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Sept. 16, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:30:30
3077 Nihilists Don’t Exist - Call In Show - September 14th, 2015
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Time Text
Good evening, everybody.
Hope you're doing well on this very 14th of September, 2015.
Hang on.
Mike, quick calculation for me.
What's 14 plus 10?
That would be 24.
24.
24th of September.
Why does that ring a bell for me?
24th of September.
That's right.
It's a trick question.
September is my birthday month.
It never ends.
It's the entire month.
I'm actually pushing to get it to three or four months, but so far, in my family, at least one month isn't even really taking insofar as I'm getting a lot of pushback from people in my family, not to mention so-called friends, about my birthday month.
Calm down, calm down.
I've already arranged for determinists dressed in Freddie Mercury outfits to jump out of a cake, so you'll be all set on your birthday, Steph.
Don't worry about that.
Excellent.
Now, this is an important birthday for me.
I'm only 49 this year, which means it's my last year to be young.
Because, you know, the 18 to 49, that is the demographic.
After that, you are...
You're in the Matlock demo.
Yeah, you're beyond the pale.
So, you get short suspenders, a stick to whittle with, and when balls come over your fence in your yard, you just keep them.
Because, you know, they should know better.
And don't like the looks of those teenagers anymore.
Used to like the looks of those teenagers.
Now, it's just bitterness and creakiness.
But on the plus side, you will know when a storm is coming at least three days in advance based upon your joints.
So I hear there's lots to look forward to.
And, yeah, my birthday is on the 24th, just in case anybody was wondering.
And I'll take donations in lieu of presents at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
But no need to wait until then.
September is always an exciting month.
Everyone's back to school.
Everybody's out of money.
So please feel free to drop by.
freedomainradio.com slash donate to help us out.
Always a very essential and necessary thing because we selfishly still like to eat.
All right, Mike, who do we have up first?
All right.
Well, Rob is up first.
And Rob wrote in and said, UPB is great.
I love it.
However, can I suggest some clarification on the method and some possible ways to communicate it better?
And after that, he has some follow-up questions.
But I think that's a good place to start.
Welcome to the show, Rob.
Hello.
Hello.
Let's start at the beginning, and let's take a long, sensual, lingering mud bath over the comment that UPB is great.
I think we should focus the majority of the call on that, because that, of course, is the most important thing about what you said.
Afterwards, I don't know, it just kind of all got garbled for me, but I think that first point is very important.
Well, I basically wanted to call in and run over it with you to make sure I understand what you're saying.
I think I do but I also think because I've been looking for a lot of opposition to what you're saying on the internet and the most common thing is that people don't know what you're talking about and so they're attacking something that is not what you're saying and so I thought there would be some sort of value in me explaining to you what I think it is and you telling me if that's correct.
Sounds great.
If you want to steal someone's property, if I take your property If you want me to take your property, it's not theft.
So theft only arises if I take your property and you don't want me to take your property.
Right.
So your judgment, because it's your property, so you have ownership of it, your judgment of my action is binary in that you either do or don't want me to take it, and that's what matters.
Is that correct?
I wouldn't start there.
No.
I mean, this is jumping into the deep end.
I mean, there's a reason why there's a little bit of foreplay in UPB. Probably the only way that you can describe anything.
But hang on.
So the first thing that I would start is just to say that UPB says basically that we focus not on specific actions, we focus on theories.
Right?
In the same way a scientific theory Our scientific hypothesis does not focus on a specific rock or star or black hole, but rather focuses on the behavior of matter and energy in general, and it needs to be universalizable.
You know, if I say yesterday, well, I saw a rock float in the air for a second before it fell, and that could never be reproduced, then, you know, you can't really do anything with that.
It needs to be something that's reproducible and universal.
And so, If you have a theory of property rights, so if you have a theory that says theft is moral, theft is good, theft is universally preferable behavior, then you run into a contradiction immediately, which is that if theft is universally preferable behavior, then everyone must want to both steal and be stolen from.
But if somebody wants to be stolen from...
That's not theft.
Like, you know, the old argument is if I leave an armchair out on my front lawn with a sign saying, take me, I'm free, then the person who takes it is not stealing from me because they want them to take it from me.
And so theft can only occur if one person wants to take someone else's property, right?
If nobody wants to take anyone else's property, theft will never occur.
People are always going to want to steal.
So theft can only occur When two human beings have opposite preferences, my preference for you not to take my property and your preference to take my property.
And so because we have oppositional preferences for theft to occur, theft cannot be universally preferable behavior.
Now, a respect for property can be universally preferable behavior, right?
Two guys in a room can both respect each other's property.
But if two guys in a room, one has an iPad, one has an iPod, and theft is universally preferable, Then the guy who has the iPad should want to steal the iPod and should also want the guy to steal his iPad.
But if you want someone to take your property, it's not theft.
So theft can only be sustained if it is not universalizable, which means that the idea that theft is universally preferable behavior can't be sustained.
And you kind of don't need to go...
So just look at the theory, right?
And so...
There's only three possibilities when it comes to universals.
Either a hypothesis can be universalized, or it can't be universalized, or it is universalized to some degree.
So you can say everyone should like jazz, no one should like jazz, some people like jazz.
Now of course the truth is that some people Like jazz, because they just haven't heard enough Queen.
Oh, actually, no.
I shouldn't say that, because jazz is the name of a Queen album.
Anyway, so when it comes to theft, you can say theft is universally preferable behavior.
Everyone should want to steal and be stolen from at all times, which is not logically possible and therefore can be dismissed without any further investigation.
Or, number two...
Respect for property is universally preferable behavior, which can be universalized.
Or number three, sometimes respect for property should be universally preferable behavior, and sometimes it shouldn't be.
And the moment you get into sometimes, you're no longer dealing really with philosophy.
You're dealing with a whole bunch of subjective, relativistic, who knows what, right?
So I think that's sort of where I would start with theft.
Yeah, I did sort of jump in a bit too much.
I was going to go back to the universal thing.
I think that's where a lot of people have a problem with it, is that it is a universal moral standard.
Am I correct in saying that you focus establishing universality on the act of debating?
Because if you debate or bother to try to change somebody's mind, you're automatically setting a preference for a universal standard, which is true versus false.
So you're automatically demonstrating universally preferable behavior.
Absolutely.
If you expect somebody else to reject his or her position and conform to a more rational or a rational position, then you're saying that a rational position is infinitely preferable to an irrational position that the other person must reject.
To be true, give up an irrational position and take a rational position and that truth is infinitely preferable to falsehood and so on, right?
And so all of these being the case, this is when people argue against universally preferable behavior.
They're saying it's universally preferable behavior to not believe in universally preferable behavior.
And that's just such a short circuit.
It takes a huge amount of trauma and propaganda to not see that right off the bat.
I'm not talking about you.
I'm just, you know, in general.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I'll just be upfront.
Emotionally, I'm 100% on board with it.
I think it's great.
But that's where the danger is, right?
If you're emotionally drawn to something, that's where you have to really push back against it.
Yeah, for sure.
Sorry to interrupt, but just sort of an example.
A lot of my current skepticism towards all things multicultural and the diversity thing.
Early on in my career in the business world, I was in charge of A diversity outreach and newsletter and program for a major Canadian corporation.
And I had absolutely no doubts about the value of diversity and multiculturalism.
And I advocated for this in various university outreach things that I was involved in.
And the same thing with...
You know, women oppressed throughout history.
All of these things, I had no more doubt than I do that the world is round.
And, you know, when some information came my way that was counter to it, I just initially wanted to be like, ah, you know, come on.
I'm not going to examine the flat earth thing either.
You know, like, I mean, I don't have time.
But the evidence seemed to be very compelling about the negative effects of multiculturalism and so on.
And so, you know, when you automatically believe something, and particularly when you believe that it's virtuous, then that's when you need to really immerse yourself in the counter-arguments.
And that was sort of my history with that stuff.
Well, yeah, I mean, great point.
Can I just say, too, just as an aside, I'm a little bit nervous.
I don't know.
Oh, no, no problem.
I understand.
I'm sort of just still calming down.
So if my thoughts are a little bit scattered, I'm sort of getting there.
And it's early in the morning for me.
