Oct. 27, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:16:37
2830 Fifty Shades of EGGS - Saturday Call In Show October 25th, 2014
I believe in God because the alternative is less rational, how familiar are you with various Christian doctrines? What are your thoughts on women’s strict adherence to ‘timelines’ for when they expect marriage, kids and the white picket fence? I've been arguing with a lot of communists, is there such thing as a 'class' as in monetary disparity - or is it something else?Includes: The crucifixion of Jesus Christ, being a good Samaritan, bible mistranslation based arguments, God’s love through abuse, myths in evolutionary understanding, sexual attractiveness is making yourself a target, crafting realistic looking fake ducks, men with resources are like supermodels, good genes for your eggs, communist entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs are the working class, dumpster freedom, the class of IQ, stoking the resentment of unintelligent people and making philosophy user friendly.
Post-bugs, pre-bone marrow implants of icicles, also known as the Canadian winter.
So, yeah, we just had some lovely walks today.
Hope you're having a great time getting out there, enjoying the last remnants of vaguely tropical weather.
And I wanted to mention, so a couple of weeks ago, we had a young lady on the show who was in a rough situation.
She was in a rough way.
She was in a pretty nasty environment.
And we put out the call for anyone who wanted to help her out.
And I'm happy to acknowledge that the community has kicked $2,700 her way.
and she has now moved to a safe and secure and happy location.
She's reunited with a family member, and all of this stuff is absolutely peachy and wonderful.
So I just wanted to say thank you to the community as a whole.
And, you know, we don't usually like to talk too much about the charitable stuff that we do, but the lady had said that she didn't want any more money because she's felt that the community's been more than generous enough.
And so don't send any more in, but thank you to everyone who did.
It's a great thing to see people take care of each other in this way.
Yay, anarchy!
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Now, on to the brains of the outfit, which would be not me, but the ethereal voices which I often hear in my mind, regardless of whichever Bluetooth device I'm wearing or not.
Mike, who do we have up first?
All right.
Up first today is John.
And John wrote in and said, I believe in God because the alternative is less rational.
He'd like to debate religion with you and wanted to start off by asking how familiar you're with Christian doctrines.
Well, I would say that my knowledge of Christian doctrine lies somewhere between my knowledge of the Monster Manual and the Fiend Folio in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.
So, not bad, but certainly not memorized.
Does that help at all?
Okay, I guess that's my cue to go, right?
Yes, it is.
Okay.
Hi, Stefan.
You must be bad at prayer if you don't know when the voices in your head should be answered.
This must not be...
It must not be your specialty.
It's ethereal.
I was practicing.
No, what I was wondering was because I was listening to one of the shows about a little over a week ago, and it was one that ended up being the crisis of faith call.
I think that was part of it.
And the reason why I was asking about how much of a grasp you have on various Christian doctrines was because when you were talking to this fellow, It was a lot of stumbling over some doctrines And it was kind of like watching a slow-moving train wreck, like a beached whale fighting against shallow water.
Not that anybody got hurt.
It's just I started wondering.
I thought, well, I've got a call now.
I have to call him.
I appreciate that.
I mean...
Certainly, I appreciate the mishmash of metaphors.
I assume that the beached whale does get hurt, as do people in the train wreck.
So certainly, if I'm leading people astray, I would like to do it with full knowledge of the astrayness to which I'm leading them.
So if there's things to be corrected, please, by all means, go ahead.
Okay, okay, great, great.
Excellent.
Some of it I have, I actually got the transcript from the show, so I'm not going to misquote you at all, so I know exactly what you said.
But before we go down that route here, let's just out of...
Out of honesty and respect for you and for the show and the listeners, I think the onus maybe is on me to tell you exactly what I am, what the doctrinal positions that I hold, or rather, these are valid Christian beliefs.
Just so that later you can't say, oh, you're making shit up now, or you're blowing smoke up my ass, I have to move on to the next caller, or moving the goalposts as a term used in debates.
I mean, we could if you want, but...
I mean, I can argue positions that I don't hold.
And so it doesn't matter to me hugely if you hold the positions or not.
If I'm in error, then I can be corrected whether you hold the beliefs or not.
So I'm not sure it matters what you believe.
It certainly matters how well you argue and what evidence you and I can bring to bear on the question.
So I'm not hugely keen on an outline of your belief system.
I'd rather get straight to the meat of the matter.
Okay, okay, great.
I can understand that.
All right.
One of the little things they started messing up with here with the other fellow, who was actually his name also, Jonathan, but it's not me.
He said, you mentioned the idea that Jesus was supposed to have these divine mystical powers, that he was super magic man, and that's why he went to the cross, that if he went to the cross, then he's obviously not divine.
Or he could have just used his powers and got jumped off the cross.
No, no, sorry.
Just to clarify my position, and if I said that, I certainly was not speaking in my complete beliefs.
To clarify my position, If I believe that a man is Superman and then he is bound by cobwebs and won't break free, then I have a problem because Superman should, of course, easily be able to break free of cobwebs or, I don't know, little bracelet chains or something like that that aren't made of kryptonite.
And so one of the tests of...
Divinity would be the capacity to not be crucified.
Now, the fact that he was crucified, I know, is explained in Christian doctrine because God wanted his only begotten son to die for the sins, to watch free the sins of mankind, and that's why he died.
But that's kind of ex post facto reasoning.
I think that the challenge is that this being who could walk on water and turn loaves into fishes and do all of these, you know, heal the sick and drive out demons and do all sorts of remarkable non...
Physics kinds of things, then was not able to break free of being nailed up on a cross.
And so it's not a disproof, because you can make anything up after the fact and say, well, you know, Superman decided not to break the cobwebs because whatever, whatever, whatever.
But it is a challenge to his supernatural powers if he cannot escape a death that he clearly did not want, right?
Jesus himself says, you know, God, oh God, why hast thou forsaken me?
He did not want to die on the cross, and everyone gathered around, I would assume, would want him to use his powers to escape the gruesome, mutilated murder at the hands of the Romans on the cross.
And the fact that he didn't was a challenge to his supernatural powers.
I mean, we can only assume that, you know, if Jesus was a real person, and if Jesus was able to perform these miracles, then The most people around would have gathered at his crucifixion because he would have been at the height of his fame and notoriety.
And so I would imagine, there's no way to prove it, but I would imagine that would be the most witnesses that would be available for one of his miracles.
And said miracle, of course, failed to occur, which is a challenge to the belief system.
But I get that the story is that, you know, God wanted it for him to clean the sins of mankind.
That's the Christian answer, right?
Right.
Well, it's multifaceted, but yeah, that's the general idea.
That's one of the ideas why he was on the cross.
So you don't take that anything that was written after the fact as being valid just from ex post facto.
You would take it extra biblically and saying this is illogical just because of what happened.
Therefore, it's not true because this is what happened.
If Jesus had supernatural powers and Jesus did not want to die, then Jesus should have been able to prevent or heal...
He was able to heal people of leprosy, which is a more complex illness or ailment than having spikes driven through your hands and your feet.
So if he was able to drive out demons, walk on water, make all of these loaves and fishes and endless wine, then he absolutely had the power.
To not be killed in the way that he was killed and he certainly has the motivation to not be killed in the way that he was killed because he didn't want it.
He wanted to not be tortured and killed in that way.
So it certainly doesn't make any sense if Jesus had the capacity to perform extraordinary miracles and was limited by no physical restraint whatsoever and he did not want to be killed on the cross Then that doesn't make any sense, right?
I mean, either then he wants to die and he's refraining from using his powers, in which case the story of him saying, why have you forsaken me?
And him not wanting to die makes no sense.
Or he wanted to not be killed in that way, but he did not have the supernatural powers that were claimed of him, which makes him a person, not the son of God.
What if it's something simple like cognitive dissonance, that he actually knows that part of his reason why he was sent was to go through this ordeal?
He said, God, oh God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Well, yes.
That's all we know.
You could say, well, maybe he believed the opposite deep down, but that could be true of anything.
I mean, that's like, you could say that.
We have to go with evidence, not pure conjecture, right?
Well, part of him knew, and this and that, well...
There's no evidence of any of that.
The only evidence that we have is that he really, really did not want to die in that way.
Well, there is, but it's from a different author.
I mean, I know the Gospels, the Synoptic Gospels.
But that author did not have the capacity to cross-examine Jesus and put him on a couch and figure out what his unconscious motives were, right?
Okay, you're right.
So that's pure conjecture.
Okay, so I get where you're coming from with that.
And you understand that that confirmation bias renders the entire narrative suspect, right?
Yeah, right.
Because then, if Superman should be able to break cobwebs, but Superman doesn't, but I explain it away as, well, Superman didn't really want to break those cobwebs because they reminded him of his mother's hair or something, then I have what's called confirmation bias, right?
Which is that there's no way to disprove that that's Superman.
Yeah, and following with that, we can get into a lot of begging the question as well.
But yeah, I can understand.
You believe it because you wanted to believe it, you believe it because it's up and that's where you want to go with it.
Okay, so let's see.
Let me skip everything else, then what happened after that.
Another thing that you brought up, okay, so we can skip divinity.
I got you.
I can understand where you're coming from.
When you said your quote, what you said during the call, you said, when you're talking about reasons why people worship God or reasons why people worship a deity wouldn't be out of all-powerful, or sorry, it wouldn't be out of virtue, it would be out of that they're worshiping power, not virtue.
And I can dig that.
I can relate to that.
I know where you're coming from.
But it went off into a tangent on Christ's questionable morality, which you said Jesus was not really a moral example when he says, oh, you know, your quote now, he has come here to set brother against brother, child against parent, and create as much discord as humanly possible.
Yeah.
That's not the context, in other words.
That's what I'm trying to say here.
There's a context around that.
Okay, go for it.
Well, that particular verse, it's actually talking about splitting from Judaism, which was heavily entrenched in the people's lifestyle and their life and culture, and still is.
And it still happens today in Jewish families.
I'm surprised it didn't catch your eye, because he was actually the first advocate of defooing from toxic relationships and toxic culture.
And in application, and then later what happened, it shows through.
That at one time, Jesus had multitudes following him, Again, if we can go along with the story.
He had following them, and they dropped off slowly because his sayings were too hard for them.
And so he was saying, cut off, you're going to have a lot of problems if you come up and follow me.
Because a lot of what Jesus said was directly against the Judaistic mindset.
He was very much against the Judaism of that day.
And so when he says...
I've not come to set peace, but a sword, setting variants, setting child against parents, brother against brother, and the enemies shall be of thine own house.
It's about the society.
It's about the family that's going to say, oh my gosh, you can't believe what you're doing.
This guy's not going to be the Messiah.
And later it caused a whole lot of trials and tribulations through the lives of the apostles.
And we see later on through the Acts.
This is how it plays out.
They eventually...
End up having to go out on their own.
It can't possibly mean, with that context, with that in mind, it can't possibly mean that Jesus was here to wreak chaos and havoc.
Because if we have another verse, for example, John 12, 47, where he says, well, I came not to judge the world, I came to save it.
So like I said, there's a context about cutting people off.
And I know there's a lot of atheist arguments.
I know that I'm sure you as a software programmer, you have a lot of experience.
I'm sure you know the phrase garbage in, garbage out.
Right?
Mm-hmm.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Right.
So atheists, as it tends to be the web ring of the internet or whatever, the atheist arguments come around and somebody hears them and they pass it along and they pass it along.
But they're not valid.
Sometimes it's ignoring context.
Sometimes it's ignoring the historical frame or what was actually going on there.
And a lot of times it's difficult because it's from thousands of years ago.
Sometimes you'll miss something that's lost in translation.
Right.
So we're going to that reference about he's not there to create chaos or to set discord.
We have so many other verses of him talking about peace and love and saying, love one another as I have loved you.
Well, okay, but saying that he contradicts himself doesn't solve many problems, right?
So saying, well, what he meant was if your parents or your brothers or whoever, if they remain Jews, you should cut them out of your life, which is as far as I understand what you're saying about the early part.
So if that's his argument, and I have no reason to disbelieve you, I'm perfectly willing to accept that, and it makes sense, you know, based on the historical context that I understand of how Christianity, of course, emerged from Judaism.
But if he's saying you must reject everyone who doesn't follow your beliefs, but without providing a moral standard for that rejection, that's kind of culty.
Right, so I've said for many years since the very beginning of the show that people do not have to stay in abusive relationships.
And...
Of course.
I have given very clear definitions of abuse.
You know, we've got the adverse childhood experience score, physical violence, sexual abuse, and so on, right?
So I have sort of moral standards, and I don't impose them.
I don't tell anyone, you can't see your family, you shouldn't go and see your family.
I'm just saying, look...
Just as if a woman is being abused by her husband or vice versa, you say, look, you don't have to stay.
You legally and morally are not obligated to stay in that relationship.
So there are moral standards by which one can judge the moral content of a relationship.
But if a leader, let's say, says...
Disassociate with everyone who disagrees with me.
That is a very different matter.
Because that is definitely going to separate people from other people around them and then have them, I guess, unconsciously cleave or adhere to some leader.
Right.
In other words, you should disassociate with everyone who doesn't agree with what I say and what I say doesn't have proof, but it's asserted with miracles.
Right.
With flashpots and flying flaming doves and pigs running off cliffs and so on.
Right.
That to me.
So I'm all for the voluntary relationships in all things.
So I, you know, I have no problem with him saying, do not associate with evildoers.
I think that is not original to Jesus.
That goes all the way back to the pre-Socratics, that you should not, it is not wise and moral to associate with evildoers.
Or as Aristotle says, we love our friends, but we must love the truth and virtue more than our companions.
And where they contradict, we must choose the truth and virtue over even the comforts of our companions.
So I don't, you know, I didn't hang a huge amount of hat on him saying I have come with swords and sow discord and turn brother against brother.
That to me is not immoral.
Like it's not an evil thing for him to say that.
But I don't think it's particularly healthy just to say to people, disassociate with everyone who disagrees with me, the leader, and what I command and say without philosophical or empirical proof.
Well, it's not that it's so much prescriptive, it's more descriptive, saying that this is what's going to happen to you.
He doesn't actually say, go spit in your parents' face and kick their dog on the way out and make sure you slam the door.
I'm going to have to bring up that quote because I think we may be diverging.
It's in Matthew and it's also in Luke.
There's a slight variation between two of them.
But do you understand the distinction that I'm making?
Oh, of course.
I'm not saying you agree with it, but does it sort of make sense?
Yeah, I totally get where you're coming from with that, but it's just part of the misunderstanding of what it actually says.
This is what's going to happen to you, is where he describes it.
It's more descriptive than it's not really prescriptive.
Well, but if...
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Listen, if the divine being is telling you what's going to happen, then there is no difference between descriptive and prescriptive.
Because once you have omniscience, that which is descriptive is prescriptive.
Like if I'm pushing a ball towards the edge of a cliff, and I say, when I push that ball off the edge of the cliff, it's going to fall.
Am I being prescriptive or descriptive?
Well, yeah.
You're telling me what's going to happen because you know what's going to happen.
Right.
So that when Jesus, who has got the hot wire to omniscience, When Jesus says that this is going to happen, it is not just prescriptive.
It's descriptive.
Right?
Because that is what's going to happen, because he's Jesus, and he knows exactly what's going to happen.
So once you get omniscience, then you can't split the two.
But he's not telling them to do this.
He's telling them that's what's going to happen to them if they do this.
This is what he came to do.
And in cutting off of the entrenched Judaistic mind, what we see that plays through the stories is they want to strangle him.
Many, many times, because of what he taught, especially with the lives of the apostles, they end up being killed.
And it says, if you hate the world or something, no, if people hate you because the world hated me.
And so it's a matter of kicking off the wrong people, which is what the scribes and Pharisees, they use the power of the state to have him executed.
By Pontius Pilate, he wiped his hands of the matter.
When Pilate washed his hands, he says, I found no fault with this guy, why are you having him killed?
And they just said, well, we hate him.
Blasphemy.
We don't want to have him anymore.
And this happened a few times through the Gospels.
They would try to trick him or stumble him, and he ends up just leaving.
Okay, so if I say to you, if with omniscience, I say to you, you are going to drive to Minnesota tomorrow, then your driving to Minnesota is fulfilling a divine plan, right?
Right.
If that's what it is, yeah.
Well, and this is why Jesus is wise, right?
So when you say it was descriptive, not prescriptive, no, no, no.
If he says, you all are going to fight like cats and dogs, and that's divinity, and that's the divine plan, then all who fight like cats and dogs are obeying God.
Well, yeah, but now we're going back into divinity and omniscience.
Myself being sort of, I lean more towards open theism.
I don't really hold these beliefs originally like omnipotence and omniscience or that it's kind of limited because it's not actually in the Bible that way.
If you were to say, for example, using your Minnesota scenario, if I say, if you drive to Minnesota and you're going 95 miles an hour down the highway and you hit a sheet of black ice, you're going to fly off the road and It's not going to be good.
I'm not actually dooming you.
I'm not cursing you.
I'm saying, if you do this, this is what's going to happen when you hit that black ice.
Right.
Okay, but what I'm saying is that the dichotomy between descriptive and prescriptive, I don't think, holds hugely once you get omniscient.
So, let's move on from the bring a sword thing.
Okay.
Because that's not, to me, fundamental to my moral disagreements with Buddy Jay.
Okay.
Yes!
Okay, alright.
For the next one, you had mentioned, I know, what a lot of atheists have, keeping with the garbage in, garbage out thing, and saying that there's a lot of bad atheist arguments, stuff like, it's usually little things that have been, there's a flooded market of people willing to give answers and explanations.
Okay, hang on, hang on, hang on.
We will save a lot of time if you stop framing things.
Like, oh, it's garbage in, garbage out.
There's a lot of bad atheist arguments.
Atheists misunderstand.
No, no, no, no.
Don't tell me that the argument is bad.
Show me that the argument is bad.
Just dive straight in.
We had a guy, just by the by, we had a guy who read a 20-minute letter or something like that in a show.
And we did even at conservative calculations, that was almost eight years of human time that he wasted just on a very conservative estimate of current listeners.
So let's just, just don't tell me how atheists misunderstand and the argument is bad.
Just show me what you got, right?
No more teasing.
