Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Jan. 22, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:05:59

2892 Science Is Not Harry Potter - Wednesday Call In Show - January 21st, 2015

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Let's just get the streamer going and we can get started.
	Sorry, you said get the streaker going, right?
	That's not at all what I said.
	Hopefully you're not doing video.
	Oh, hopefully I am.
	I was streaking during the show, Steph.
	No, no.
	Keep your shirt on.
	You took your shirt off once.
	And you heard the clamor for more?
	Coming from my hand puppet?
	Once was enough.
	Once was enough.
	Next comes the pants.
	I'm aware of that, but, you know, just...
	Pants.
	Restraint.
	I plead restraint.
	Hi, everybody.
	Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	I hope you're doing well.
	Oh, my friends.
	I hate to be a nag.
	Oh, I just hate to be a nag.
	But if you leave those Adidas shoes on that kitchen counter one more time, young man...
	I know it's after Christmas, but please throw us some shekels.
	The show is lower than it was.
	I know this recession goes on and on and Christmas bills are due and so on, but please remember your friendly neighborhood philosopher and his mission to bring reason, evidence, peace and virtue to the world and go to freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
	Please, please, please don't make me get on my knees because then you'll only see a few curly tufts Of aged mohawk on the bottom of your screen.
	So thank you very much, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	And Mike, who's on first?
	All right.
	Up first today is Ash.
	Ash wrote in and said, How does slash will, the current government structure and the effects it has on the economy, impact the family structure, both now and moving forward?
	Uh...
	42.
	All right.
	Who else do we have next?
	I don't work for tough questions, man.
	I work for peanuts.
	Ash, are you there?
	Yes.
	How are you going, Steph?
	I'm doing well.
	How are you doing?
	I'm all right.
	The question was asked in relation to...
	I've watched a lot of your podcasts to start with, watched a lot of them, and I really admire your work.
	I think you and me are on the same page on a lot of topics.
	But my thing is, most of this violence that we're talking about with children and domestic violence, just violence in general in society, is when we can relate it back to through all the studies that I've researched, and I'm sure you've researched a lot more, comes back to Poverty comes back to lack of money, lack of finances, lack of ability to move forward in that aspect.
	So if that's the case, how do you project at this present point in time in the economy state that we're in, projecting this non-violent and non-violent towards kids especially, but in any aspect, forward with lack of people being able to be taught how to be non-violent?
	It's a great question.
	And the interrelationship between state and family is very much at the core of my show.
	Yes, I have been called a revolutionary, and I'm certainly not an evolutionary, because the machinery of evil is developing far faster than the snail's pace of virtue.
	So let me give you the up scenario before I give you the down scenario, if that's the right, Ash?
	Oh, yeah, go ahead.
	So the purpose of this show, in a nutshell, is to convince you of good and of evil.
	And to have you choose the path of virtue over the path of evil.
	Radical, I know, for a philosophy show.
	Actually, it is kind of radical for modern philosophy, which seems to have wished evil out of the air like somebody who had a giant fart at the queen's dinner table and pretends that one of the corgis exploded.
	So...
	To convince you that evil exists, to convince you that virtue is a beneficial state of mind to be in, and then to get you to apply those values to your own life.
	One of the ways that people make philosophy impotent, the castrate philosophy, by casting your gaze at all of the giant abstract constellations in galaxies far, far away that you cannot change.
	Whether that is, you know, the politics or the state of mind of the world as a whole, or the rationality of irrational people, or which law you're going to pass or fail, or who's going to get it.
	None of that is going to be what you can achieve.
	When I was young, I used to read Fafford and the Grey Mouser, which was a fantasy novel series, and one of them was called The Curse of the Small and the Stars.
	And the thief and his big giant oafish companion were cursed by With attention to unbelievably insignificant details and giant windy abstractions that they could never put into practice.
	It was a curse that was put on them to render them unable to fight, to win, to achieve their goals, to further virtue and so on.
	And I always remember that.
	The curse of the smalls and the stars.
	It had a big impact on me when I read it when I was 12 or 13.
	And...
	The curse of the stars, the curse of when you can will these constellations into a different shape, only then will you have achieved practical virtue.
	Now, that's not the way we deal with improvements in other areas of life.
	We don't say, everyone in the world must eat well before you can eat well.
	Everyone in the world must be rational before you You can be rational.
	You don't apply to take a degree in physics and they say, hey, man, come back when there are no superstitious people left in the world and you banish magic from the mind of man.
	Then we'll accept you.
	That's not how things work.
	You work on your own conscience.
	You work on your own actions.
	Now, the goal of this show, of course, is for you to bring the non-aggression principle into your own life.
	UPB, universally preferable behavior, the non-aggression principle into your own life.
	Now most times you will only be tempted to use the non-aggression to violate the non-aggression principle Against your children.
	That is the major way in which people fail the test of the non-aggression principle.
	They use the aggression principle in the raising of their children, which is why the non-aggression principle seems kind of weird to people, right?
	We're not allowed to use force.
	The government is allowed to use force.
	Just in the same way when we were kids, we weren't allowed to use force, but our preachers and our teachers and our parents in general were allowed to use force.
	And this is the parallel and the paradigm that exists within the mind of man.
	But those in authority are exempt from the rules that they impose.
	You know, how can you hit your sister?
	Whack!
	Right?
	Don't use force to get what you want.
	Grab!
	Right?
	And until those in authority are consistent with the virtues they inflict on their subjects, there will be no peace in the world in any meaningful, fundamental, or lasting manner.
	And we cannot change the authority of the church.
	We cannot change The authority of the state, but we can, nay we must, change our authority within our personal relationships.
	This means don't use aggression.
	Be assertive, of course, but don't use aggression.
	Don't be vicious.
	Don't hit, and so on.
	And even with regards to children, and adults too, don't use ghastly terms against individuals that scar them for life.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	I understand...
	The aggression principle, I completely agree with.
	I have two children of my own.
	I follow it through.
	I think you mean the non-aggression principle, but I don't mean it.
	The non-aggression principle.
	And I have two children of my own.
	And I use this theory, before I even heard of you, I've used this theory with my children from day one.
	And I have a great relationship with my seven-year-old.
	And we can sit down and use You said something the other day on one of your podcasts that you sat down with your daughter and wrote a list about what we can change into communication between the two of us for the next year or to see if we can move on.
	I do the same thing with my daughter.
	I'm 100% behind all of that.
	My question is more relating to this isn't going to happen.
	And I'm all for it.
	I'm fighting 100% behind it.
	But it's not going to happen when we have the society we have today without teaching people Adults and children, and children at a school base, at a preschool base, and maybe that generation will bring it through to their kids when they're born, because I honestly believe it happens in the first two years of a child's life where you can establish this relationship.
	The negotiation skills, the ability to have a really shit day at work...
	Have 12 people cut you off in traffic on the way home in a fight with your girlfriend or your wife on the way home from work.
	And to get into the front door and to sit down and rationalize with your child when she doesn't want to eat macaroni and cheese and that's all you can afford and that's all she's going to have for the night.
	Not get into a violent argument and have the ability within yourself to calmly sit down and take a step back and go, let's negotiate.
	Let's talk.
	Well, what can we do about this situation?
	This is how it's going to happen.
	And this is how it plays out.
	I have not the best.
	I am not perfect.
	No one is perfect.
	But I have a great understanding on how to do that.
	I do come home from work and be able to sit down with my girl and negotiate and change that approach in my own manner.
	But I think it has a lot to do with self-being and self-preservation in human society.
	I'm sorry, you said self-something and then self-preservation.
	What was the first one?
	Self-being, like knowing yourself, right?
	So whether you've been abused as a child or whatever's happened in the past and whatever you see on TV, on the news, you've got to be able to take a step back as a person and go, I don't need to do that.
	I don't need to get frustrated and angry.
	I just need to be able to communicate.
	And that goes between husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend, mum and dad, from...
	Being a dad to their child.
	It has to be across all boards.
	So my question, I think, was more pointing at the fact of how do we implement this teaching of self-awareness and self-being able to logically look at yourself and sit down and go, I'm mad because of what happened, but it's got nothing to do with this person I'm yelling at.
	So I'm going to take a step back Have a breather, whether it takes five minutes, ten minutes before you walk in the front door of your house, or whether you can do it instantly because you've done it.
	I'm sure you and me can do it pretty much instantly when we walk in.
	Not instantly, because that's not going to happen, but very short periods of time because we're used to this way of thinking.
	How do we teach other parents and other humans, and especially the kids that are growing up in today's society, to learn That way of thinking so that violence isn't the answer.
	I can't even remember the last time I had a fight.
	Physical violence in my life does not come to me.
	There's times where I've had confrontations with people and when I've left that confrontation, people who have known the person I've had a confrontation with has turned around and said, I can't believe you didn't get your head punched in.
	Normally he goes off his handle.
	I have the ability to calm myself down, which calms other people down, which lessens the violence.
	But how do we teach other people who don't have that and how do we teach kids that don't have that to grow up in that way so that this does become an actual thing?
	And I'm not trying to diss what you're saying or what you're doing, but there's a lot of us that are living this way, but reality is we're still people on YouTube talking about it.
	It's really not being put into place.
	How do we put it into schools with the financial and economic situation we have in today's society without costing us billions of dollars, which is bullshit, And teach these kids that they just need to know themselves.
	They need to be happy within themselves, to accept themselves, so they don't have to be turned violent.
	Violence only comes around when someone is unhappy with themselves.
	When they don't feel happy with themselves or they don't feel comfortable with themselves, they turn violence because it's the only thing they know how to do, right?
	We've got to teach them how not to do that.
	So how do we get to that point in society at the moment?
	What would you, I mean, I know that this is a lot of hypotheticals, but what would you think we should take into place to push that forward in society?
	You can't teach anything but consequences, fundamentally.
	For people who are not rational, people who are rational, like yourself, I mean, you were peaceful before you heard the show.
	I hope that this has helped you.
	Back you up on that.
	And your kids are very lucky.
	What a great dad you sound like.
	Just wanted to sort of mention that.
	But for irrational people, you can't teach them anything because they're irrational.
	But what you can do is you can expose them to consequences.
	You can stop enabling.
	Stop supporting.
	You know, when I was growing up, this was the sort of self-help 70s and 80s.
	And a lot of it was about don't be an enabler.
	And an enabler is somebody who shields a dysfunctional person from the consequence of his or her own decisions, bad decisions.
	And so you can't go and teach kids.
	You can't.
	I mean, atheists disagree with religious people, and can you go and teach the children of religious people atheism?
	You can't.
	I mean, you can't.
	On what?
	In a corner of them in the school?
	You can't.
	And so you can't just go in and teach kids this and fix kids with that and so on, in my opinion.
	Now, you cannot illuminate virtue without also illuminating vice.
	This is a very fundamental aspect of philosophy which makes it not for the faint of heart.
	You cannot illuminate virtue without also illuminating vice.
	Which is why the nastiest people tend to hide in relativism, because they wish you not to see virtue so that you can't see their immorality.
	They hide in fog.
	Yeah, they hide in fog.
	So, you can't...
	You know, the only thing that I've really been taught and have learned In the realm of sort of practical or applied economics is the only cure for corruption is voluntarism.
	The only cure for exploitation is voluntarism.
	The only cure for destruction is choice.
	And so I've used this analogy before but If you wanted to make the post office efficient, would there be any point leaving it in the hands of the government, but going in and lecturing them about the free market and the need to satisfy their customers?
	Fair enough.
	The only thing you can do is you can promote voluntarism.
	Where there is choice, there is the capacity for virtue.
	Where there is no choice, there is only the service of immorality.