The thing to remember is that if this show is as innovative, deep, and great as I think it is, people will still be listening to this in a thousand years.
So just think of the next thousand years of people listening to you over and over and over again, trying to find every conceivable flaw and fault and all that.
Steph, you're helping again.
Stop it.
What?
You're helping again.
Stop it.
Hang on.
Hang on, I just freaked myself out.
With that said, because you're right, I have to be skeptical.
A lot of people trip up about the idea of morality being universal.
That's a big sticking point for a lot of people, it seems.
It's not for me, but I thought, why don't I put my brain into gear and see if I could prove why morality would have to be universal.
I very humbly go out of my depth and give a suggestion to you.
Do you remember I'm sure you've heard about it, but for the listeners, Socrates-Euthyphro.
I don't know if I'm saying that correctly.
Euthyphro dilemma.
Have you heard of that?
I know Euthyphro and Socrates, but I don't know the actual dilemma off the top of my head, but feel free to refresh me.
I mean, I heard it years ago because I think someone like Richard Dawkins threw it out as an argument against the idea that we couldn't be moral without God.
But I mean, obviously...
Thanks to you, I can't see how you can throw any of these arguments back against the state.
But he basically said, okay, if God says something is good, is it good because he said so, or is he saying so because it's good?
Oh yeah, I did a podcast on this whole thing.
I didn't know it was by his name.
Yeah, power versus virtue, a love story, I think it was called, and it was pretty early on, but I don't need to say, oh yes, I understand it.
I mean, is God's commandments, are they good because God made them?
In other words, do you worship power, or do you worship virtue?
Our virtue of story.
And if something is good simply because God says so, then the only reason it can be good is because he is powerful, not because he is good.
And that's just the base worship of power, which has nothing to do with ethics.
On the other hand, if what God says is good because it conforms to a standard of virtue that is not just centered around God's power, which means it can't be virtuous, if there's a standard of virtue by which we can judge whether what God says is good or bad, Then that standard of virtue exists independently of a deity and therefore you don't need a deity to be good.
Yeah.
And do you think that in the first case where it's like it's a might is right argument, you could also extrapolate that out to being simply a state of nature where, you know, not that anyone's calling anything good, but they're basically doing what they can get away with, like animals.
Well, they'll eat that animal because they can or, you know, you know what I mean?
So, if those are the only two options, that something is good because God said so, well, that's really an argument against morality.
It's an argument saying it's like a state of nature that might is right.
No, that's an argument that says that totalitarians are virtuous.
If you look at the personality behind people like Mao Zedong in China or Stalin in Russia, We're good to go.
In essence, like in my brain, I sort of extrapolated it out to like a system of no morality.
People are just doing what they can get away with.
You know what I mean?
Okay, so let's say that you have a system, a nihilism, right?
A system called no morality?
Yeah.
Okay, then when people proclaim a universal morality, are they wrong?
Sorry?
So if you have, as your perspective, I'm not saying this is you, but sort of Mind game time.
And if a nihilist says there's no such thing as morality, then the nihilist must logically oppose those who say there is such a thing as morality, right?
Okay, well can I extrapolate sort of my whole thing?
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
That's not the end of that thought, right?
And so if the nihilist says there's no morality and the ethicist says there is morality, then the nihilist and the ethicist are at odds, right?
And if the nihilist says to the ethicist, you are wrong, there is no such thing as morality, and you should change your arguments for morality, you should abandon them and you should accept nihilism, because nihilism is true and morality is false, well, the nihilist has just exercised UPB,
because he's saying you have false arguments, they're either irrational or anti-empirical, and therefore you should abandon them and accept the rational and empirical arguments against morality and And so the nihilist is immediately saying that consistency and accordance with the evidence and conformity with reason is infinitely preferable to error.
And once you accept that, then you already have accepted UPB. There's no way.
The nihilism is like the determinism argument.
You simply cannot argue against anybody else.
Like, everybody wants the capacity to argue.
Everybody wants the capacity to disagree with other people.
Everybody wants the capacity to prove other people wrong and to get angry at them and to reject them and to scorn them.
I don't mean you, but just in general, most people want that.
And the way they do that is through UPB, whether they know it or not.
And everybody wants the fun toy called being right, but nobody wants the responsibility of everything that comes along with wanting to be right, like needing to disprove things and UPB and reason and evidence and so on.
So I just sort of wanted to, that's sort of an emotional driver.
Everybody likes to conquer other people by being right, but then everybody rejects all the standards by which they're supposed to conquer people by being right, which is reason and evidence.
Yeah, for sure.
But a nihilist could say, well, if there's no standard, I've got no interest in truth, or I'm just going to do what I can.
You know what I mean?
Sure.
But if the nihilist never justifies his actions in any way, shape, or form, and if the nihilist never tells anyone else that he or she is wrong, and if the nihilist never promotes nihilism as true, you would have no idea that person is a nihilist.
Yeah, it's true.
Like the moment someone comes up to you and says, I'm a nihilist, They've just revealed a vast amount of information about themselves and that they accept that nihilism is true because it conforms to reason and evidence and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
The only way you'll ever know if someone is a nihilist is if they're engaged in a public debate and they bring their perspective to bear.
If somebody is truly a nihilist and they're completely invisible in the sphere of public debate, they simply don't exist.
And so, who cares, right?
I mean, if somebody never practices science and never writes anything down that's scientific and never presents his papers or never puts forward his ideas, who cares?
I mean, the scientists move on.
This guy doesn't exist in that universe.
Well, I was also thinking too that, like I was saying, if one option is that there is no morality, if you ever met one of these hypothetical people that reject the idea of morality, I mean, they would have no basis at all if you stole their car to say, oh, that's a bad thing to do.
Well, no, they could say, I don't like it, or whatever, right?
And they might even shoot you, but they probably, you know, whatever.
They couldn't use a universal moral judgment like good, bad.
You know, I mean, nihilism, I guess, is something that you wrestle with.
We all do pretty early on.
But I find the topic so dull because it's so obviously self-defeating.
And generally nihilists...
Are just cowards.
Because nihilists like to pick on people who are unsophisticated philosophically, who are untutored.
And it doesn't take a lot to pick apart most of the common ideas about morality.
It really doesn't.
And so nihilists are people, they love to go around unraveling other people's beliefs, but they won't go up against a competent philosopher in general.
I mean, Mike, I can't recall.
I don't know if we've ever had a nihilist who has the balls to come on and talk to me.
No, I'm just thinking of it.
I don't even get emails from people that are like, I'm a nihilist, let's set up a show or call or something.
Yeah, I mean, I did a whole podcast and video on nihilism and what ridiculous bullshit it was.
And people got all flamey in the comments.
It's like, hey, I do seven or eight hours of shows a week.
Feel free to call in.
Apparently nihilism is just Greek for chicken shit because they just don't.
They'll pick on people, you know, they'll pick on some secretary somewhere who, you know, doesn't really know much about philosophy and so on.
But when it comes to debating somebody with any competence, they're really just a bunch of chickens.
I just think they're just a bunch of bullies and sneaky cowards.
So, you know, which kind of makes sense, I guess.
Well, I mean, if what you said that they'd have to show a preference and what I'm saying is that you have to show some preference at some point for the concept of morality.
I've never met anyone like that.
Well, and they know that because I know what I'm doing, they come on my show, and I've got them on the ropes in 10 to 15 seconds.
Literally 10 to 15 seconds.
Now, this show, you know, and you can see this publicly, just over the last 30 days, 2.5 million video views.
That's not even counting any of the podcasts, which are usually equal to or greater than that.
So, you know, they can...
They can come on this show and they can get hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people over the long run, to listen to their arguments.
What an incredible opportunity that would be.
If you really cared about your belief system, this is the place you come to get your belief system out there.
And if you really believe that I'm unbelievably full of shit, then come on and show me that I'm wrong.
People were so upset at the single mom video that we put out a couple weeks back.
And I was like, please, please.
I was trying so hard to get someone to call in and talk about it.
No one wanted to.
I've been trying to get a Bernie Sanders supporter.
I really want a Bernie Sanders supporter to call in.
No one will call in.
It's so frustrating.
Yeah, and it's sad.
