoint, I think it's really important to read criticisms of that viewpoint.
	Hopefully that way the strongest aspects of that viewpoint will survive and flourish.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
	Thank you very much.
	That's helpful.
	You're very welcome.
	And I always throw in a plug for this, which is Paul Johnson's book, Intellectual, so I'll do a review of it one day.
	Just an incredibly fantastic book.
	Also, Arianna Huffington wrote a biography of Picasso that is really interesting.
	It is...
	It is deeply shocking, at least it was for me, to realize that most of the people who were revered as artists and intellectuals in the 20th century were completely evil psychos in their personal life.
	I mean, Picasso was a complete monster.
	Perhaps the worst of all was Bertolt Brecht, the author of very, very famous left-wing plays, but also very good plays.
	And with Kurt Weill, he wrote, it's a three penny opera and so on, which is an adaptation, I think John Gray's, a Vegas opera from the 18th century.
	Lord, I'm testing the limits of my historical knowledge now, but Hemingway was a monster.
	I mean, just...
	Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, the English poet, was a monster.
	Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a complete clusterfrak of a human mess.
	I mean, this is the guy who wrote very movingly about the tender education of children, who left four of his babies in a French peasant orphanage right in the 18th century.
	I mean, just dumped them there, basically rang the doorbell and ran away.
	Karl Marx, you know, personally was a complete monster.
	This is the man who railed, you see, against the exploitation of the capitalists, by the capitalists of the working class.
	You see, the working class is terrible.
	Don't want to exploit the working classes.
	And he basically banged his maid.
	And then when she got pregnant, forced her to give away the baby and just kept her as his basic sex slave for his whole life.
	Because remember, it's really bad to exploit the working classes.
	I mean, just a complete and total monster.
	And what it does is it gives you significant pause when you look at the personal lives of these people and the degree to which they elevated themselves as the instructors of mankind.
	And you see what complete monsters they are in their personal life.
	I mean, to some degree, to a smaller degree, it's what happened, of course, with the Catholic Church and other churches that elevate themselves to be the moral instructors of mankind.
	Which means that maybe you shouldn't be sending pedophilic priests from place to place to rape more little children rather than lose a little bit of income or get them into some kind of counseling and keep them away from children.
	You know, the people who claim to be the moral instructors of mankind who claim to tell people what to do are almost invariably complete sociopathic monsters who act in utter opposition to their stated and demanded values.
	In almost every aspect of their personal lives.
	Lifting the lid of a public finger-wagging moral instructor of mankind will almost always reveal an intense hell of truly disgusting, vile, abusive, horrendous behavior.
	And they just use people around them like human toilets, not just for sexual lust, but for anything, for money, for favors.
	They lie, manipulate, cheat, beg, steal, stab, kill.
	I mean, they're completely horrendous behavior.
	Now, my UPB brain is tickling my brain and saying, ah, but Steph, do you not claim to be a moral instructor of mankind?
	And the answer is, absolutely not.
	Absolutely not.
	You know, I think you could comb through all of my podcasts.
	I can't even think of a time where I ever told someone what to do.
	I just, I can't, I can't think of a time where I ever told someone what to do.
	I have told people, I don't think you should do this, or the consequences that this seemed to me rather bad, or, you know, if people say to me, well, I can't leave my wife.
	I say, well, you can.
	I don't know if you should.
	But you can, right?
	Because I have to tell people the truth.
	And the truth is you can leave abusive relationships, whether they're parental or spousal or whatever.
	But you'd be really hard pressed.
	I mean, there probably is one or two.
	I can't think of any, but you'd be really hard pressed to find times where I actually told someone what to do.
	Now, of course, me telling someone what to do is completely irrelevant.
	I mean, I can tell you if you want to go and stick four grapes up your nose.
	And what are you going to do?
	Well, you're going to be really difficult and stick five grapes up your nose just to show me how independent you are.
	So, I mean, me telling people what to do doesn't mean anything, but even if it did, I'm extremely reticent to tell people what to do.
	So I'm really not a moral instructor.
	And certainly, even if I did have opinions about what people should do with their lives...
	As an anarchist, I can't possibly enforce that.
	I can't possibly enforce that because there's no state that I can use as the mechanism by which I make people do what I think they should do.
	There's a few things I know that people shouldn't do.
	You know, the four big bands is rape, theft, murder, and assault.
	Yeah, don't do those things.
	But as to what people should do, I don't know.
	I really couldn't tell people.
	I try to give them Things they may not have thought of, perspectives they may not have thought of, some hard-won, perhaps, experience of mine.
	But I am not at all a moral instructor of mankind.
	In fact, I am incredibly opposed to moral compulsion of any kind, of any kind.
	Starting with spanking, all the way through to confinement in schools, all the way through to government jails, and so on.
	I am intensely and passionately committed to not being any kind of moral instructor or enforcer.
	I don't know what people should do with their lives.
	I don't think I've ever told people You must not ever hit your children.
	I've told them what the consequences are of hitting children.