Sure, sure.
For example, bats are birds.
Have you heard of that one?
Bats are birds?
That's in the Old Testament, yes.
I don't know that one.
Okay.
Well, let's say, look at this, the Bible's so stupid because it categorizes bats as birds.
And I said, well, that's easily answered because for something like that, we see Carolus Linnaeus' taxonomy didn't come until the mid-1700s, and the word mammal didn't appear until 1826.
So if some category like that, when you lump in bats with birds, it's not that the Bible's stupid, it's that that's how it's listed.
It's the same way...
They call it all a fish, even though we understand it like with Jonah, that it's just a whale.
Have you heard about the one that rabbits...
Hang on, hang on.
Do you think that atheists thought that thousands of years ago everybody understood the biological distinctions between a fish and a mammal?
I'm trying to understand.
Do you understand why the atheists are bothered by that?
Well, no.
I don't know why they're bothered by that.
Okay, but you should know why.
Because you're mischaracterizing the objection.
It's like saying, well, there's no theory of relativity in the Old Testament.
You say, well, but the theory of relativity didn't come along until 1912, so how good?
Of course, atheists know that.
But why do they have a problem with that?
Because, and you said you don't know, so I'll answer it.
The reason why atheists have a problem with that is the book is supposed to be divinely written.
And one of the ways that you would know if it is divinely written is if it contains knowledge that is virtually or almost certainly impossible for human beings to have at that time.
So if it talked about the germ theory of disease transmission or if it talked about atoms or neutrinos or dark matter or black holes or, you know, how many light years away Alpha Centauri is and so on, right?
Or what diameter Betelgeuse's star is relative to Sol.
I mean, if it had that information in it, which would be unthinkable that these people would have thousands of years ago, then we would say, well, there was certainly more than human intelligence.
Maybe it was space aliens, but it sure as hell wasn't the people around at the time, right?
And so if God is dictating the Bible and God makes...
Biological errors in classifications that are identical to the ignorance of the people around, then we say there's no evidence of anything more than merely human intelligence in the creation of this document, and therefore it cannot pass the claim of being divinely inspired.
That's why they have the issues.
But the Linnaeus' taxonomy didn't come until like 1750, where it actually starts classifying that.
God made the mammals.
God made warm-blooded beings who give birth to live young and suckle their young with nipples.
God made the mammals and he knows the difference between a bat and a bird because he made them.
Right?
And so if God is dictating the Bible...
Then God should say that these are not birds because he knows that he made them.
They're not birds.
He designed them.
He created them.
He rolled them up with plasticine and breathed life into them and away they flew.
He knows precisely the difference to a degree far better than any biologist will ever know.
He knows the difference between a bird and a bat.
And so if he's dictating the Bible, he should not make that mistake.
Now, the people who were alive at the time did not know the difference between a bird and a bat.
And therefore, strike one blow against the argument for divine inspiration.
Does that make sense?
I can't really go along with that, though.
Because we're picking Linnaeus' taxonomy over just as simply saying, let's throw all these animals that fly together.
Okay, I'll try one more time, because I'm not obviously communicating in any way that's working for you.
Does God know the difference between a bat and a bird?
Sure.
Did God dictate the Bible?
Again, that's iffy.
What's iffy?
Isn't that the whole point?
I mean, if it's just written down by people, then it's just a myth.
It's like Lord of the Rings, right?
We don't think that was divinely inspired by Sauron, do we?
No, that gets into whether or not the Bible is divinely inspired, how it was actually assembled over a few thousand years.
No, okay, are you saying that there's no divine inspiration in the Bible?
There is some, but in my particular belief, which is what I wanted to just go ahead and give it earlier, that certain parts, I don't think they're not that inspired, which is a doctrinal position.
Okay, but hang on.
So, are you saying that the part where someone confuses a bat with a bird is not divinely inspired?
No, I'm saying that doesn't matter because it precedes so far.
No, no, no.
Look, you've got to meet me halfway here, man.
I mean, I can't work for both of us.
Logically, if the part where the Bible says the bird is the same as a bat, if that is divinely inspired, then God doesn't know the difference between a bird and a bat.
And therefore, God is not omniscient and God did not create squat and therefore is not God.
So that part of the Bible cannot be divinely inspired because it contains fundamental errors about that which God made, right?
Okay.
Okay what?
I know where you're coming from with that, but I can't...
No, no.
Not where I'm coming from.
This is not...
I'm not picking you up from an unexpected location, right?
This is logic.
Logic 101.
I know that you're religious, but you wanted to have a rational debate, right?
Yeah.
We have to establish this.
And if we can't establish this, I've got to move on to the next caller, because I'm just not willing to chase paper bags around to pretend I'm reasoning, right?
Okay, okay.
Okay, so, God, this is just syllogism 101.
God knows the difference between a bird and a bat.
Therefore, the parts of the Bible where a bird is confused with a bat cannot have been dictated by God, since God cannot lie, and God has all knowledge, right?
Okay.
Or God will not lie, let's say.
Well, again, in my position of open theism, again, that's not so much a problem with these particular doctrines that not all Christians agree.
No, no, but I'm not asking you what all Christians agree.
I'm asking you to think logically.
Okay, going with that model, yeah.
Yeah, okay, so God would know then.
Which model?
That he knows that bats are not birds and that they're actually much better.
That's not a model, that's a fact.
You've got to give me the facts.
Because you keep trying to reframe it like it's doctrinal or there's different interpretations or that's a model.
But this is a fact.
If God knows the difference between a bird and a bat and there's something in the Bible which says there's no difference between a bird and a bat, God is either lying or that was not divinely inspired.
Now God, I would not assume, would lie to people.
And then say, you have to follow this book to get into heaven.
By the way, I'm going to lie in it randomly.
And you won't find out for 1,700 or 2,000 years.
That would be sadistic and ridiculous and not worthy of any deity, right?
So God can't be lying in the Bible.
So if there's contradictions with knowledge that God has, which is all knowledge, all that which contradicts within the Bible cannot be divinely inspired.
There's no way to get around that.
That's just a basic logical reality.
I can meet you on that when I agree.
Because of my position being a conservative Marcionite, I don't hold that the entire Bible happens to be inspired.
Okay, but here's where we come into a problem.
Because we've solved one problem in that we agree, at least on this logically, but we've created another problem.
The other problem is that we kind of have now what is called a tautology.
Which is, we say, well, we say, there are parts of the Bible that are not divinely inspired.
Right?
Well, what parts are those?
Those are parts which contain errors.
Well, how do we know that they're errors?
Well, because we have greater knowledge now.
Now, in the past, when they didn't know the difference between a bird and a bat, they would have accepted that as a fact.
Now we know better.
And so we say, well, parts of the Bible are divinely inspired and parts of the Bible are not divinely inspired.
And we know that because wherever God is wrong, we simply claim that God is not speaking.
In other words, we scrub the entire document looking for errors.
Where we find errors, we say, well, that's not God.
Now, we face the problem in the past, they thought it was God, which is not great, right?
And in the present, we've created a situation where God always gets a perfect score because every wrong answer gets crossed out.
So we automatically have perfection and Like, I could have perfect perfection in any test I ever took if all of my wrong answers were crossed out.
Well, those answers didn't come from Steph.
Well, how do we know?
Because Steph is perfect.
Well, how is Steph perfect?
Well, we throw out all of his answers because he's perfect, so he has to be perfect.
It's like, but that's just a circular argument, right?
If you just cross out in the Bible everything that God gets wrong and then say, well, God is perfect, you've just created an argument that has no end.
It's completely circular.
It is completely circular like that, which is why it's a doctrine that's held by some people.
No, it's not a doctrine.
You keep using the word doctrine when you mean error.
Okay, position.
No, you can change the word to position.
If I say two and two make five, that is not a doctrine.
That's a mistake.
That's wrong.
That's an error.
If I said the world is banana-shaped, that's not a position.
I guess it's a position, but it's just completely wrong.
And whatever positionness it has is vastly eclipsed by its genuine and general wrongness.
Right?
So if people say, well, I know the Bible is divinely inspired because I cross out everything that's wrong, that is an erroneous and irrational argument.
Again, it's like me saying, I'm perfect in every test I take because I simply get rid of every answer that's incorrect.
And that's how I know I'm perfect.
It's like, no, no, no.
If you're going to have a test, then have a test.
Can you give me a section of the Bible that you would consider to be divinely inspired?
Well, sure.
A lot about the New Testament.
I can say many things in the New Testament, being myself more towards replacement theology.
I can say things like, divinely inspired to be a new command I give unto you, that you love one another as I have loved you.
Be good to those that hate you, bless you, bless you.
Do not return like for like.
Okay, so hang on, hang on.
So God says, love each other as I have loved you?
Well, Jesus said that, yeah.
Jesus said, love each other as I have loved you.
And Did he love the money changers?
Yeah.
No, I think he hit them with whips, didn't he?
But that does mean he didn't love them.
Okay, so this again, we have a problem.
If I go and hit someone with a whip while claiming I love them, I'm considered to be insane.
Right?
No, no, listen, listen, because now what you're saying is, well, Jesus loved everyone, And no matter what Jesus did, it was defined as love.
No matter what Jesus did, so when he goes and hits people voluntarily changing money outside the temple, when he goes and hits them with whips, Well, that's just love.
Because you understand, this is not an argument from empiricism.
This is just a completely tautological, self-referencing argument.
Everything Jesus does is love.
Well, here's something Jesus did that is not love-loving.
No, no, that is love.
It's like, okay, well then, don't pretend you're making an argument.
You're just making a totality.
Jesus equals love, and no amount of empirical evidence from the Bible itself can reject that.
I go hit someone with a whip, I'm really not going to, nobody's going to believe me that I love that person, right?
I mean, otherwise, slave owners were loving their slaves when they beat them with wits, right?
Fuzzy kind of love.
I'm sorry?
Well, no.
I mean, there's different relationships at play.
You can't look at snuggle, cuddly, fuzzy love, or eros was a sexual love.
Phileo was a brotherly love.
There's different things at play.
You can love one person more than another person, but if one person hurts the other guy...
Of course.
You're telling me things that there are different types of love, which was...
Definitely there since Plato wrote the symposium.
I get all of that.
But we're not talking about different kinds of love.
There is no kind of love that includes beating someone with a whip.
Right?
If you love another person more, you can love somebody less.
We're talking about the altruistic, the agape kind of love.
No, no, no.
But you're saying airplanes can climb at different rates of altitude.
Of course they can.
But a stone that is falling is not rising.
You're missing the point at which it goes from love to hatred.
When we beat someone with a whip, we are not loving them.
Well, I guess that's kind of a quandary there in how we're defining what he's doing at No, it's not a quandary.
Look, I'm sorry.
It may be a quandary for you because you've got this tautology, but it's not a quandary rationally.
Look, I'm not saying it's a bad thing that he hit the moneylenders with a whip.
I don't know.
I mean, I wasn't there.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Well, maybe they're a bunch of complete scumbags using the state to oppress the poor.
I don't know.
Maybe he's pulling a complete Howard Rock with a building.
I don't know.
But it's not loving in that moment.
You hit someone with a whip.
That can't be called love.
Unless you're just willing to say, well, anything is love if Jesus does it.
But that's like saying everything is legal if the president does it.
I mean, that's a worship of power, not of virtue, right?
Well...
I mean, he says don't return like for like.
The money changers weren't hitting him with whips.
He was initiating force, as far as I understand it, in that situation.
The money changers were there so that people could leave the proper offerings in the proper currency to be convenient for the priests.
So the money changers were there voluntarily.
They were not, as far as I understand it, agents of the state.
They simply provided, like you go to the kiosk at an airport and there's usually some woman sitting back there with a whole bunch of money who's willing to exchange it for you.
Yeah, they make a little bit of a profit.
That's their job.
That's the service that they're providing.
So you don't have to go to a bank.
Now, if I go to the airport with a giant whip and I start beating and flaying into a woman who is offering up money exchange at the airport, do you think the headline would be, Stéphane Molyneux of Freedom Aid Radio erupts in a love fest of whipping Stéphane Molyneux of Freedom Aid Radio erupts in a love fest of whipping at the
That would be true.
Yeah, that would not be.
But do you ever get mad at somebody that you love?
Do I ever get mad at somebody that I love?
Yeah.
Of course.
Okay, so you've gotten mad at them, right?
And if you have to do something that they're hurting somebody else or...
But it doesn't actually say he hit them with whips.
He had to drive them out with whips, something he fashioned, a cat of nine tailors or whatever, and drove them out of the temples and he flipped over their tables.
If you saw evil, if you saw something that people you care about are engaged in a harmful situation, what would you do?
Other than reasoning.
Well, what I would do is I would do exactly what I'm doing, which is to reason with the world and not start running around hitting people with whips.
I would do what Socrates did, which is to go to the marketplace and reason with the world.
Okay, but if reasoning fails, what do we reduce to?
If reasoning fails, you try again.
I mean, reasoning is a very long, complicated, and difficult process.
You try again and as long as people are not initiating force against you, you continue to reason with them.
Well, I understand what the non-initiation of force thinks.
So you're going to keep reasoning and keep reasoning because the way it's portrayed there that he gets mad, he flips the tables over, and he drives them out with a whip.
And how long did he spend reasoning with them that we know of?
Well, it doesn't say.
It doesn't say that he spent any time...
Well, see, that's the first thing we hear is he's driving them out with...
You can tell me reason, reason, reason, but now you're just making stuff up, right?
Because there's nothing in the Bible that says he reasoned with them.
Well, the exploitation of the poor, do you reason with somebody who's going to exploit?
Or even, I mean, I don't want to go to an absurdist level and say, let's say if he's hurting children, do you reason with them or do you say, get out of here?
I'm not sure what you're asking.
I'm sorry, just to be kind of clear.
Are you saying that if I see someone who's charged, like if you see a credit card company that I think is charging too high a rate for their service, that I should go into their offices with whips and drive them out of their offices?
Well, it was a public place.
The temple was not like a private place.
It doesn't matter if it's public or not.
What does that matter?
Let's say they're doing it in a mall.
They're trying to sign up college kids to credit cards with high interest rates.
Do I take a whip and whip them out of the public square?
Would you look at that and say, well, that man's doing the Lord's work?
I mean, the exploitation of the poor I don't think is something we should suffer with, right?
No, you're not answering my question.
If I, like when I went to college, there were all these companies that were trying to sell credit cards and it's like, for the first six months, your interest rate is high.
And then you look down further and it's like, and then it jumps to, oh my God, we've just repossessed your grandmother.
And free t-shirts.
I mean, am I justified in going to get a cat of nine tails and beating those people until they leave?
Well, it doesn't say he beat them, but it does say he drove them out.
Okay.
Is it a bank robbery if I don't pull the trigger?
If I only threaten people with a gun?
Is it a bank robbery with an armed weapon?
Do I have to shoot in order for it?
The people didn't know he wasn't going to hit them.
Otherwise, they wouldn't have left.
Right?
I mean, it doesn't matter whether you pull the trigger.
I mean, it does, obviously, in terms of whoever might get hit by the bullet.
But it's not like, well, I didn't pull the trigger, therefore it's not robbery.
Of course it is.
The fact that you're threatening with a weapon is enough.
That's kind of a changing of the scope of things.
He didn't go to rob them.
He just went to kick them out of a place of worship, a place of a temple.
All right.
Well, I think we've...
I can give you one more issue if you'd like.
These weren't my major issues with Jesus.
My major issue was...
I know a big issue.
With hell, but...
Yes, hell.
If you want to talk about that, that's fine.
I was going to jump right into hell.
I knew that's the next place we go.
Don't jump into hell.
No, I don't.
I would feel bad if it were real.
But go ahead.
Yeah, well, the problem with hell is that it comes out of a lot of bad translations, which goes to English.
The Old Testament was written in ancient Hebrew, New Testament's in Greek, and between the Old Testament and New Testament, they would go with the Septuagint that would help them along sometimes.
Yeah, that's no good.
You cannot get anywhere with me.
I'm sorry, maybe I'm wrong in this and I'm just telling you about...
You can't get anywhere with me with translations.
You can't.
Listen, when I was a software entrepreneur, I wrote programs.
I wrote big, complicated programs designed to do very intensely important and legal and regulatory things with data to clean up the environment.
And we published the software...
In a variety of languages, Mandarin, we did German, French, a variety of languages.
Now, we hired people to translate, some we did in-house, but we hired people to translate the software, both on the web and on the desktop, into a variety of languages.
Now, was it our job to make sure that the translations were accurate?
As translators, yeah, you've got to make sure this was stuff that was up to date and current.
He didn't accidentally call, you know, well, actually, I don't know that much about programming.
I can't give you an example.
No, but I mean, I wouldn't say, you know, that the way that you should install the software is type in format space C colon backslash, right?
Yeah, right.
And so it is important if I am translating documents that are essential for people to operate my software correctly, since Millions of dollars and lawsuits and all that hang in the balance of them using this software correctly.
You understand that it is my responsibility as the writer of the help manuals of the software instruction manuals.
It is my job to make sure that the software manual translation is accurate, right?
And you do that by, you know, you sit down with the people and you say, what are the steps?
Follow the steps.
And you make sure you get, like, three people to read it and all reproduce the steps.
You work really hard to make sure that your instruction manual doesn't get mistranslated, right?
Because that's a basic moral, legal, and ethical responsibility.
Now, nothing that I did in the software field comes within a bazillion light years of Of importance of keeping people out of hell and getting them into heaven, right?
Well, yeah, unless it's software heaven.
People get excited about that.
And so God, since he is threatening people with hell and rewarding them with heaven, must give accurate translations or instructions on how to achieve that goal, right?
Eh, now it gets a little sticky.
Because the original words have a meaning to them, and they weren't translated sometimes correctly.
No, no.
God can correct all translations instantaneously with no problems whatsoever.
There is no barrier.
God can let people write whatever they want and then rearrange the text without even a moment's effort.
God can come in and guide people's hands.
God can make them write in their sleep so they wake up in the morning and everything is perfectly translated.
There's no barrier to translation to God's will.
And God knows that it is the most essential thing I mean, if I'm a lawmaker, and I write a law that in French says you can do this, and in Mandarin says you can do the exact opposite, and this law is supposed to be for everyone, I've made a mistake.