I mean, it's sad.
It's sad because anybody with any self-knowledge would recognize that they had an unprecedented opportunity to get the word out and to show me how wrong I was and all that.
And, you know, but all these brave keyboard warriors who just, you know, call me an idiot on the internet, it's like, hey, you know, come on into the studio.
Come on into the conversation.
And, you know, it's just a big, giant, empty chamber of nothingness because, you know, it's just, I mean, it's usual.
It's just all talk.
You know, it's just a bunch of cowards and bullies and crap like that.
And, oh, you always get the same thing.
You know what I'm I'm not that comfortable in a public forum and I don't really know.
Well, get comfortable, dammit!
I mean, if you've got a cause, figure it out.
I found this a big tragedy because I was trolling some videos of, you know, what's wrong with UPB yesterday just to sort of get my brain into gear for today.
And I think there was someone quoted something from your book And then turned to the camera and said, wait, what the hell's up with that?
And then moved on to the next point.
Airline food, what's up with that?
Public washrooms, what's up with those?
This is not comedy genius.
You know, that's the Jon Stewart, you know, where you jam together two things which makes the person look like he's contradicting himself.
And then you give a funny look.
And you just make a couple of funny jokes and this and that and the other.
Like Stephen Colbert had one of his opening segments.
He's as liberal as the ghost of Mao.
And he wants to establish his liberal bona fides.
Like at the beginning of 30 Rock where they have the idiot homeschooled children talking about men and dinosaurs living together.
You just have to put out the The sonar for your audience to know that none of their liberal sensibilities will be upset by anything going on in the show.
So he gets, like, Donald Trump and puts him together with, like, KKK imagery, right?
And, I mean, it's like, oh, God, that's so sad.
Because, you know, there's Donald Trump and now I've got a funny joke with KKK. And it's just like, oh, my God.
And the funny thing is, is that KKK is actually quite appropriate in that Compared to R, he's triple K. You know, the R versus K stuff that I've been doing in the Gene Wars.
KKK, without any racist overtones, of course, yeah, he's triple K. And I just think that's actually kind of funny.
And now Donald Trump's going to go on, you know, and this is why I don't go on mainstream media, because it's like, you know, first thing I'd say is, what are you doing?
What are you doing?
Like, I'm a serious thinker.
I've published some great books.
I've done some great TV. I really want to help this nation.
And you're throwing up pictures of me with the Klan?
What are you doing?
What are you doing?
Have you ever done that with...
And he said, you know, the interesting thing, you've never done that with a Democrat, and the KKK was actually the military or the pseudo-military offshoot of the Democratic Party.
So putting me a Republican in and around the KKK is not only personally offensive, it's historically the opposite of the truth.
So get your shit together and stop being a propagandist.
Or if you're going to be a satirist, at least be an even-handed one.
But anyway.
Sorry, I know we've drifted off a little bit.
Yeah.
I just don't want to spend a lot of time, and I haven't talked about nihilism in forever, but you just know it's just going to be another one of these guys in the basement, and they have no idea why UPB bothers them.
I do, but they have no idea why UPB bothers them so much.
And there's some stuff to nitpick in the book.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
There's some stuff to nitpick in the book, which I think is fine and fair, and I've had some suggestions for improvement and so on.
But, nonetheless, people have still been unable to overthrow the core theory.
And, you know, I've had, I don't know, probably 30 or 40 people come strongly on to debate UPB, both publicly and in sort of more formal debates and also on this show, maybe closer to 50 now.
I don't know, but it's been a lot.
And...
Nobody's been able to overturn it, and that's just because you can't.
I mean, as soon as you're debating, anyway.
So, in terms of how better to communicate it, that is a challenge.
I did have a suggestion.
Yeah, go ahead.
I feel like I only got started on the first point, so maybe can I just spit it out really quickly?
Please do.
If nobody ever makes a moral statement, then you're necessarily in a state of nature where there is no morality.
But if someone makes a moral statement...
Hang on.
But morality is a subset of universality.
Right?
Because you can make universal statements that aren't ethical, that aren't moral.
You know, a scientific hypothesis...
These are universal statements that have nothing to do with morality.
Gases expand when heated is not a moral statement, right?
And so it's not that if people reject morality, people have to reject universality as a whole.
Because the moment that they say that there's universalities, and universality is only universality because it's in accordance With reason and or evidence.
And so they have universalities as a whole and that's impossible to do.
But sorry, go ahead.
What would you call the state of no people around and nature's just doing its thing then?
You mean before like the...
If nobody had the capacity to say, make any moral statement whatsoever.
You mean pre-human?
Yeah.
What would it matter what I call it?
It's nature.
It's just, you know, it's the law of the jungle.
It's the law of survival and sex and evolution.
Yeah, and that's why I equated it to the authority, argument from authority.
Something is good because I said so, because I'm big and stronger.
It's like the law of the jungle.
It's essentially an argument.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
You can't, sorry to interrupt, but you can't conflate those two.
The lion does not say to the gazelle, I mean, if the lion could speak, it wouldn't say that I get to eat you because I'm More moral, it would say, well, you get eaten because I caught you and I'm hungry, and that's what I do.
Okay, sure.
Now, the moment the lion had the capacity to reason, to speak, to philosophize, then it would be subject to ethics, and then jumping and ripping apart would be somewhat more questionable if there were other alternatives and so on.
Okay.
So you either are in a system of morality or you're not.
Like if you can't comprehend it, because you're talking about this thing with the animals, that they exist outside of morality because they can't comprehend it, and I spent a fair bit of time on that.
But if you are in the position as a human being to say, well, something is...
Good or bad or make a moral judgement, then you necessarily would have to be like option B. I'm saying it because it's moral.
You're alluding to the fact that it is moral objectively outside what I'm saying and I'm just adhering to that.
I'm not saying it because it is moral because I said so.
Well, again, to some degree we're begging the question, though, because we're trying to establish what morality is or how to argue for it, and you're already using moral.
That's why universally preferable behavior, I think, is a better term than morality.
Morality is a subset of universally preferable behavior, but it exists in other areas as well.
If you want to be a scientist, it's universally preferable behavior.
To use the UPB methodology called the scientific method.
And if you're a doctor, you do that which is beneficial to people's health or whatever, a nutritionist and so on.
So there are universal principles in every discipline, in engineering and even in music and so on.
You want to play your music in a range that not only dogs can hear but also people.
And so there's UPB in every aspect of human endeavor and one of those subsets would be ethics.
I imagine a conversation between two people, because obviously, like I said, I'm just a total amateur hour with this, but I imagine one guy coming up to another guy and saying, to not murder is good.
And the other guy says, okay, is it good because you say so or are you saying so because it's good?
Okay, why don't you be that guy?
Let's do a role play and you be the nihilist, right?
And you would come up and say, I don't think I'd do very well.
Just give it a try.
You'd be surprised.
If you've been to public school, you'd be surprised how close nihilism is to the surface of your mind.
So you come up and say...
So I say murder is wrong, right?
Yeah, and I say, is it wrong because you say it's wrong, or are you saying it's wrong because it's universally wrong?
Are you saying it because it is wrong, or is it wrong because you said so?
Well, if it's wrong because I said so, that wouldn't be philosophy.
No.
Philosophy aims to put forward universal theories, or theories at least which deal with universality.
Well, the problem is the word ridiculous is not an argument, so that's what I would say to this person, right?
So saying that something is ridiculous shows that you don't really understand how philosophy works.
But the way that philosophy works, of course, is that it aims to put forward, just like science does, as universal a set of propositions with reference to reason and evidence as possible.
And so it's not like murder is wrong because it has some invisible ghost called wrongness inside of it.
Murder is wrong because it is impossible to come up with a rational theory called murder is universally preferable behavior.
Everyone should murder all the time.
We'd run through the arguments which we did at the beginning with regards to theft.
And so it cannot be that murder is universally preferable behavior.
And so the only way that murder can show up in universality is to be banned.
That murder is not universally preferable behavior.
In fact, to not murder is universally preferable behavior because it can be achieved by everyone at all times.
Of course, there'll be people who...
We'll still kill because individual actions, you know, unlike science where atoms don't have free will, people can choose to disobey a theory.