	And this is why I have consistently and continually promoted the voluntary family.
	Because the voluntary family is in the interpersonal realm exactly the same as the free market is in the economic realm.
	Rather than going around and lecturing everyone to be economically efficient, all you need to do is repeal laws.
	You do not need to make laws to make the world free.
	You need to repeal laws to make the world free.
	You need to repeal, in the free market we know, you need to repeal laws.
	All of the laws that interfere with the free flow of trades and goods and services and from there you get Efficiency and you also promote virtue and so people who are honest will tend to do better in the long run than people who were dishonest and so on and people who keep their contracts will require less overhead for the The backstopping of their contracts and so on in the future,
	you know like smokers pay less for life insurance and all that kind of stuff and honest people pay less for the overhead of doing business and So I don't want to go around the world lecturing people on what they should do as if the world was free.
	I don't want to go around lecturing people in the teachers' union.
	This is what you should be doing if education was voluntary and part of the free market.
	It's a waste of life, a waste of breath, and it's failing to empirically understand That people do not...
	You can almost never count on people to do what is right, but you can almost always count on people to do that which they believe serves their self-interest, at least in the short run.
	Okay.
	So, let me just finish my point, then I'll be quiet.
	Yeah, cool.
	Sorry.
	No, it's fine.
	So, I am in the promotion of voluntarism, and I am, you know, a pimple on the nose of the giants who have promoted voluntarism in the past.
	There was voluntarism with regards to the choosing of one's leaders in ancient Athens and ancient Rome, at least for those who were citizens.
	There were those who fought against serfdom and the buying and selling of peasants with their land.
	There were those who opposed medieval guilds and wanted freedom of trade.
	There were Forced monasticism of the Catholic Church, there were those who opposed slavery, there were those who opposed the idea that women couldn't leave marriages, there were those who opposed the idea that divorce was impossible.
	Up until the 60s in Canada, it took an act of Parliament to get divorced.
	So this slow, grudging promotion of the expansion of choice, the expansion of voluntarism, I'm a tiny, tiny little person at the end of this incredibly long dominoes of giants who eclipse anything I could ever dream of.
	But where the volatility in this conversation is that the last bastion of involuntarism is the family.
	I mean, that is something that is very hard for people to piece together.
	The family must be voluntary.
	My daughter...
	When you were asking me, we made this list of things to improve the other day.
	You know, she tries to make jokes, and I'm trying to be honest with her when the jokes are funny or not.
	Sometimes they are, and sometimes they're not.
	Anyway, she sat me down the other day.
	She said, Dad, I need to tell you about something.
	I'm finding that your jokes are more appropriate for, like, four- and five-year-olds.
	I'm not actually finding them really funny now that I'm six.
	And I, you know, I wanted to say, you may not be alone in that, and I may not be able to change it.
	But that's great.
	I want to know that.
	You know, like all families, we have our running gags, and as she grows up, those gags fall away, and sometimes I'm a little...
	I hold on to them a little bit too long, and...
	Like, I play this tough guy with her.
	And, you know, the tough guys, tough guys, they don't do laundry, they just set fire to dirty clothes.
	You know, this kind of stuff, right?
	And she's really enjoying that, but there will come a time where she doesn't, like, the tough guy is not funny for her anymore.
	Yeah.
	So all of that level of communication and respect, I'm a service provider to her.
	She's not a service provider to me.
	I'm providing a service to her called parenting.
	And I have no right to anticipate that when nature grants her the independence that now she does not possess, that she has no reason to come back and see me.
	She has no reason to want to have anything to do with me when she gets older.
	And that is my job, is to make sure that I stay close to her preferences.
	I stay of value to her life.
	And then she can make her choices when she gets older.
	But I mean, my wife could wake up and decide to bolt on me tomorrow.
	And it's up to me to make sure that that doesn't happen, or at least that she doesn't have much incentive to do that.
	So, you know, I don't have any ways of saying we should go out and teach kids this, that, and the other.
	The way that you improve quality in any relationship is voluntarism.
	Voluntarism, there's no such thing as quality in relationships.
	Like in a centrally planned economy, whatever is ordered has no price.
	You can make up a price if you want, but price is a voluntary transaction.
	Quality results from a voluntary transaction emotionally just as price results from a voluntary transaction economically.
	And it's very hard, you know, when you dig down deep into the guts and bowels of philosophy and you find those laws of physics.
	You find UPB. You find universals.
	You keep pushing them out.
	You keep pushing them out.
	And it's disorienting from people and it rips the matrix right out of their neck.
	But we really have no choice if we wish to advance.
	There is no progress but universalization.
	So go ahead, Ash.
	That's my thoughts.
	I agree with you on most of those topics.
	I don't I'm not very good at writing and taking notes, so I'll relief what I can capture in my head.
	Wait, Ash, are you saying that you agree with my daughter that my jokes are mostly appropriate for four and five-year-olds?
	Well, knowing you from what I've watched, at the moment they might be for her.
	You've taught her the best you could.
	I'm just kidding.
	I'm joking.
	What are you saying?
	I'm just joking.
	I understand this voluntarism.
	Like, I do get that, okay?
	I understand that people have to volunteer to participate in this way, right?
	But my problem is with, and what I've seen, and what I'm witnessing at this present point in time with a lot of my friends, they are, a couple of my friends have come to my way of parenting.
	I'm lucky that we all had children roughly around the same time so it wasn't later in life so it was easy to go into that for them and they swayed from the other way and realized it worked because I was a showcase for it that made it work.
	But in saying that, I've met people with kids that are in their 9 and 10 and 12 and 13s and they They've gone down that road of, I'm not going to spank my child, I'm not going to discipline my child, but at the same time, their kids do not have reason,
	logic, and I'm not saying, and I completely understand that it's an individual thing, that sometimes we haven't and sometimes we don't, but I also believe that, you said in one of your podcasts once, if we could all speak Japanese and the world was better, you'd put your kids in a Japanese school right now, wouldn't you?
	Like, if the world was...
	But Ash, hang on.
	So when you're talking about parents whose kids don't have reason, simply refusing to teach someone Korean does not teach them Japanese.
	So simply not hitting your kids, not yelling at your kids does not make them rational.
	It's necessary but not sufficient for them to be rational.
	And I think that's what I'm trying to get at.
	I completely understand that.
	I think that's what I'm trying to get at is the fact that how do we teach parents We put out over the news in the early 80s and 70s, like you said, it was a huge thing not to spank your child, not to discipline.
	And that whole sitting in the corner for five minutes, that doesn't do anything either, because that's what they think the discipline is.
	They don't have the rationality to bring that child back, even after sitting in the corner for five minutes, if you want to use that method and not hit your child, to sit back and say, why did I put you in the five minutes?
	Can you explain to me?
	And have that communication level.
	The communication level isn't there because people have not enough time on their hands to sit down with their children due to economic situations.
	Oh, no, no.
	Listen, man, you are an excuse machine for parents.
	Hang on.
	The average American watches...
	I'm playing...
	Mike, you just...
	Hang on a second, Ash.
	Mike, you just looked this up the other day.
	Pardon?
	Parenting...
	Sorry.
	The average adult watches how much television per week?
	Oh, gosh.
	I don't remember off the top of my head, but it's a whole hell of a lot.
	Yeah, it's ridiculous.
	I think it's over 30 hours a week.
	Yeah, it's ridiculous.
	I mean, it's basically like a job.
	My job is to spread my butt and turn my eyes square.
	That seems to be people's job.
	So you've given, like, because, oh, they're poor, or they don't know any better, or they just don't have time.
	And, like, if you've got time to watch 30 hours of TV a week, you've got time to sit down and talk with your kids.
	Like, I'm...
	That just is the way it is.
	100% of the way.
	I do agree with you.
	I was playing a bit of a devil's advocate there.
	I do agree with you on that 100%.
	But how do we get these people, because not everyone, and I wish everyone did, but not everyone watches your podcast, right?
	And the people who do watch your podcast are on your side and already doing what we're already asked.
	No, no, we're growing.
	I mean, we spread, right?
	I'm not just preaching to the choir.
	There's new five hours per day.
	Is that right, Mike?
	Five hours a day?
	Five hours per day.
	This just came out.
	So Americans are watching five hours per day.
	So 35 hours a week.
	And instead of watching YouTube channels like this and learning about stuff, they're watching TV and fucking themselves over.
	So I completely agree with you on a lot of your stuff.
	I'm playing devil's advocate, but how do you get those people to reignite that communication level in that aspect?
	I'm with you.
	I want this to progress forward, and I understand it's going to take many eons to happen, if not many decades, but I just want to progress forward.
	The women's movement, the racial movement, the most common ones that I know of, they move forward in a 20-year period, right?
	From when they basically started, and it was a long time before that of protests, I understand, but from when it actually started to make sense and people started to clack onto it, it took them still another 20 years to move on with that.
	When are we going to get that point where we're clicking in, or when do you think we'll get that point where we're going to click in and we're going to have that short period of turnaround where it becomes not a thing that we're talking about on YouTube and being radicals and anticlus and all this bullshit, It's actually just going to become, that's what we should do.
	We should go down that road and start following it.
	At what point do you think that's going to happen, is my question.
	Because do you not think teaching children self-esteem and relating issues to that at school, even if they're not getting it home at school, is not going to benefit that cause greatly in a quicker period?
	You mean, do I think that...
	The personhood of children, which is the great blank spot of the species, that the personhood of children is going to be delivered via government schools?
	Well, no, I don't like government schools as much as you don't like government schools.
	Actually, I hate them even more.
	But we have to start somewhere.
	And if school is something that's mandatory and school is something in this society that we have to do, why not try and implement in that system something that we can teach our kids instead of rather teaching them bullshit?
	And teach them something that we can actually, like we want to teach them English, maths and all the other curriculum that we actually need to teach, but teach them something that actually will make them a better person and not follow the drone system that's in place at the moment.
	But how and why would teachers and administrators and unions and politicians What incentive would they have to do that?
	I mean, isn't school fulfilling exactly the purpose for which it's intended, which is to make society feel enormous and you feel insignificant and those in power make you afraid of those in power and to make you believe that learning is rote memorization and regurgitation?
	So, I don't know...
	You're basically saying, well, why don't we get the army to be gardeners?
	It's like, that's not what the army is.
	And that's not what public schools are about.
	They're not about the personhood of children.
	I mean, were you ever asked in government schools whether you wanted to be there or what you'd like to study next year or whether you like this teacher?
	I mean, you're a hostage.
	The whole thing is set up that way.
	So the idea that we're going to get government schools to teach children about their uniqueness and personhood The extension of personhood, as I've said before in this show, is really tough.
	And it's always completely incomprehensible that you extend personhood before it happens, and it's always completely incomprehensible that it wasn't extended sooner after it happens.
	The extension of personhood to slaves, to women, to draftees, all of the extension of personhood to people who have different religious beliefs.
	Or people who have different political beliefs.
	You don't just go and attack them.
	They're just evil and enemy.
	The extension of personhood to children is extremely tough.
	When I was growing up as well, and particularly in school, they kept talking about this thing called the other.
	The other!
	The other.
	And the other was people who are unfamiliar to you that it's hard for you to extend personhood to.
	And that, I mean, everyone talks about it like other cultures, other races and other countries and so on.
	No, no, no!
	The fundamental other is the child in your society who speaks your language and looks like you.
	That's the fundamental other that we cannot extend personhood to.
	Because we have all the legal protections in the world for adults and very few, if any, for children, at least in the realm of what's called discipline.
	Like, you can't call up a cop and say, listen, man, My wife served me a cold meal, so I'm gonna cold cock her in the head, but I need you to come over here and make sure I'm not doing anything illegal.