And I can't punish people in Mandarin, people in China or people who are speaking Mandarin and reading that Mandarin law.
I cannot justly punish them for my mistake, for my mistranslation.
All mistranslations in the Bible are God's mistranslations because God is the originator of the arguments and the ideas and the ideals and the commandments and the rules and the punishments.
God is the lawmaker, lawgiver, law transcriber.
He uses people, but who cares?
Doesn't matter.
He can make them do whatever he wants.
And so God cannot conceivably punish a human being who has received a bad translation that God has allowed to occur.
That would be absolute sadism of a scale no human being could possibly approach.
Because all human beings can do is torture and kill you, but only God can send you to hell forever.
So don't give me this translation stuff.
It is God's job to make sure his correct instructions get to the people.
Or he has to not give them any punishments whatsoever for what he has failed to provide them in terms of information correctly.
Okay, well, let me take that example and place it today.
Let's say that the Bible is completely accurate.
It's all 100% true.
Through and through, it's 100% accurate, true, and all that.
And I, here in 2014, I take it and I start going, you know, whistling and going, just going, scratching out things and say, there we go.
I crossed out, you know, five verses and I decided to insert FDR or I decided to insert anything.
I decided to insert whatever I want and I pass it on to some poor Chinaman or anybody, the villager.
So, is that now, does that disprove the existence of God?
Does that prove God to be a sadist?
Yes, absolutely.
If that villager is subject to those laws, that disproves the existence of God.
Because God has allowed you to do that and hand over that instruction manual to the Chinese villager.
God has not put a fiery barrier in your way.
Sorry?
For this plan.
Well, no, but God has not put a fiery wall in front of you and said to the Chinese villager, this man has broken my covenant.
This man has not given you my word.
Or what he can do is he can rearrange the text in Mandarin instantaneously on the page so that the Chinese person gets the correct version.
God can do all of that with no effort whatsoever.
So if the Chinese person ends up with incorrect instructions, it's because God is allowing that to happen.
Okay, I would take it then that you would step that up to a bigger scope here and say that because all the evil things that go on in the world, therefore there is no God.
No, we're talking about the text.
We're talking about the translations.
Okay.
Okay, so just for the translations, but if people, if they have a car accident or good Christian people fell off a roof or whatever, and God didn't send an angel to save them, is that a logical conclusion then?
Therefore there is no God because...
No, I wouldn't say that there is no God, but it would prove that God is a moral hypocrite according to the moral instructions that he gives to mankind.
Because according to the parable of the Good Samaritan, if you see a person suffering and you can do something to alleviate that suffering, it is a moral imperative that you do so.
The person who stops to help the Good Samaritan, bleeding by the side of the road, is taking infinitely greater risk and using infinitely more resources than God would ever have to do.
And so either the parable of the Good Samaritan is kind of like a weird joke that says do the opposite of what God does, or God, by doing the opposite of the virtue he proposes in the parable of the Good Samaritan, is doing wrong.
Okay.
So it's horribly immoral, or at least you take great offense at his lack of activity.
I don't take great offense at the fact that the tooth fairy doesn't leave me any money under my pillow at night.
I don't take offense at any of this.
But if I put forward a moral standard for people to follow, and then I do the opposite...
Even though it's far easier for me to conform to that moral standard than it is for those I pass it along to, I am called a moral hypocrite and I'm not considered to be a virtuous person.
And so if through the parable of the Good Samaritan, God says, if you have the power and strength to help a person in distress and to save a person who is injured and to help someone, and then God does none of those things, then God is a moral hypocrite according to the rules that he provides his followers.
Because God doesn't act to save when he commands you to act to save.
Oh, help.
Yeah, the thing of do as I say and not as I do.
Yeah, and again, that's not a question of God's existence, but that is a question of God's ethics or God's integrity.
Do good where you can.
Do good where you have the power to do good.
God has infinite power to do good and can save everybody in the world with no effort whatsoever.
So, which is it?
I know, these can be a lot of philosophical questions.
God could do this, God could do that.
No, no, God would do this.
These are not philosophical questions.
Okay, would do this.
No, they're not philosophical questions.
Philosophical questions are, what is the rational and empirical evidence for the existence of a deity?
And even if we accept his existence, let's say that you could prove to me that God did exist, is he an angel or a devil?
Is he virtuous or evil?
These things are all necessary.
Now, because theologians and religious people can't even get to the proof that God exists, the question of whether he's good or evil is really, it's like saying, well, you know, there's a There's a ghost upstairs.
Is that ghost friendly or unfriendly?
It's like, I think first we can figure out whether there's a ghost upstairs, then we can figure out whether it's friendly or unfriendly.
But I'm certainly willing to talk about the friendliness or unfriendliness of the ghost.
Because if something is irrational at its core, and anti-empirical at its core, it really doesn't matter how many premises you granted, it's still going to end up irrational and anti-empirical.
So even if we grant that God exists, and if we grant that the Bible is divinely inspired in sections, then we still have a problem.
If the parable of the Good Samaritan is divinely inspired, then God is doing the opposite of his moral standard.
Not to mention, thou shalt not kill with the flood of Noah, which killed everyone except Noah and the inhabitants of the ark.
That is an outright genocide of virtually the entire species, including people who, by the Christian definition, Had not reached the age where moral choice meant anything.
We reached the age of reason at the age of seven and so on.
God killing infants in the womb, drowning pregnant women, drowning babies.
That's the action of a psychotic.
That's not the actions of a moral agent, especially a moral agent who demands that thou shalt not kill.
Yeah, I know.
I agree with you completely on that, which is why I might...
Well, I would say doctrines again.
I wouldn't say doctrines.
Position on certain beliefs would be pretty much different from a lot of denominations out there.
Right, but what you do then is you say, well, that I think is immoral, so I'm going to exclude that from divine inspiration or divine action.
But then you're cherry-picking.
You're worse than a social scientist or somebody who's trying to prove that a drug is safe who only cherry-picks the peaks and never the valleys.
If you're cherry-picking, you're no longer engaged in the work of truth.
You're engaged in the work of ex post facto confirmation bias justifications.
You're not engaged in the pursuit of truth if you start rejecting that which is clearly wrong and contradictory and reserving your approval for that which you find moral.
That is a Mobius strip you can't ever break out of.
We have to look at the logic and the facts and the morality of the questions ahead of us For all of us.
And we can't just create these exceptions.
And look, I don't think Christians are even that bad at this compared to statists.
I mean, statists create these insane exceptions.
Nobody shall initiate the use of force except a giant government that we're going to give police, law courts, military, nuclear bombs, nuclear submarines, nuclear power-driven aircraft carriers and anthrax and biological and chemical weapons and massive printing presses.
I mean, So, as far as don't create arbitrary exceptions goes, I'm actually much closer to Christians than I am to most, certainly most people on the left who tend to be socialists and state worshippers.
And, of course, I do hugely respect that Christians, as I've talked about before, are willing to truly talk about the value and virtue and necessity of ethics.
But once you start cherry-picking and saying, well, that story is obviously wrong, and therefore it does not represent the deity, or it is not inspired by the deity, or it's not written by the deity, you've just created a cherry-picking kind of narcissism where it's, well, stuff that I can approve of and stuff I can justify, well, that's God.
And stuff that is not stuff I like or not stuff I can approve of, that's not God.
Well, you're really just describing your own preferences and elevating them to the divine.
Yeah, which is every denomination.
Every Christian church says that.
That's why there's so many different ones.
We all kind of go along with that.
And I'm completely on your side with that with the state.
So that's not even a non-issue with me regarding the violence that uses force, bombing people and stuff like that.
So it would be fair to say that you're infinitely more concerned with the morality of whether God is, is he good or is he bad or is he nuts, than if he ever created the earth and then just took a bunch of sleeping pills and took a scuse for a few millennia.
So, John, for me, the question is around the preponderance of evidence.
Now, I mean, I'm not going to do sort of atheism in 90 seconds because I have to speak really fast, but it's around the preponderance of evidence.
Clearly, the books exist.
The books were written down and there's clearly people who believed at the time, I would assume.
I don't think it's all some big con game.
I mean, I think people genuinely assumed that miraculous stuff was occurring, that there was a deity and so on.
The question is, we know that human beings are fundamental myth makers, fundamental storytellers.
You know, we watch movies, we read books, we even play video games to pursue stories.
We grew up as storytellers.
We are incredible narrative machines.
I mean, listening to my daughter make up a dream that she had last night is an astounding thing.
I mean, she's incredibly fluent in creating stories with good and bad and conflict and climaxes and resolutions.
And she's five.
We are myth-making machines.
Oh, yeah, she's wonderful.
It is a fantastic and wonderful part of life and love, because through myth we can more easily in some ways transfer that which is essential to happiness than we can through mere philosophy.
And so the question for me with regards to religious texts is, given that we know how amazingly creative human beings are, what incredible myth-making machines they are, and how myth can transmit some incredibly essential stuff for the pursuit of virtue and happiness, what are the odds?
What are the odds that these books were written by myth-making human beings striving to transmit the essence of positive cultural, social, or tribal habits?
Or, what are the odds that some external, omniscient, all-powerful deity told them what to write?
Well, those are very important questions.
Now, to me, obviously the first one It's the default position, right?
I mean, that's Occam's razor, right?
I mean, so all these books are written down by human beings who are really good at writing things down and making up compelling myths and stories.
I mean, go back to Beowulf or Gilgamesh or the Norse mythologies.
I mean, human beings are incredible at making up very powerful mythologies that pass the test of time.
And the best mythologies last the longest.
And best, I mean the ones that communicate what is essential for people the clearest.
So the default position, given that we know human beings are incredible myth makers, and that myths have a very essential function to play in human society, given we know that, that must be the default position, because that's what we already know happens.
It's like saying, well, rain could be the spontaneous urine of billions of tiny fairies.
No, seriously.
I mean, I'm not trying to be stupid here.
I mean, like, you could, maybe, you know, maybe at one point that could conceivably, whatever, right?
But, you know, Occam's razor says, well, it rained yesterday, it's going to rain tomorrow.
This rain is the usual, you know, the usual cycle, right, of water in the atmosphere.
The rain to rivers to oceans and lakes to, right, the Evaporation to condensation to rain.
That's what's going on, because we know, we all know all about that.
So the idea that we've got these invisible fairies that are peeing on us, like, that seems like an unnecessary complication, and that would not be our default position.
Like, you don't stand there and say, could be rain, could be fairy pee.
You know, I weigh it in the balance, right?
That wouldn't make any sense.
It's raining.
Now, if somebody said, listen, man, I can prove to you that it's fairy pee, you'd be like, Okay, you know, that's not the default position, and there's a very high standard of proof for that.
And if they say, well, you know, someone wrote 3,000 years ago that it was fairy pee, that would not be your standard of proof, right?
Well, yeah, or which end of the rainbow does the leprechaun hide as gold?
Exactly.
And so when it comes to religious texts, we know that there's profit motive involved.
It doesn't invalidate it.
I mean, just because there's profit motive in Coca-Cola doesn't mean there's no such thing as Coca-Cola.
But there is a profit motive involved.
People have gotten extremely wealthy from religions.
So there's a profit motive involved.
Atheism is a non-profit organization.
I'm sorry?
Atheism is a non-profit organization.
That's right.
P-R-O-P-H-E-T. So that's just my position.
And it's been my position since I was quite young.
When I first began writing stories at about the age of six...
I remember I was in Africa, and I wrote this story about a leopard who staggered into a bush camp, and everybody thought the leopard was sick, and they were very sad about it.
They thought the leopard was going to die.
They fed it milk, and they massaged it, and so on.
And then the leopard basically, you know, lay down, and everyone thought it was going to die.
They're going to bury it in the morning.
And in the morning, the leopard is giving birth to six babies.
It's like, oh, everybody's so happy, and they all go dancing off into the woods and all that.
So...
Once you start writing stories, you realize just how powerful the myth-making capacity of the species is and how essential the myth function is.
So then do we say these stories of religious texts, what is more likely?
Is it rain or is it fairy pee?
And one of the ways that you would know that it's human-created rather than divinely created is that it contains contradictions.
And the contradictions in the Bible, we could, you know, spend another 12 hours talking about it and still only scratch the surface.
We would also know if it was humans have a unique capacity to pass moral rules on the low while exempting the high from those moral rules, right?
You and I can't tax.
You and I can't counterfeit.
You and I can't start wars.
You and I can't have tanks.
That's wrong, right?
But kings and politicians and they can have all of that.
So we have this incredible ability as a species, and it's one of the things that I hammer and hammer and hammer at on this show.
We have this incredible ability to double-think as a species, which says the rules are for the serfs, and the rules do not apply to the lords.
In fact, the opposite rules apply to the lords, and nobody notices that contradiction.
That is everywhere in society.
And so when we have a book that says, here are your moral rules...
Don't even think of applying them to the deity.
That is a uniquely human social survival strategy by which you don't get bludgeoned to death by the witch doctors and the warlords, right?
And so when I look at a book and I say, well, here's the moral commandment.
Don't kill.
And then the man in charge kills all the time.
That is...
Don't steal.
Well, the people in charge tax all the time.
Don't counterfeit.
Well, they counterfeit all the time.
Don't initiate the use of force.
They initiate the use of force all the time.
So when I look at a document that perfectly parallels mankind's basic delusion about the universality of ethics, I assume it's a human document.
It's exactly the same as the Constitution.
It's exactly the same as what is called law in a state of society.
It is the infliction of Of supposedly universal rules on the citizens while creating this opposite Shangri-La of evil for the rulers.
And that's exactly what you see in the Bible all the time.
You see it with Jesus, you see it with the Old Testament prophets, you see it with God himself.
And so that, again, the reason I want to talk about ethics in the Bible is because it's a significant piece of evidence that it's a human-created document because it follows all the patterns of human infliction of power on the weak and excusing of evil in the powerful.
That's exactly how the Bible functions.
And so, again, it's just the reason it's worth talking about is you look for the contradictions and you look and say, do these contradictions mirror what human beings in general believe?
Well, they do.
And the fact that in the old texts from any religion, there is not one piece of knowledge there that was not available to an educated person in that environment is an indication.
It's proof, really, that they're human-created and not omnisciently Because, I mean, imagine the last point I'll make.
I mean, imagine if I went back just a thousand years.
I mean, that would not make me omniscient or all-powerful.
Let's just say I went back a thousand years.
I'm like a reasonably educated human being.
You know, I've studied a lot of philosophy.
I've read most of the major philosophers.
I've studied a lot of history.
I studied a lot of literature.
I've written a lot of novels.
I've written like 30 plays and poems.
I'm reasonably well-educated as a human being.
I'm not a specialist in anything outside of philosophy and maybe a little bit of history.
But just with...
You beam me back a thousand years and I dictate to people what to write down about the world.
There would almost be nothing in that world.
Which was written down that anybody there would know.
And that's not from a position of omniscience.
That's just a thousand years down the road.
God is infinitely smarter and more powerful than any human being or any aggregation of human beings.
So just take an ordinary, reasonably educated mortal, throw him back a thousand years, have him dictate a whole bunch of stuff.
I could pretty much dictate for the rest of my life and still be blowing people's minds.
And then when those documents came forward in time, It would be indisputable that a consciousness possessed of far more knowledge than could ever be available in that timeframe dictated this.
That standard, and I'm giving you a standard that is infinitely smaller than the standard for a deity, just a thousand years of reasonably educated guy going back, even an uneducated guy going back would say stuff that would blow people's minds.
So if we take that standard, which is way low, All historical religious texts fail that standard completely.
Now, people do say, well, according to this allegory, you could interpret it, but by that, Nostradamus is a scientist, right?
I mean, you can find in any multi-10,000-word document, you can find a few things that happen to coincide with stuff that happens if you take them allegorically and blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
That was a snake eating its own tail.
That's kind of like the structure of the carbon atom, if you think, come on, right?
I mean, that's not how it would work if I just went back in time 1,000 years.
Everything I dictated would blow people's minds and there would be no dispute that someone of infinitely greater knowledge, almost infinitely greater knowledge than was possessed at the time, dictated those works.
There's no text that reliably follows or passes that test.
And you put all these things together and there's just no possibility that I think any honest, and I'm not saying you're dishonest, you have a confirmation bias.
And look, so do I.
But there's no way that an intellectually honest person cannot look at all those facts and say there's a deity.
Was that a question? - Thank you.
No, I think that's my position.
Well, my opening question here, I mean, sorry, not a question.
That was about Christian doctrines.
The opening position was that I believe in God because the alternative is less rational.
I don't know if you want to pursue that.
As opposed to a God-centered universe, as opposed to an accident-centered universe.
Because what we have is a state-funded fairy tale being taught to an entire generation of children in schools.
You mean evolution?
Yeah, or the overarching meta-narrative of evolutionism, not just evolution.
There's nothing wrong with that.
The descent with modification is not myth.
But when you say, you know, Carl Sagan's billions of years ago, you know, tiny little dot, a spin, an explosion, and poof, we precipitate out of stardust.
You know, that's...
That doesn't exactly have evidence to it other than to say, we're here, therefore it happened, which is a tautology.
We're here because it happened, which proves we're here.
Right.
And look, I don't think anyone knows, nobody knows the entire story of how human beings came to be here.
And I think we should be honest and accept that.
And say, don't know.
Don't know.
And the idea that then we run back to texts written 4,000 years ago by people who didn't even know what soap was and say, well, that's the answer, I think is crazy.
I think we have to stand strongly on the precipice of human knowledge and stare into the void of things we don't know that are important and say, we don't know.
We're going to keep looking and we have a methodology to look, which is science.
But we cannot retreat into ancient superstitions and think that we've answered any questions.
Now, when it comes to ethics, it doesn't matter how we got here.
Whether God's made us, whether we evolved from some primordial soup, it doesn't matter.
And I think with universally preferable behavior, my Proof of secular ethics, ethics with neither gods nor governments.
I think the problem has been solved as far as why be good and what is goodness.
Certainly what is goodness has been solved.
And so whether it doesn't matter to me than where we came from doesn't mean I don't want to know.
I do want to know.
I think it's interesting.
I don't sit there and say there's a huge void in my life until I do know.