Of course, atoms can't choose to disobey a theory, which is why any conflict between even the slightest deviation of material behavior and a universal hypothesis disfavors the hypothesis.
Alright, so if you said, if I pose that question to you, obviously the Socrates question, and the first answer is invalid, then you're necessarily saying that you're saying it's wrong because you're just adhering to a standard outside yourself.
Would that be correct?
Yes, I mean, because the question of ethics as power or theory, well, power cannot be why we believe things.
No, so if option two is the only valid option...
Yeah, so the only valid option when it comes to ethics is that behavior conforms with the theory of universality.
And the reason we know it has to be universal is that ethics in general deals with that which is aggressively imposed upon other people, right?
So if I like jazz and you like blues, we can both put on our headphones and I can enjoy my jazz and you can enjoy your blues.
And, you know, we haven't inflicted Things on each other.
But ethics deals with that aspect of human behavior, or those aspects of human behavior, wherein behaviors or preferences are aggressively inflicted upon others.
Now, it cannot be right that any aggressive behavior can universally be inflicted on others and be called moral.
Because they would all cancel each other out.
right like if everyone gets to kill everyone else well first of all it can't be killing if everybody wants to be killed if killing is a universal value if murder is a universal value then people want to be murdered and if theft is a universal value then people want to be stolen from which means it's not theft is rape is a universal value then people want to be raped which means it can't be rape if assault is a universal value it means people want to be beaten up which might be kinky or might be boxing but certainly isn't the same as assault
and so the the aspects of human behavior wherein we're dealing with actions aggressively imposed upon others is the proper study of ethics and And there's no way to universalize the aggressive imposition of violent actions upon another human being.
Therefore, the only valid moral approach to these is to ban them.
I was trying to think of a proof of why it has to be universalized.
Because a lot of people have a problem with that.
Why what has to be universalized?
Well, any of these moral propositions.
I mean, obviously, I am cool with the idea of it.
Obviously, I think it's valid.
But a lot of people don't or don't see the value in it.
So, I mean, that's what I was saying.
Like, if anyone may...
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Sorry.
I'm just...
So, their argument is...
And again, I wish we'd have one of these people on here because it's a little tough to do this third hand.
Yeah.
But the argument is, what is the value in universalizing...
A question of ethics.
I don't know what the argument is, but a lot of people will say...
But that's what ethics is!
I mean, it's like saying, what is the value of universalizing a scientific theory?
Because that's what scientific theories are.
I mean, if you're not universalizing your hypothesis, it may be something, I don't know what it would be, but it's not science.
Science is, by its very definition, that which universalizes hypotheses...
It deals with hypotheses that universalize I was trying to think of what I would say to anyone who says, well, why does it have to be universal?
And I would say, well, obviously, as I pose a question to you, like, if someone makes a moral statement, only the second option would be valid, because the first option is invalid, so the second option is that, well, I'm relaying something that is an objective standard outside of myself.
I'm conforming my words and actions to a standard.
No, it's because that's the definition.
If you want to play in mathematics...
Screaming random syllables at a piece of paper may be something.
It's not mathematics.
Mathematics is universal by its nature.
Two plus two make four.
And people say, well, why does mathematics have to be universal?
Because that's what mathematics is.
I mean, sorry, if you want to do something non-universal, then you have to go do something else.
But, you know, you can't go to a math symposium and come up with a big argument about how two and two make four is not universal.
It is universal.
So that's what math and that's what ethics are.
Well, why should ethics be universal?
It's like, well, because that's what ethics is.
If you want to do something that's not universal, do something that's not ethics.
Do something that's aesthetics or something.
But as you...
They are optional.
They're not subjective, but they are optional.
What are optional?
Ethics.
You can choose to be corrupt.
Oh, sure.
And you can choose to do bad math.
Right?
I mean, and you can choose to have bad scientific theories.
I can choose, you know, there's a guy who does wonderful correlations between things that are completely unrelated.
So, for instance, I think he's got a graph which is drowning deaths in the United States compared to frequency of Nicolas Cage movies.
Mm-hmm.
And he just, he finds data that overlaps.
Mike, see if you can dig this up.
If he's got some pretty funny ones, like, this doesn't make no sense.
But the data just coincidentally happens to overlap.
And this is his hobby, you know?
I mean, I don't know, maybe he never discovered pornography, but this is his hobby.
And what he does is he finds statistical data sets that just overlap, and they're just funny.
And there's just really strange correlations.
Now, I mean, that's a pretty funny hobby, but it has nothing to do with I think?
Those NASA bastards.
Can you imagine?
Now, if it was Snotting Tang that got you killed, then we could understand it, right?
Does he have any others?
Am I right about drownings versus Nick Cage movies?
It's actually number of people who drowned by falling into a pool correlates with films Nicolas Cage appeared in.
Absolutely.
Per capita cheese consumption, number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets.
Now, the funny thing is that with drowning in Nick Cage movies, if Nick Cage had starred in the movie Deadpool, that would actually make a lot more sense.
But he didn't even do that, to my memory.
One more, one more.
Divorce rate in Maine correlates with per capita consumption of margarine.
So if you're in Maine and you don't want to get divorced, switch to butter.
Actually, as a sex aide, I assume butter would probably be better as a whole if it's not salted.
Does he have any others?
Oh, there's a ton of them.
Worldwide non-commercial space launches correlates with sociology doctorates awarded.
So science and the exact opposite of science.
Per capita consumption of mozzarella cheese correlates with civil engineering doctorates awarded.
People who drowned after falling out of a fishing boat correlates with the marriage rate in Kentucky.
I would assume that's because a lot of marriage ceremonies in Kentucky involve fishing boats.
Ah, hooked me a good one!
A mermaid!
U.S. crude oil imports from Norway correlates with drivers killed in a collision with railway trains.
Now, if they were shipped over, that would make sense.
But Norway, I'm pretty sure it comes by sea.
We could go on all day.
Yeah, you could go on all day.
And some of these correlations are pretty good, right?
Oh yeah, 95 plus for a lot of them.
Yeah, 0.95.
So this is the kind of correlation that makes Stoyan go...
It makes him shiver with anticipation.
So yeah, so people can say, well, why should things be universal?
But it's like, because that's, you know, why should math be universal?
Why should science be universal?
Why should logic be universal?
Why should engineering principles be universal?
It's like, because that's what they are!
Right?
Why should geography involve land masses?
Because that's what it is!
Why should marine biology involve liquids?
Because that's what it is.
I'm trying to understand what people's objections are.
Like I said, I went and trolled around for some of the objections and obviously came across the David Gordon review which is pretty pitiful.
But I'll read a little quote, and he's talking about theft, and he said, this argument doesn't work.
A thief is someone who takes what does not belong to him.
He wants what he steals, but this does not entail that he thinks he's a legitimate owner of the pool for goods.
To take something is not to make a moral claim to own it.
And it's like, yeah, but if morality is universal, then wouldn't other people then be able to just identify that person as corrupt?
Wait, it's been years since I've read this.
But Gordon was saying that a thief...
No, the thief, one presumes, would not want someone else to take from him what he has stolen, but that does not entail that he would deem someone else who did this a violator of his property rights.
But why is it so hard for him to say, well, yes, people do bad things?
And this is actually really common.
Like people were talking about going, well, just because two men can't murder and blah, blah, blah, then people still murder.
It's like, yes, people are corrupt.
Yeah, that makes as much sense as saying because people eat badly, there's no such thing as better or worse nutrition.
Yeah, of course, people can choose to disobey principles.
Because there is mysticism, it does not mean that there's no such thing as science.
In fact, the only reason we know there's such a thing as mysticism is because we have science.
Sorry, go ahead.
So because, as you said, morality is optional but not subjective, there's three options.
There's someone who actually claims who I think is a mythical creature that does not exist, but some hypothetical person that says, I do not believe that morality is relevant or I'm not going to adhere to it in any way.
Like a nihilist, but not really.
Or someone who then claims, the option two is someone who says, yeah, morality is objective, but I do the opposite, which by their own logic, they are then corrupt.
Or someone who says, I believe in objective morality and adheres by those standards, who then is moral.
Yeah, I mean, there are people who eat cars.