	I've made the case that spanking children is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	But giving people orders is ridiculous because if you don't have any power to enforce your orders, but you're giving people orders, then you're delusional.
	And if you do have the power to enforce your orders, then you're tyrannical.
	You're dictatorial.
	I mean, It's like you can tell your kid what he's going to have for dinner if you lock him in his room and slide something under the door, like he's in solitary or something.
	So, yeah, I mean, I don't put myself in the category of a moral instructor of mankind.
	So I think that I'm sort of not in that particular prescription.
	But, you know, when they say, it's an old statement, right?
	Judge the man by his deeds, not what he says.
	I can't hear what you're saying over what you're doing.
	Actions speak louder than words.
	And when people do claim to be a moral benefactor of mankind and claim to have the insight to tell the entire fucking species, the entire fucking planet what to do with, you know, the couple of decades of life that we're granted, then the first thing I do, I don't really care what they say, first thing I do is, okay, well, let's have a look at your life.
	Let's see how you lived.
	These values that you espouse on others.
	And can you imagine?
	Can you imagine the hue and cry that would erupt around the internet for those interested in what I'm doing if it were to be found that I were spanking my daughter?
	I mean, can you imagine?
	People would just dismiss What I was saying with no further argument.
	People are trying to dismiss what Dr.
	Benjamin Spock said about anti-spanking in the 1950s because one of his grandchildren committed suicide.
	Well, that's what...
	And he didn't even spank his kids.
	So imagine if I, you know, all about peaceful parenting and it turns out that I'm spanking and starving my daughter.
	People would immediately dismiss everything that I had to say.
	Well, I'm very much the same when it comes to other thinkers or other people who propose exactly How they should, how everyone should behave and what they should do.
	So you can save a lot of time just by looking at, it's not perfect, but you can save a lot of time by looking at what these thinkers do.
	And one other thing that I thought of and then forgot, which is if you want to really look at, I think one of the most competent defenses of the welfare state, of sort of the mixed economy, some free market, some Government controls or redistribution of wealth.
	You can read John Rawls' The Theory of Justice.
	His basic argument is if you were floating above the world before you were born and you didn't know if you were going to be born rich or poor or smart or dumb or sick or healthy or whatever, So if you were smart and healthy and all that, you'd want a society that would let you have a free market enough to pursue your opportunity, to achieve your bliss, to whatever, and build your companies or start your motorcycle club or whatever it is you're going to do.
	To give you scope for your abilities.
	On the other hand, if you ended up being born sort of sick and poor, you'd want a safety net so that you didn't end up starving to death.
	So that's why we have some free market and some government redistribution of wealth, because there's that.
	So, I mean, I've done a podcast on it, and we'll get into the arguments against it here, but it's a pretty competent and fairly compelling argument for what's called the mixed economy, sort of free market and half government control interventions and redistribution.
	So...
	So anyway, that's my...
	But yeah, really, read intellectuals.
	It is...
	I still remember the...
	I read that book in two days straight.
	It's a pretty big-ass book.
	I read the book two days straight, and it was an incredible liberation for me to see how much work still needed to be done.
	Because his argument says, well, these artists and these philosophers and these...
	Edmund Wilson, who wrote To the Finland Station, was an avowed Marxist who wrote an entire history of Soviet communism.
	And To the Finland Station refers to when the German high command sent Lenin through Finland to go to Russia to start the revolution to get...
	Russia out of the First World War because America was coming in, thus America's involvement in the First World War started the communist dictatorship and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	So this ass clown, I mean, it's entirely around communism and a heavy socialist and take care of the poor, redistribute the wealth, high taxes, government control.
	This fucker didn't pay his taxes for over 10 years.
	He paid not one goddamn penny of taxes.
	For over 10 years.
	In fact, it was so bad, his accountant said, basically, you're gonna have to flee the United States.
	Like, you don't even talk to these people.
	Just get out of the country and never come back.
	Wow.
	I mean, goddamn Michael Moore, he's pretty left, would you say?
	Kind of a socialist guy.
	Guy takes millions of dollars in tax breaks every time he makes a movie.
	And he hires non-union People to work on his movie.
	I mean, come on!
	I mean, he's one of the few people whose hypocrisy is even bigger than his fucking belt.
	Anyway.
	So, just look at the people and don't look at the philosophy first.
	The philosophy is usually a distraction from the individual.
	And it doesn't mean that if an individual has some elements of hypocrisy, it doesn't mean that then you dismiss everything.
	But if they're completely acting in opposition to what they claim to be the ideal, you know, what does Jesus say to the Catholic Church?
	What does Jesus say to the Pope?
	Whatever you do to the least among you, you do unto me.
	Now, I have not seen, and here we're going to test the existence of a deity, see if any kind of lightning is going to come through the window and strike me down.
	Whatever you do to the least among me, you also do to me.
	I don't believe that ass-raping Jesus has ever been on a stained glass window in any Catholic church.