I don't really know how my liver works.
It doesn't mean that, you know, I can't...
Drink alcohol.
And so I think that the striving for virtue that religion has in many ways pursued, and in some ways it's been a servant to power as most philosophers and the state as a whole been.
But the pursuit of virtue, I hope that I've solved it.
And for those of you who look at me like I'm insane, go read the book and tell me where I'm wrong, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
You know, I've had like Five or six years of very smart people telling me where I'm wrong and so far it stood.
Doesn't mean it's going to stand forever, it just means it stood so far.
Ethics is usually a pretty easy thing to knock down if it's not firm.
So it doesn't, you know, as far as where did we come from, I don't know.
It doesn't trouble me too much that I don't know.
I mean, I don't know how many moons there are orbiting around whatever planets there are around Betelgeuse.
I'd like to know.
I'd love to visit them.
I think it'd be very cool.
But my life is not...
Avoid or fundamentally problematic because I don't know where we all came from.
But I am resolutely opposed to superstition as a pretend answer.
That does not answer anything.
Saying some magical being did it in ways we can't possibly comprehend for reasons that will never ever become clear to us because we're not divine and he did some in some dimension we'll never be able to access.
That's just the opposite of an answer.
Just to ask a fair question, then.
Does it trouble you at all for, say, to have youth having their rational thoughts, rational thinking being hijacked with any fairy tale, whether it's in a classroom, in a church?
I know you know from the church, but with a classroom saying something that fails the scientific method, but we're going to tell you how it happened even though it won't pass the scientific method.
Oh, you mean that, as far as I understand it, and I'm no expert in the counter-evolutionary, I've read a couple of articles, but it's the argument that we can certainly accept evolutionary tendencies within species, but cross-species evolution has not been established.
Well, not just across species, but going back billions of years that you and I got together and hooked up with a pair of amoebas.
Or, you know, lightning striking rocks and stuff like that.
The absurdist that says, well, it fails the scientific theory, it fails the scientific model, we can't test it, prove it, analyze it in an environment of constants and variables, but we're going to teach this entire generation that this is how it happened.
Oh, so yeah, teaching, look, there is, to be fair, there's some bullshit in evolution, and I was actually shocked to read about it, right?
I mean, so, you know, this old thing where they put these moths on trees, and they say, well, as the trees got darker from pollution, only the light moths survived.
That's all bullshit.
Yeah, that never happened.
They were just nailed to a tree.
I mean, it's pure propaganda.
And this has happened a number of times in the evolution.
Even the Scopes Monkey Trial, where in Tennessee there was a town that was supposed to be this big debate on evolution versus religion, and all these famous lawyers got involved.
A complete scam.
I mean, they went to the biology teacher and said, you know, we'd really like to put this town on the map.
Let's pretend that you're going to get fired.
Let's pretend to have a big...
It was all just a publicity stunt for the town.
And so that does, again, I just want to point out for, you know, science deserves much better than some of the tricks that has been used.
And when they talk about species evolving into other species, there is a positive evidence for that.
And I, you know, I fully accept that.
One of the huge problems, of course, with anything to do with history is that if you were to take the entire population of North America and subjected to the same kind of whittling away of evidence that has occurred since the dinosaur time.
Yeah, 350 million people, you would end up with one thigh bone.
That's the relationship of the fossil evidence to the number of dinosaurs or the number of historical creatures.
You'd take the entire human population of North America, 350 million people, you'd end up with one thigh bone.
So it is an incredibly spotty record.
But there still are tests.
There's still our tests.
And look, to be fair, again, to the religious objections, you know, they say, you know, well, how did an eyeball come about?
And, you know, people like Dawkins will say, well, you know, you'd get light sensitive cells that would evolve and then, you know, this would happen and that would happen and so on.
It's like, but eyeballs don't fossilize.
They don't know.
And they can't show it as actually having happened because there's no fossil record of the development of the eyeball, right?
Again, am I sort of stating the case?
You probably know a lot more about it than I do.
Am I stating the case fairly well?
Yes.
When they're on a government-funded, well, government-funded work, and the grant money is running out, you could call them highly motivated.
Oh, yeah.
I regularly get in trouble for my skepticism of the value of stuff which is paid by force.
Which is like getting in trouble for being skeptical of the love generated by rape.
But anyway, so yeah, look, I think that there is...
This is very conspiratorial, and I don't have proof for it.
I'm just putting it out there as a possibility.
I think a lot of anti-religiosity comes directly out of the left.
It comes directly out of communism.
And their pretended rationality and scientific method and so on is all, I mean, it's all nonsense.
It's all complete bullshit.
Like, you hear from the left that race is a social construct?
Do you know if you were a doctor and you treated people of different races the same, you would be sued for malpractice?
I mean, the number of differences between the races goes into the hundreds of pages, like physiological, biological, basic differences.
And so for people on the left to say, well, we're really big on science, but race is a social construct.
It's like, then you're religious when it comes to race.
Like, you're worse than religious because you're claiming to be scientific.
So on the left, you'll see this...
Incredible anti-religiosity that drives a lot of the evolution narrative.
And it is, I believe, people on the left are competing with religious people, and we see this pole swinging back and forth between statism and religion continually, which is why people on the right in America tend to be smaller government and bigger God, and people on the left tend to be bigger government and smaller God.
It's the same, you know, it's just two different sides of the same pendulum.
And so when it comes to looking for evolution as decisively proven, anybody who claims that, I think, is premature.
They can say...
I mean, I accept...
Don't get me wrong.
I accept evolution.
I don't know all the details.
And I've read Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, I think it's called.
And I was really surprised at the degree of...
Proof that there was for evolution.
So I accept it and all of that.
But it is very important to recognize where they're theorizing and where they have proof.
And the two are often, for me at least when I was growing up, they were portrayed as the same.
And I think that's just kind of a leftist tactic to advance a secularism at the expense of religiosity.
And I think that it is Unnecessary and unwarranted.
And I was surprised at how many hoaxes had been pulled off in the name of advancing the cause of evolution.
It really is appalling.
An abysmal amount of hoaxes that end up being exposed.
And still, they say, well, we lost it before, but we have it this time.
Before, that was no good.
Now we have the better stuff.
Do you have a couple others?
I'm racking my brain, but it's been a while since I've read this stuff.
Lucy was one, right?
The hominid?
Lucy was a little chimpanzee, a little monkey.
When she was discovered, it's a hip bone.
It's a couple of bone fragments.
They were found in a completely different strata, 30 feet away.
It was all recreated from the position of the hip bone itself.
They've created an entire Lucy's family.
They had an entire thing around that.
And it still held on to as the early hominids.
But, I mean, you look at it, you see these bones.
It was a chimpanzee.
It was not an unknown species.
Not entirely.
No.
I think it's pretty much still held on to last I checked on it.
I don't think they've let go of Lucy yet.
But they have let go of things like the Piltdown Man.
He was one of them that got tossed out.
I know there's a lot of other hoaxes that at least they were.
Eventually they just had to let him go and they realized, of course it was science that found it out, which is they say, they made the...
Sorry, they made the fabrication and then they exposed it, you know, 20 years later and they took credit for it.
They said, see, look, we're good.
We exposed it, even though we made it up, even though it was bad.
The Piltdown man, the Cro-Magnon man, the Nebraska man, you know, where you take a human skull and you mix it with a pig's tooth.
Or you take perfectly normal-looking people and you mix it up with the jawbone of a gorilla.
Stuff like that.
It's passed off.
This is the latest, greatest missing link.
And then later it's, oops, we lied.
Oops.
Sorry.
Yeah, and I think that's horrible.
And it is despicable.
And I think it is unworthy of science.
And so with regards to your original question, I think that people should be taught the theory of evolution.
They should be taught where evolution is supportive.
They should be taught the null hypotheses for evolution.
In other words, if you can find a significantly advanced aspect of a living creature that precedes a less advanced part of it, I think these things – and this has been put forward by Dawkins and others.
There are null hypotheses for evolution that, to my understanding, have not been broached, which again does not mean that it's established with every level of detail.
That will never be possible because the fossil record is simply way too spotty.
And of course, the fossil record is only one part of the record that is needed.
You would need the entire soft tissue and brain and, you know, which you're not going to get because it's just all gone.
And it becomes circular reasoning with the dating of the rocks, the dating of the fossils, the geologic column and the index fossils.
It's sketchy.
Yeah, it is sketchy.
And I think we can all understand that given the paucity of the record, it's going to be sketchy.
I mean, so...
I think that people should be taught the evidence for it.
I think they should be taught the theory.
And I think that they should certainly accept that all human beings do accept that have any reason in them whatsoever.
All human beings do accept that evolution within species is perfectly valid.
In fact, that's how dogs have been bred.
It's how sheeps and cows and cats have all been bred.
And plants, I mean...
Trying to cross-pollinate and refine plants and create new plants.
So the refinement of characteristics within particular species has been man's domestication mission for thousands of years.
I think we all can accept that.
But, you know, I think people should also be taught the history of the hoaxes, which are significant, and should definitely give pause for motive, though I don't think they're enough to throw out the theory.
Anyway, listen, I've got to move on to the next caller, but a great call.
I really, really appreciate the chat.
It was most enjoyable, and you certainly know your stuff.
Well, it definitely was for me as well.
It was beautiful, and it took a much different turn than I expected.
I think I can get more of a handle on some of the positions that you come from.
Thank you very much for your time.
Can I leave you with a joke?
Another?
Yes, please, go ahead.
I've got a few wedged in there, so go ahead.
Okay, yeah, I know.
Little one-liners.
So, Rene Descartes, he went into a restaurant.
The waiter came out and said, Monsieur, would you like some hors d'oeuvres?
And he says, no, I think not.
Then, poof, he vanished.
There you go.
That's good.
All right, thank you so much.
Not a lot of Cartesian jokes, but I'm glad to hear them where they come.
Okay.
All right, thanks, man.
Bye.
Alright, up next is Corey.
Corey wrote in and said, I gave up on relationships upon noticing a trend of women in their late 20s showing little interest in building a solid relationship and only caring about marriage because they dreamt they would be married with children by age 30.
Stefan, are you aware of, and if so, what are your thoughts on women's strict adherence to timelines for when they expect marriage, kids, and the white picket fence?
You just got to tell me your thoughts first, because once I start, there shall be no end until the oxygen leaves the room.
Steph, can I just quickly thank you for one of the podcasts you did a little while back?
It's probably six months ago now.
You spoke to a guy about Vanity Projects.
He was the guy in the heavy metal band.
I'm not sure if you remember.
Yeah, I was saying focus on the music, not on the technique.
Yeah, yeah.
I realized after listening to that, I was like, holy shit, I'm involved in a vanity project.
So I left that.
I was doing reviews for a pop culture website.
And I left that and I said, screw this.
I'm just going to start my own YouTube channel.
So yeah, I review Asian cinema on YouTube.
And what is your channel?
It's called Pieces of Work.
So if you just type that into the YouTube search, you'll find that.
I was looking for a niche, because there's not many Western people talking about Asian cinema.
So I thought, hey, that's something nobody's doing.
So yeah, that's what I do.
Not as a vanity project, just to spread the word.
And I followed how you do free domain.
I don't monetize any of the videos or any of that, so hopefully people won't get ads.
So it's just about spreading the word for Asian cinema, really.
Well, fantastic.
I will check it out.
I don't know a huge amount about Asian cinema, but there's always cool stuff to learn.
So thank you very much for sharing that.
No problem.
So with my question, I'm actually engaged now.
This is going back a few years ago.
I just thought it was something that I don't know if many men have talked about.
But about three years ago, I was doing internet dating.
And I was going on quite a few dates and I noticed these women in their late 20s, kind of early 30s.
You'd get to talking and the first thing that they would ask you was, oh, you know, how much do you earn?
How many kids do you want?
Do you have kids?
Have you been married before?
Yeah, you've heard this before.
Will you make me a good nest for my brood?
Pretty much.
But then one girl mentioned...
When I said to her, you know what, no, I'm not really interested in that.
What I am interested in is spending some time and creating a relationship that's going to last for a long time rather than rushing into something silly.
And she got really upset and then opened up to me and said that since she was 13, she had her life planned out.
So, when she was 13 years old, she had already, in her mind, by the time she was like 21, she was going to be engaged.
And then, say, 23, she was going to be married.
And then 25, there was the house and the child.
And none of that worked out for her.
And I thought, hmm, that's kind of strange.
That's a weird way of thinking.
And then I told that story.
Wait, wait, sorry.
Just before, I want to make sure I understand what you mean.
What's weird about it?
I'm not saying it's not, I just wanna know what you find weird.
Well, I mean, men don't do that.
I don't think we do.
I just think it's more...
Wait, don't do what?
Plan their lives at all or plan them around...
No, no, no.
Actually, specific times and this year I have to do this and that rather than...
That was more important than saying, hey, I should meet somebody that I want to spend the rest of my life with and build a relationship.
It was more about, no, these things have to happen At this time.
And then when they don't happen, they try to rush to obviously fix what they see as their mistakes.
Well, but I mean, why do you think she did that?
And let's just generalize.
I don't know if you agree to that it's true.
Let's just generalize.
You know, we'll just play generalissimo.
Yeah, yeah, no worries.
Why do you think more women would do that than men?
Obviously, you know, if they want to have children, then they have to have them by a certain age, I guess.
So that's a thing.
And then I guess a lot of women are kind of raised to believe that, you know, a man should provide them with...
I guess it's to do with how they're raised, I guess, and what their own family kind of beliefs are and things like that.
Do you think...
I don't know.
I mean, do you think a lot of women are raised with, you know...
I mean, assuming the man isn't like Obama or the government as a whole.
I mean, I don't know that that's very common, maybe in some sort of the southern Christian communities or whatever.
But I didn't meet women who really had much of that perspective personally.
Now, again, I went to, you know, elite kind of colleges and so on.
So that was sort of a different situation.
But I didn't meet a lot of women who believed that.
I'm just curious, maybe you did.
I mean...
I don't know.
Maybe it's an Australian thing.
I'm not sure.
But when I spoke to other female friends of mine, they were saying, oh yeah, I know plenty of women that have these kind of idolizations of when these moments should happen in their life.
I've heard stories of women planning their wedding before they've even met a guy to get married to and things like that.
Oh, yeah.
No, I think that's fairly common.
I mean, girls to some degree will play.
Why would they do that, though?
I don't understand.
I can't wrap my head around that way of thinking.
Why a woman would be very interested in planning her wedding before she'd even met the man?
Yeah.
I mean, you know how biology works, right?
Yeah.
Okay, so you know that we're here to make more of us, right?
Yeah, I know.
The photocopier is not expected to be the novelist.
It's just make another one, make another one, make another one, make another one.
Right.
And so men are focused on getting out into the world and getting resources.
And women, again, it's all crap generalization.
But women are focused on...
Using those resources to build children.
Because that's why we're not amoeba.
Because, you know, we kept making more of everything.
And, you know, survival of the fittest, survival of the fastest, survival of those with the most chiseled jawline and the most bumpy abs, I don't know.
But that's what happens.
So the fact that women would be interested in...
Marriage and planning marriage and being all dewy-eyed about babies and so on.
It's sort of like asking, well, why the hell is that peacock's tail so long?
It's like, because it gets them laid.
Right.
Because getting laid is what it's all about.
I mean, you know, there's all this great refined stuff that we do up in the top of our brains, but it all sits on this brainstem of get some eggs, right?
I mean, that's the egg sperm, make the meat.
That's what it's all about.
So women, of course, have very fundamentally different Reproductive drives than men, in general, right?
I mean, because the cost of a sperm is none, nil.
I mean, we waste, you know?
It's that great line from the Woody Allen film.
Creep, though, he probably is.
You know, he's a sperm, and go back!
It's only a blowjob!
We're gonna get wasted!
We're gonna burn up in stomach acid and not make a new baby.
So, a man, you know, millions and millions of sperm, you know, just, you know...
Bouncing along in the subway, rubbing up against a pole.
And for a woman, her egg is incredibly precious and a huge resource.
So a man wants to spread his seed, and a woman wants a man's commitment to get resources.
And women are attracted the most to the men who have the most capacity to have sex with women.
In the same way that men are attracted the most to the women who have the most capacity to have sex with a man, but of course that's a much lower threshold.
So, I mean, this is one of the great tragedies of unenlightened women.
In other words, women who are driven by biology and not self-knowledge.
Sorry, go ahead.
Sorry, Steph.
But the thing is, most of these women were, like, highly educated.
And I thought, because, yeah, I don't know.
Would that make a difference?
No, no.
Education doesn't solve the problem of self-knowledge.
I've met incredibly educated people who have zero insight into themselves at all.
They have no observing ego that I can figure out.
And they are driven by the windiest abstractions and the basest mammalian principles.
And they just don't connect the two at all.
Right.
So a woman wants...
This is the ideal for a woman, just purely biologically.
Right.
So a woman wants the alpha, alpha, alpha.
And ideally, she'd like the alpha to stay in a committed relationship with her and make the sex only with her, right?
But of course, the whole point of the alpha is the alpha has his pick of the litter, right?
I mean, he can go out and have sex with whatever women.
And the woman's going to get older, right?
And so the woman biologically is driven to get the most physically perfect resource-heavy men.
I mean, if you look at Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades of Grey is like how a computer would program a book to make a woman's eggs ejaculate.
I mean, that's exactly what the book is like.
He's incredibly wealthy.
Resources for your eggs.
He's incredibly handsome.
That means good genes for your eggs.
He's incredibly fit.
That means good genes for your eggs and healthy genes for your eggs.
And he's mysterious and he doesn't answer questions, which means that He's not very interested in you, which means that he's going to spend time out there getting resources rather than just focusing.
Like, women find men who just focus on them annoying because the whole point of a woman is to have him stare at the eggs and go get resources to feed the eggs.
If he's just staring at the eggs, he ain't out there getting resources.
He's like this sales manager I knew years ago who said to guys—I said this in a podcast recently—who said to guys in the sales room, he's like, Don't be here.
Don't be here.
Because when you're here, I know that you're not out there selling stuff to the customers.
So I don't care.
Go do your expense accounts from a Starbucks.
Don't be here.