Yeah.
For real, right?
I mean, people, they like break down cars into tiny components and they eat cars.
Now, do they think that cars are nutritious?
Yeah.
Do they think that cars are nutritious?
Well, they probably don't, right?
Does that mean that there's no such thing as nutrition and no such thing as being a nutritionist and there's no such thing as a better or worse diet because people eat cars?
Yeah.
I mean, this is how philosophy...
Morality breaks people.
It breaks their brains.
Because if the problem of morality is solved, people have to actually start getting stuff done.
And so lots of people like to muck around with flagpole scenarios and lifeboat scenarios.
And basically what they're trying to do is stall everyone else from acting.
Because once the problem of morality has been solved, then you've got to get your ass off your couch.
And you've got to get your ass out of your...
Professor's chair, and you've got to get your ass out of your little cozy corner cubicle of compliance, and you actually have to go get something done.
As soon as you finish planning the battle, you actually have to fight the battle.
So people love the planning stage.
They love putting the things and moving stuff around on a map, and what if this, and what if that, because nobody gets shot when you're planning, right?
But it's when you actually have got your better plan and the enemy is massing and now it's time to go out and fight.
And UPB, by solving these problems, is like, okay, now we have to go and fight for it.
And people don't want to do that because fighting for virtue puts you in conflict with some rather nasty people, obviously, right?
That's the point, right?
Fighting against cancer puts you in direct conflict with some rather nasty and highly reproductive cells.
And so people want to, and I know why, because if UPB is valid, and it is, right?
I mean, then, okay, the problem has been solved, and now we've got to go out, and we've got to go and convince people, and we've got to go and tell people about what virtue is, and there's no doubt anymore, and we have to confront people who make their money, because there's two ways that people make money off morality, if they're not philosophers.
Number one is through force.
The government says that the law is morality and you must pay through taxes for us to uphold morality through the law.
And they make trillions and trillions of dollars around the world through taxes.
And so that is the force that people...
And the other is faith, that God has decreed what is morality, and we will take 10% of your income in order to promote this morality around the world.
And if it is neither force nor faith that is the definition of morality, then as an ethicist and an activist, you, I, everyone, we're putting ourselves in conflict with ancient tyrannies that have been That are all over the world and have been around for thousands of years and have highly entrenched special interests and are very aggressive, of course, like Smog in the defense of their treasure.
And it is, you know, it is tough to get out of the library and get into the ring, right?
People, they don't want to do it.
I understand that.
I understand that.
But then they should go and do something else, right?
If all you want to do is read boxing manuals, While you're sitting in the ring, then you should get out because people actually want to train and they want to fight.
These people are just in the way and what they do is they try to tangle up the feet of anybody in action.
I'm not speaking about anyone in particular, just people in general who just nitpick and nitpick and nitpick.
They're trying to tangle up and they're trying to sow the seeds of self-doubt among anybody who comes up with a moral theory.
Well, what about this?
Or what about that?
And it's like, okay, well, I guess I'll go back and I'll work on this.
Okay, well, what about this?
Okay, I guess I'll go back and work on this.
What about this scenario?
Have you thought about this?
Oh, okay.
It's like, oh, fuck.
Forget it.
You know, all they're doing is keeping anybody with any energy and commitment Out of the ring.
So the bad guys win.
I mean, they really are, in general, serving the immoral powers of the world.
Because they're simply continually tripping people up and continually sending people back.
Well, if you don't have an answer to this scenario, it doesn't work.
If you don't have enough, okay, I'll go back.
It's like, oh, then I'm dead.
And I spent 40 years answering useless questions that never show up.
This is why I ask people, you know, they come up with these absurd questions.
Theories, you know, what if space aliens and what if lifeboats and what if flagpoles and it's like, okay, have you ever faced this problem in your life?
Is this a big issue in the world?
No.
Then go and deal with some big issues and stop clogging up the works with all of these stupid questions that never lead anywhere and simply tie people up who should be out there saving the world.
So can I make a suggestion then in the way you communicate the murder thing?
Yeah.
Sorry, I just, I didn't want to, I could keep going, but I wanted to sort of move on to another thing, if that's okay?
Sure, last thing, because I got a bunch of callers tonight, but go for it.
I thought so.
So, when you say two men in a room can't murder each other, I know what you're talking about, but I think it's kind of a confusing way to say that, because I think my brain shoots off into imagery of mutually pooled Mutually activated trap doors and all this sort of stuff.
And I actually don't think it's correct because I think someone can have an intent to murder someone else but not be murdered and they can both accidentally kill each other at the same time.
But I think what can't happen...
Accidental death is not murder.
But I know what you mean.
Like you could both be strangling each other and theoretically you could both die at exactly the same time while wanting and not wanting.
Yeah, I get it.
But the actual criterion of the smallest thing that cannot happen is that Bob cannot kill Doug And have both Bob and Doug call that action good.
Murder cannot be enacted by both of them at the same time, because murder is something that must be desired by one person and not desired by the other, and therefore you have opposing desires, which means it can't be universalized.
When you say murder can't be enacted by both people at the same time, my brain automatically goes to an image of two people trying to murder each other.
Yeah, so the better way of putting it is to say – but the better way of putting it, I suppose, is to say murder cannot be universally preferable behavior by two people at the same time against each other.
Yeah, but that's when – like I'm sort of playing devil's advocate because I'm trying to – Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
A lot of people would be like, well, but someone can want to murder someone else and then not want to be murdered.
And it's like, yeah, but I think it would be value in pointing out that...
Well, but that's the whole point.
It doesn't matter whether it's not one individual.
Because if there was only one individual, there'd be no such thing as ethics.
Right?
Because there would be no possibility...
If there was only one individual in the room, there'd be no possibility of another individual imposing his will.
So it's both individuals.
Is it possible for two individuals...
To commit the act that murder is a universally preferable behavior at the same time.
Can murder be universally...
Forget murder for a moment.
Just let's go with theft, right?
Can theft be universally preferable behavior for two people at the same time?
No, it can't.
Because theft requires that you don't want someone to take your property.
And so you have to want to be stolen from and not want to be stolen from at the same time.
And that's a contradiction, which means the thesis fails.
What do you think about this way of putting it?
Like I said, say you're Bob and Doug.
Doug has some property, Bob takes it.
At the moment that Bob takes the property, Doug either did or did not want him to take that property.
And so it's a binary question.
I just went over this last night because someone was like, oh, what are these exceptions?
Okay, but they're like, well, you know, maybe he did, maybe he didn't.
It's like, no, but at the moment at which someone is either assaulted, raped, murdered or stolen from, in their mind, because their body and their property is their own, they are either wanting or not wanting that action.
So the only thing that cannot occur is that Bob takes Doug's property and both Bob and Doug Agree that that is a good action, a morally good action, that wouldn't be theft.
Right.
Not that Bob and Doug both have property and that they don't want anyone else to take it, because I think in people's brains it breaks down to, like, I know what you're talking about.
If both people want the theft, the theft doesn't occur.
Yeah, but you don't need to talk about two people in a room Trying to thieve or murder each other, it's just if one person takes another person's property, in that singular action, the person doing the taking and one being taken from both need to agree that that is a good thing to happen, that that action is good, but they can't.
And if they do, it's not theft.
But I mean, the way you sort of say that they can't murder each other, that's when people start thinking about, well, trying to mutually kill each other yet not be killed and all these strange things, which can't be universalized either, but it's more foggy.
But if you just say, well...
Bob can't kill Doug, and at the moment Doug dies, or the things that are set in motion that end up killing Doug, he either wants or doesn't want that.
It's a binary thing.
So if he wants it, it's not murder.
So at the point that he wants it, murder evaporates, rape, theft and assault will evaporate.
So they only happen if at the moment that singular action takes place, the one doing it does it, and the one having it done to them does not want it to happen.
Right.
No, and I think that's a good way of putting it.
And I've done that sometimes before, but suddenly I certainly do get pulled into the other thing from time to time.
No, I think it's a good way of putting it.
A man can't murder another man and have both men call that action good.
Right.
I think that's a sticking point for people.
Yeah, yes and no.
I mean, it could be dodging.