	I mean, I've never seen, and I've looked.
	I mean, I've visited a lot of churches, and I've looked.
	And given that I don't believe that ass-raping Jesus is an ideal, but Jesus says, whatever you do to the least among us, in other words, the children, he says, suffer the little children to come unto me.
	Jesus focuses on what you do to the children, you do to me.
	And it's really hard to...
	Have a lot of respect for the clergy which covered this stuff up and fought tooth and nail for restitution and so on.
	So yeah, look out for the moral instructors of mankind.
	It's almost always a complete and total scam.
	And you mentioned a book, The Biography of Picasso.
	Who is that by?
	Who is that author?
	Oh, you know, the Huffington Post?
	Mm-hmm.
	Let me just, I'll get the title of it.
	Ariana Huffington wrote it.
	It was some time ago.
	Now, she's, of course, a complete leftist.
	But Creator and Destroyer was the name of the book.
	And it's really quite...
	It's a good book.
	It's a good book.
	I mean, he is a...
	You know, she really worked hard.
	She interviewed his daughter...
	She interviewed his mistress of 10 years, the mother of two of his children, and so on.
	And it's worth having a look at the degree to which this man is just a complete monster.
	Just a complete monster.
	And, you know, and it's funny, you know, because there's a, well, he's a flawed artist, you know?
	That's like calling Charles Manson a flawed country singer.
	Anyway.
	Thank you very much.
	That was really helpful.
	You're very welcome.
	And I hope that that helps.
	And I'm sorry for those of you who over the years have asked me to put together a reading list.
	Well, the first one you could find is freedomainradio.com forward slash free for all my books.
	That would be a recommended reading list.
	But I will absolutely get down to it this fall, putting together at least a first round reading list with some reviews.
	And hopefully people can have a look at some of the books, at least those books that have influenced me enormously.
	And thanks.
	Great question.
	Thank you.
	Bye.
	All right, Jake, go ahead.
	You're up next.
	Hello, can you hear me?
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Hello?
	And welcome.
	Thank you.
	How are you doing?
	I'm well.
	I'm well.
	How are you doing?
	I'm good.
	I'm good.
	So my question's a little bit abstract, so I'll try and be as concise as possible.
	So I'm a college student.
	I'm studying psychology.
	I've always been like a competitive person.
	I've enjoyed being on sports teams, just competitive sports, games, etc.
	It seems like the last couple of years...
	I've always enjoyed being on competitive teams, competitive sports, sports teams, etc.
	I think you've already hit the non-concise buzzer.
	Because I know what sports teams are.
	Just pointing that out.
	Oh, go ahead.
	Right.
	Yeah, but video games, everything like that.
	And just the past couple years, I've been having trouble finding direction, I guess.
	I've had a passion for philosophy and reason and truth and everything.
	And I'm just wondering if there's advice that you have for maybe using those things to try and find a direction as far as a career path and everything.
	But aren't you studying psychology?
	I am.
	So aren't you sort of like a train asking me which way it should go?
	I'd say, well, follow the track, right?
	You're on the track.
	Yeah, I'm not sure.
	I'm not so positive it's what I want to do.
	It's a very broad field, so even after you get a degree, there's no guarantee that you'll end up being a psychologist.
	It's just sort of, it's very open-ended.
	So why did you choose psychology?
	Why did you choose psychology?
	I'm very interested in it.
	I like to help people.
	It's interesting to me.
	I've had some mental health problems myself, you could say, so it's something that's close to me, I guess.
	Are you depressed at the moment?
	Yeah, the past three or four years, I've been struggling with it on and off.
	Are you depressed at the moment?
	No.
	Okay.
	All right.
	I mean, your voice sounds a little flat.
	I have sort of a mellow tone, I suppose.
	You have a what?
	A mellow tone?
	Demeanor?
	Catatonic, mellow, potato, potato.
	All right.
	And where are you in your degree?
	I'm a senior currently, but I'm probably going to graduate like half a year later or so.
	So you're near the end?
	Yes, there's about like three semesters to go, so yes.
	Okay.
	What aspect of philosophy is interesting to you?
	Well, objectivism and anarchism and the non-aggression principle, they all just seemed to connect with me.
	They just made a lot of sense.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	As soon as I learned about them from your show and other sources, mostly on the internet, it's just something I've been interested in.
	And what do you want on your headstone?
	When you're dead?
	I don't know.
	I've never really thought about it.
	I don't think about the future all that much.
	No, listen, you should think about it.
	Everybody needs to write their own eulogy.
	Seriously.
	Write your own eulogy.
	What do you want people to say about you when you're dead?
	And I think that's an important thing.
	I mean, you're not going to be dead, you won't care, but the point is that if you want your life to mean something, and if you're aiming at philosophy, your life is either going to go big or go home.
	There's no middle ground in philosophy.
	You're either going to do some really great stuff or die living in a cardboard box in a van down by the river on a steady diet of government cheese.
	So it is important To think about your eulogy, to think about what you want people to say about you when you're dead.