When you're here, I know you're not selling.
So, you know, this man, oh, I'm just going to sit and stare into her eyes, and we're going to make a little tent out of the bed, and I'm going to make her mix tapes, and all this cool stuff, we're just going to stare into each other's eyes.
It's like, no, no, no, no.
The woman, yeah, she's happy if you stare into her eyes, and then wanting the sex stuff makes you go and get resources, which is sort of what you're for.
I mean, you bring the sperm and then you bring the resources.
Now, making the man keep bringing her resources is the challenge of the woman, because especially if she marries an alpha, because the alpha, she's going to age and she's going to get less attractive because she's going to have kids and the boobs are going to hang and the ass is going to sag and she's going to get wrinkles and so on.
So she wants the alpha to Who brings resources but all the women want the alpha who brings the resources and so other women will be playing applying for that alpha and other women who are younger and more successful Reproductively right there.
They've got fertility and youth and attractiveness and so on So the great challenge of the woman is particularly since being a grandparent is very helpful for the gene pool the great challenge for the woman Is to back the alpha and then keep the alpha now in some cultures Particularly in France, if you're an alpha and you have a mistress, that's fine.
As long as the mistress doesn't interfere with the resources for the wife in any fundamental way, like if you have enough money to keep a woman in a condo downtown, but you still can afford the big house for the kids, eh, fine, you know, may not like it, but it's okay, right, and get your rocks off if it keeps you here, right, which is why the only crime in France is actually falling in love with your mistress rather than just using her as a masturbatory flesh device.
And so the great challenge is, well, how do you keep the alpha around?
Now, women used to try and solve this challenge through being attractive, through being virtuous, through being helpful, through being just so wonderful that the man would not think of wandering in particular because she's just so much fun to spend time with and so helpful and so wonderful.
That was really until family court came along.
And now...
Women keep the alpha around by just offering to grind up his gonads into a fine ginseng dust and run it through the shotguns of lawyers and spray it all over the family court.
So now, the men are bound in this like Robin Williams serfdom style to these women, and therefore the women don't have to be that nice, which is why the sort of rolling-eyed, exasperated, nagging wife has kind of become the norm.
The women who put up with the man.
But they don't have to be that nice any more than a postal worker has to be efficient.
Women don't have to be that nice to keep the alpha around.
They just have to get their hooks into him and then offer to basically soar his nuts off with legal briefs.
Okay.
So what about women that...
When I was younger, okay, I... I was a very good looking guy.
I mean, I still am young.
I'm only 31.
But I was a musician.
I lived in the UK. I had a lot of women throwing themselves at me and things like that.
I'm not sure if it was that as well.
You put a guy...
I heard you say this, right?
It's important.
Wait, were you in Australia and had an Australian accent?
No, no, no.
I lived in the UK. Okay, because that's like being in France and know how to...
I mean, I didn't do anything for you, right?
So you were in the colonies with an accent, which is basically like half a Ferrari or like two extra inches of penis size.
So, you know, you take an accent over just about, because, you know, what does an accent do?
An accent, like, ups your IQ by 20 points in the perception.
If you have one of the cool accents, if you have a Southern accent, sadly, you just fall down a manhole cover in terms of people's perceptions.
So you have the accent, you're in a band, you're a good looking guy, so alright, you've got panties flying all over, right?
Yeah, so I was with a girl at that time and she was English and I met her in England and I was completely committed to her even though I had all these women throwing themselves at me and I never cheated on her or anything like that.
But she would always accuse me of being the one to cheat just because I had that kind of attention from women.
But then it turned out that in the end she was the one that cheated on me.
But the thing is, she cheated on me.
She didn't cheat on me with an alpha.
She cheated on me with some guy that was not even a beta, like lower than a beta.
I don't even know if that's possible.
Oh yeah, there's layers below betas.
Yeah.
All the way down to zetas.
And how long were you going out with her before she cheated on you?
Well, when I found out, it was at the end of the relationship because I ended it and that's when I came back to Australia.
Oh, but how long was that?
About three years.
And were you going to get married?
Um...
No.
Right.
Why?
That's probably why she cheated, but why?
Yeah, yeah.
Um...
Because at the end of the day, we weren't compatible.
And that's why it was one of those things.
At the end of the day, you were talking about the end of 1200 days.
What do you mean you weren't compatible?
You were in a band, a good-looking guy with an accent in a band, and you chose an incompatible woman because, what, no selection?
No, I wasn't in the band when I was...
The music happened after we got together.
So we were together for about 12 months, and then I got into doing...
into the music scene and things like that.
What did you play?
I was a singer and guitarist, so...
Oh, man.
Do you have a guitarist?
Yes, I've got a guitar.
Like there?
Yeah, give me a second.
Do you want me to pull it out?
Not right now, but hopefully you can give us a song at the end.
Okay.
If you don't mind, because I love hearing what the listeners can do.
Yeah.
So, it was one of those situations where I think we were just together because it was convenient.
And...
And I'm glad it ended.
I'm happy.
If she's happy, that's fine.
It doesn't bother me.
But I don't know why it lasted as long as it did.
Probably because, yeah, it was convenient for both of us at that time.
Well, am I right in assuming that just nobody better came along?
Like, do you have any regrets and say, well, I wish I'd pursued that other person?
No, no, no.
It wasn't anything like that.
It was just...
I was young and it fizzled and...
It was a learning experience, and I learned from it.
No, it didn't fizzle.
No, it didn't fizzle if she cheated on me.
Well, it didn't exist to begin with, to be honest.
That's like taking a supernova of fizzles, right?
No, it didn't exist to begin with.
There was no proper relation.
All right, so let's move on from that rather drab scenario into a general theory.
So your general theory or general question is around women in their late 20s?
Yeah, yeah, like women who are kind of getting close to, I guess, they're drawn up, to be frank.
Late 20s is an important time for women.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, late 20s is the effects of your aging are starting to become noticeable.
And so the great fear for a woman in her late 20s is, I have completely fucked up.
Yeah.
I took my time of greatest sexual attractiveness and I squandered it on a bunch of idiot players who never were going to commit when the whole point of my sexual attractiveness is to wring a commitment out of the man, W-R-I-N-G and R-I-N-G, to wring a commitment out of a man and I squandered it.
I did not invest my inheritance.
I blew it.
And now that I'm But heart-worn, I think, I believe, and I think there's evidence for this, I don't think it's proven, but I think there's strong evidence for this.
I believe that a man can sleep around a lot more easily than a woman can sleep around.
I think, I mean, with some exceptions.
I'm not talking about gay community levels of sleeping around.
There's this gay actor, I can't remember his name for now, but a really good actor, Rupert Everett.
He said when you have too much sex when you're young, you just get smashed up.
Your heart just gets smashed up.
You just can't avoid it.
Because you're kind of used and you're using people.
You're not getting to know them.
You're using them as physical objects for Mere mammalian lust and even mammals do better than that They don't just generally screw around and right so in the gay community, you know as I had roommates once who They had sex they met and then they went on a date shockingly their relationship didn't work out that well I tell you it's a good thing.
I didn't know sex was that available to gay men when I was a teenager I'm telling you Oh, that's a story for another time.
Anyway.
No, listen, I had a gay roommate who basically had sex with a guy because it was a wrong number.
Seriously.
Guy called him up and said, is Bob there?
There's no Bob here.
But you sound cute.
And then a guy came over, they had sex, never saw each other again.
What?
A wrong number?
And I gotta buy flowers and movie tickets?
Wow.
You know, cross my fingers for a month?
Anyway, it's just a good thing that that's not more widely known amongst people who went to boarding school.
Anyway, topic for another time.
So she's got this desperate terror that she's blown it.
And the reason that she gets this fear is a couple of reasons.
The first is that the alphas are getting less interested in her.
Because she's 28, 29.
And she's looking for a commitment.
They know that.
I mean, we're not biologically retarded, right?
We know that.
We know when a woman in the late 20s, early 30s, what's she looking for?
A fling?
No.
She's looking to settle down.
So the alphas don't want that complication.
They want to go out with the 21 or 22-year-olds who are younger and firmer and hotter and carefree because they don't know how they're sliding down that god-awful cliff towards their late 20s.
So they can't get the quality of...
Physical attractiveness that they used to be able to get.
Merely being sexually available is no longer enough because they're getting creaky.
So then they have to go through the humiliation of lowering their sights.
And that's, you know, that's a moment.
I mean, you're 31, so depending on how you look, there's a time where you say, most guys say, Like, I either can't get or don't want the 20-year-olds anymore.
You know, like, I'm 48 years old.
I mean, there's, you know, my wife, I don't know, gets beamed up by space aliens and, you know, but there's no, like, I'm never, ever going to date a 20-year-old woman.
Like, I'm never, ever going to do it.
No, I completely agree there.
Yeah, I mean, look, you know, even if I was Brad Pitt, but I just, well, God, you know, like, I think it's great that you're into Lourdes, but...
What are you going to talk to them about?
Well, you're not.
I mean, you're going to pat their head and give them a cupcake and send them home.
So for women, they can't get the top tier of guys anymore.
They're older, it's too complicated, they want to settle down.
And so they have to lower their sights, right?
And that's really tough for a woman.
I mean, I think it's tough for everyone.
You have to lower your sights and say, well, this guy, I wouldn't have given the time of day two.
A while back, I'm now going to give the time of day two.
Ah, but that's a problem.
Do you know why that's a problem?
For the guy?
For the guy that she's going to give the time to?
Yeah, instead of going for the nine, she's now going for the six or the seven.
Yeah, or the five.
Or whatever, right?
So why is that a problem for the guy?
Because he's going to be controlled for the rest of his life.
No, no, why?
No, forget the rest of his life.
Often thinking about the rest of their lives.
Which is why they're in dance.
Why is it bothering him?
Um, I'm not sure, because I've never been in that situation, so I don't know.
Stay single long enough, you will.
The reason that the guy is going to be upset when the woman turns to him is that he was trying to get that girl all through his 20s.
Oh, right, yeah, of course.
She wanted to have nothing to do with him, because she was chasing the show-me-your-tits-guys, reference to last show.
Go listen if you haven't.
She was chasing the idiots, right?
Yeah.
I'm a drummer on a cruise ship.
I think I've got a future, but look how much fun I am.
My teeth are really strong, and I don't need glasses.
And I can hold my liquor and dance all night because I don't have to get up in the morning because I'm a drummer on a cruise ship.
Let's have fun.
Do you have an app?
Yes.
Great.
And so the whole time that good guys, decent guys, nice guys...
Where after the hot women, the hot women were chasing the idiots.
Like I've heard statistics, I don't know if it's true or not, just passing it along as a possibility, that 80% of women date 20% of the guys.
So 80% of the guys there can't get their feet in the door.
And so when the woman in her late 20s says, fine, I'll go out with you, what does that guy experience?
Well now, now that you've been used up by all the pretty boys, now that you're all loose and rubbery, and now that your heart is all stomped on and it's got a bunch of Doc Martin imprints all over its formerly tender ventricles, now that you've been poured at by a bunch of gross idiots with high cheekbones, now...
Now I'm supposed to date you.
Now that you're sloppy 20 seconds.
Thanks.
Not sure.
Now that you have HPV. Now that you have viruses in your pussy that can give me cancer if I have oral sex with you.
Now that you're basically Chernobyl.
Now that you're fucking radioactive.
It's my turn!
Yay!
I'm so excited.
Because this guy, of course, you know, when puberty hits, you start eyeing the pretty girls, right?
It's just the way biology works.
You can't fight it.
I mean, you don't have to act on it.
You can't fight it.
So this guy, by the time he's in his late 20s, he's like 15, 16, 17 years of trying to get women to Who won't give him the time of day because they're busy chasing guys he knows are going to break her heart.
He knows for a fact that the women...
The guys that the men chase...
Sorry.
The guys that the women chase in their teens and their 20s are going to break their heart.
And then when they're all twitchy and fucked up and insecure and nervous and have no experience...
With any kind of intimacy, any kind of connection, any kind of constancy, when they're all kind of estrogen hysterical and jumpy from having had their heart driven over too many times, when they're physically and emotionally scarred, when maybe they've been pregnant, had an abortion, had some STDs, then it's like, okay, fine, I'll date you.
Hey!
Don't do me any favors, honey.
Because, of course, the only guys that they'll want to date are guys with resources, right?
They're not going to date some guy who's 29.
If they want to settle down, they're not going to date some guy who writes found and beat poetry while working as a barista at Starbucks, right?
They want a guy who's got some coin, who's got some savings, who's got some resources.
Why?
Because they want to start having kids in their early 30s at the latest, which means, well, Five to ten years, mama needs some vittles, right?
Yeah.
But those guys don't want to date her because they've got resources so they can go younger, where they don't run into this tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, right?
Okay.
So then not only do they have to go down from the eights, nines, and tens to the fives, sixes, and sevens, but they've got to go upwards in age, right?
Yeah.
Because if they want a guy with resources, they look pretty good to a guy who's 36, 37, who may have some resources, but that guy might have an ex-wife.
He might already have kids.
He might not want kids.
And then that fundamental question arises, why, if this guy is reasonably good-looking and has some resources and has a job, why is he still single?
I can't wait to find out, but I bet you it's going to be horrible.
I brought Beth to bed with us.
She's a goat.
Oh, that's why.
That's why.
And this is what these women are like, I hope I don't get stabbed in the neck.
You know, I dated this woman.
I try and keep this story short.
So on a business trip, I met a woman who was a literary agent.
And I told her, I was a novelist and she said, send me what you got.
I sent her what I got.
She said, I really like the first half.
I'm not so keen on the second half.
This novel took place in England, in the countryside, in the past.
So I rented a cottage and I went out there for a month, took a month off from work, rented a cottage, went out there and wrote every single day and finished half a novel in a month, which is an extraordinary feat, by the way, but nonetheless.
That's great.
And a woman I was dating wanted to come and visit me.
And I said, sure, you know, not for long because, you know, I'm working, but, you know, come up for, you know, half a week or whatever.
It'd be great.
And she did.
And it was nice.
But she literally told me, she said, well, I had to tell my sister where I was just in case you're an axe murderer.
And I'm like, are you kidding me?
We've been dating for a couple of months.
You think I'm an axe murderer?
Are you crazy?
But this is like, and she said, well, you're single.
You know, good looking guy.
Good job.
Intelligent, charismatic.
And you're single.
I'm like, yeah.
So you must be Patrick Pateman.
So what, you know, when do I get my freak on?
Like, when do I pull off the mask?
You know, I'm like the sex cryptkeeper or something like that.
You know, it's just like, I'm showing up in scuba gear with a massive dildo half shoved up my ass.
Let's get it on.
Let your freak flag fly, baby!
Right?
I mean, she's just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
You know, why is this guy still single, right?
And of course, you know, the answer in Fifty Shades of Grey is because he's hot wax on the nipples guy, right?
Who mysteriously can have straight normal sex with no problems at all.
Just like all other people into S&M. Anyway, that's neither here nor there.
So...
So they're jumpy as shit, right?
And they kind of get that being wanted is not an end in itself.
That's the fundamental thing that I really want to get across to women and, you know, to hot guys or whatever, right?
Being wanted is not an end in itself.
Being wanted is supposed to be get resources, have kids.
Get resources for the woman, get resources for the man to give to the family or whatever, right?
You can reverse these roles if you can figure out a way to make men give breast milk or whatever.
Being wanted is not your doing, right?
You didn't get those tits from doing sit-ups.
It's not a virtue.
Having a man want to have sex with you does not make you special.
It does not.
Hair.
You know, you washed it.
It's not yours.
You didn't earn it by doing chin-ups.
You didn't earn it by learning Mandarin.
You got tits.
You got an ass.
You got eggs.
It's all you want.
Eggs.
In other countries.
Ooflets.
Eggs.
Right?
So, the fact that a man wants to impregnate your egg...
It does not make you special.
And mistaking accidental biological drives for personal value is so ridiculous when you think about it and such a fundamental driver of human society that it makes you want to just eat your own head off.
Like, thinking that you're worth something because you're sexy is like thinking you're a great businessman because you inherited money.
Just an accident.
Doesn't mean anything.
Yes.
Men want pussy.
You happen to have one.
Doesn't make you special.
I can run through a bad neighborhood with a clear plastic bag full of hundred dollar bills.
I will have quite a number of people following me.
Does that make me special?
Does that make me an ennobled and enlightening and inspiring leader?
No.
It makes me a target.
You are a target.
There's a little crosshair on your eggs.
And penises...
Can you smell those if there are any eggs out there?
Can you smell them if there are any eggs out there?
What do I need to do to get us some eggs?
I want to make another penis.
I don't care about you.
You're just this big giant robot that helps me to make another penis.
If I could get over there on these balls, I would.
But these balls were developed before there were roads.
Gunroll!
I wish I had little stealths and I wouldn't need your big, galumphing, smelly mess of an idiot face that says stupid things and makes me not get eggs.
It just wants to be out there like a freaking wheelbarrow.
Just wheel it around and roll up the legs while they're sleeping if they could and get you another divine second coming.
A third coming, I don't know.
So, balls want to make another ball.
Pussies want to make another pussy.
We all know this in our heads, but in our hearts, it's like, I'm so hot.
He wants me.
No, he doesn't.
He doesn't want you.
He wants your eggs.
You know, it's like if I'm running down the bad neighborhood with $100 bills and a plastic bag.
I'm popular.
They love me.
They're willing to listen and follow.
No, they want the money.
They'll hit you to get the money.
They'll lie to you to get...
They don't care about you.
They want the money.
And for women to remember that eggs don't make them special is really tough.
Because it's a huge amount of power for women who used to be trained on how to deal with that power and now that power is just mutant and rampant and steroided and gone nuts!
And crazy, insane hyper-sexualization of the culture.
Women used to be taught, like, you basically have a whole bunch of bombs, and the bombs can go off in a controlled manner, or they can go off and take out half the fucking village.
But they're gonna go off either way.
Now, the controlled manner is, you get a man to commit, you get the eggs, you get the babies, there's your controlled egg explosion.
The uncontrolled manner is, you fuck a lot, bad shit happens, you run out of time, your eggs die, boom!
Nothing but a smoking crater of regret for the second half of your life.