No, no, what I mean is that if somebody is set against a theory, it almost doesn't matter how you explain it.
Right?
Like, I mean, if people just start immediately throwing up whatever objections they can come up with, and look, this is not to say that things can't be explained better or can't be done better or whatever, for sure.
But if people are emotionally set against a theory, it almost doesn't matter how you explain it.
Because even if you'll get them to admit something in the moment, the conversation will vanish tomorrow, and they'll be right back where they started, even if with better communication.
Now, that's not to say that better communication doesn't help, but I got a free book.
I've probably done 10 or 15 or 20 videos on UPB and podcasts and so on, so it's not that complicated a system to come up with, but what happens is That it conflicts with people's emotional preferences to avoid conflict with evil people.
And so they feel a very strong desire to push back against the theory and come up with all sorts of absurd things because they don't want to run into conflict with evil people.
I mean, for me, in the way that I communicated that to you, I just think that because you're isolating down to the smallest criterion, which is the person's preference who's having the action done to them, and it's necessarily binary.
Like, if you said to me, why is murder wrong?
I said, because...
And I gave that explanation to you that at the moment that the second person is killed, they either do or don't want that.
They can't both want to be irrational or something, but they either do or don't want that.
So murder can only exist if he doesn't want it because his body is his property.
He's the one being killed.
So they can't both call that good.
I mean, if I say that to you, I mean, I'm sure I'll be surprised when bringing that sort of argument to people.
But what would you argue if you were like an emotionally...
Challenged by that.
You know, if I said that to you, what would you say?
Oh, I don't...
Yeah, I don't really want to leave people with Clever arguments against what we both agree on.
So I just wanted to remind people, we've got a video called Does Morality Apply to Animals?
Small Categories Explained.
And we've also got a video called The Death of Reason, Why People Don't Listen to Reason and Evidence.
But I really appreciate the call, and it's a good reminder to focus on the don't murder.
I haven't used that one for a while, but I don't think.
But it's definitely a good reminder to avoid that.
Because...
Oh yeah, lack of sea pirates correlates with global warming.
I heard somebody put that in too.
Actually, that probably is a correlation.
Alright, got to move on to the next caller, but thanks very much for your call.
You're certainly welcome back anytime.
It was a real pleasure to chat.
You too, pleasure.
Thanks, man.
Alright, thanks, Rob.
And I know you have more questions, so we'll definitely get you on a future show so you can continue the conversation.
But up next is Ben, and Ben wrote in and said, I've listened to Mr.
Molyneux's series on R versus K reproductive strategies, and I'm a bit puzzled about one of the ways that he has repeatedly characterized K strategy.
Something along the lines of ancient China, unchanged for centuries.
Yet, case strategists are supposed to embrace competition in free markets, which are extremely unstable, not a judgment of value.
How does one reconcile these two positions?
That's from Ben.
Yeah.
No, that's a great question.
I don't think anyone has any particular answers.
I can sort of beat around some potential answers to that.
Yeah.
The question, of course, has been raised many times, which is why has sort of white Western Christian European civilization been so energetic, let's say, you know, and so assertive about technology and military and empire and so on.
And it's sort of a big and important question, and I don't think anyone really knows the answer.
Some of it, the answer obviously has to do with...
Particular choices that people make about whether to bring forward arguments and pursue them energetically and so on.
So there's some magic free will.
There are some people who say that it may have to do with a disparity in testosterone levels.
In the general, my amateur understanding of the way the biology works is that East Asian men have the lowest levels of testosterone, and then whites have more, and then, at least according to those researchers who are trying to figure out why certain cancers show up in the black populations in America and around the world, blacks have the most testosterone.
I've heard sort of from 10 to 20 percent more.
And so it could be that Asian Ks without much testosterone get kind of stuck in that what they do is they compete within an existing system rather than compete against an existing system.
In other words, China and Japan achieved staggering successes as civilizations thousands of years before modern European civilization achieved its successes.
They had systems of weights and measures thousands of years ago.
They had a universal currency.
They had entrance exams for bureaucrats.
They had sophisticated roads and sea travel and gunpowder and all just amazing stuff that happened.
I think what happened was that the case-elected Asians competed. - I'm excited.
To be in charge of the existing system.
So they would compete for courtier positions or being mandarins or being in charge of particular aspects of the existing system.
However, the West's innovation, Christian, European, Western civilizations innovations, It's not how can I best compete within the existing system, but hey, how about a brand new system, right?
Not how can I displace the aristocrat in charge of my feudal lands and gain his power, but how about we don't have feudal lands and we privatize stuff and we get capitalism.
And so when you have true, really energetic Ks, and maybe that's to do with the testosterone levels that are sort of right balanced with intelligence levels and so on, Then you...
So if you are a...
If you're in a mercantilist system, right, where you gain a huge amount of economic favor or power by colluding with the king, right, getting particular trade concessions or getting licenses to operate, like the East India Company having the license to operate and so on.
So if you are, you know, medium...
Testosterone K, then what you want is to gain the favor of the king and get those preferential things and so on.
But that's not very competitive.
In the same way that if you're like East Asian K, without a huge amount of testosterone, then you want to compete within the existing system to gain all the advantages you can out of it.
But if you have more testosterone or more energy or more creativity or more oomph, so to speak, then you want to...
Rip down barriers to competition and let everyone compete on a more even playing field.
In other words, if all you're interested in is winning and you don't have a lot of energy, then if the society has a tradition of bribing the umpire, then you're going to want to bribe the umpire so that you can win.
But if you have more energy, then what you want to do is Get rid of bribing the umpire and hopefully get rid of the umpire so that everyone can compete.
And so what you saw happening in the Netherlands to some degree, but particularly in England, was a very strong focus on truly free trade, like no tariffs, no favors and so on, just real free trade.
And you can look up sort of the abolition of the corn laws, which were highly restrictive, mercantilist policies regarding the importation and distribution of corn.
In the 19th century in England, they fought like dogs to open that market up, and it was one of the foundations of the empire to get that kind of efficiency going on in the corn trade.
And I've got a video sort of on deck, which will be coming out this week, I guess, about colonialism and the empire and the degree to which there were very few tariffs and taxes going on in the British empire and so on.
And so, where there's an excess of K and a not very strong amount of testosterone or oomph or whatever you want to call it, Then the K's compete within the existing system.
However, when you have a lot of K's and a lot of testosterone, And very high intelligence, then I think what happens is that you get competition between systems, not within systems.
And the desystematization, so to speak, of the economy, which is the expansion of free trade, was the sort of singular characteristic of the Europeans, at least up until the 20th century.
Again, I'm not saying there's anything definitive, and I can't prove it.
It's just sort of where my mind goes, if that helps.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a difficult empirical question, I guess.
So I guess what I wonder is, to what degree, I mean, to the extent that we can even tell this, would you really characterize, say, Asian civilization from hundreds of years ago as being super K-dominant?
I mean, that's sort of, I don't know, I guess sort of colloquially how we think about this, but what real evidence is there of that?
Well, there's significant biological evidence.
Okay.
That's not so much in the realm of theory.
Okay.
Right?
So, I mean, if that's of interest to you, I'm certainly happy to run through some of the empirical evidence.
Sure.
Okay.
So, the general idea, I just sort of compare Asians with Caucasians.
So the general idea is that the organism that is slower to develop ends up more complex, right?
And the argument for that has to do with some biological factors involving twinning, right?
So twinning is more common, giving birth to twins is more common Among Caucasians than it is among Asians.
And it's like four times more common among Caucasians than among Asians.
And twinning is, I would assume, more are selected, right?
Because again, higher birth rate and so on, right?
So lower birth rates tend to be more case-selected.
And so between Asians and Caucasians, Asians twin far less frequently.
That's sort of one evidence.
The second is sexual frequency among Asians is lower than it is among Caucasians.
And I can't remember the exact ratios.
It's been a while since I've done those video searches, but there is that aspect of it as well.
Also, Asian babies tend to stay in the womb longer than Caucasian babies.
Also, Asian babies tend to learn to crawl later than Caucasian babies.
Asian babies also learn how to walk later than Caucasian babies.
And this is all correlated with the fact that Asians have very wide hips.