	But you can do that in the States.
	There's people who call up cops and say, listen, man, I'm going to discipline my kid, so you've got to come over and witness it to make sure I'm not doing anything illegal.
	And people are like, yeah, that seems like a good idea.
	I'm glad he did that.
	That seems legit.
	I mean, this is just how mad and morally mental the world is.
	We would never dream, dream of forcing people to To work at the office closer to their home, no matter what their preferences were.
	And we would never imagine that.
	But you can make children go to the school that's closest with no choice of their own.
	These things are just incomprehensible.
	We would never imagine saying to a woman, you must stay married to this man for your whole life because what God has put together, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	But we...
	You know, when people say, well, you know, relationships with adults, adult children and their parents should be voluntary and should at least be subjected to the same analysis from a moral standpoint as a marriage is, even though the marriage was chosen and the parent-child relationship was not, it's incomprehensible.
	I mean, you know, people say, I don't know, I haven't called my mom in a month or two because I just don't find her conversations that interesting.
	And people are like, oh man, she's your mom, you gotta call.
	But, you know, women, the biggest reason given for women divorcing men, even when they got kids, smashing up a whole family, is dissatisfaction.
	I just, you know, just dissatisfied.
	It doesn't really satisfy me.
	And people are like, you go, girl!
	Sisterhood, power, power, power!
	But you, you know, you hit a kid for 15 years, and then that kid doesn't want to see you as an adult, and people are like, oh no, you've got to go see you.
	You're a bummer.
	You're a daddy.
	We're going to see you.
	And, you know, I don't mean to mock these situations, which are, you know, very sad and very difficult, but there's a click moment.
	The feminists used to talk about this.
	I don't know if they still do this click moment.
	You'd be sort of driving around Maybe you had a degree in English literature or something.
	You'd be driving your kids around to their third activity that day and sitting, waiting for them.
	And there'd be this click moment like, hey, man, I'm a chauffeur.
	I'm a chef.
	Actually, I'm not even a chef.
	A chef would have some artistry.
	I'm like a short order cook.
	And I'm a maid.
	And like, I'm just...
	I'm a personal assistant to this goddamn family.
	I don't have any intellectual life in here.
	It's all just about wiping people's asses, picking up after them, doing their laundry, cleaning the floors, cooking their meals, paying the bills.
	It's a click moment when women were like, this is not a...
	Good existence!
	This is not what I want out of my life.
	I am dissatisfied.
	No, I get that.
	I really...
	I mean, I'm not trying to mock that.
	I mean, these click moments that happen where you're like, boom, I call it the zoom out, right?
	The zoom out, you go, ah, my life.
	I'm mortal.
	I'm gonna die.
	What am I gonna do with my life?
	What am I gonna leave behind?
	What footprints...
	Am I gonna leave footprints in snow that melts or in rock that is displayed forever?
	And I get this click moment.
	And when people...
	I mean, I don't know.
	You say it's not how you do it.
	The amount of repetition it takes for people to understand something that they're emotionally resistant to, to really grok it, as Heinlein used to say, to get it, takes a huge amount of repetition.
	I mean, I listened to, you know, read and listened to libertarian and objectivist stuff for years and years and years.
	I remember Harry Brown was the 92 or 96 libertarian candidate.
	I can't remember.
	Anyway, Harry Brown, the gentleman.
	And...
	He was, I was just listening to a show.
	This is probably maybe 10 years ago.
	Just listening to it?
	Sorry?
	I said you were just listening to it?
	I was just, no, no.
	I mean, I listened to a bunch of his shows.
	And I really remember that he said at one point, the government cannot protect you from your stockbroker.
	The government cannot protect you from someone who's going to cheat you.
	The government cannot, I can't remember the exact, but it basically was like, it clicked for me.
	Like, ah.
	That's...
	I just...
	And again, it took...
	And I'm with the ideas.
	And it took me, like, because I was not an anarchist.
	And it, like, took many...
	And it's like, oh, wait a minute.
	There's a principle right down deep here.
	And I started digging into that principle and so on.
	And it was just...
	It was just not even a massive big speech that he gave.
	But it's just something.
	And I've had these click moments throughout my life where something just clicks into place.
	And you realize that the world is not blurry.
	Your eyes were just unfocused.
	And then...
	You get this clarity.
	And everything hoves into it.
	Now, how do you get that into people's heads?
	Passion, entertainment, repetition, analogies, enjoyment, and putting the moral fire into the species.
	You know, a man with a moral fire in his belly can walk up a mountain of ice.
	And so I think it's just really repeating the moral case and...
	With the enthusiasm of your own example trying to spread the message and recognizing that it's going to take a long time for this click to happen.
	But once it happens, species almost never goes back.
	So this click of like, well, slavery is wrong.
	They're people.
	They're people.
	Slavery is wrong.
	Bam!
	There's a click.
	And humanity doesn't go back that way.
	And nobody's sitting there and saying, well, you know, women should not be able to enter in a contract without their husband signing for it.
	When you get the click, it's like, it's a one-way thing.
	It's like, you know, you learned how to ride a bike when you were a kid.
	And it seems impossible.
	It seems like you're riding across this tripwire over in Niagara Falls, and then you get that momentum, and then you click, and you never forget.
	You never forget after that.
	So, you know, other than doing what I'm doing, I don't really have any answers for you, but I'm telling you, if you're going to try and get reason, virtue, empiricism, evidence, critical thinking, and so on, into government schools, I don't think that's a very practical approach.
	You don't?
	Okay.
	That's fair enough.
	I was playing devil, like to a certain degree playing devil's advocate, trying to get what your viewpoint of it was.
	But I will also add to this, when I put this email in to get on your show, I then watched more of your shows because I've been trying to catch up on stuff I haven't watched.
	Oh, there's always more.
	Oh, there's always more.
	I don't even think I've watched half of it.
	You mean you haven't watched every show?
	I'm getting there.
	Ash?
	Really?
	You haven't watched every show?
	Where's the hang-up?
	I'm getting there.
	That's fine.
	I've only got so many hours in a day, right?
	So, I was watching the one only just recently.
	I think it was last night or yesterday.
	Where you went down to Ohio, I think.
	And you played devil's advocate and taught how to argue...
	points that we're arguing and I think it was Ohio or somewhere like that and you're in the States and you were showing how to have this argument when someone comes back at you with a gun and there's a gun in the room and how to like either lessen the gun and if they still come back at the gun you realize there's no point to argue so you back off but at the start of your speech you said something along the lines of and I can't paraphrase but you said something along the lines of I used to argue when they sit there and say The government
	is good.
	And you'd sit there and go, what?
	Are you serious?
	The government's good?
	And that's me.
	Well, it was me up until a couple of months ago.
	But I used to be able to sit there and go, are you serious?
	Are you thinking this?
	And try and fight every other reason why not to.
	But you did give me on that podcast or that show something that really triggered with me.
	Just give them a simple one-liner.
	And if they'd react to it in the wrong manner, Walk away from the conversation because you can't teach them anything.
	And if they give you a great reaction, then you can open up the doors and start the conversation and discussion on any topic.
	So thank you for that, because that gave me another way to attack, not attack, but to recognize with other people on certain times.
	And we get a lot of propaganda about engaging with opposites.
	I don't know if you've ever seen these cliched moments in movies where The man and the woman are often, while it's raining, standing outside and saying, I hate you.
	Well, I hate you.
	And then, you know, they start kissing and so on.
	And there is this, you know, this hatred and opposites and so on is where compatibility is in a weird way.
	Or people say, well, you only dislike in others the aspects of yourself that you reject.
	It's like, really?
	Really?
	So I really dislike those guys who are cutting off people's heads in the Middle East.
	Does that mean I'm disowning my inner Islamic fundamentalist?
	I mean, it's just silly.
	I mean, it's all nonsense, as far as that goes.
	So there is this idea that...
	I mean, we all have a shadow, and I think that's, you know, you explore your capacity for immorality, that's all worthwhile.
	But the idea that...
	You only get angry at the evil in yourself, which you've disowned and so on.
	This engagement with opposites is ridiculous.
	But we do get a lot of propaganda about that kind of stuff.
	For sure.
	I don't know.
	You've got a couple of people lined up behind me, I suppose.
	But I could start a whole different topic and we go for another five hours.
	No, no.
	You're welcome to come back.
	But let's move on.
	I just looked this up.
	Apparently...
	For people to even think about purchasing your product, they need to see your ad at least seven times.
	At least seven times?
	Yeah.
	Wow.
	And, you know, they have to be experiencing whatever negative thing your product is supposed to be alleviating.
	I can see an ad for a wart medication seven times if I don't have any warts.
	I'm not going to go.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I appreciate talking to you.
	Love your conversation.
	Yeah, thanks, Ash, and thanks for your great contributions to the world.
	You know, I mean, as far as it goes, you know, I mean, obviously you can start a podcast and join me out here on The Ramparts, but to my way of thinking what you're doing with your family, that's the main thing.
	Yeah.
	That's the main thing.
	And I try and put it amongst my mates that that's the main thing.
	Yeah, that's great, too.
	They do somewhat take some heed, but I was more talking on a general scale, but we'll talk soon, I hope.
	All right.
	And I'll just keep watching.
	All right.
	Thanks so much.
	Thank you so much for your time.
	Thank you, Ash.
	Before we move on, I just want to expand a bit on the television thing.
	I've been putting together some information on single-parent families, and we mentioned that the average American watches more than five hours of live television a day.
	They also spend another 23 minutes a day on time-shifted television, which would be Netflix or streaming, that kind of thing.
	An hour using the internet on the computer, an hour and seven minutes on a smartphone.
	And two hours and 46 minutes listening to the radio.
	I don't know how they find time to do anything else, but apparently that's the average.
	Well, I assume some of that, like the radio stuff might be at work or...
	Background, potentially, yeah.
	But just to contrast this, and I don't have as much data on this as I would like, but for example, in 1965, parents on average spent approximately 30 hours a week with their kids.
	By 1985, that amount had fallen to 17 hours.
	I gotta imagine it's a whole lot less than 17 hours present day, and I'm looking for that information, and hopefully we'll have it by the time I put out this presentation, but that just shows you in 20 years how much the one-on-one personal time with parents and children had fallen.
	Yeah, it almost went down by half, right?
	From 30 to 17 hours?
	Yeah.
	And I also have the amount of time a father spends with his child one-on-one averages less than 10 minutes a day.
	Almost 20% of 6th to 12th graders have not had a good conversation lasting for at least 10 minutes with at least one of their parents in more than a month.
	And what was the percentage of that last one?
	20%.
	20% of 6th to 12th graders have not had a conversation lasting at least 10 minutes with at least one of their parents in more than a month.
	I just want to throw out there as devil advocate, just before I leave, the whole point of a father not spending time with their child for more than 10 minutes a day, I'm sure if you went back into real history,
	like, like, Stefan can most probably stomp me on this because of his teachings, but if you went back to actual history, men didn't spend much time at the home, and still in tribal traditions, I've spent a lot of time in Papua New Guinea and tribes and stuff, The men don't spend time at home with their kids.
	It's mainly the mothers.
	And having this whole women need to work or women want to work or all this stuff coming out of the house, it takes down that moral superiority of a house and a household.
	I worked close to nearly 70 hours a week in Australia doing a massive building company.
	But I would spend at least a minimum of four hours a night with my child.
	I would spend it with them, let them go to bed, then do my work.
	I think that's the major...
	It's the thing that kept me in touch with my daughter and kept me all weekends I spent with her.
	We went hot.
	But back in the day, it used to be quite standard for that.