Mind your eggs.
Be careful of your eggs.
You are the egg carrier.
Doesn't make you special.
Doesn't make you special.
Any more than having money makes you wise.
It's just the way that the world evolved.
It's the way things work.
And so women in their late 20s begin to figure this out.
And they say, shit, I was supposed to use my prettiness and my hotness and my attractiveness To get commitment from a man.
But instead I used it for recreational vanity sex fests that have left me heartbroken and full of antibiotics.
Not a very good plan.
And I feel some sympathy for women because of course There's lots of people out there saying, you're special because you're pretty.
You know, being pretty is the best.
Yeah, just ask Halle Berry, who's now trying to get her sex addict ex-husband to stop siphoning $16,000 a minute out of her handbag.
God.
If beauty was wisdom, I mean, Marilyn Monroe would be doing these videos.
She'd still be alive and probably still be hot.
But...
So there is this looming sense of disaster.
And it happens to men, too, in their 20s, too.
And the way it happens for men, too, is men say, well, I sure self-indulged a lot.
I've got really good at Call of Duty 3, and I know how to make a latte, but I don't really have any money with which to build a family.
Oh, shit.
So with women it happens with aging eggs, and with men it happens with deflated bank accounts and deflated prospects.
You know, like I worked like a son of a bitch in my 20s and my 30s.
My God!
I know I've worked since I started this show hard too.
But the guys I knew who, you know...
I'm going to go to archaeological digs!
Do you want to become an archaeologist?
No, that's a lot of work!
I like digging!
I sure like to go prospecting for a summer.
That would be cool.
I'm going to go tree planting because I hear you get lots of sex.
I mean, all that digging of holes and planting of seeds.
Ooh, it's hot, blue spruce kind of action in the Everglades.
And they go off and they do this shit.
And I was like, man, that's fun.
Goddamn, I hope I don't get cancer when I'm 46.
That would suck.
I'm going to go backpacking.
I'm going to go pick grapes in Queensland because I hear it's really cool in Australia.
Oh, I really want to get my scuba certification.
Do you want to teach scuba?
Is that what you want in the profession?
No, it's just cool.
And I'll have great pictures.
And all these people, all these guys just fuck-offing around the world doing all this cool shit.
And I was going insane under fluorescent lights building up my intellectual capital.
And I'm like, ooh, this better pay off.
If I get hit by a bus, I'm going to be pissed.
Now, it did pay off.
I have, you know, reasonable career, reasonable assets and all that.
And they're like, fucked.
Because they're in their late 30s, early 40s.
And they're competent for nothing, fundamentally.
Right?
Oh, I thought I'd be a waiter for a while and I'd study glassblowing.
Oh my God!
Stop it!
Think of the eggs!
Think of the eggs!
They don't care if you know how to blow glass.
Unless that glass has lots of money in it.
Or it can be sold for lots of money.
Or, uh...
I'm going to make crafts.
I literally had a friend.
Oh my god.
We played Dungeons and Dragons together.
Here's plan.
I'm going to paint paintings and get this.
You think that's not smart enough?
I'm going to make duck decoys.
Right.
Do you even know what those are?
I have no idea.
You sound too cool to know.
What a duck decoy is, right?
So a duck decoy is, if you go duck hunting, you have to put these decoys on the water.
Oh, okay, yes.
Because then, like the other ducks say, oh, there's ducks down there, so there can't be any hunters around, because then the ducks wouldn't be there, because the ducks, so the ducks can, you shoot the ducks, right?
Right.
Yep.
So you've really got to work.
You know, you this guy's like you won't believe how hard it is to become Good at making a realistic duck It's like I will now shoot myself if you continue this sentence Because not only do I not know I would pay good money to never know Do not tell me the intricacies of carving a duck's ass so that it looks like a duck's ass to another duck please God
I would rather hear how somebody makes Lars's girlfriend out of rubber and papier-mâché than know how you carve a duck's eyeball so that it looks like another...
Sorry, I just shot myself even talking about it, but I just winged myself, so I think I'm okay.
But so women like they're like, oh, I fucked up when I should have been building like a relationship to to have kids.
I fucked up in my 20s.
And now I'm really screwed because I've got to try and scramble to find some guy to commit me can to commit to me.
When I'm running low on looks and when I have this agenda and the guy knows it's too obviously about the eggs.
See, in your early 20s, you can make it subtly about the eggs.
But in your late 20s, it's like, hey, you're going to get married.
How much money do you make?
How long have you had your current position?
What's your education like?
It's just like egg, egg, egg, egg, egg, egg, egg, egg, egg.
And nobody can pretend that there's anything to do with love or romance in it, right?
Hmm.
And that's not good.
You need the illusion of romance to generate the fantasy of love to generate the prison of commitment.
No, I'm kidding.
I love you, Mary.
So guys don't gather resources and women don't trade in on their attractiveness.
And then there's a fundamental mismatch then in their late 20s because the woman wants resources for the eggs and the men around her who aren't married don't usually have resources.
And they begin to panic.
And there is...
I mean, I have...
I don't...
I mean, I don't really have any fundamental regrets.
I certainly made mistakes, but I don't really have anything where I look back and I say, God, I ever fucked that up hugely.
I don't...
I mean, I sort of think about that every now and then.
But the people I know, their regrets, like, who didn't prepare...
You know, and I read in my early 20s, I was reading a lot of Jung, and Jung said...
You know, the first half of life is designed to prepare you for the second half of life.
You know, that was always really, really an important statement to me.
You know, first half of life, you go out, you conquer the world.
Second half of life, you've got to kind of reap some of the rewards of what you did earlier on.
And now I'm in the position with this show, I can do some of that, which is great.
But the people who've not planned for the second half of their life, who just literally dicked around for men and for women...
Or as they say, right?
Rode the cock carousel and thought they were special because men wanted to have sex with them.
Oh my god.
Of all the ridiculous reasons for feeling special.
It's like a rock feeling special because the earth wants to hug it.
It's just the way physics works.
Rock, don't make it special!
See all the other million rocks?
And we've just got the society that doesn't tell the truth to young people.
I mean, the truth is that I think, and that's why I might tell my daughter if she asks when she gets older, if you want to have kids, I think it's pretty good to have, if you've got a good childhood, if you had a good childhood, have them kind of young.
You know, have your kids in your 20s, and then you've got your late 20s, your 30s, your 40s, your 50s, your 60s, your 70s, to do whatever you want in terms of career.
But once you start investing in a career, I mean, if you want to see, I'll shut up in a second, but If you want to see a portrait of a neurotic childless woman, God help me, I clicked on it by accident and then I just found it quite compelling for reasons that I don't think even the creator of the show is aware of.
There's a show on Netflix called The Mindy Project about this woman who's in, she's a doctor and she's 31 and she's freaking out about not having a boyfriend or a husband and wanting kids and all that.
And it is brutal because she put all this time into becoming a doctor.
She's been a doctor for a couple of years and now she wants kids.
Well, that was fucking great, wasn't it?
You know, like only a third of the women who got MBAs are actually in business anymore.
The rest of them fucked off to have kids.
Great!
What a huge waste of fucking social resources that was!
Good job, everybody!
Great!
I know a lot of people who went to university, got these degrees, and then they just wanted to be housewives.
And I was like, well, why did you bother in the first place?
Well, because that's where you meet.
Well, that's where you meet somebody.
The maximum providers is in university, right?
Yeah.
Well, in Australia, it's government-funded, so it comes out of taxpayers' money.
Oh, right, right.
Yeah, so...
Yeah, it's a huge waste of resources for women to get this big-ass education and then go home and be housewives.
I mean, do it later if you want, but that's...
For the women who train to become doctors and then take 10 years off to have kids, it's like, fuck, that was a ridiculous thing to do now, wasn't it?
Because there could have been some guy who would have given the world 10 years more of healthcare, driven down the cost of healthcare, so the more poor people are going to get healthcare without the goddamn government fucking everything up.
No!
I want to be a doctor!
Okay, then be a doctor.
Don't have kids.
No, I want kids!
Anyway.
So I won't see them.
So they'll grow up.
Anyway.
Yeah.
So I think that's a lot of the stuff that's going on in the late 20s.
And it starts, it's like this slow uneasiness.
You know, it's like Courtney Cox at the beginning of this show, Cougar Town.
She's just trying to hold up parts of her body.
And they just, she lets go and they fall.
She's like, damn.
And it says Cougar Town, right?
Which is like, she's now in her 40s or whatever, and she's falling apart.
And the basic reality is women have it way easier when they're younger and men have it way easier when we're older.
It's just this elemental balancing out that happens.
And I'd rather have the late stuff because the late stuff you can be more unanimous and wise with your power.
But women have fertility when they're young and men gain in resources as they age.
And so basically older men with resources are like supermodels for The age bracket.
And even for younger women.
You know, why did George Clooney get married now?
Because dating, like marrying a woman 20 years younger than you is no good, because that's kind of creepy.
15 years is kind of like the outside, right?
So he's 50 and he got married to a woman who's 35.
Well, there's a shocker, right?
Because if it was 30, he'd be like, yuck, he's old enough to be her dad.
Once you get to that threshold of old enough to be her dad, it's pretty creepy, right?
Which is why 15 is like the cutoff.
Unless you're Paul Walker, in which case it's the cutoff in another way.
She's too old!
So that's why he got married now and why he got married to a woman who's 35.
So yeah, there's a slow unease that creeps up on you.
And like all these slow unease things, you can kind of put it off for a long time.
But the longer you put it off, the worse it gets.
And at some point, you're really just kind of screwed.
And Women, of course, a lot of women, not all women, a lot of women get this, it's called baby rabies, like in their 30s.
And it's a crazy feeling.
It's like you constantly have to pee all the time, like hard, or you're constantly hungry.
And this burning yearning of like, egg, egg, egg, egg, egg, about to expire, get me some sperm!
Egg!
I mean, it makes women insane.
It's like this constant nagging, aching yearning.
That occurs.
That for a man, I mean, she might as well be coming up with a roofie and a fucking turkey baster, right?
Because, I mean, it's terrifying for a man.
It's just like, give me sperm!
Give me sperm in 20 years of legally confined support.
I mean, you know it's not for you.
And at that point, I mean, it's a complete disaster.
And all of this stuff was well known in the past, and we've just done a fantastic job of obscuring it from everybody relevant.
Yeah.
Yeah, nobody really tells you this stuff when you're younger.
No, and it's complete dysgenics, because smart people don't have children they can't afford, and they have a huge amount to lose from ending up on the welfare bandwagon.
But dumber people, they don't have much to lose, they can't make much money anyway, and they just act on the impulse of the moment, and they do fine on a couple of grand a month in money and benefits.
Yeah, it's great.
I mean...
I can either flip burgers and get less or I can have three kids and get more.
I mean, smart people wouldn't make that decision out of a basic empathy and care for the child.
But idiots and cold-hearted fools make those decisions all the time.
And so we've got this weird, dysgenic situation where we're basically just paying idiots to breed and taxing intelligent people to stay away from each other with anything remotely resembling fertility.
Well, it's going to have its effects.
I mean, IQ is pretty heritable.
Does that help at all?
Yeah, that was great, Steph.
That was really good.
Well, I'm actually in a relationship at the moment.
I'm engaged to be married, which is great.
We've been together for almost two years now.
It's all good.
Everything's going great on my end, but it was just something that I was just curious about.
Listen, if you have a daughter or a son, tell them this stuff.
Start early.
Yeah, well, we're not sure if we're going to have...
Well, we're not going to have kids.
We've made that decision.
So my fiancée, she's doing her PhD at the moment.
So that's what she wants to do with her life.
And I myself, I'm starting a master's degree soon.
So we're very into...
She is 30.
Yeah.
Well, I think it's a shame.
I mean, I'll be honest with you.
I just think it's a shame.
I mean...
That doesn't mean anything.
It's just my idiot opinion from the other side of the internet.
But, I mean, if you're into self-knowledge, if you're intelligent, well-educated people, breed, you selfish bastards, breed.
I know.
We've been told...
The amount of people that have said that...
You've got musical talents, good luck, and I'm sure you can inflict an Australian accent on your brood.
So...
Yeah.
The world is pretty out of white people.
I'm sorry?
Well, we're planning on, we don't know, like, she's almost finished her PhD, and we're planning on moving overseas, so who knows what could happen?
So we eventually want to settle in probably Japan.
Who knows what could happen?
You do know how this works, right?
There is some choice involved.
You don't just like, you don't just drop your sperm on a blender and, you know, hope she's not bending over, right?
I mean, this is not how it works, right?
We're pretty adamant.
I'm going to blindfold myself and throw handfuls of it all over the place.
I wonder what's going to happen.
No, don't sit there!
Anyway, think about it.
Just think about it.
Think about it.
Think about it.
If you're into this show, if you're into peaceful parenting, if you're smart people, I mean...
Just think about it.
I mean, I know you have.
And obviously, if you don't, fine, fine, fine, right?
Well, it's not just that.
What an incredible opportunity for kids to be born into your family, right?
Yeah, I know.
But it's not just that.
We both have Crohn's disease.
Do you know what Crohn's disease is?
I do.
Yeah, so I have that and my girlfriend's actually going through a lot of testing at the moment.
They're not sure if she's got MS or if it's something else.
So we've both got conditions that we think, well, would it be selfish of us to have a child and pass on a burden to a child?
Would that be a selfish thing to do knowing that you have medical conditions?
I mean, I know dads who have Crohn's.
Yeah.
And it makes them obviously very careful about the condition.
And I hugely sympathize.
One of the best men at my wedding had Crohn's, still has Crohn's.
And so I hugely sympathize.
But there are dads who do it.
And I mean, that doesn't mean anything because, of course, there are different degrees and all that.
But it's not necessarily a deal breaker.
Yeah.
Fair enough.
Well listen, when are you going to get married?
Probably once the study's done.
Once we're both finished studying, we're going to get married, which is probably...
We've only just got engaged, so we'll probably give it maybe a year or two.
We don't plan on having a big wedding or anything.
We're just going to do something really small with our close family and friends, because that's the thing I don't...
There's this big culture.
I don't know if it's the same in Canada or the States or in the UK or whatever, but in Australia, there's a lot of people I know.
I know people that got married, and they end up spending up to $50,000 on their wedding, and I just think that's utterly ridiculous.
Yeah, I mean, that's just stupid social vanity, right?
Look at me!
I can light cigars and $100 bills.
I'm pretty sure I read the average wedding here.
What the average person spends is around $30,000, which is crazy.
Yeah, it is.
It's absolutely crazy.
I've talked about weddings before.
I like the social investment and the public declaration of don't let us screw this up.
And if we get upset with each other, convince us to get back together.
I think that's all great.
So in some ways, it's an investment.
The more people who are there, the more people who know how committed you are, the more people who can help you stay together.
But that's a lot of insurance for $30,000.
Yeah.
I think we did $10,000.
It's more showing off.
Yeah, $10,000 is okay.
I think $10,000 was fine for us.
Yeah.
We had a wonderful wedding, a lovely wedding, and so I think all of that is more of a reasonable amount.
I mean, you want it to be a beautiful and memorable day, and you'll revisit it in your mind's eye many years down the road.
But yeah, once you start getting north to 20, 30, 40, it just seems kind of nuts to me.
It's just absolutely crazy.
Listen, man, I've got to move on with the next call.
I appreciate your call.
Keep us posted, and I hope things work out with your Fiance, that's incredibly scary stuff.
Yeah, it'll be fine.
Yeah, let us know, if you can, just what the results are of the test.
I won't share it on the show, but I'd just like to know for myself.
No worries, Steph.
Thank you so much for your time, mate.
Thanks, man.
See you, man.
Alright, Dwight is up next.
He wrote and said, Is there such a thing as class in a monetary disparity, or is it something else?
Well, the first rule of Dwight Club is you do not talk about Dwight Club.
So, tell me what you mean by class.
I mean, it's one of these words that gets tossed around more often in sophistry than it does with knowledge.
Yeah, yeah.
I understand.
I did some kind of individual research on it.
I tried looking for a definition first.
Right?
Can you hear me?
Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Oh, and the definition that I found was the relationship between an individual and the sources of power within society.
And so, yeah, what they basically said was that there's a working class and then there's a ruling class.
Which, you know, I basically think that...
And I can...
I don't think that this is an argument because of me saying, but I think that I personally believe that there are two kinds of people.
Like, there are criminals and then there are individuals, right?
I mean, there are people who kind of do wrong things for society.
Wait, are you saying criminals on individuals?
No.
Well, yeah, they're individuals, but they're individuals that do crime.
Category fail.
I'm sorry.
Well, there are criminals and there are individuals, but the criminals are individuals.
It's like, nope.
I'm sorry, man.
No, no, that's fine.
So they say relationship to the source of power in society.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's what they said.
And I assume that they mean economic power.
I mean, there's very few people who say we have a class structure and the class structure is political.
They usually say it's economic, right?
Yeah, yeah.
That's usually what they say.
I'd also like to say like a grand and enormous fuck you to everyone who talks about the working class.
Like, seriously, fuck you.
You selfish, entitled, largely academic assholes.
Are you trying to tell me that in your fucking definition of the working class, when I was an entrepreneur and I've now been an entrepreneur for 20 years almost, are you saying to me that a fucking fat bastard punching his clock...
At the DMV or the post office, he's the working class.
But me, as an entrepreneur, working sometimes 60, 70, 80 hours a week, putting my ass on the line, signing massive liabilities for tens of thousands of dollars to keep payroll going for another couple of weeks until money comes in, that this fucktard of a government employee, he's the working class, And I'm not working?
Are you kidding me?
How do people say this with a straight face?
Fuck you to the people who talk about the working class.
Be a goddamn entrepreneur rather than a pimply communist ass-sitting motherfucker and then maybe you can talk to me about the working class.
Get out of the academics.
Stop reading Marx.
Go start a fucking company.
Go come up with an idea, get some investors, and work your fucking ass off.
Stare at a business plan until beads of blood fall on your forehead, form on your forehead, fall, and create some miracle of hieroglyphics that produces money.
Go and start a company, and then talk to me about the fucking working class.
Entrepreneurs are the working class.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I totally get that, and I kept on rebuting that entire theory with that entrepreneurship.