	You know, when Victor Hugo died, 19th century French novelist, astonishingly popular.
	I mean, second only to Dickens in his popularity.
	Dickens was just like a rock star of the 19th century.
	I mean, everywhere he went, people mobbed him.
	I mean, he was just a complete, one of the first modern celebrities.
	And Victor Hugo was the same way.
	Victor Hugo had to go and write on an island in the middle of nowhere because otherwise you couldn't get anything done.
	And he was one of these insane hardy guys like, ah, it's the middle of winter.
	I must rip off my shirt and write in the cold.
	You know, this very Gerard Depideur kind of hard-nosed stuff.
	But anyway, when he died, like 10,000 people walked down the procession of his coffin.
	10,000 people!
	I mean, this is back when you couldn't tweet to meet, right?
	I guess you could tweet your meet if you're Anthony Weiner, but you couldn't tweet to meet.
	And why not?
	Why not aim for something like that?
	It will give you some clarity and some courage about what it is that you want to achieve.
	So, it doesn't mean that your eulogy has to be like a big thing.
	It doesn't have to be this guy changed the course of human history, this guy illuminated mankind like a supernova in the cerebellum.
	It doesn't have to be anything like that, but it can be, you know, he was a nice, quiet neighbor, his kids never came on my lawn, and he, you know, watched my cats while I was away.
	It can be that.
	But boy, I tell you, a couple years ago, I went to the funeral of a friend of mine's mom, She died unexpectedly.
	She had an aneurysm.
	Just died.
	Dropped.
	And she was, I think in her late 60s, early 70s.
	So it wasn't like prime of her life or whatever.
	She just, she died.
	And then she'd been like a bookkeeper and she was married twice to bad men and she had only one son and she hadn't really done much with her life.
	And I Did a eulogy and other people did eulogies.
	And frankly, was not the easiest speech writing I've ever done in my life because I didn't really know what to say.
	And one of her neighbors said, ah, yes, I remember her well.
	She always had lots of candy for the children at Halloween.
	I'm, oh my god.
	Oh my god.
	I think that's terrifying.
	You know, she never left her shoes in the hallway of the apartment building.
	She always pushed her garbage right down the chute.
	Like, she didn't just leave it there.
	Kind of wedged in there when you try and get yours in.
	She was that kind of woman.
	Magnificent.
	Her car was always quite clean.
	I never saw her in polyester.
	She had a mole that had hair coming out of it and quite often, quite often without even being prompted, she would just pluck it.
	What else?
	She was very efficient.
	She only read Reader's Digest condensed books.
	The big ones, which I think are just full of filler.
	She kept her freezer eerily defrosted.
	I don't know how she did that.
	Like she'd boil a kettle in there or something?
	Anyway, we could go on and on, but people were just like reaching for anything to say about this ghost of a woman who passed through, leaving barely a ripple in life.
	I read the Robert Frost poem about the road less traveled.
	As a reminder to myself that I did not want a eulogy about, he shone well in sunlight.
	He was a fine beacon for ships lost at sea in the sunset if he stood by the beach.
	I just, I just, people didn't know what to say about this woman when she died.
	And of course, a lot of what they could have said, they didn't want to say.
	Thank you.
	She kept her son close to her so that she didn't have to have other friends at his expense.
	Anyway, so if you think about your life as a whole and what kind of imprint you want to leave in the world, that can help you to organize What it is that you want to do.
	And if you're interested in philosophy, and that's what you brought up as something that motivates and moves you, well, nothing could be easier or harder.
	If you want to get into philosophy, we have this amazing thing called the internet.
	You may recognize it from our conversation.
	You can just start writing.
	You can start broadcasting.
	You can start publishing.
	You can do books.
	You can do articles.
	You can do reviews.
	You can Bring your intellect out to the world.
	And you can then wait for the feedback of people who read or review or peruse your stuff and then you can listen to them about what they want and you can attempt to compromise your interests with the needs of your audience and you can grow to bring as much philosophy to as much people as possible.
	It's possible.
	I mean, I've done it, right?
	I'm not the only one who's done it either.
	So you can do that kind of stuff.
	But the problem is that you're going to have to self-start that, right?
	And if you say mental health issues, struggle with depression off and on.
	And one of the reasons you may be feeling anxious is that your time in structure, right?
	Drawing to a close, right?
	Since you were four or five years old, your days are all laid out for you like a train track, right?
	I mean, you get to choose a couple of courses, but That's like choosing where you want to go on the train line.
	That's not the same as striking out into the woods on your own, right?
	So you've had structure.
	Here's where you go.
	Here's where you sit.
	Here's what you read.
	Here's what you write.
	Here's what you learn.
	Here's what you have to do tonight when you go home.
	Here's when your test is going to be.
	It's a conveyor belt through other people's preferences.
	Same thing goes on in college.
	You have a little more freedom, but not a huge amount.
	Once you choose what here are the courses you need to take.
	Here are your prerequisites.