I know it doesn't look that way, but if you sort of look at the internal structure, Asians have wider hips than Caucasians, and that's because, in general, the Asian brain is physically bigger than the Caucasian brain.
And so, because the Asian brain is bigger, this is one of the reasons why they have to stay in the womb longer, I would assume.
The Asian brain is bigger than the Caucasian brain.
Mike, if you can look up these numbers, I'd appreciate it.
It's slightly bigger, not much, but it's slightly bigger.
And the Asian head is slightly bigger at birth than the Caucasian head.
And this is why the Asian women have wider hips, because they have to pass a bigger brain through their hips and so on.
And so, lower testosterone, less frequency of sexual intercourse, slower development, slower maturation, resulting in a more complex organism, does seem to be how you would look at Asians as being more K-selected.
And the end result of this being, of course, that Asians have a higher IQ than Caucasians.
Again, you can't judge individuals, the usual caveats and so on, but Depending on who you read and which studies you look at, it's not a huge difference.
It's not as big as, say, the difference between Caucasians and Ashkenazi Jews.
Caucasians, of course, having about 100 IQ, Ashkenazi Jews having about 112 to 114 IQ, a whole standard deviation almost above Caucasians, and in language much higher.
And so you end up with Asians having a...
A tested, in general, IQ, and this is true of East Asians around the world, and it's true of Asian babies who are born and are adopted by Caucasian-French couples, and it's true whether or not there's stimulation around where the Asian babies are.
There were a number of Asian babies, I think, in...
Korea, I can't remember north or south, a bunch of Asian babies who were rescued and suffered severe malnutrition for the first couple of months of their life and were incredibly deprived of stimuli and so on for the first couple of months or four to six months of their lives.
Starved and no stimulation and they grew up to have above average IQ so it's not just environment.
Obviously environment plays a part to some degree but it's true for East Asians around the world.
That they end up with an IQ between 104 and 105 on average relative to Caucasian IQs of 100.
And this is reflected, of course, in the incomes that East Asians throughout the world, wherever they are, generally have.
Where there are free markets and not massive amounts of bigotry, they generally end up with a higher per capita income than Caucasians, even in supposedly Caucasian countries and so on.
Those would sort of be my arguments from a biological standpoint as to how you might make a case for East Asians in particular being more case-elected.
Okay, yeah, that seems compelling.
Well, I suppose that answers my question, I guess, to the best of the ability we have.
Yeah, and please understand, you need to look up the experts for all of this.
It's just my, in passing, understanding of how this goes.
Let's see, here we go.
Mike, did you want to dump this stuff in the show?
Yeah, sure.
And I encourage everyone to do their own research and look into this yourself.
But I'm just going to read this here.
It says, Dozens of studies have found race differences in brain size, whether measured by MRI, endocranial volume, brain weight at autopsy, or external head size, with or without correction for body size.
Averaging all the data, the following figures have emerged.
Brain size for East Asians?
1,364 cubic centimeters, compared to whites, 1,347 cubic centimeters.
The overall mean for East Asians was 17 cubic centimeters more than it was for whites when it comes to brain size.
And of course, as you can imagine, in 17 cubic centimeters, there are billions of neural connections and so on.
So this is one Sure.
All very interesting stuff that I've never, until recently, have never been exposed to.
I mean, I think I'd heard a few of those facts, but not the majority, so that's interesting.
And do you know why you've never heard these facts?
Which are very well known in the biology...
I could guess.
I'm sorry?
I could guess, certainly, yeah.
Seems rather politically incorrect, but...
Oh, those inconvenient facts.
Those inconvenient facts, right?
Yeah, I mean, it's basically because of communism, you know, and I sort of hate to sound like, you know, the Reds scare or the Reds are coming up my legs or whatever, But communism wished to discredit capitalism and therefore it downplayed any difference between the races and therefore the average value that the free market increasingly plays upon intelligence,
if there are intelligence difference between Caucasians and Asians or other races, Then that will show up in different incomes in a free market, right?
Because basically the free market is a giant IQ test.
I mean, whether we like it or not.
And it's becoming, this is, you know, we just had Charles Murray on the show, which was of course a great pleasure.
And he's written a book called Coming Apart, The State of White America, I think from 1960 to 2010 or something like that.
And he points out that as the market progresses and as technology gets more sophisticated and as financial instruments get more sophisticated, the premium that is paid for intelligence becomes more and more and greater and greater.
And he was taken out of a sort of midwestern town and he ended up, I think, graduating from Harvard and so on.
And he sort of pointed out that the capacity of elite schools to scour the country and find those bright sparks among everyone else and scoop them up and hoover them off to I guess the Hoover Institute and other places where their intelligence gets full.
Or Wall Street, of course, to find people who are really great at math and who can create these n-dimensional neural net financial thing jiggeries that apparently shit money on people's plates, right?
I mean, so his argument is that, you know, like 75 years ago, somebody who was really good at math but socially awkward, you know, might be an accountant in the back room somewhere that you never brought out to talk to clients, you know, just some Like the guy in office space who's just muttering to himself and sets fire at everything, hopefully without the last part occurring.
And he's saying social awkwardness plus high intelligence, which often go hand in hand, particularly if you're the smartest kid and a bunch of not-so-smart people, to put it as nicely as possible.
But now, if you're socially awkward but really smart, the opportunities for Wealth accumulation are enormous.
Just enormous.
In the computer field, in the financial field, in the mathematics field, in the statistics field, in the scientific field.
I mean, you can go gangbusters because there's a huge amount of non-client-facing, massive money-making jobs that require significant amounts of intelligence and so on.
And so his argument is to sort of point out that There's more of a concentration of intelligence.
There are more rewards of intelligence.
There's more of elite institutions scouring the country to find those with high intelligence, which is one of the reasons for an increasing wage gap.
Social mobility has remained pretty much the same now as it was sort of 50 or 75 years ago in that the numbers of poor people who become rich and the number of rich people who become poor, that social churn between the classes has remained relatively constant, but one of the reasons why there would be a bigger income disparity It's because of intelligence.
And if intelligence is, for a variety of evolutionary reasons, not widely, not evenly distributed among the races, and if this knowledge is kept from the public, that there may be intelligence differences between the races that there may be intelligence differences between the races or between ethnicities, if this knowledge is kept from the public, then the public will ascribe all unequal outcomes to racism.
And then what you get is a giant government program called Combating Reality, where any dissent is screened down, which is a perfect government program.
I'm going to combat reality.
I have a government program to make everyone the same height.
It's like, you know that can't ever happen, right?
Doesn't matter!
And you're racist, you're hightest for saying so, right?
I mean, so it's just part of destabilizing the market by...
And it is one of the great tragedies, of course, of the modern world that this information is rigorously denied and kept from the public because it means that governments are embarking on all kinds of fantasy missions that have unbelievably destructive social and economic consequences.
Literally, like they are taking a giant axe to the base of civilization.
And it's a genius part on the communists to sort of keep this information away from people.
It's fantastic.
Because, you know, we all want everyone to do well and we would all like it if most people were, you know, if all different groups were equal, that would be fantastic.
But it's not really up to us.
I mean, that's sort of up to Mother Nature and evolution and all that kind of stuff.
So, yeah, so there's a reason why this, you know, when you see disparities among particular ethnic groups, the answer is always, well, racism.
Or legacy of X, Y, or Z, or, you know, whatever it is.
And maybe there's some cultural stuff thrown in and so on.
And these, you know, all have effects and should be noted.
But, you know, the first place to go to is to IQ. And, you know, we just, again, not to harp back on Charles Murray, but This is sort of one of his basic arguments in The Bell Cove, which I read, oh gosh, 20 years ago now?
Something like that?
But the basic argument is, you say, ah, well, you see, Asians make more money than whites.
And that's a fact, right?
I mean, it's not a small amount more money, too.
Asians make more money than whites.
And this is not true.
Fundamentally.
It's not true that Asians make more money than whites.
What is true is that people who are more intelligent make more money than people who are less intelligent.
That's the accurate way of putting it.
Not Asians make more money than whites, but more intelligent people make more money than less intelligent people.
And we can understand that.
People who are physically strong used to do better in battle.
And the guys with, you know, legs the size of garbage cans and arms the size of my legs, right?