	I think the fact that the parents, especially single parents, male or female, are stepping out into the workforce, having to work in today's society is crushing the family orientation and reality.
	We've already been through this on a couple of his podcasts.
	The reality is it's all got to do with income.
	It's got to do with taxes.
	It's got to do with the government negotiating.
	The fact that you have to work a certain amount of hours a week to even survive.
	But if it's time, Ash, five hours a day of television.
	I know.
	If it's just down to time, I mean, we can't explain it away with looking at the television numbers.
	Well, you can't explain it away with the TV. But what they do is they get their kids home.
	And I've noticed this in my mates.
	They get their kids home, feed them, and then put them straight to bed.
	They don't leave that time for the parents.
	And that's a big thing.
	And that's what I'm trying to say.
	Back then, they used to work their asses off and there was no TV. And they spent 30 hours a week with their kids.
	That was a lot better than now and what is happening now.
	We need to have some form of equal pendulum swing.
	We're at one end of the pendulum swing.
	We need to come back and get back to...
	Look, I appreciate that.
	That's why I do really counsel people as best I can or at least suggest that they explore the possibility of one person staying home.
	Yeah.
	What's the point?
	I mean, what's the point of having a child that you barely spend time with?
	I mean, it just seems weird to me.
	I mean, why not just get a tiny doll that's consistently needing your attention and stuff money in a burning mouth?
	I mean, it makes no sense at all.
	I agree.
	But I also wanted to point out, so with the New Guinea stuff, look, I'm no anthropologist, but certainly where there's hunter-gathering societies, the men certainly spent time with their sons because they needed to transfer the skills to Of being a hunter and a tracker and so on, right?
	And they also needed to transmit their skills of war.
	They spent their sons once their sons become of age after the age of 12.
	No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	Before that, there was a sort of belief in the ancient world.
	I don't know how widespread it was, but there was a belief in the ancient world, which is, look, women are great for babies and toddlers.
	Men don't have the patience for babies and toddlers.
	Neither do they have the swinging feed bags for them.
	But women are great for toddlers and babies.
	But around the age of seven, the kids really need to be transferred to a guy.
	Because that's how you get the critical thinking, the separation, the social skills, the hunting skills, the whatever, right?
	I mean, and I'm not saying it's right or wrong.
	I'm just saying there was some of this perception in the ancient world.
	I genuinely believe, Ash, that father absence is the giant hole through which fascism rushes into society.
	Oh, I agree with that 100% in many ways.
	Many, many different levels.
	I agree with that 100%.
	I mean, the fact is that I think it was 67% of unmarried women or single moms, I can't remember which category, voted for Obama.
	Women vote...
	And married women voted for...
	Like, wanted to vote for Romney.
	Because married women don't need Obama to give them stuff because they already have a husband to take care of them if they're having kids, right?
	But there is this...
	Where there is no father...
	And especially when they're a kid.
	So the single mom, there's just this giant black hole that draws fascism into the universe because they need resources and they don't really care about long-term political self-interest and the maintenance of abstract ideals.
	They care about food for their kids.
	And if they don't have a husband around, they will trot themselves off to the state and bow down before the state to get the resources.
	That they need.
	Now, this is only because we feel that even irresponsible women should keep their kids.
	In the past, that usually wasn't the case.
	Because in the past, if your teenage daughter got pregnant, she would generally go off and give the kid up for adoption and come back, and you'd never talk about it again.
	That's right.
	Because in the past, before the welfare state, the parents of the irresponsible teenage girl would have to raise that child themselves, and then their daughter would be unmarriageable.
	Their family line would kind of end there, probably, and they'd have to spend the next 20 years raising a kid and spend a quarter million dollars to do so.
	And so because the negative consequences accrued to the family, the family had a huge interest in regulating the sexuality of unmarried men and women.
	And that's just not the case anymore.
	The welfare state has taken all that burden off the parents, so it's like, whew, don't have to have that confrontation, and so on.
	Fatherlessness is the great tragedy of the modern society, and fatherlessness It's not, well, there's just a family portrait and you take out the guy.
	You know, what happens is you take out the father in a family portrait and you replace him with, like, Darth Vader.
	You replace him with this increasingly omnipotent state that provides the role of provider, right?
	It creates and maintains the role of provider, which is why unmarried women vote Democrat, unmarried women vote Republican.
	Unmarried women vote to take away the money of married women's husbands.
	That's the sisterhood that is constantly Ignored.
	The government is a mechanism by which unmarried women take money from married women's husbands.
	And, of course, married women, which is a very general way of putting it.
	And married women don't need to rely on the state.
	In fact, they want the state to get smaller because it's taking resources away from their family.
	And unmarried women want the state to get bigger because it's giving resources to their family.
	So I wish it were more complicated than that.
	Anyway, we've got to move on to the next caller.
	But thanks so much for your questions.
	Thank you so much.
	Alright, well up next today is Eriko.
	Eriko wrote in and said, What is truth?
	And what is the difference between a philosophical truth and a scientific truth?
	Which one do you want to do first?
	Stefan, if I could begin with yes or no question, and then if you allow me to, I would like two minutes to fully explain two points.
	And one is why there's not such thing as truth in science, and the other one is about how theoretical science and the free market intersect.
	Sure.
	Okay, so...
	I'm sorry, what was your name again?
	My name is Erico.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	So, my question is, if I leave my five-story apartment building by the window instead of the door, Is it true that I'm going to die?
	No.
	How do you know?
	I don't know, but I know it's not true that you're going to die.
	What do you mean about it's not true that I'm going to die?
	Well, I mean, your five-story apartment building could be in a space station with zero gravity.
	You could be living right next to a river.
	A hay cart might go by underneath.
	You might have a parachute on.
	I mean, six million birds might gather you by the sleeves and fly you off into Ponyville, right?
	So I can't say for sure that you're going to die.
	I probably will die if I jump off a building.
	But as you know, I can't be really sure about it.
	Because giving enough people, jumping off enough buildings, we're pretty much guaranteed to find someone that will reach the ground without a scratch.
	Now, if I make a statistical analysis of people jumping off buildings in the last 10 years, there was this guy in Brazil who fell over some trees and only had a few bruises, and people thought, oh, it's a miracle!
	So that means It's not absolutely, I can't be absolutely sure that I will die, but 99% sure is enough for me to decide to use the door instead.
	Yeah, but these are neither philosophical nor scientific truths.
	So you wanted to talk about philosophical and scientific truths, but your first example is neither.
	Okay, so let me explain the way it's related to science.
	So in the same way, Science is a method for evaluating the relationship between prediction and experimental results.
	So I predict that I might die and the experimental results say that I have a 9% chance of time.
	No, that's not science, to my knowledge.
	Okay.
	So let me finish the point.
	No, listen, listen, listen.
	Hang on, hang on a second.
	So there's a game called Cards.
	Okay.
	And what you do is you sit like 10 feet away from the card, from the wall, and you get a deck of cards and you flip the cards and see who can get the card closest to the wall, which is tough to do because the cards fly all over the place, right?
	Okay.
	Now, it's not science to gather information about how many cards get how far away from the wall.
	Because it can't be universalized.
	It's just data gathering.
	It's like saying, well, it's science to count how many blades of grass there are on a lawn.
	It's not science.
	I was just using an example to get to the next point.
	Okay.
	Let's say that it's a relationship between having an hypothesis and a measurement.
	And it's a relationship that can be replicated and tested And if it's a very good hypothesis, it eventually becomes a theory.
	Like I said, it becomes something that's so tested that it becomes universal.
	Now, let's say gravity.
	Newton's gravity is precise enough to hit a bullet with a bullet.
	But it can't really predict the orbit of Mercury.
	So Einstein can aim and sail.
	Gravity is actually space bending around massive objects.
	So you have to take into account that the Sun is bending the space around Mercury to make a precise prediction.
	But not even Einstein has the final word on how gravity works.
	Because he still works well with planets, but fails with things the size of atoms.
	So this happens because human perception completely fails sometimes.
	So instead of trusting our senses, Engineers build machines that allow for precise measurements, and those precise measurements allow for better theories, and better theories allow for better tools.
	So science is not about the truth.
	It's about an ever-increasing approximation to the truth.
	Scientific progress happens not when scientific theories are shown to be true.
	It happens when they are shown to be wrong.
	The fact that measurement may be better to contradict theories is only not expected, but it's required for that business of scientific knowledge.
	Oh, is that it?
	Yeah, that's the first point.
	Okay, so I'll give you my thoughts on that.
	So the problem is that you're using science for two things, right?
	So you're using the word science to indicate the scientific method and also to indicate The process of scientific exploration and refinement.
	Now, philosophically, what matters is the scientific method.
	The actual individual process by which people pursue and refine scientific theories, which we only know that they're doing validly or in a valid manner because of their adherence to the scientific method, doesn't matter as much.
	And so from a philosophical standpoint what matters is the use of the scientific method which is used to refine and continue to pare down and make more efficient and more accurate and more universal a variety of theories.
	So if we look at something like The Ptolemaic versus the Copernican model of the solar system.
	So in the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, the Earth's at the center and everything goes around the Earth.
	And in the Copernican model, or the Galilean model, the Sun is at the center of the solar system and the planets go around the Sun.
	Now, it is true that The Sun is at the center of the solar system, not the Earth, right?
	I think we can accept that.
	Yeah, and he was also wrong because he said that the Sun was the center of the universe, so you see how...
	Okay, no, I understand that, but as far as the Sun...
	No, I get that, but as far as...
	That's why I just said the solar system, right?
	As far as the solar system goes, the Sun does not orbit the Earth.
	I mean, obviously it does a tiny little bit because even the Earth has a tiny gravitational impact on the Sun, but...
	The Sun does not orbit the Earth.
	The Earth orbits the Sun, right?
	So it's false to say that the Sun orbits the Earth.
	It is true to say that the Earth orbits the Sun.
	Are we agreed on that?
	Yes, I think we can agree on that, yeah.
	Okay.
	And we know that because even though it looks like the Sun orbits the Earth in the same way it looks like the Sun and the Moon are the same size, like a dime held at arm's length, we know that it's not.
	And we know that because of science, right?
	Sure, sure.
	So, saying that science cannot get to truth because the Copernican system displaced The Ptolemaic system, or because Einsteinian physics has proven to be more accurate, particularly for interplanetary, even interstellar journeys, than the Newtonian system, is because the scientific method has revealed them to be more accurate.
	And so from a philosophical standpoint, it's worthwhile focusing on the scientific method rather than focusing on Every particular transaction that goes on underneath that method.
	So, for instance, in the realm of economics, the principle is that, you know, free trade is beneficial and there's certain economists who would say that free trade is moral and so on.
	But some people buy something and regret buying it.
	Right?
	Buyer's remorse, it's called.
	I bought this thing.
	I was high.
	I don't even want these Doritos, whatever it is, right?
	It could be buyer's remorse.
	It was just right today, Webster, and just pick up a package.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Now, we wouldn't say that the free market is somehow invalidated by buyer's remorse.
	Because, of course, in the moment of the transaction, the people entered into it voluntarily, and you may regret it later and so on, but that doesn't...
	So each individual transaction is not how We measure the value and virtue of the free market, but in the principle as a whole, that nobody initiated the use of force for the transfer of resources.
	Does that make sense?
	Sure.
	No one was pointing a gun to the head.
	By the Doritos, I will shoot you.
	I'm sorry?
	No one was pointing a gun to To my head and say, you either buy the Doritos or I will shoot you.
	Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing.
	And then there's a question, of course, you know, people wake up the next morning and regret, let's assume they're sober, they wake up the next morning and they regret having had sex with someone.