	You have a couple of options.
	But even those options, you got to pick from a list, right?
	And your time in this passive conveyor belt of other people's structures joined to a close, right?
	And now you face life uncharted.
	Life with no track, right?
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
	I think that's been one of the problems is I'm identifying that eventually I'm going to have to do my own thing and pave the way for myself and everything and maybe I'm subconsciously afraid of it or I don't think I'm ready for it.
	I don't know, but yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
	Well, maybe is one of these words that tells me that we've got precisely nowhere in the conversation, which is, you know, okay.
	But when you say maybe, then you're basically saying, well, I don't know, and nothing has been illuminated or resolved, right?
	I'm not criticizing, I'm just sort of pointing it out, right?
	No, no, I think you made a lot of good points.
	I think you're definitely correct to a good degree.
	Which you just restated the same thing, but with more words.
	Hey, weren't you going to be concise?
	Well, tell me, tell me, what do you want your eulogy to sound like?
	Give me your eulogy.
	I'm really not sure, to be honest.
	I mean, I would want it to be meaningful, and I'd want to have some effect on people and leave something behind.
	But what?
	I'm not sure.
	- Well then, you have no desires or preferences?
	Well, you said you wanted to have an effect on people I assume you mean a positive effect, right?
	An arsonist has an effect on people.
	I'm sure you're not talking about that, right?
	Yes.
	You want to have a positive effect on people, right?
	Yes.
	So what, do you want to make them more rational?
	Do you want to make them more sensible?
	Do you want to make them happier?
	Do you want to make them more courageous?
	Do you want to make them more virtuous?
	Do you want to make them more cautious?
	Do you want to make them healthier?
	Do you want to make them wealthier?
	What is it that you want?
	How do you want to affect people?
	More rational and honest with themselves.
	Because I think that's the core problem is people aren't honest with themselves.
	Okay, so what dishonesty with the South do you find the most prevalent in society?
	- I'm sorry, abstract.
	I just see, like, The point you bring up a lot is that people try to see the world in a different way because of to compensate for their own insecurities.
	And I just see that a lot in various ways in people.
	Let me put it another way, because that's not actionable.
	I'm giving you project management 101.
	This is life management 101.
	You say you want to have an effect on people.
	Well, what kind of effect?
	Well, I want to make them more rational.
	Well, if you want to make people more rational, then you have to look at and find the biggest source of irrationality, right?
	If you say, I want to make people healthier, then you have to say to yourself, okay, well, what is the biggest single source of people's unhealth, right?
	So again, this is obviously, you're not used to this.
	That's okay, right?
	I mean, it's sad.
	I think that parents in schools and all that don't, in your early 20s, I bet, and you don't know how to organize your life.
	It's sad.
	It's not your fault, right?
	But I'm just going to give you that 101, right?
	And this doesn't have to be your answer.
	This is just how you go about figuring out what you want to do with your life.
	So you want, what will make you the happiest, let's just assume that that's true, and make you the happiest to make people more rational, right?
	So then you have to say, what is the biggest single source of irrationality?
	In the world.
	You say, well, people not being honest with themselves.
	I want to make people more honest with themselves.
	It's not actionable, right?
	Because if I say, okay, we'll start on that now tonight, you wouldn't have anything to do, right?
	Right.
	Other than cross your fingers.
	I hope that the rational elves go down the chimneys of people's ears and take up residence, right?
	Right.
	So there's no answer to this that's important and objective, but what for you, in your experience in life, is the single biggest source of irrationality?
	Or manifestation of irrationality?
	I would say religious institutions, public schools, probably.
	So, public schools are...
	I mean, that's how people are made irrational, but how does that irrationality show up?
	Because there's a difference between churches and religion, right?
	So, if I said, well, the biggest single source of irrationality is religion, that would be different than saying it's churches, right?
	Right.
	So, what is the single biggest manifestation of irrationality in your thoughts at the moment?
	It's not a final answer, right?
	When you say a manifestation, what do people do that's irrational?
	Yeah.
	I mean, let me give you an example because I know this is tough, right, without a template.
	So for me, the biggest example of irrationality in life is people's simultaneous rejection of and worship of violence.
	That to me is the biggest single manifestation.
	It's their rejection of violence and their worship of violence.
	You should not steal.
	The government must steal.
	I would call it taxation.
	You hit your kids telling them not to hit other people.
	You say, don't kidnap people, but the state should do it for people who smoke the wrong piece of vegetation.
	Murder is wrong.
	Oh, you're in a uniform.
	Murder is patriotism.
	Murder is protecting and serving and blah blah blah.
	That first caller say, I was in the service.
	Don't insult the word service by calling that service.
	I'm forced at gunpoint to pay for your ass in uniform and then you go around killing people around the world.
	I don't think you're serving anyone, except the CEO of Halliburton.
	So, that for me is this simultaneous rejection of violence and complete worship.