Karl Marx?
Karl Marx talking about the working class?
than that.
The guy didn't work a fucking day his whole goddamn life.
He leeches off his dad.
He leeches off his wife.
He leeches off his angles.
Yeah.
And then he bangs his maid, tosses around the street.
Oh, because, you know, exploitation of the working class is really terrible.
Bangs his maid, tosses around the street, denies that he even has a son, which everybody knows he has, because he wouldn't want to lose his moral prestige.
This fuckwit of a pimple-ass motherfucker is going to talk to me about the working class.
You giant Old Testament bearded fucking leech parasite on the human condition.
Just bugs the shit out of me.
Get a fucking job.
Start a company.
Hire some people who you call the working class and compare your hours to their hours.
Then talk to me about the working class.
Otherwise, shut the fuck up.
Yeah.
I understand that.
I just keep on getting into these weird arguments with them and it's like they don't stop using the same argument after it's been rebuted.
Yeah, class, look, the Marxist definition of class is just an appeal to vanity.
Yeah.
You're the real heroes here.
Because you come in at 9, you get your two 15-minute breaks, and sometimes 45 or 50 minutes for lunch, and then come 5 o'clock, you're out of here.
You're the real hero in this company.
Without you, this company couldn't function.
Those guys up there...
Who worked 80 hour weeks to build this company?
They're the parasites.
You guys are the real heroes.
You're the real money makers.
They're just stealing from you.
And you know why they're targeting the people at the bottom?
Because the people at the bottom are usually too stupid to know that's bullshit.
Listen, when I was a waiter, I didn't feel exploited.
Yeah.
Because...
When I was a waiter, I was like, God damn, I'm glad somebody made this restaurant because I'm not a retard.
I'm not an idiot.
I know the restaurant didn't just belch itself out of the ground like lava out of Mount Vesuvius.
The restaurant had to be conceived of, built, planned.
Somebody had to order all that shit that comes out of the back of the restaurant.
Somebody had to advertise.
Somebody had to order to paint the wall.
Somebody had to make the table.
Somebody had to make the oven.
Somebody has to pay the electricity bills.
I just got a fucking waltz in there.
Bring people some food and walk out with change in my pocket.
Yeah.
I mean, when I was a waiter at a pizza place, this is way back in the day, you had a five-minute guarantee on people's lunches.
Five-minute guarantee for sit-down food.
And you had to get their drinks out before you brought their food.
So you had like eight or ten tables.
People all come in and sit at the same time.
You have to get their food.
And they put timers on the table.
And you'd slap the timer and off you'd go.
You'd have to get the drinks.
Then you'd have to go back and get their food and have it out within five minutes.
And if you didn't get out within five minutes, they got a free pizza.
The manager of that restaurant was throwing up blood sometimes.
He was so stressed at the end of those lunches.
Because it was so crowded.
And they just shooting fucking pizzas out like cannons.
Pull!
Slap down, right?
And I mean, I was like, people would say to me, hey, do you want to go be part of the parasitical managerial class?
It's like, I really don't.
Because he's like, his eyeballs are yellow with stress.
Like, he's throwing up blood.
I don't want that.
That's not for me.
No thank you.
I'm just gonna come in, tie my little uniform on, throw some pizzas at people, and go home.
So the idea that I was somehow viciously exploited, you know, those same people who say to the working class, you're being exploited.
Do you know how I really no longer felt exploited when I couldn't get a job?
When I graduated in the early 90s, a terrible recession.
I talked about this before, I'll keep it brief, but I was like, I want to be a waiter.
We don't need a waiter.
We've got more waiters than we can handle.
We're firing waiters.
Everywhere I went, nothing, nothing going on.
Look, I'm free of exploitation.
Yeah.
I'm free!
Can't a brother get a crust?
Yeah.
I can't waiter at the restaurant, but maybe they're throwing some food out in the back.
I'm going to go taste me some dumpster freedom.
Jesus Christ!
I mean, look at people who can't get jobs!
It's like, no, no, no!
You're free!
You're free!
You're not being exploited anymore!
Shouldn't you be happy?
Now you can go be one of those parasitical managers who just coast by on everyone else's labor!
Go do it!
So easy!
I mean, if you could get shit for free, everybody would be a manager.
The idea that there's no costs and benefits to being a manager, they get paid more.
Okay, good.
So go do what they do.
If it's easy, it's free money, which defies all the laws of economics, but that's okay because you're kind of an idiot.
So just pretend that they're getting free magic money because they're tall or have nice hair or a white or a male.
It's free money.
So go get some.
If it's so easy.
But they don't want to do that.
They just want to sit there and have people like Iago pour these resentments into their ear.
You know, he's just making all the money off your labor.
It's like, oh, well, the sensible thing would be for me to go and do that then, right?
There's this big pile of unattended money over there.
You can just go and get some like he did.
Well, I'm going to go over and get me some of that unattended money.
Huh.
Doesn't seem to be here.
What there is here is a whole lot of 80-hour work weeks and stress and worry and debt.
And risk?
You know, when a restaurant fails, the owners are usually left hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, which they will spend the next fucking five years paying off, if they're lucky.
What happens to the waiter?
Oh, two-week severance.
You poor, poor, exploited bastard.
Good lord.
Yeah, something that...
What kind of broke my indoctrination was when I went up and worked for my aunt and uncle.
They ran their own business, their own janitorial business.
So, I mean, I got a little bit of an idea of how entrepreneurship actually works.
Yeah, it's this weird thing.
People think that when they go home, the managers just sit there, roll around in free money.
It's like, who's paying those property taxes?
Who's doing all that paperwork?
Who's paying the taxes on the corporation?
You know, when you go home and watch fucking Ally McBeal, they're sitting there up to their eyeballs in paperwork.
Who's dealing with the health and safety regulations?
Who's making sure that all of the food is kept in the right spot?
Who's fixing all when the freezer breaks down?
Who's doing all that shit?
It's not you!
It's not you!
You're just coming in and complaining about being exploited!
As opposed to, you know, we have a mutually beneficial arrangement.
You have costs and benefits.
I have costs and benefits.
And you know what?
It all works out.
I don't want the stress and debt.
And you want more money and you're willing to accept the stress and debt.
So there you go.
Costs and benefits.
But nobody likes to think about costs and benefits.
They don't want to think that the choices and consequences, right?
Yeah.
I went to the gym.
You sat on the couch.
You have diabetes.
I don't.
You stole my insulin, you exploiting bastard.
You smoked, I didn't.
Anyway.
Yeah, so the class thing, it just bugs the shit out of me.
And look, I'm not saying that employees don't work hard.
They do.
Sometimes, for sure.
But it didn't start it.
It did not start it.
They didn't take the risk and they're not legally exposed to the liabilities of the company that fails.
And everything, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
If you want the extra money, work the extra hours, take the extra risks.
There's nothing free in this world.
There's no free lunch and nobody is being exploited.
I mean outside the political system and all that.
It's just choices and consequences.
I was not being exploited when I took a massive pay cut To do free domain radio.
It's not exploiting.
Choices and consequences.
I have a richer, deeper, more meaningful, more passionate, more involved, more engaged, more helpful life to the good and a more harmful life to the evil, which is exactly what I want.
But choices and consequences, it all could have blown up.
In terrible ways.
Yeah, definitely.
So, it's just choices and consequences.
Look, I have no problem with people who want to be employees, who want to sit on the couch, who want to stuff their faces with Cheetos.
I don't...
Fine.
I'm not going to sit there and finger wag and be the ultimate asshole ninja police of ultimate fitness and health.
I do do it.
Just accept that choices have consequences.
If you don't want to start a restaurant, that's fine.
If you want to work your magic...
Amazing human brain potential to the point where you are a very good food-carrying robot.
Go!
Take the food from here and put it there.
And then take the plates from there and put them there.
That's your job.
You are a conveyor belt with an apron.
I've got no problem with that.
I did it for years.
Nothing wrong with it.
Do that.
Then you don't have to go to school.
You don't have to take any risks.
But you know what?
You get paid for what you know.
And knowing how to move food from A to B is not knowing very much.
Yeah.
Knowing how to start and run a restaurant, yeah, a little more skillful.
You know, when I was stocking shelves when I was 12 years old at a convenience store?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was getting paid $2.45 an hour.
I was happy that there was a convenience store that was willing to pay me $2.45 an hour.
And yeah, it was a little humiliating.
Girl came in that I liked.
Here I am on my hands and knees scraping gum off the floor.
And I'm looking up and I'm like, this is really not the hottest posture for a young man to be in.
Look, I'm a gum scraper.
Want to go out sometime?
I'll probably wash my hands.
Yeah.
But, you know, I was happy to have the work.
You know, I got my first job at the age of 11 in a bookstore.
Happy to have the work.
Got up, took the subway for, took the bus on the subway for an hour and a quarter to get to work to work for four hours.
Took the bus back.
Great.
I mean, what was I going to do at the age of 11?
Start my own bookstore?
So this class thing, it's just a way of telling people that their risk-free choices should get the same benefits as risky choices.
That their inertia should get the same benefits as energy.
That their reactive comfort should receive the same rewards as proactive discomfort, which is also called entrepreneurship.
Yeah.
But there is a class.
Sorry, before I get to the next rant, I just want to make sure if we're...
I mean, does this sort of make sense?
Is this useful?
Yeah.
There is a class, though.
And I've talked about this before on the show.
And the class is IQ. Okay.
And the class is IQ. And to some degree, that's environmental.
And to some degree, that's genetic.
And what level?
Some people say the correlation is 0.6.
Some people say it's 0.8 in terms of genetics.
But there is a class.
Now the class is malleable because two parents who have an IQ of 120 are not likely to have an IQ 120 kid.
They're likely to have an IQ 110 kid.
Because there's a regression to the mean, right?
Wherever there's A disparity, there tends to be a regression to the mean.
That is being somewhat reinforced, or actually, sorry, that's being somewhat undermined, because since sort of the 1970s, particularly in American society, society has gotten very good at finding smart people and hiving them off to Ivy League bubble spheres of cultural and economic and political influence.
So like the top 5% of intelligent kids, sorry, of the top 1% of intelligent kids, like 31% of them go to like the top six or eight Ivy League schools in America.
Society is getting very good at finding smart people and removing them from their local towns and communities and bringing them to Ivy League schools and, you know, putting them on the fast track.
It's one of the reasons why wealth disparity is, and again, it's all government funded, at least largely government funded and largely government driven.
It's one of the reasons why wealth disparities are increasing, right?
So that there is a class, it has something to do with IQ, and certainly IQ's proximity to political power vastly increases the power of IQ. But IQ, which is largely fixed in an individual by the age of six, it rarely changes after that in any substantial ways.
And there's been lots of, of course, there's been lots of goals in society of trying to close IQ to make it less of a bell curve.
But, you know, that's like trying to make everyone the same height.
Sorry, genes at work, right?
I mean, genes at play.
And I mean, the whole point of the Head Start was to get disadvantaged communities up to the same IQ as everyone else.
And there was some initially very encouraging things.
And then as genetics tends to play out as, you know, or whatever, the X factor genetics plus environment.
And I'm a big fan of focusing on environment and figuring out what can be solved around that, as I've talked about for many years.
But there is.
There is a bell curve.
And so what?
There's a bell curve in singing ability.
There's a bell curve in height.
There's a bell curve in reaction times.
It's just the way it is.
We have this wonderful biodiversity of humanity.
And so there is a class.
And the class has to do with IQ. And the class has something to do with genetics.
And there's simply, to the degree that that class is influenced or determined by genetics, there's simply no way to call it unfair.
I mean, you can call it unfair if you want, but that's stupid.
I mean, somebody who's smart...
It's not stealing IQ from other people.
I do think that smart people should work as hard as they can to create an environment where other people's IQ can flourish, which is why I talk about peaceful parenting and negotiation and no spanking, because that's going to give people a five to six point boost in IQ right there.
So I think if you are smart, there's not much better good that you can do than circle back and try and improve IQ for other people.
It's not going to make everyone the same.
You know, if some kids grow up short because they're malnourished, give them more food.
It's not going to make everyone the same height.
There is a spread in ability.
And I think there's nothing wrong with that.
It's fine.
You know, there's way better singers in the world than me, and there's way better musicians.
I took, like, I did violin for 10 years when I was a kid.
I was in an orchestra.
I was okay.
But there were some people who practiced kind of the same amount.
It was really good.
Yeah.
I mean, they're not stealing my ability.
Yeah.
And low IQ doesn't mean that there's any fundamental problem with success, right?
I mean, I think Muhammad Ali's IQ was like 78.
70 is like borderline retarded.
He had an IQ of 78.
But he had energy, he had drive, he had charisma, and he was a good-looking guy.
And so he made something of himself.
So it's not the fundamental determinant.
But to me, when people are talking about class...
It's sort of like when people talk about the NBA. In a lot of ways, they're talking about height, you know?
And that's fine.
I mean, a couple of short players in the NBA, but come on, right?
Yeah.
I mean, there's a couple of Chinese players in the NBA, but we don't expect them to be proportionally represented according to demographics, because Chinese people tend to be kind of short.
Tall Chinese person is the exception that rules the rule.
You call them tall.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think that looking at the world through the understanding of IQ is important.
IQ does not make anyone superior at all.
Yeah.
You know, if I'm running away from a lion, I want fast legs.
I don't want a big brain.
In fact, a big brain is just going to slow me down.
So it's nothing to do with superiority or anything like that at all.
It's simply just a characteristic.
And so in the Marxist view...
There is this insane egalitarianism, like we can just make everyone equal.
And that fundamentally comes out of the concept of the soul.
Because in the soul, in the eyes of God, everyone is equal.
Yeah.
Because the soul is not dependent upon any physical characteristics, like number of brain cells, or size of the brain, or size of the cranium, or size of the neofrontal cortex, or anything like that.
So this is weird egalitarianism.
And egalitarianism only appeals to the resentful.
And it only appeals to the fundamentally insane and it only appeals in its most essence to somebody who wants something for nothing.
You know, you want to go be a front man in a band?
Go sing in front of a band.
Go sing in a band.
I did it.
It wasn't really that good.
It wasn't for me.
Well, it was for me.
I just wasn't for it.
I don't have the voice.
So go try it.
And if you can do it, do it.
And if you can't do it, then you fail.
And so, you know, a couple of garage bands that I sang for were like, hey, you know, you've got lots of energy.
And not so much with the voice.
I'm like, I did play violin for 10 years.
Well, Ashley McIsaac, I'm afraid you're just going to have to keep on moving.
And so, yeah, you just go out and try it.
Now, I mean, people who become rock stars, they're not stealing from mine.
I don't have the physical voice to do it.
I like to sing.
I can sing a few things okay.
Just don't have the voice.
And that's just a reality.
The idea that we all have these beautiful, perfect singing voices and the people who are front men of bands who are great singers are stealing that position from the rest of us is just ridiculous.
It just ignores the basic reality that singing ability is also a bell curve.
I mean, Freddie Mercury never took a singing lesson.
Man, bastard.
Right?
Never took a singing lesson.
Yeah.
And, you know, to me, one of the great pop and rock and singers and even did some pretty cool operatic stuff with Montserrat Caballet, just, you know, just the way it is, just how his voice was.
And so this egalitarianism is a way of, I think in particular, it's so easy to lie to the lower IQ folk And it's so wrong to do so.
You know, if I cheat...
If I cheat someone who's really intelligent and really savvy to what I'm doing...
Like, if I can get Bernie Madoff to invest in my Ponzi scheme, I'm clearly a bad guy.
But, you know...
He knows kind of what's going on.
He knows the scene, right?
If I get some, I don't know, some 17-year-old with an IQ of 75 to invest in my Ponzi scheme, that's like evil with an extra side heaping of unbelievable douchebaggery.
Yeah.
Because to lie to the less intelligent is so easy That to do it is even more immoral.
Like if I want to go and beat up someone and I beat up and pick on someone my own size, I'm still initiating force.
Still wrong.
But if I go and, you know, punt a midget, yeah, I'm initiating force.
Not really a fair fight.
And this is what troubles me about Marxists is that they really do fasten on the less intelligent.
The same thing is true of religion.
I mean, religiosity decreases almost proportionate to IQ increase, which again is not to say there aren't the outliers, but as IQ increases, religiosity decreases.
So religion really is a virus that preys upon the less intelligent.
And Marxism to me, because it tends to try to appeal to the resentments Of the lower IQ people because they're, quote, workers, which means they're not entrepreneurs.
They don't have the intelligence, the skill, the drive, the ambition.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
It's perfectly fine.
I need roads too.
But because the Marxists and the leftists, they tend to prey upon the lowest, not the lowest, they tend to prey on lower IQ people.
It's far worse because it tends to be more intelligent people identifying the lower IQ people and then going in to stoke up fear and resentment in them.
An intelligent, like a reasonably intelligent person when told about going to be burned in hell because a sky ghost doesn't like that you touch yourself will say, A, why are you so interested in me touching myself?
And B, I just don't really buy it and I'm not going to buy, like if I go to an atheist and say I'm going to sell you insurance from demonic possession, the atheist is going to say I don't really need it.
And if I am going to go to a person with an IQ of 120 and say, I've got this imaginary disease called sin, which I will now need you to pay me 10% of your income to pretend to cure you of, the intelligent person will say, I know, I get off my lawn.
Please, just stop it, right?
But if you go to somebody who's got an IQ of 80 or 85 or something like that, and you start spinning these tales about how You know, the rich are just rich because they've stolen from you and you should have everything they have.
I mean, the poor person, the less intelligent person is so much more susceptible to those kinds of manipulative lies that to me it's like stealing from a girl guide.
It's in the same moral category as stealing from Mike Tyson, but just extra douchey.
Like extra ugly, vicious, preying upon those unable to defend themselves intellectually douchebaggery.
And that's what really troubles me.
And you can see this a lot, the degree to which communism tends to take its root and its hold in less intelligent countries or less educated countries.
Less intelligent is the wrong way of putting it, but less sophisticated countries.
Because the whole theory behind Marxism is that it was supposed to take place in the most educated and most advanced societies.
That's never happened.
That has never happened.
Marxism tends to take place where you've got...