	And certainly if that person turns out to have a sexually transmitted disease, you probably really regret having sex with that person.
	But that does not make it rape, right?
	So regrets afterwards are certainly something to be taken into account, but not...
	You can't ex post facto change the moral nature of the action unless there was some deception or fraud involved.
	So, when it comes to truth, you were sort of asking the relationship between philosophical and scientific truth.
	I think that scientific truth tends to be conditional.
	But philosophical truth is not conditional.
	So scientific truth would say, if you want to say something valid and true about the physical world, you have to use the scientific method.
	You can't use chicken entrails, you can't guess, you can't flip a coin, you can't read tea leaves.
	You have to use the scientific method.
	You can't just have a dream and it's true.
	So the scientific method would say, if you want to say something true about The physical universe, something valid or something accurate, then you have to use the scientific method.
	Now, philosophically, the way that I think it works is, if you want to say anything, you're already using philosophy.
	So science is, if you want to say something true about the physical world, you have to use the scientific method.
	Whereas philosophy says, if you're saying anything, You're already using philosophy.
	In other words, since I'm talking to you, it would be irrational for me to deny your existence.
	If I'm talking to you, it would be irrational for me to say words have no meaning.
	If I'm talking to you, it would be irrational to say we do not share a common universe.
	If I'm talking to you, it would be irrational to say that there's no physical properties that are constant between us.
	You could go on and on, right?
	And so, if you're talking, you are already being philosophical and can't reject the very principles that guide your speech.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	So you're saying that the way philosophy evaluates truth is by comparing with the universal principle or the first principle and see how well it fares with the perceived truth of how well it's dealing with the principle.
	No, that's not what I said.
	What I said was if you are saying anything to anyone, you've already accepted about 9,000 philosophical principles.
	That's not necessarily the case when it comes to science.
	But if, like, there are plenty of non-scientific people or communities in someone, maybe even anti-scientific people in communities, but philosophically, if you are speaking to someone, if you are making an argument or rebutting or telling someone he's right or he's wrong or simply using language at all to communicate with someone in any form, written, verbal, or whatever, then you've already accepted that.
	The basic metaphysics and epistemology that is necessary for philosophy.
	In other words, you can't enter into a conversation with someone without accepting a significant number of rational, objective, empirical, philosophical principles.
	So you are saying that it also has to do with the way to use logic to communicate?
	I'm sorry, say again?
	So, you are saying that it also has to do with using logic to communicate.
	Say you are using the correct grammar or...
	No, I didn't say that.
	Again, it's tough to hear what I'm saying, right?
	Because you've got your own tangents going on.
	So, no, I didn't say that.
	What I'm saying is that, like, somebody can use bad grammar, but they can't use bad grammar and tell me...
	Like, I can't have an argument with you that says...
	There's no such thing as objective reality because I'm using...
	I'm assuming the objectivity of reality as a medium for transmitting this information.
	I can't say to you, language is meaningless.
	Words have no meaning.
	Because if you understand my argument, I'm relying on the fact that words have meaning.
	It doesn't mean that they're always perfectly comprehensible to everyone, of course, all the time.
	Okay.
	Like, I can't talk to you and say there's no such thing as human hearing and the human voice cannot produce sand.
	The human throat cannot produce sand because I'm saying these things.
	So when people stop...
	Look at what they're doing when they're making an argument and What they have to accept in order for the argument to first occur They have already accepted almost all of what philosophers have been trying to convince humanity of for the past at least rational philosophers of the past few thousand years So it doesn't somebody doesn't have to be logical at all I mean obviously no force of nature that requires people to be logical the very Idea would be absurd not I'm saying it's your idea so people don't have to be logical and I can deny that you exist,
	but I've just proven that I'm illogical.
	You don't have to do anything any further with me, right?
	And of course, when people get wiser to this, then they will view as openly foolish people who attempt to argue against objective reason, the validity of sense data, the consistency of matter, the existence of others, and so on.
	Go ahead.
	So when you talk about objective reality, is that a scientific statement or a philosophical statement?
	Well, it's a philosophical statement, insofar as you are relying upon the objective properties of objective reality in order to even make your argument to me.
	But how do you know that the objective reality actually is objective reality?
	No, no, no.
	You're not understanding what I'm saying.
	You are accepting it, not me.
	By making an argument, you are accepting the objectivity of reality.
	Because you are relying upon the objective properties and nature of reality to create the sound waves, to transmit the sound waves from your computer over the internet to my brain and so on, right?
	And so you are already accepting the properties of objective reality.
	And insofar as if I woefully misrepresented your position, if I said, so what you're saying is unicorns are real, you'd say, no, no, no, no, that's not what I said, right?
	Right, so if I misrepresent your position, Then you're going to correct me, which again relies upon you heard what you said, I may have misheard what you said or not understand it or whatever.
	So by correcting me, you're saying accuracy with regards to universal, empirical, objective reality that, Steph, you should have fidelity to what I actually said rather than saying something that I didn't say or responding to something I didn't say.
	So then we're accepting the reality of memory, we're accepting the objectivity of reality, and we're also accepting that truth is preferable to error, and I have a responsibility in a debate to accurately represent what the other person is saying and to respond to what the other person is saying.
	All of these are built into the very act of even starting to have any kind of conversation or debate, and therefore cannot be denied in that debate.
	Irrationally.
	Okay, I think I understand now.
	And I think the thing that was confusing me is the word objective.
	Because the way I see it, it's more like a perceived reality than objective reality.
	Because the way I see things, when you say objective, you are also taking into account the things that nobody can see.
	But they're...
	No, no, no, no.
	Again, hang on.
	Sorry to be annoying.
	You're drifting off into some abstract land again.
	Just focus on what is actually happening between the two of us at the moment.
	Forget about other things and other realities and all that.
	You understand and accept that if reality did not have stable and objective properties, you could never make an argument to me, right?
	Yes, sure.
	So the fact that you're making an argument to me means that you accept That reality has objective universal principles and properties.
	I don't mean that everything is always perfect and so on, right?
	I might suddenly have an ear rupture and not hear the rest of your sentence or whatever, right?
	But what I mean is that we at least have to accept that as the basis of our communication.
	Okay, so when you use the word philosophical truth, Do you mean that it's an absolute truth or it's something that, like the scientific method, it's probable truth?
	Can you explain better how that works?
	Well, I don't know what the word absolute truth means or the phrase.
	I don't know what the, like, two and two make four.
	Is that an absolute truth?
	I mean, I guess you could say some praxeological truths are, almost by axiomatic definition, But I don't know.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Something like religion.
	So I absolutely true that when I die, I go to heaven and nothing can change my mind because I can't compare what I'm saying with reality.
	Well, no, but that's a proposition with no null hypothesis and therefore it's not in the realm of philosophy or science.
	Like if something can't be disproved, like if I say to you, is equivalent to you'd say, well, is that true or is that false?
	I mean, you can't evaluate it.
	It can't be parsed, right?
	You're comparing an integer to a null, right?
	And so the statement, when I die, I'm going to heaven, is a non-falsifiable statement because any standard by which you might test that It's rejected as invalid, right?
	Like, so there was a book, The Boy Who Died and Went to Heaven was published, I think, in 2008 or 2009.
	And it was about a kid who died, went to heaven, and he said, came back, and he wrote a book.
	And he basically just came out and said, that was nonsense.
	It wasn't true.
	None of it happened, right?
	Now, are people then going to say, well...
	Okay, I guess there's no heaven.
	Of course not, for the most part.
	Right?
	So, it's like, is there a god?
	Do we die and go to heaven when we're dead?
	Is there a devil?
	There's no way to evaluate these statements from a rational standpoint, so they're neither part of philosophy nor science.
	I see, I see.
	Okay, if you want me to, I can move on to the next topic.
	Okay, we need to keep it a little short, but go ahead.
	Okay.
	So...
	Okay.
	Moving on.
	You often mention on the show something that goes like this.
	I wish theoretical physicists would build something useful I could watch porn on.
	So, I know it's a joke you make, and it's a pretty funny joke, but I think there's some true deep down that you actually mean it, and I think that's a bit of misunderstanding about how science and the free market intersect, specifically how theoretical science and the free market intersect.
	So, for instance, when we talk about lasers, Lasers were created to test some of Einstein's theoretical physics ideas, and as any new technology, it was dangerous, it was large, expensive, and everyone thought it was useless.
	So basically, this is the worst idea you could possibly pitch to an investor.
	Especially when you consider that investors can't understand what Einstein was saying.
	Basically, most people in the world could not understand these ideas.
	And it will take many, many years for the investment to pay off.
	Now, I'm against the use of money from taxpayers that it's extracted from the barrel of a gun, but I can see why the scientists would eventually go to the government for funding.
	And if you were not for the insane desire of the military to stay ahead in new ways of killing people, I'm not sure how the money for getting the technology off the ground will come from.
	Anyway, so after the initial The initial bust of taxpayers' money, lasers became smaller, safer, and cheaper, and now they have applications that vary from TVs, microchips, light bulbs, printers, DVDs, fiber options, and smartphones.
	So, science applies to the free markets.
	It means that the backside of your phone might have an Apple logo on it, but Apple did not invent your phone.
	In fact, Microsoft had done something very similar 10 years before and failed because it was too big and too expensive at the time.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think I understand the argument.
	Your argument is that if you fund theoretical physics, you could end up with free market applications.
	Exactly.
	Sure.
	But I couldn't possibly have ever denied that.
	I mean, of course that's the case.
	I mean, I've explicitly said that that's true.
	I mean, we got Tang because of the space program, right?
	So, of course, there's no question that theoretical physics have resulted in real-world marketable, valuable, and useful applications.
	I mean, that to me is perfectly valid.
	Now, I'm guessing that you haven't studied a lot of economics.
	I can't really say.
	If I have, I'm not really sure.
	You can go ahead and explain to me.
	Okay.
	So, economics is the art not of looking at the visible benefits, but the hidden costs of things.
	Right, so the old example is a government program, they build a road to nowhere and they've employed a hundred people for a year.
	And everyone who says, great, you know, the government created a hundred jobs, look at those people have money to spend in their community, this, that and the other, right?
	That's the visible benefit.
	Now the hidden cost is all of the jobs that weren't created because the government took money from people who were being productive and may have wanted to create jobs and gave it to those hundred people to build the road to nowhere and there is a hidden cost.
	Now, there's no question to me that the funding of theoretical physics has, at times, produced marketable goods.
	I mean, the very internet itself was developed as a government program to link the Department of Defense in case of nuclear war.
	So, the fact that I produced a show over the internet that was originally funded and developed by the government, That would say there's no value to government science, I mean, would be a ridiculous position for me to take.
	The position that I do take is, you see the lasers, I see no cure for cancer.
	Actually, there's cure for cancer.
	You're looking at the visible benefits.
	You're looking at the visible benefits of forced reallocation of money.
	I get that.
	What I'm looking at is how much was stolen and taken from people In order to produce a laser that the free market would, I'm sure, have come up with at some point anyway.
	And did that delay the introduction of life-saving technologies or even just entertainment technologies by 10 or more years?
	Look at all the money that was put into the space program.
	As John F. Kennedy said, I think, in 62, get to the moon by the end of the 64, get to the moon by the end of the decade.
	And they spent hundreds of millions of dollars, I think, and they got to the moon.
	And there are pictures of Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong bouncing around on the moon in the merry, merry month of May.
	And people say, well, look, that's the way to waste government money.
	Yeah, we got to the moon.
	Absolutely.
	And getting to the moon may have given us other benefits and so on.
	But what does that have to do with anything?