	Of violence is the biggest manifestation, and to me it comes right back to childhood and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
	So that's why I focus a lot on personal life, on childhood, on history, on parenting, on all that kind of stuff, while at the same time exploring how these ideas manifest themselves in the government and in religion, right?
	As people say, thou shall not kill, that's a high ideal, but God goes around killing everyone, literally everyone except Noah and his family in the Old Testament, and people are like, well, that guy's really great.
	It's like, what?
	Don't kill.
	Universal genocide.
	How do you square that freaking circle where you say this is the highest moral ideal who continually breaks and violates the most sacred moral commandments he provides to everyone else?
	I mean, it's like being a pro-Semitic and worshipping Hitler.
	It just makes no sense to me.
	But again, this stuff all goes back to childhood.
	So this is my particular bugaboo, right?
	People's love of and hatred of violence that is simultaneous in their lives.
	And you don't have to have anything that sort of thought out.
	I mean, I've had 30 years to work on it, but maybe it's that for you, but what is the manifestation of people's irrationality?
	Where do you see it?
	Um...
	How do you know people are irrational?
	You say, I want to make people rational, but how do you know they're irrational?
	What is it that convinces you?
	So I say, well, I want to make people thin, because everyone around me is 400 pounds.
	Well, now I know why I want to make them thin, because they're 400 pounds.
	How do you know they're 400 pounds?
	How do you know people are irrational?
	When I see the political issues and such that people talk about, people's views, they don't make sense, they're inconsistent.
	If you look at things like gun control, the cities with higher gun control, higher crime, and they just ignore the facts, and they just base their conclusions off just visceral emotions, and that's about it.
	Okay.
	So people, quote, think emotionally, right?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	And I mean, I would agree with that.
	Not that that means anything.
	I just happen to agree with it and make it true.
	But what is the cure for that?
	Well, the reason and teaching people how to try and shrug off emotion and look at the evidence when dealing with issues.
	Why do you think that's the cure?
	Because evidence works, and just like science works, and religion doesn't.
	Okay, so this would be another Life Planning 101 moment, which is that you think you have an answer, but you in fact don't, at least scientifically.
	And...
	There are studies that are very clear and very consistent that people who, say, have a particular political persuasion, when they are presented with facts and evidence, not opinions, facts and evidence contrary to their position, their original position hardens.
	They become more intransigent.
	So when people who have a particular, Republican or Democrat or whatever, let's say that they're for gun control and then they see the facts against gun control, They're actually more for gun control after the fact and vice versa.
	So I think it's really important to understand that if you think reason and evidence is going to change people's minds, that's a hypothesis.
	And since you're into science, you want to first test your hypothesis.
	Right?
	Because if you end up with a false hypothesis, you will literally waste your life.
	Reason and evidence tend to reinforce prejudice.
	And there's many, many studies that have been done in this area.
	I'm just trying to dig one up at the moment so I can give you some more details.
	Because I just read it yesterday, but God help me, I didn't bookmark it.
	Fool that I was.
	But if you have a theory, you can't assume that any of your theories are valid.
	Nobody can.
	And what you need to do Is if you have a hypothesis to check it, right?
	And it bugs me when libertarians and objectivists and anarchists and so on say, well, this is what we got to do or this is how I'm going to solve things.
	I'm going to go into politics.
	I'm going to go become an academic.
	I'm going to write books.
	I'm going to give people good arguments or whatever.
	How is that?
	How do we know whether that's true?
	How do we know whether that's true or not?
	And It doesn't actually work to provide people facts, arguments, evidence, you name it.
	What it will do is it will harden their original position.
	Because people don't make decisions based on facts and evidence.
	If people made decisions based on facts and evidence, there would in no way shape or form be such a wide divergence of political and cultural opinions.
	I mean, do you think that religious people base their beliefs on facts and evidence?
	No.
	Right.
	Do you think that people who prefer particular political parties, do they look at the facts and evidence for those political parties?
	No.
	No.
	What about people who are into particular sports teams?
	Do they look at all the various sports teams around the country and decide which one is best?
	Usually not.
	Oh, come on.
	You've got to give me that one.
	That's an absolute.
	I think I found it.
	That's an absolute.
	I mean, there's nobody who says, well, I think that the best team is the New York Knicks, so I'm going to go move there.
	Wherever you live, that's your sports team, right?
	Yeah.
	Do you think that people think that they choose their culture if you're sort of Greek or Turkish or whatever?
	Do people pick their culture based on reason and evidence?
	Do they look at all the cultures around the world and which one is the best?
	No.
	No.
	Do you think that people choose their spouses based upon a rational and objective analysis of the qualities that they're looking for, the values that they share, and so on?
	Very rarely, I doubt it.
	Right, very rarely.
	Can you think, outside of science, and even science is pretty messed up, I mean just look at some of those global warming emails that were Leaked a couple of years ago where basically people were just conspiring to keep information hidden and conspiring to keep people out of journals and there's all that kind of crap going on as well, right?
	Look at the quote science behind SSRIs or other psychotropics and it's all complete nonsense.