North Korea, where you've got Cambodia, where you've got the benighted, uneducated serfs of the Soviet Union, where you have brutally raised, relatively unsophisticated populations.
That's where these assholes tend to take root.
Simply by calling someone the working class, you're automatically appealing to resentment and entitlement.
Who the fuck are you to say that the guy who's pushing around the floor cleaner In the office building is somehow the exact economic equivalent of the guy who risked his entire life savings to build the office building and then built it.
I mean, just...
It's ridiculous.
And it's foolish.
And this is what I really dislike.
Like, it's the same thing with feminism, too, to some degree, where the feminists sit there and say, well, you know, women are only getting 77 cents on the dollar for what men get, right?
Which any intelligent person says...
Well, fuck me.
I'm going to make a fortune then because I'm going to hire women at 80 cents and all the women will come work for me and I'm going to make a killing.
And then someone else is going to go, oh, I'm going to go for 82 cents.
I'm still saving 18 cents on the dollar from the men.
So the idea that there's this massive disparity in this incredibly profit-seeking free market, that there's this massive disparity that has no basis in productivity or economics...
Only idiots could believe that.
Yeah.
Absolute idiots.
And the fact that people then repeat these lies over and over again, stoking the resentment of these idiots, is preying upon the dumb.
It is vile and vicious intellectual bullying and cowardice.
To those people I say, pick on someone your own size, assholes.
Call in here.
Call in to a competent economist.
Go talk to Christina Hoff Summers.
Go talk to Karen Straughan.
Go pick up the phone and talk to somebody who's fucking smart.
But no, they won't do that.
They go talk to Emma Watson.
I mean, God almighty.
God almighty.
You know, if you're such a heavyweight, get in the boxing ring with Mike Tyson.
Don't go punch out Don Knotts.
And if people really grasp that, the degree to which these bastards, these unbelievable scumbags, are stoking the resentments of people who don't have the intellectual acuity to understand the ridiculousness of these arguments.
You're worth as much as the CEO! You're being underpaid!
It's like anybody with brains will go, wait a minute.
How could that be?
I mean, the CEO was here long before I have.
He's got way better education.
Guy works 80 hours a week.
He built the whole company.
Yeah, he's worth more than I am.
But those people tend to do quite well in organizations.
And last thing I'll say.
Last thing I'll say is that it tends to be such a self-perpetuating prophecy.
So if you tell people who are workers, who are generally less intelligent, because only less intelligent people tend to buy this bullshit, the smarter people who buy this bullshit are actually looking to sell this bullshit.
They're looking to get on the gravy train of stoking resentment and then in the divisions they create expanding political power by creating victims who demand state restitution for imaginary wrongs.
But what bothers me so much is that If you keep telling workers they're being exploited, that the people who created the company they're working at are parasites and out to do them harm, what kind of work attitude are these people going to have?
They're going to resent getting up.
They're going to resent going to work.
They're going to resent their paycheck.
They're going to resent everything about it.
And they're going to feel, by God, if I could only live in a Marxist robot city where everybody bought me spam and eggs on a hover bot.
I shouldn't have to get up here.
I shouldn't have to go to work.
These people are assholes.
They're exploiting me.
Bastards!
I don't want to be here!
I mean, what is going to happen to that person's work ethic?
What is going to happen to that person's enthusiasm?
What's going to happen to that person's desire to improve themselves and move up the economic ladder?
They're going to be one surly, resentful son of a bitch to have work for you.
It's the same thing with women.
If you keep telling women, oh, it's stacked against you and you're never going to make any money and the men are just exploiting you, they're going to be in there.
They're going to be resentful.
They're going to be bitchy.
They're going to be upset.
They're going to be entitled.
They're going to be feeling like if you can teach someone that they're being taken advantage of, they'll try and take advantage back in subtle ways.
Take extra long lunch hours and not come back on time and feel okay about being late.
And next thing you know, that person is not moving up.
That person is not going to have a job for long.
And you have just fucked someone else's life for the sake of pumping your own ideological bullshit into their tender and unsophisticated mind.
That is predatory.
That is a virus.
That is the real parasitism.
You know, it's such projection.
The communists like, well, there are these exploiters out there who lie to you and cheat you and reduce your economic value.
That's you, assholes!
That's you!
That's not other people!
Well, you know, there are people out there who undervalue the contributions of women.
We'll keep them down and won't let them have money.
That's you!
By keeping telling women these lies about how they're underpaid.
They just work less because they want to have kids.
God love them.
Keep doing that.
That's wonderful.
But it's not the capitalist class you're talking about.
Fucking Marxist academics?
Talking about the working class?
That's like me doing a play called My Black Experience.
Academics?
The working class?
Are you kidding me?
These people wouldn't know hard work if it came up and slapped them on the face with a wet fish.
And they're the ones exploiting the underclasses.
They're the ones stoking the resentments of the underclass.
They're the ones undermining the economic opportunities of men and minorities, of women and minorities and women.
The hell's wrong with my brain.
Let me try that again.
They're the ones who are undermining the economic opportunities of the poor, of the less intelligent, of women, of minorities.
No, I'm not putting them all in the same category.
These are just the people who tend to be the targeted receptacles of the resentment mongerers.
So I think they're just absolutely horrifying and horrible people.
I always told my employees when I was a manager, do what you want.
Mike's interested in joining more on the show?
Join him more on the show.
Find a word edgewise.
Wait for me to take a break.
Never going to happen.
Good luck.
But no, I mean, do whatever you want.
An employee who's like to come on a sales trip?
Come on.
Come on a sales trip.
Hey, I'd like to do this research project.
Go for it.
Give me a cost-benefit analysis.
Let me know how it's going to pay off.
Love to hear it.
You do what you want.
This company is going to be a place where you can work as much or within reason as little as you want.
You can...
Work to grow.
I'll share with you every piece of knowledge that I have.
Fantastic.
This is a place where you can play to your heart's content and grow to your heart's content.
And yes, we will fund your education.
We will fund whatever works for you that's going to add to the productivity of your time here.
Wonderful.
Never held any barriers in front of people.
And some people wanted that and some people didn't.
Both of them were fine with me.
But then the ones who didn't had no right to resent when those who did take advantage of those opportunities moved up.
You know, I took significant, I mean, first world risks.
You know, I'm not out there eating fruit bats, but first world risks.
I took significant risks in my entrepreneurial, a lot more than most entrepreneurs take.
And that was challenging for the people who didn't take those risks around me because some of them paid off and it was hard.
But it's like, I don't, I don't resent the people who didn't take the risks because they had fun.
When I was there working in the middle of the night and they were out there going to discos and stuff, you had fun.
Great!
I don't resent the fun.
But then later, see, they can tax.
They can tax my profits.
I can't tax their fun.
And that's why that resentment works because you can remove from someone the fruits of their labor, but you can't remove from someone the fruits of their fun.
So they went out to discos and they went traveling across Europe.
I can't tax them for that.
I can't get those memories.
I can't have worked less and had more fun.
But they can tax the money that I got from working that hard and taking that many risks.
And that's why this resentment is so easy to stoke.
Because the fruits of virtue can be transferred.
the fruits of laziness or the fruits of self-indulgence or the fruits of hedonism can't be transferred, but the fruits of virtue and hard work can be transferred.
And that's the fundamental imbalance that makes statism an always and forever unjust situation.
Does that make sense or help you with class?
Yeah, yeah, it helps me understand.
So, that's kind of getting into Plato's stuff, right?
Like, I know better than you.
I don't know.
There is an order of intelligence that is necessary.
I don't know what the number is, but I would argue that it's sort of 90 to 95, maybe 105 IQ. There's an order of intelligence that is required for any basic understanding of economics.
And that order of intelligence is the capacity to not look at the visible benefits, but at the hidden costs.
In other words, it's not perceptual.
You can't see it, right?
So when the government is building a road, everyone can see that the road has been built and they consider that to be economic activity.
It takes an order of intelligence to understand that there was other things, five other businesses that didn't come into effect because the government taxed all that money to build this road.
And so when you're speaking to less intelligent people, It's really important to remind them of the hidden costs and the visible benefits, and the visible costs and the invisible benefits, right?
So everybody understands that if you go and work out, sometimes it can be uncomfortable, it's often boring, it's sweaty, you know, it's not, very few people work out just for fun, right?
I don't.
Yeah.
So there's your visible cost.
What's the hidden benefit?
Well, we all know it's in health and blah, blah, blah, flexibility, strength, energy, better sleep, weight management, blah, blah, blah, right?
And in the same way, when you're speaking to less intelligent people, it's really important to remind them that the hundred jobs the government just created cost 500 jobs that weren't created that nobody can see.
And the people, of course, who get the jobs that the government creates are happy, but the people who don't get the jobs because they were never created because the government took all that money or debased the currency, they don't even know they didn't get those jobs.
And so without constant reminders to the less intelligent people in the world, there will always be a skewing towards an increase in state power.
Now, since there always will be less intelligent people in the world, hopefully we can move everybody up, but there will always be less intelligent people.
There will always be a bell curve.
And there James Flynn has theorized that we've sort of reached the maximum in terms of what we can do in intelligence, that there has been a significant leveling off of the Flynn effect.
And in some ways, people 100, 150 years ago were smarter, at least in terms of reaction times.
IQ has only been around as a test, really, as it's administered from the early part of the 20th century, and particularly through the military.
Military being one of the few organizations that's legally allowed to use an IQ test, it's mostly illegal for private companies to use it because of the perception that it discriminates against minorities.
But You really have to constantly remind people that the CEO is making money for a variety of reasons.
Hard work are probably some helpful starts, but that's not unfair either, right?
I mean, some people are born beautiful.
They didn't steal my beauty.
Brad Pitt didn't steal my hair.
And so the fact that people are born beautiful does not give us the right to mutilate them and make them ugly.
The fact that some people are born tall doesn't give us the right to remove part of their shinbone and make them short and transfer it.
The fact that some people are born with kidney disease doesn't give us the right to steal kidneys from healthy people.
There is inequality in the world and we remediate that with compassion and charity and the pursuit of better environments for everyone, particularly through parenting.
At least that's my argument.
But you have to constantly remind people.
You go to workers and say, look, the CEO is making a lot of money and you're not.
Now, if you're capable of making that money, then go to it, and here's how.
You work hard, you work diligently, you're enthusiastic, you take risks, you listen to mentors, you enroll people in your success, you take training courses, you travel, whatever you need to do, right?
You express your ambition to your manager, or you go start your own company.
If you can do what the CEO can do, then don't resent him, go do it, right?
If you can't do that, What the CEO can do, then don't resent him.
Because resentment means that it's unfair.
And it's not.
So a friend of mine got me tickets to SoC Queen with Adam Lambert.
Damn, that guy's a singer.
Holy crap.
Like, what a set of pipes.
You know, he's like, everybody, sing along!
No!
I'm sorry, I won't.
Because it's Canada.
Nobody else does.
Anyway, I sang along to one or two songs.
But, you know, you try and sing along and you go like, well, this is why I'm here in the audience and you're up there with the microphone.
Because I can't do 20% of what you can do with your voice.
Yeah.
And I took singing lessons in theater school and all that.
So...
If I could sing like Adam Lambert, then I should go enter a singing competition, I should go start a band, I should start writing music, I should just go and do it, right?
If I can't sing like Adam Lambert, I could say, that's a bummer.
But I can't say that's unfair.
Because being unfair requires a moral agency, and Adam Lambert's singing voice is not the result of a moral agency, but rather the result of genetics.
Or whatever.
It's not environment.
It's just you're born with that voice, right?
You can train it and so on, but you have it or you don't at that level.
And so, yeah, it's like, oh, Adam Lambert sucks.
It's got such a great...
That should be me up there.
It's like, then go do it.
And if you can't go do it, be happy someone can if you love music.
Because if it was you up there, there'd be nobody in the audience.
Like, if I was up there singing for Queen, there'd be like my wife apologizing to everyone else who showed up by accident.
Sorry, he thinks he can, but he can't.
And so...
But the stoking of resentment is absolutely predatory upon the most vulnerable people in society which are the less intelligent.
And I think it's absolutely hideous.
It's like a doctor using his skill to poison and harm.
Intelligence, I believe, should be used...
To the benefit of the species as a whole.
You can go home and, you know, masturbate and play World of Warcraft all you want, if you want.
But I think, ideally, those of us who are accidentally blessed with brains, go help some people, for God's sakes, you know?
Do it!
And I think that's a great way to use it, but I certainly won't You know, if I've got some brains, I'm certainly, I wouldn't steal them from anyone else.
I have some natural ability and I've worked for 40,000 hours to develop it.
But the goal for me is to translate the abstractions that I've worked on for many years into a digestible format for people of only slightly above average intelligence.
I'm not saying that's you.
Just so you know.
But, you know, I get lots of emails from people who are like, you know, I've been a janitor for 10 years, you know, and I get what you're saying, you know, it really has changed my life, and so on.
This could be a guy with an IQ of 90 or 95, and he gets what I'm talking about.
I think people that call in tend to be smarter, but that's what I want.
It's to bring the fruits of intelligence.
You know, like how at the beginning computers were like impossible to use because it was all command line bullshit?
And now it's like, Right-click, place your forehead into the iPad screen, and lo and behold, you've just made a painting.
I mean, that's what I want, is to use a friendly the shit out of philosophy.
And that, to me, is absolutely essential.
There's no reason that everyone should come up with a right UPB, but if I can explain it in a way that makes sense to people of average or even slightly below average intelligence, fantastic.
Because it's those people that we most need to stop hitting our kids.
Because I'll tell you one last thing.
IQ... And criminality are incredibly related.
I don't mean like ruling class criminality, you know, like Wall Street and the Fed and military-industrial complex.
What I'm talking about is like a basic on-the-street criminality.
Most criminals have an IQ of 75 to 80 or below.
And if through peaceful parenting we can up those criminals six points, that's not outlandish.
That doesn't put them in super mensa category, but it will lift millions and millions of people out of the criminal class.
What an amazing thing to advocate for.
So you talk about peaceful parenting, rather than you're a victim, the man screwed you, you're never going to get anywhere, so go trash something.
I mean, that just have to look at the different approaches of, of this show versus the Marxists or the whoever, right?
Feminists and race baiters and crap.
I mean, just work at, you know, do the Zimmerman video.
I'm like, man, black families, please stop hitting your children.
You know, here's the evidence.
Go watch this.
You know, we just passed a million views on that.
A million people have seen that peaceful parenting message, a lot of whom are in minorities.
Fantastic.
Let's start closing this gap.
Let's start raising your children peacefully.
Yeah.
As opposed to the other people who are like, you're screwed.
White man a racist.
It's like, you absolutely exploitive bastards.
How dare you call other people exploitive when you are the people holding them down?
Yeah.
I think that part of my IQ is kind of related to things that I went through as a child, but I don't really need to get into that right now.
But, you know...
I started to notice a little bit of a higher IQ around the time when I started to hit some growth spurts, and I think that that's because I could actually defend myself.
It was mainly from my mother, but I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, I think certainly we can end up with some pretty strong muscles from opposition.
I certainly would not have the quickness of thought processes and debate if I had not grown up with a crazy mom, that I constantly had to push back with an attempt to assert and maintain my relationship to reason and reality.
So, yeah, I mean, that which does not kill is bloody, bloody, blah.
So I think there is some truth in that, but...
Yeah.
That's certainly not...
It's not like if you put everyone in that situation of adversity, they all come out with a high IQ. That is not...
It does not seem to be the way it works.
IQ tends to be formed pretty early.
And IQ even tracks with reaction times as an infant pretty closely.
So there is...
I believe that there is a strong genetic component to it.
I don't know to what degree it is.
And it doesn't really matter fundamentally.
Yeah.
Because let's say the genetic component to IQ is 0.3 correlation or 0.9 correlation.
Doesn't matter.
Does that mean we won't do everything we can to equalize it through opportunity and peaceful parenting?
No.
We're still going to continue to do all of that.
So I act as if IQ is 0% hereditary, although I know that's not with the current science.
But I act as if it's 0% because what difference would it make?
Even if it's only 1% environmental, we would still do everything we can to...
To attempt to close whatever gaps exist.
So that's, I think, my focus.
So, yeah, the adversity, I think, can provoke some significant skill development, but I don't know the degree to which...
I mean, criminals have gone through significant adversity, too.
They just tend to have gone through it with a significantly lower IQ than the general population.
So that adversity did not bring great things to them.
But I think if you have a high IQ, adversity can bring you some great...
Skills and abilities.
So that's sort of my thought on it.
And again, this is all tentative and subject to scientific revision.
Yeah, well...
Yeah, I've got, like...
My dad's really smart, but my mom's not really there.
So...
I mean...
Both of them have been in college for...
I mean, you know, the past 20 years.
So that's kind of where that's at.
That's going to cause them some troubles.
And listen, man, like Dwight, I know you want to, I mean, I can sort of hear you wanting to talk about your family, and I would like to do that.
I don't think we can do it tonight, because I think we're sort of rounding the corner to the finish line of the show.
Yeah.
But if you do want to talk more about family stuff, just give Mike a ping, and we'll see if we can fit you in in the future.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Thank you for the rant opportunity.
Yeah, I know.
That was awesome.
Yeah, I hope that people on the resentment side or the stoking resentment side will look at the facts and really put their muscle and weight behind doing what they can to improve the human condition rather than stoking resentment, which is an age-old splitting technique designed to really rupture societies as a whole.
Yeah.
When they reap what they sow, if they do, they will bitterly regret their choices, I believe, but I hope now is not too late.
So thanks everyone so much for the show.
Thanks to all the callers.
As always, massively, massively appreciated bringing your thought, curiosity, openness, and honesty to the conversation.
You guys are the best.
I genuinely, completely, and totally believe that this listenership is the highest quality listenership That there is in the world.
We have the best conversations.
We have the best topics.
I still listen to a bunch of other people who do shows, particularly with callers.
I mean, you guys are just like hands above, miles above, stratospheres above, I dare say light years above, the other callers to other shows that I've listened to.
And I hugely appreciate that.
So this show in particular, and this is the bulk of what we produce, six or seven more hours a week, is entirely driven by the quality of what you guys bring to the table.
And what you guys bring to the table is magnificent.