	That's just looking at the visible benefits rather than the hidden costs.
	And the purpose, from an ethical standpoint, what I want is for voluntary benefits.
	Relations, voluntary transactions, as you do, right?
	So we're on the same page as far as that goes.
	But saying that I want physical theorists or physics theorists.
	Theoretical physicists!
	There we go.
	I do it.
	Great for it.
	The fact that I want theoretical physicists to be bound by the discipline of the market does not mean I don't want them to work on theoretical physics.
	I mean, there are many companies out there who would love to have and probably do have theoretical physicist departments who do nothing but come up with study the nature of atoms and matter and so on and that.
	And maybe some of that produces...
	consumer goods and maybe it doesn't.
	There will be people who want theoretical physicists to study the nature of the universe, even if it has no market valuation, right?
	So, I mean, I'd be interested in knowing where the universe came from.
	And I chip in some money every year for people to pursue that, even if they never produced anything of value.
	But that's all voluntary.
	What I don't like is people who, scientists who feel like, well, I want to play with the origins of the universe.
	So give me money, taxpayers, or I'm going to call on the cats in blue to drag you off to jail.
	So there's a market for charity as well as there is a market for goods, right?
	So when I say, well, people will voluntarily fund theoretical physicists just out of curiosity, absolutely.
	And And those theoretical physicists are then responsible to provide value to those who are donating.
	And theoretical physicists will do a lot better if they can show progress, right?
	So there'll be a competition among donation dollars for the best theoretical physicists to produce results.
	So yeah, of course it was tongue-in-cheek to say, I want them to produce something I can watch porn on.
	I get that.
	But the reality is I just don't like it when people force me to pay for their stuff.
	And yes, they can cough up Tang and they can cough up lasers and stuff like that.
	But the reality is far more has been destroyed than created.
	I'm not really sure about that because if you look into every single technology that we use on daily basis, There's taxpayer money on it.
	And the sad truth is that the taxpayer money went to the military.
	Oh, come on, man.
	I mean, so in the past, every piece of clothing you bought had been made by a slave.
	What does that have to do with anything?
	It didn't justify anything?
	No, I'm not saying it justifies anything.
	I'm just curious about how do you propose to replace the method of funding?
	I'm not saying it's something that...
	No, no, it's not my job to replace.
	How do you propose to get all of the cotton picked in the absence of slavery?
	It doesn't matter.
	It's not my job to propose what happens when we stop pointing guns at each other.
	Like if the government forced everyone to get married and you said, well, how are you going to ensure that everyone gets married in the absence of government?
	That's not my job.
	My job is to get people to stop pointing guns at each other.
	My job is not to figure out how they interact in the absence of guns pointed at each other.
	I see.
	How will you replace sex for the rape?
	The job of the moralist is thou shalt not, not thou shalt.
	The job of the dictator, of the central planner, of the state, of the priest in general, is thou shalt.
	Now, thou shalt is incredibly restrictive compared to thou shalt not.
	Thou shalt is binary, thou shalt not is just don't go here, go in the rest.
	Don't go initiating force, you can do anything you want.
	So when you say, when human events and relationships and transactions and interactions are dominated by a thou shalt, And the ethicist comes along and says, that's immoral because that's the initiation of force.
	It is not the moralist's job to say how these interactions are achieved in the absence of violence.
	Anymore, as Mike said, that it's the job of the ethicist to say to the man who's denied the capacity to rape, how's he going to get laid?
	The point is, don't rate.
	How you get laid is nobody's business but yours and whoever you're voluntarily having sex with, but the rate thing is definitely out of the question, right?
	You can't do that rate thing.
	And so how roads get built, how schools are funded, how theoretical physics gets its mojo and giant test tubes of discovering the origins of the universe is absolutely, completely irrelevant to the ethical question of should people initiate the use of force to get what they want.
	The answer is, of course they shouldn't.
	And UPB is, I think, a very great explication as to why.
	But when people then say, well, how is this thing going to be achieved in the absence of violence?
	Well, what on earth would my opinions have to do with anything to do with that?
	I do know, as an ethicist, as a philosopher, as a moralist, I do know that people should not be initiating the use of force against each other.
	What they should do in the absence of initiating force against each other would be a question that only a totalitarian mentality would try to answer.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, it makes sense.
	And the difference is that I'm someone that's trying to understand it because I'm trying to figure out a way to do it.
	So that's why I ask the question.
	To do what?
	To fund science without having money from...
	No, no, that's not a good job to have.
	That is a bad job to have.
	I'll tell you that right now, brother.
	Because the point is that we need to speak out against the violent transfer of money, which is really the violent transfer of people's lives.
	And the violent subjugation.
	It's the temporary enslavement of someone.
	If I go and steal 500 bucks and it took them a week to make that money, I've just enslaved that person against their will for a week.
	So...
	If you're interested in ethics, your job is to put down the gun, not to try and figure out what happens after people put down the gun.
	Put down the gun, then we'll talk.
	And for you saying, well, I've got to figure out how to fund science in the absence of violence, means that you're not actually on the front lines of trying to get people to put down the guns and reminding them that violence is immoral.
	The job of what do we do on the other side of violence, what do we do when we achieve peace, First of all, we're not going to achieve it in our lifetime.
	So you will have no job if you're going to try and figure out how science is funded in the absence of the state.
	You're going to live and die having the government around.
	So you're never going to get to implement whatever plan you come up with.
	I guess if you're independently wealthy or fantastic at raising money, you could try and bring up some sort of independent science institute or whatever.
	But they'll still all have to pay taxes, which will go to the other guys.
	So the job of the moralist is to continually expose and point out, nag, remind, bully, whatever it is, to tell people that there's the initiation of force in the world, which we need to stop doing.
	But the job of the moralist is not then to order people around afterwards and tell them, well, you need to do this, what was formally done by the government.
	No, no, no, that's not the job of the moralist.
	The job of the moralist is put down the gun.
	Then you can do whatever you want.
	But first you must put down the gun.
	And after that, my job is done. - I see.
	The difference is that the way I think about it is to think about a way that would replace the government and that will replace the need of the government because we can actually fund the building of streets or fund the research and development.
	So if we don't do that, I don't see how the government is ever going to give up unless they become obsolete.
	Well, the government is never going to give up.
	Power is an addiction.
	Which is why we raise children to not be part of a dominance hierarchy where the ruler is exempted from the rules they impose on their subjects.
	We raise them in a different kind of family and that different kind of family rolls out to a different kind of society.
	You know, we want to make...
	We want to grow children so that they're foreigners to a hierarchy.
	They will not assimilate.
	They will not, right, into a hierarchy.
	You know, they'll obey the rules as long as it's a constant jail and so on, right?
	But there is no replacement of the government.
	Because the government is, through its initiation of force, is foundationally and fundamentally different from voluntary human interactions.
	There is no replacement to rape.
	Right?
	Because...
	Lovemaking is not what replaces rape, because lovemaking and rape are polar opposites, right?
	They're about as opposite as things can be.
	And so, what do we replace theft with?
	What do we replace assault with?
	What do we replace murder with?
	What do we replace the initiation of force with?
	I hope that the question is incomprehensible in a way.
	To me it's not incomprehensible because say you want to figure out a way to make sure that your car is not going to crash and instead of going to the government and having the police around and writing tickets, you simply make a car that is autonomous and will never crash.
	So basically you replace the need for police, you replace the need for stop signs and And everything.
	And that's something that people can do without the help of the government.
	And each step of the way, you can slowly replace the government fully.
	Can you think of an example where that's happened?
	Sure.
	So, let's say that we have something like First of all, the government makes laws because they don't know how to solve problems.
	So when you have something that solves the problem, you don't need the law anymore.
	Let's say you have the safest...
	No, no, no.
	I'm not asking you for theoreticals.
	I'm asking you for empiricals.
	Okay, so say we have the safest...
	No, no, not say we have, no, no, listen, listen, man, hang on a second.
	No, we started off this conversation talking about the scientific method and testing theories, right?
	You said there's a hypothesis, and then you test it, and then it becomes a theory.
	So I'm not asking for a hypothesis.
	I'm asking, you have a theory, you have a hypothesis, and I'm asking you for an example.
	Okay, elevators.
	They are the safest way of transportation ever invented.
	And if you look at the legislature for elevators, you don't have stop signs, you don't have policemen, you don't have traffic tickets.
	Why?
	Because it doesn't need any of those.
	It's a safe way of transportation.
	You don't need people watching over it.
	So that replaces the guy...
	Have you been in an elevator?
	What do you mean the government is not involved in the elevators?
	As someone who has worked in a very large building with ginormous elevators, the amount of regulation involved in the functioning of those elevators and the mechanisms around buildings like that is astronomically huge.
	I will tell you that right now.
	But basically it's autonomous then.
	You can't ever justify the need of having a policeman to pull a gun on you because you were speeding.
	So slowly, that replaces the need of government.
	No, no, but your example is the opposite of your point.
	So you need to be unionized, in other words, or you need to be licensed by the state to even build an elevator.
	The government's got to come and inspect it.
	The government comes back and inspects it.
	The government continues to give you a license to operate the elevator.
	And if you operate it without the license or build it without it or build it without the inspection, you're saying that here's an example of where we don't need a state, but the government is all over.
	I think it was...
	Somebody was telling me about Walt Disney.
	I didn't know he died...
	Anyway, so Walt Disney bought up a bunch of land and created Disney World.
	And there were only two interferences that the government had in the creation of Disney World.
	Number one, they had to pay property taxes.
	Number two, they had to have elevator inspections by the government.
	So, listen, I'm afraid we've got to move on to the next caller.
	If you want to take some time to think about an example where something has outgrown the state and the state has shrunk as a result, not just reallocated resources, I mean, good heavens, violence is down 40% over 20 years in America.
	Okay, so I can tell you something else.
	We have built large machines for harvesting and we don't need people picking up Slavery ended before combine harvesters.
	We have combine harvesters because there's no slavery.
	And one of the great tragedies is that, you know, 600,000 people died to supposedly end slavery in America during the Civil War when machinery from non-slave nations, the farming machinery that was being developed in non-slave nations was probably within 10 to 20 years going to make slavery obsolete in America anyway.
	But all right, so we're going to move on to the next caller.
	It's very interesting stuff.
	Thank you.
	Bye-bye.
	Alright, up next is Amir.
	Amir wrote in and said, to what extent can you journey through self-knowledge without a therapist?
	And in different wording, is therapy unnecessary to gaining self-knowledge to its fullest extent?
	Well, you know...
	The analogy that I use is sports, right?
	So how great a sportsman can you be without a coach?
	And do you need a coach forever?
	No.
	I mean, I think when you're learning about the sport, I think it's really good to have a coach.
	Of course you can try and invent it all yourself.
	But I think you end up like Eddie the Eagle on a ski slope.
	Oh, Google it if you want to.
	But I think you need a coach to achieve optimum performance, but you don't need a coach for the rest of your life.
	For instance, once you become a coach, you may not need a coach to coach you on how to coach other people.
	So I think you can do a certain amount yourself.
	I mean, like I am teaching my daughter skating and skiing, and I learned skating and skiing without instructions.
	I barely took any instruction in tennis and ended up, you know, I guess reasonably competent and so on.
	And I'm a pretty good skater.
	Like, I can skate backwards.
	I can do spins and stuff.
	And I'm okay at it.
	And skiing is not bad.
	I was...
	I went on the cheap days as a teenager.
	And I can't do moguls and double black diamonds still make me get down slightly damper than when I started.
	But for that, I can do most of the rest.
	And I've done ski holidays when I was a high-flying business exec.
	I did ski holidays in Quebec where the real hills are and so on.