	But outside of certain particular areas of science and mathematics, can you think of an example where people base their perspectives on reason and evidence primarily?
	Um, no, not really.
	Okay.
	Let me read to you an article, just a little bit from it.
	It's called How Facts Backfire.
	It's Boston.com, which I think is in Chicago.
	Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information.
	Ah, faith it is.
	It's this.
	Facts don't necessarily have the power to change our minds.
	In fact, quite the opposite.
	In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds.
	In fact, they often became more strongly set in their beliefs.
	Facts they found were not curing misinformation.
	Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
	And you can read the whole article, I won't bore you with the whole thing, but you know, there's an old statement which is very true, which says that you cannot reason a man out of an opinion he has not been reasoned into.
	So If you want reason and evidence to change people's minds, you first of all have to look for those aspects of their thinking which were created through a strict adherence to reason and evidence.
	Right?
	Right.
	And if you can't think of any, that's probably why it's a little tough to figure out what to do with your life, right?
	Yeah.
	People ignorant of the facts, in the article it says, people ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote.
	But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions.
	Ain't that the truth?
	A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000 by this dude.
	He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents, are there really 1,000 people in Illinois?
	Maybe that's like with mirrors.
	It's like a fun house.
	Maybe you went into fun houses like, whoa, people in Illinois, all kinds of warps.
	Anyway, more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare, the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout.
	More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct.
	But in fact, only three...
	It's too sad.
	I can't.
	It's too sad.
	Remember I said I was crowded in with these lemmings all rushing off a cliff to our doom?
	Ah, let me out of the subway.
	I know where we're going.
	To hell itself.
	Blow it out your ass.
	Somebody really likes my Duke Nukem voice.
	What are you waiting for, Christmas?
	What was Isabella saying today?
	The Schwarzenegger quote?
	Do it!
	Do it now!
	Do it now!
	He always feels like he's swallowing half the English language sideways.
	Anyway.
	So, sorry.
	All these people, more than half indicated they were incredibly confident that their answers were correct.
	But in fact, only 3% of the people got more than half the questions right.
	Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic.
	Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong anti-welfare bias.
	Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena.
	I'm going to start that whole sentence again.
	Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, healthcare reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion.
	The researcher calls this sort of response the, I know I'm right, syndrome, and considers it a potentially formidable problem in a democratic system.
	Do you know, I just wanted to mention that that railway spike that was driven through your head might present a potentially formidable problem to wearing headphones.
	Or going through a metal detector.
	Or living.
	It implies, he wrote, not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs, but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.
	And they get the same vote that you and I would get.
	Which is why I don't vote.
	I'm just not mingling my competence in with these truly dangerous anti-knowledge idiots.
	So, there he writes, it's a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye towards reinforcing their pre-existing views, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
	Anyway, you're in psych, I don't need to tell you all this stuff.
	Do the research.
	If you want to change the world, if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself.
	If you want to change the world, you need to figure out why the world is the way it is, and the world is the way it is because people are bludgeoned With prejudice and bias and propaganda and lies and bullying.
	And they have no idea.
	They can't think.
	They don't think.
	They're allergic to thinking.
	In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact checking in the wake of the Iraq war, some dudes devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories.
	You know what's strange about that?
	They're all mock news stories.
	Because they mock.
	What is it?
	I think it's...
	Oh, gosh.
	Samuel Clemens.
	Mark Twain.
	He said, if a man doesn't read the paper, he's uninformed.
	If he reads the paper, he's misinformed.
	So they were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false statement, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure.
	That there were WMDs found in Iraq.
	There weren't.
	That the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues, revenues actually fell, and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research.
	Only certain federal funding was restricted.
	Nyhan inserted a clear direct correction after each piece of misinformation and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.
	For the most part, Do you think it did?
	Think it didn't?
	It really didn't.
	The participants who self-described as conservative believed the misinformation on WMDs and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction.
	So they say, WMDs have been found.
	Actually, no, they weren't.
	That's completely incorrect.
	They believed more strongly that WMDs had been found after they were told that they weren't.
	With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic, Anyway, we could go on and on with this stuff.
	I just wanted to mention that if you want to change the world, I think that's wonderful.
	I'm intensely...
	I intensely admire people who want to change the world.
	But, boy, you've really got to figure out why the world is the way it is.
	And just saying, well, I'll give people better arguments and information, and they'll change their minds.
	Well, I think that you've got science against you, if you're looking at that.
	You're like a potter saying, well, I'm just going to make an entire pottery store worth of stuff from water.
	It's like, actually without the clay in there, you're basically just splashing around like a four-year-old in a tub.
	So I just wanted to...
	I wanted to point this out.
	And if you think that, well, I just talk to people who are smarter or better informed or better educated, sorry, that doesn't work either.
	A 2006 study by Charles Tabor and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types.
	These people may be factually right about 90% of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10% on which they're totally wrong.
	Tabor and Lodge found this alarming because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	So anyway, I just really wanted to point out that reason and evidence is not going to save us.
	There's no scientific evidence for that.
	And as a guy who's been pointing out that taxation is theft for 30 years, I can guarantee you that the vast majority of people you meet will not be swayed.
	And you even told me that yourself at the very beginning of our talk tonight, my friend.
	You said, these ideas really resonated with me.
	I was really drawn to these ideas.
	It was not reason and evidence that convinced even you, but a kind of emotional compatibility.
	And don't get me wrong, I mean, it was the same thing with me, too.
	I mean, that's self-knowledge.
	Why was I drawn to these ideas?
	Was it because, against the great resistance of my deepest desires, I surrendered my virginity to reason and evidence?
	No.
	I was emotionally drawn to these ideas.
	Now, I'm aware of that, and I've spent a good deal of time and energy reading opposite opinions, as I talked about earlier in the show.
	But if you want to get into philosophy, then you want to be a potter, you better know the difference between clay and water, or you really will waste a lot of time.
	Does this make any sense?
	Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
	So I don't want to suggest don't do it.
	Do it.
	Do it by all means.
	But if you're going to take on something as important as saving the world, you really, really got to study how best to approach it.
	Which is, I'll do the reason and evidence thing for sure.
	I mean, I've done dozens of debates on this show where I've even corrected people about misstatements.
	Right there.
	Right there.
	Tom Willicats did this debate where he said, well, you know, private insurance, they don't pay out their claims.
	And I pointed out that Medicare has a far higher rate of denying claims than private insurance in the U.S. Did he change his mind?
	Did he apologize?
	No.
	With Jake DiLiberto.
	I said the CIA had no advance warning and no prior knowledge of the fall of Russia.
	He said, yes, they did.
	I read him two or three articles pointing out that they did not.
	Did he change?
	Did he apologize?
	Did he retract?
	Absolutely not.
	I mean, openly, clearly factual statements.
	You can correct people live in a recorded format that they can view again.
	And will they retract?
	No!
	Storm Cloud Gathering is still convinced that I watched some stupid-ass documentary about a hundred-year lightbulb.
	No evidence that I did.
	It's just the way we are.
	We're crippled.
	We're all in wheelchairs.
	At least the majority of people are in wheelchairs.
	They don't know it.
	They think that they're LeBron James.
	He's not in a wheelchair, right?
	Did I get that sports reference right?
	I don't know much about sports.
	Anyway, so I just really want to point that out.
	If you're going to do it, I mean, you know, focus.
	We have to create people who can think.
	And very few people will make that transition.
	But if we tell people to stop hitting and yelling at their kids and stop dumping them in daycares and stuff, we have a chance to raise a generation of people whose very identity will not be dismantled through the process of thinking.
	And most people, when you invite them to the Reason and Evidence Party, what What you think is, hey, I'm giving you these great tools to become a better and nicer person and think more clearly and be virtuous and so on.
	What they see is you're opening up a TARDIS to interstellar space.
	Hey, step in here.
	I'm going to beam you halfway between here and Alpha Centauri.
	Don't worry.
	For the three seconds before your head explodes, the view is fabulous.
	That's how they experience it.
	So that's just my annoying life plan 101.
	I hope that you will...
	Join those of us who are trying to help the world.
	But you've really got to be very critical about the ways that you think it can work.
	Because if you're anything like me, just don't waste as much time as I did trying to do stuff that doesn't work.
	That's my hard one experience.
	So thank you very much for the call.
	I'm afraid we're going to call it a night.
	Thanks to Mike for running the show.
	I'm sorry about a few technical issues.
	I'm glad we got them sorted out.
	FDRURL.com forward slash donate if you would like to help the show out.
	I believe it's the most important show in the world today.
	We have almost 20 million downloads.
	On YouTube.
	On YouTube.
	And on MySpace.
	Oh no, MySpace broke up with us too, right?
	Sadly.
	I'm sorry to be making fun of this guy's heartache, but...
	FDRURL.com forward slash donate if you'd like to help out.
	If you've got no money, no problem.
	Please just share some videos.
	It's an important thing to do.
	The emails that I got from people who decided not to hack off half their child's foreskin were prodigious.
	Share that stuff and you can literally save people from genital mutilation.
	Share the truth about spanking.
	You can save people from being hit by their parents.
	Share this stuff.
	It will change You know, there's this cheesy little, it's true, it's a cheesy little thing.
	There's a little donation around where I live.
	You can donate to the animal shelter, say, your spare change will not change the world, but it sure as hell will change the world for that one pet.
	And it's very true.
	You share the stuff about peaceful parenting.
	You share the stuff about ethics.
	You share the stuff about spanking.
	You share the stuff about circumcision.
	You even share the stuff about, you know, Syria, current events.
	It's going to shake people's matrix.
	And you won't change the world through that, but you will change someone's world.
	And that is really more than we can ask for.
	So I hope you will do that.
	Thank you so much.
	Have a great night.

▲