	So I can teach her some stuff about this.
	But, you know, obviously if she wants to become a figure skater, then...
	Somebody's going to have to teach her how not to eat while consuming 12 million calories a day in exercise.
	I can't take her that far.
	If you want to do important, really great, get the gold medal of self-knowledge and changing the world and all that kind of stuff, I think a really good therapist is a good idea.
	In the same way that if you want to be a champion figure skater, You're probably going to need a coach because otherwise you're going to spend too much time reinventing the wheel and so on.
	So, yeah, it really depends on your ambitions and how much you want to get done that is great in your life.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah.
	Can you hear me all right?
	Yeah.
	Okay, well, yeah, I completely understand what you're saying.
	I'd first like to open by, you know, doing the standard, as I think everyone should.
	I want to thank you for, you know, answering all these questions, giving us your, like, providing us with your knowledge, your intuition, your time, giving us your time and your anecdotes and your experience to, you know, enrich our lives.
	And I really appreciate that, you know, doing this for us.
	Thank you.
	For the question, I'm curious, do you think that people have the capacity, like anyone has the capacity to journey through self-knowledge to its full extent?
	Because, personally, I like to keep an open mind, as you know, a lot of people say, oh, stay open-minded.
	And I can't really make my thoughts concrete like that.
	Do you understand what I'm saying?
	So let's say I have family from Egypt and they're Islamic and they'll tell me their beliefs and I'll say that's a possibility.
	And then I'll think As you believe there isn't a God, I'll say, you know, that's a possibility, but I don't like to stay set in stone.
	So with therapy, you know, you have someone telling you, this is like, give me the information that you have, give me the data, and I'll come up with a conclusion as far as I've seen.
	So can one person have the capacity to take their own data and make a conclusion off of that?
	Wait, hang on.
	on.
	So with therapy, do you think therapy is about the therapist giving you conclusions?
	Well, giving conclusions and helping you forwarding your progress to make a conclusion.
	Have you done therapy?
	No.
	Right.
	And I'm just curious where you're getting your information about therapy wrong.
	Well, my mom went to therapy and For some time.
	So I took some information from her and over the past couple of years, I mean I know it's not a significant amount of time, but I've tried to get into philosophy a lot more and introduced myself to self-knowledge.
	And I'm just, you know, grasping an air here.
	I want to hear what you have to say because you're the master.
	No, I'm not trying to be annoying.
	Yeah, I understand.
	Okay, so let's go back just a sec first and look at something more practical because I have a feeling we can get lost in the stars out here.
	So your relatives or your friends from Egypt come over and say about God, right?
	And you say, hey, it's a possibility, right?
	Yeah.
	Because you want to stay, as you say, open-minded.
	Is that maybe another way of saying non-confrontational?
	Because you're casting things as a virtue, right?
	So this is sort of self-knowledge about really being honest with yourself.
	And I'm not saying you're not, I'm just saying this from the outside, right?
	But you were framing your conversations with, were they relatives from Egypt?
	Yeah, extended family.
	Okay, so extended family comes over from Egypt and tells you about the existence of God, right?
	Yeah.
	And is your perspective that God is a possibility?
	Yes.
	And is there anything that you believe is not a possibility?
	Like, for instance, Santa Claus, fairies, the tooth fairy.
	Yeah, I suppose.
	I mean that, I suppose, yes.
	Okay, so there are some things which...
	Would be impossibilities for you, and if someone came along and said, the tooth fairy stole my eardrum last night, you'd say, well, maybe something happened, but it wasn't the tooth fairy, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	That wouldn't be, well, that's an interesting possibility, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Now, is it your belief that the existence of gods, or a god, is...
	More credible than the existence of things, mythological creatures which you accept as not valid.
	I like to, with something as profound as, you know, religious beliefs, I like to tuck it into...
	Yes, I go towards one ideology more than others, but I'd like to think that I don't know.
	There's really no way to know.
	Well, hang on.
	But there is a way to know about the Tooth Fairy, right?
	Yeah.
	And how do you know about the Tooth Fairy?
	Because it's just a crafted story that's been passed down.
	Right?
	So far?
	Not seeing the huge barrier between religion and the tooth fairy, but please keep going.
	Well, okay.
	I don't want to have an argument over religion.
	That's not my goal here.
	No, no, and I'm not saying that I want to do that either.
	But what I am saying is...
	That if you are, like, you may have very good reasons for not wanting to talk about religion with your extended family, right?
	I mean, I might sit down with your extended family and not talk about religion, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	But to me, self-knowledge, you know, I've always said honesty is the first virtue.
	Without honesty, you can't get anything else.
	So my question to you is not, you know, let's have a debate about the existence of God.
	My question to you is...
	Why do you not have a firm opinion about the existence of a deity to your extended family?
	Because I can think of six million compelling emotional reasons why that would be tempting.
	Yeah, and I mean, I'd think that I'd have emotional reasons as well, but just when I think about Life.
	Just how, you know, we still haven't discovered how we got here, how something came from nothing.
	With something like that, it just boggles my mind to even think of such a thing.
	Just trying to wrap my head around it.
	I think, you know, maybe what they're saying could be a possibility.
	If I... All these things...
	Trying to find proper wording for this.
	I mean, to put it another way, questions which brilliant scientists with 400 years of the scientific method are still wrestling with might have been answered by people with no exposure to the scientific method hundreds or thousands of years ago.
	But wouldn't that be saying that scientists are above...
	I guess just thinkers.
	That'd be saying, you know, the scientist has the research, therefore he's always going to be above the person who thinks philosophically?
	No, because assertion with evidence is the scientific method.
	Assertion with rational consistency and empirical evidence.
	Assertion without rational consistency and empirical evidence cannot trump assertion with rational consistency and empirical evidence.
	Because one is proven and the other is merely stated.
	Like if I said that the moon is banana-shaped...
	Then you would not say, well, you know, I want to stay open-minded to that, right?
	You'd look at the moon and say, not so much with the banana, right?
	But scientists in the past said that the Earth was flat, and that was scientific fact.
	And then, you know, you have other people who thought of the possibility, you know, maybe it's round.
	So the scientists, with all the data, were wrong.
	Well, no, they didn't have all the data.
	All the data would be going out of space and looking at the Earth, right?
	With the data they had.
	Okay, but tell me something in religion that has evolved to a greater truth based upon empirical evidence, right?
	Because it's funny to me how people say, well, scientists are wrong, and then they're corrected.
	But how on earth, in the religious context, are people wrong and get corrected according to empirical evidence?
	Okay, so...
	I suppose there wouldn't be any new, you know, groundbreaking data, but like you were saying, the greatest minds haven't discovered how something came from nothing.
	There's the theory of the Big Bang, but they still have yet to discover that.
	And isn't it rather amazing with all the technological advances that we have?
	You know, it's exponential growth.
	We still have yet to Find out our fundamental roots.
	So then you could say, we're getting more and more advanced and we still can't discover this.
	Wait a minute.
	Hang on a sec.
	I think you've got a pretty high barrier to science here, if you don't mind me saying so, Amir.
	Science is really only a couple of hundred years old.
	And it has answered astonishing questions about the nature and breadth and scope of the universe.
	In a couple of hundred, you know, human history, hundreds of thousands of years at a minimum, right?
	Hominid history, millions and millions and millions of years.
	We've had a couple of hundred years of the scientific method and you're saying, well, it hasn't cracked the beginning of time yet.
	15 billion years ago, and it's only had a couple of hundred years, and those couple of hundred years have not exactly been supported by a lot of other institutions, right?
	Like some churches and some entire swaths of the human population are terrified to examine particular scientific questions.
	I mean, this is true even in the West.
	I mean, you know, can you examine the racists from a purely scientific standpoint?
	Well, you get into a lot of trouble if you do.
	There's still a lot of people out there who are afraid to deal with particular questions because of political correctness.
	So science has had, you know, after being, to some degree, though not, you know, it's a mixed bag, persecuted by various religions for asking blasphemous questions and so on.
	Science has had a couple of hundred years under the heel of the state and under the heel of religiosity.
	And if you think of the amazing things that science has pulled off just in a couple of hundred years of pretty dominated exploration, pretty stifled exploration, I mean, it's unbelievable.
	If you look at sort of the accumulated human knowledge, just think of it as a graph from like early hominids or like 150,000 years ago or wherever, right?
	If you look at that, it's like An axe.
	Yeah.
	Oh, if I draw paint on a wall, I can make a stick man.
	Fire!
	Yeah, yeah.
	Right?
	And it's that 2001 Stanley Kubrick moment.
	A guy, you know, the ape flips up a bone and it turns into a spaceship.
	And if you think, just over the last hundred, I mean, a hundred years ago, we couldn't even fly, for heaven's sakes.
	And if you just look at the last hundred years, which is science plus the free market, or rather the free market plus science, If you look at what's happened just over the last hundred years or so, I mean, it's been unbelievably astonishing that we've gone from no self-propelled flight to having spaceships out there beyond Jupiter and going to the moon and back.
	So saying, well, you know, science seems pretty limited.
	Religion has had how many...
	Tens of thousands of years to answer, say, where did we come from?
	You know, Darwin comes along and what has been considered the best single idea human beings ever had comes up with a natural selection theory of evolution.
	That didn't come out of religion.
	And religion had had thousands of years, and what did they have?
	He breathed into clay.
	Well, that's not particularly helpful when it comes to understanding why he sat on the dinosaurs or whatever.
	So I just want to point...
	You might have kind of pretty high standard for science here, saying that something is wrong with science because it hasn't cracked the veil of 15 billion years ago, which it can't even measure directly.
	I completely understand what you're saying, and I'm not...
	That wasn't my intention to put up a huge wall against science.
	In fact, I think the opposite.
	It's...
	You said, you know, what is...
	You asked me what is something, in my opinion, that...
	Religion has cracked that science has, or what is still a truth to it, or what evidence has still been provided.
	That's what I'm saying.
	Hang on, but if you're going to say that religion has cracked something or explained something, what does it explain?
	Some unknowable being for incomprehensible reasons, using mechanisms that will forever remain a mystery, created matter and energy through a process we'll never be able to understand.
	Okay, well, believing that God...
	Created, you know, created everything as a fundamental part of, like, Christianity.
	Okay, and then you have...
	No, but what I'm asking is, what does that answer?
	Where we came from.
	No, it doesn't answer where we came from.
	From God, that would be the response.
	No, listen, the word magic doesn't explain anything.
	Okay, saying that eventually science has been exponentially growing, I'm making an argument for one position.
	This is why I'm saying that I like to think of the possibilities.
	I could make an argument for science too, but you're asking me for religion.
	No, we just jumped out of the question.
	The question was you saying that religion has answered something by saying God created the universe.
	Yes.
	And my question is, since nobody can explain in any way, shape, or form what God is or prove his or her existence or explain how this could possibly have occurred and why the being that could create the universe does nothing to interfere with it whenever science comes along, it doesn't explain anything to say an incomprehensible being used magic to do something.
	If my daughter says, where do babies come from, and I say, magic, have I explained anything to her?
	No.
	So when people say, well, where do we come from, supernatural magic, I don't think that that explains anything.
	I think it gives people the illusion of some kind of answer, and the reason they need to backfill it with something, the word you used earlier, profound, the reason they need to imbue it with all this emotional energy, I think, is Is because it doesn't actually answer anything.
	Well, isn't believing that, you know, one day science will solve or will discover where we came from and then also believing that a god, as you say, magic, created everything.
	Aren't those just faith?
	Those are two kinds of faith.
	You're having faith in science to solve and then you have faith in religion that...
	No.
	No, because science doesn't bring out a magic wand to explain things.
	Science is not Harry Potter.
	Science doesn't just magic.
	You can't possibly go to a scientific conference, a conference in physics, and say, I've solved this.
	I now know what the unified field theory is.
	It's magic.
	I think the wording that you're using is Let's say supernatural.
	Let's say miracle.
	Whatever word that you want to use instead of magic is fine with me.
	It still boils down to the same thing.
	And the language shouldn't matter.
	It's not real.
	You watch a magician.
	They're pulling the coin out behind your ear.
	It's not magic.
	It's just he's got quick hands.
	No, I get that.
	But when people are saying that supernatural beings use incomprehensible methods to create something...
	That's basically just another way of saying it's magic.
	Like real magic, not like magician magic, but like supernatural.
	It's ghosts.
	You know, ghosts did it, right?
	Or a ghost did it.
	So the reason it's not faith in science is that science is never validated through faith.
	Science is validated through the scientific method, right?
	Through reproducibility, through consistency, through logical consistency, through empirical evidence, and through universalization, right?
	So that is the standard by which scientific hypotheses or theories are validated.
	No such process occurs in the realm of religiosity.
	You have to have faith in religion.
	Saying to have faith in science when science rejects faith as even a remotely valid methodology for determining truth from falsehood or validity from invalidity is to simply distort the words beyond that.
	Beyond any sense.
	To use the word faith in science and to use the word faith in religion and think you're talking about the same thing I think is...
	It's not rational, and it's not how science works.
	It's how religion works, so to speak, but it's not how science works, right?
	I mean, if I say, well, I've...
	I solved Fermat's last theorem.
	I don't know, I think the guy solved it or whatever.
	I've solved Fermat's last theorem, I say, at a mathematician, and they say, well, where's your proof?
	And I say, a magic elf did it in ways I can't explain, but trust me, it's solved.
	People would say, it's really not.
	So, how would you define faith?
	Do you think it should just be removed from vocabulary?
	Faith is assertion in the opposition of evidence.
	Faith is assertion in opposition to evidence.
	Faith, when talking about the races, is racism.
	If I say something either positive or negative about another race where there's no empirical evidence or it flies in the face of empirical evidence, it's racism.
	It's prejudice.
	It's bigotry.
	So, do you never have faith in anything?
	Again, I don't know what you mean by the word faith in this context, because I don't think we're using...
	Do I assert things in the opposite of evidence?
	I really try not to, and I can't think of a time...
	I've made mistakes and all that, and I try not to.
	But do I say that something is true in the exact opposite of empirical evidence?
	I don't think so.
	But there's still no evidence for our roots, if you will.
	See, I'm not trying to make a huge argument against you.
	Wait, what do you mean by our roots?
	Yeah, where we came from.
	How something came from nothing.
	Right.
	But there's not even a hypothesis that says something came from nothing.
	As far as I understand it, the Big Bang is not a universally accepted theory.
	It's just one possibility.
	You know, there was a second law of thermodynamics, that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but only transferred from one form to another, would seem to deny the possibility that everything came from nothing.
	So I don't even know if that is where the final answer of science is.
	So they're simply, well, first of all, A, I don't know, and nobody knows for sure.
	B, people are working on it, and that's great.
	You know, I'd be interested to find these things out.
	And C, it absolutely doesn't matter.
	Listen, if it's found out that there is some mechanism by which the universe came to be, or let's just say the universe always was and always will be, it's expanded and contracted or whatever, what possible difference would that make to you and your moral choices in the world?
	If I had the answer to the big question, which is like where we came from, is that what you're How would that change?
	Well, no, no.
	Where we came from is explained by Darwin.
	Yeah, okay.
	So where the universe came from...
	Let's say you had some answer as to where the universe came from.
	Okay.
	How would that change your day?
	Well, if it wasn't by God, then that would...
	Change a lot of things, wouldn't it?
	I'm asking you.
	What would it change about your day?
	I'd eliminate...
	Well, first of all, I'd stop praying, I suppose.
	Oh, you pray?
	Yeah, it's because I have kind of a weird...
	I mean, a strange past.
	So...
	I'm not shocked or appalled or anything.
	I was just a bit surprised, so don't mind me.
	Well, that's why what I'm saying, like, I move with the current sometimes because, like, my...
	Do you mind if I talk about my past a little bit?
	I don't want to talk about it if it's not.
	No, it's your call.
	It's your choice.
	Okay, well, my father passed when I was six from lung cancer, and...
	I'd like to think that he was carried off in some way, so if there is ever a possibility that he could hear the things that I say, To him, then I'd like to keep that open.
	Even though there's some days where I face great deals of adversity and I'm like, how could God allow this or something like that?
	It's not like I've been in some kind of concentration camp.
	I've watched Unbroken.
	It's just I like to keep the doors open to possibilities.
	If by some manner, because we still haven't discovered where we came from, so I guess this is the big thing that would change.
	It would eliminate a question that's in the back of my mind that I apply prayer to.
	And if we knew where we came from, I'd think my dad couldn't hear the things I say or have the messages transferred to him.
	How old were you when your father died?
	Six.
	I assume it was...
	I mean, lung cancer is not hugely long, but it's pretty ugly, right?
	Very, yeah.
	I'm incredibly sorry about that.
	I mean, I really am.
	And, you know, I mean, I faced cancer when my daughter was young, and it could have been the same story for her.
	So I just really wanted to express my Incredibly deep sympathy for what you went through.
	That is a horrible and brutal period in your childhood, and of course has lasting effects to this day, right?
	Yeah, definitely.
	Yeah, I just really wanted to just express my sympathy for that.
	That is a...
	A terrible, terrible thing for a child to go through.
	Yeah, metastasized from his liver to his lungs.
	He got a blood transfusion and they didn't know that there was hep C in it.
	They didn't have the testing for it then and that's how he picked it up.
	Yeah, so that was the route it took.
	That's brutal.
	And I'm not trying to pin you in an awkward position like you're going to argue with Me talking to my father from the great beyond.
	That's not what I'm trying to do, but that's what my response to your question would be.
	No, and I, you know, I would be the last one to take from you your ability to converse with your father.
	I don't think that religion is necessary for that.
	I speak with the dead all the time.
	I argue with Socrates until the cows come home.
	I disagree with Nietzsche.
	I agree with Augustine.
	You know, I have...
	Debates with the dead at all times.
	Isn't that faith then?
	There's no evidence supporting that the dead is speaking to you.
	Because I recognize that the internalization of alter egos is a natural, and I would argue a very healthy part of the human mind.
	I have arguments with people I've not seen in 20 years in my head.
	And I don't consider that to be faith because I don't think that I'm speaking to a ghost that's in the room.
	I know that they're in my head.
	And I've done role plays with people in this show where they pretend to be someone else and with no acting training do incredibly great jobs.
	The phenomenon of other personalities taking up residence in their own head, for better or worse, or indifferent, is...
	I think a very well recognized and for me when I studied acting that was sort of the goal is that you try to become Someone else for a period of mine you change your your thinking you change your physicality you change your voice you change everything about all of that and There is Dr.
	Richard Schwartz who's been on this show It's a theory called internal family systems therapy and it's called IFS also for short and you can look this up and he's got Great books on the subject.
	And he talks about the inner alter egos, the inner alters.
	So the idea that we can speak to people who aren't us, we are people who aren't us.
	Part of our personality is the ecosystem of some stuff that donate and everything that we've accumulated through passing through life.
	People are like bubbles that stick to our brains.
	We internalize everyone we are around.
	And I think that's natural.
	It's efficient in that we can...
	When you know what other people are going to say, you can either avoid conflict or vault over stuff or get to further stuff.
	So knowing what other people are going to say, which is the internalization of other people's personalities, is a foundational and elemental part of what it is to be a human being.
	The mistake, to me, of thinking that it's somewhere out there in the universe rather than in the...
	I think that's not supported by the facts.
	But I would certainly never, ever be anyone who would say, But you can't talk to your dad.
	Of course you can talk to your dad.
	And you should talk to your dad, right?
	I mean, I assume you had a positive relationship with him, which is, I get a sense of grief even, of course, these many years later.
	So to me, it would seem like a very healthy and positive thing to do.
	Does it need to come with religion?
	I would say that that would actually obscure it.
	The relationship wasn't always positive.
	Well, I guess I wouldn't delve into that, though, because that's another story.
	But that's how I got into self-knowledge, too, because I was thinking about the whole situation.
	And, you know, I would always just pray to pray.
	And until, you know, I've matured a little bit more, I actually thought about why I do it.
	So, yeah.
	And, yeah, I've been considering going to...
	I think I'm definitely going to.
	With my question, I was just curious because I'm pretty young.
	I'm in college right now and I'm not completely mature and I'm wondering how much of myself can I actually understand with my subjective point of view because I think it's difficult Often for me to look at myself objectively, truly objectively.
	I'd like to think that I could, but it's always tremendous, especially having a professional that would be able to do the same, too.
	I mean, college is a pretty good time to do it, as far as I understand.
	You can get some free therapy through college services, right?
	Yeah, there's a counseling center, but I want to have, you know...
	To me, I feel like they're dealing with kids who have relationship problems or party troubles or something like that.
	I could certainly check that out, though.
	But I'd want an extended relationship with someone that I could just tell them the whole story and they'd hear and then they'd be able to use what they've heard and understand from a long time ago something I said and apply it to something today.
	You're right.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, as you know, I'm a big fan of talk therapy with the right therapist.
	And so if you really are, and it sounds to me like you really are interested in the pursuit of self-knowledge, I mean, and that I, you know, the particular conclusions that we may differ on at the moment to me are not significant.
	I think they were worth talking about for a variety of reasons, but...
	The pursuit of self-knowledge, which we would have in common, will bring us closer in our methodology than we could ever differ in our conclusions, if that makes any sense.
	And so if self-knowledge is your goal, fantastic.
	You can achieve a fair amount of it on your own.
	I found, and I think that the statistics bear me up on this, that talk therapy can be a very, very positive way of achieving security and happiness and all this kind of stuff.
	So I'm a big fan of it.
	And again, I just follow the science of this.
	I think Richard Dichter, D-I-C-H-T-E-R, he and I had a conversation.
	He's a researcher.
	We had a conversation a number of years ago about the positive effects of therapy that you can find at freedomainradio.com or YouTube slash freedomainradio or FDR podcast and do a search for that.
	He's got some pretty good empirical evidence as to how and why Therapy is so positively correlated with long-term well-being and how much it gives people.
	So, yeah, I mean, and I've got podcasts on how to choose a good therapist based upon, you know, exactly my opinions, not science or anything.
	But I think if you get the right therapist, it can be really, really positive.
	And that much I would suggest based on the science, if that makes sense.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I understand.
	I wasn't...
	Gabriel.
	Gabriel Dishter.
	Sorry, that's his name.
	No, it's fine.
	Yeah, I was going to say one of the situations I'm having that I was trying to look at objectively and see what you thought and then see how that differed from my view.
	Will you drop us a line?
	Let us know how it goes if you decide to pursue that course?
	Of course.
	Of course.
	I hope so.
	I hope so.
	And yeah, thanks everyone so much for, you know, just a delightful and wonderful series of conversations.
	I, as always, feel immensely honored and privileged that people are willing to share their thoughts and curiosities and disagreements with me.
	It's a real pleasure.
	And to help spread that pleasure, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	I nagged you at the beginning.
	It's the nag bookend.
	To come by and help support the show.
	Things are always a little bit lean after Christmas and we really could use your help.
	Freedominradio.com slash donate.
	Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week, everyone.
	A half week, I suppose.

▲