They did really well in combat.
And the guys who had really long legs and narrow hips did really well chasing down prey or hunting.
And so, throughout particular periods in human history, there have been specific physical advantages.
And, you know, through a lot of places around the world, Right now it happens to be intelligence.
Hopefully it'll stay that way.
You never know.
And what Charles Murray has pointed out with Richard Hernstein, and of course this is lots of people who've ground through the same data, which has been available for almost a hundred years.
No.
Over a hundred years now.
What they've said is that it's not that Asians make more money than whites, or that whites make more money than Hispanics.
Watch their What the reality, what the facts are, is that people with an IQ of 105 make more money than people with an IQ of 100.
And everyone who's got an IQ of 105 generally does better.
And so we're not talking about races, we're talking about intelligence.
Intelligence, if you normalize income, like pick a particular ethnic group, if you normalize by average IQ, Everybody makes the same, right?
So a Hispanic with an IQ of 90 makes about as much money as an Asian with an IQ of 90, makes about as much money as a white person with an IQ of 90, makes about as much money as a black person with an IQ of 90.
And so it is not Race that is being judged by the free market, it is intelligence that is being judged and found valuable by the free market.
And of course, if we understand that, like I said this, I don't know, probably eight or nine months ago in the show, I said it's entirely possible that the world is fairer than we think in terms of outcome.
And this is part of sort of what I was talking about, that it's...
Height is rewarded in basketball.
And, you know, those people who tend to be taller tend to do really well in basketball.
Basketball is not measuring race.
Basketball is measuring height and fast-fetched muscles and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
Yeah, medium income by race for Asians in 2012 was 68,636 in 2012 versus 57,000 for whites, 39 and change for Hispanics, and 33, 321 for blacks, right?
So what is being measured?
Everybody thinks that race is being measured, but the data does not support that at all.
Does that help at all?
Yeah, I basically believe all that already, so yeah.
Sorry to bore you, but of course...
Oh, not at all.
I mean, it's something that's repeating for sure.
Oh, it really does.
It really does.
And again, the usual caveats need to be put in place so the information is not misused.
A black or a Hispanic or Asian or European with an IQ of 130 has an IQ of 130.
You can't possibly prejudge any individual before you meet them.
But when you take the zoom lens back far enough, there will be patterns, again, that don't relate to any specific individual.
You may have met 10 short Chinese guys.
That doesn't mean the next Chinese guy you meet is going to be short.
He could be 6'6", right?
But there still nonetheless will be tendencies if you take the lens wide enough.
I hope that helps at least with regards to the Asian thing.
And nobody really knows for sure.
But I suspect that testosterone combined...
I mean, I'm a big fan of sort of parenting practices.
Although, of course, there are...
Significant chunks of data that challenge some of the thesis around parenting, which we're sort of working our way through.
But I think that some innate characteristics like adrenaline levels combined with certain parenting practices are probably the answer.
But again, we'll know.
Probably within the next 10 to 15 years, we'll know for sure all of this stuff in much more detail to the point where it's going to become irrefutable, I think.
But that doesn't mean that people won't still ignore it.
All right.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
Thank you very much as well.
Great question.
Have a nice evening.
All right.
Thank you, Ben.
All right.
Well, up next is Mark.
And Mark wrote in and said, I have some criticism of your coverage of the police violence stories, especially with regard to the poor black community.
Your stories were well researched and quite accurate.
But as a black person, I thought your focus seemed biased.
Both the police slash government and the poor black community are in the matrix, but your focus tended towards holding blacks to a higher standard while speculating and reasoning out rational justifications for the police.
I think your coverage ought to be more consistent toward each group if you want to draw blacks into the discussion.
That's from Mark.
All right, Mark.
Thank you very much for calling in.
I appreciate the question.
Thank you for having me on.
Alright, so can you go a bit into more detail about the bias that you perceive in what I'm doing?
Sure.
Of course, this is my perception, but I'm just going to say how I saw it.
It started, I think, with the Michael Brown coverage.
Like I said before, I thought a lot of what you said was accurate and well-researched, but the focus, where did you...
Put the spotlight.
I noticed you held the black community to a very high standard, which is good, but I wish it wasn't consistent to the police as well.
Well, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Sorry, just one sec.
So are you saying that I held the black community to a high standard relative to the police or relative to other ethnic communities?
Relative to the police, I feel.
Okay, I just want to be clear for those, right?
Because I talked about better parenting and so on.
Yeah, sure.
And I've talked about that to all communities, and that's been a sort of universal nag of mine, so to speak.
Sorry, go ahead.
But relative to the police.
Yeah, I love your high standards of parenting.
That's great.
Fantastic.
I support it 100%.
But there...
The black community is where it is and we have to address them at whatever level they're at.
And I noticed things like when you criticize the protests, people getting upset about the way the investigation and the prosecution was handled.
Yeah, okay.
There was a lot of emotions, and people were not analyzing things logically, super logically.
And I think maybe understandably, perhaps.
But yeah, you brought up some good points.
Hang on, hang on.
Hang on.
Sorry, sorry to interrupt.
So maybe understandably, tell me what you mean by that, if you don't mind.
Well, in my opinion, that...
Because the government system is the way it is and so corrupt, it is unfair to poor people.
And poor people kind of suffer, I think, unduly because of the way that the whole government system, including the police, We're going from Michael Brown as an individual to poor communities as a whole?
Because my question would be, do you think that there's any ethnicity that assaults a policeman, apparently tries to get his weapon, and then charges at him, and so on?
on, do you think there's any ethnicity that would not meet a violent response in that situation?
Okay.
In other words, if I did that, do you think there'd be some magic shield of white privilege that would prevent the policeman from shooting me if I signaled, like I tried to get his weapon from him and hit him and then charged at him and I'm 300 pounds and he's dazed and he's bleeding or whatever's going on?
right?
Do you think that he would not have a shot at me if...
I had done those actions with regards to a policeman.
No, I don't think so.
Really?
No, what I mean is I don't think there's any magic shield that would protect you if you had done the same things.
And I said, no, I don't think there would be some magic shield.
So that's not to do with Michael Brown being black.
That's to do with Michael Brown attacking a policeman.
Okay, so...
Yes, yes.
Getting shot, you mean, yeah?
Yeah, so he wasn't shot for being black, right?
He was shot because he attacked a policeman.
Yes.
And again, everything continues, but there were no charges laid, and the guy's free to enjoy the rest of his life, I guess, Wilson and so on, right?
So as far as that goes...
There were a lot of falsehoods put out about that, right?
I mean, so initially, the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch published this article.
Michael Brown remembered as a gentle giant, right?
He was dyed black, unarmed, and from multiple gunshots.
Daily Mail, oh, he was a gentle giant, timid and quiet, six foot four, tall, 300 pounds, and so on.
The paper ran quotes from Michael Brown's family and aunt who said, you know, he wasn't a violent person.
He was peaceful.
He was a gentle giant.
He looked like he could really do something, but he wouldn't.
You know, getting the victim's family, I mean, did they interview, you know, Officer Wilson's mother?
It's just sort of a very one-sided thing.
It was widely reported in the media that Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown in the back, execution style, with his hands in the air and This is all false and there was no substantial corrections or no hand-wringing on the part of the media like how could we have gotten this so wrong?
Brian Williams expands on some of his stories about being in Iraq and Katrina and a couple of other things and the shit hits the fan and the guy basically gets canned and so on.
And there's lots, you know, the Rolling Stone publishes this article about University of Virginia rape fests, which turn out to have some significant problems.
And there's, you know, all of this hand-wringing and so on.
There was even some hand-wringing about the credulity of the media and the lead up to the Iraq war and so on.
But there wasn't that same sort of hand-wringing about, like, how could we have inflamed racial tensions to this degree and so on, right?
They didn't really do any research, right?
I mean, so, you know, Dorian Johnson, you know, outstanding arrest warrant for theft.
Lewis Head, Brown's stepfather, five years in prison, two felony narcotics convictions.
Brown's mother involved in an assault or robbery of another family member for selling Brown merchandise and...
I mean, there was just a lot of lies, a lot of falsehood that was horrible and, you know, very destructive to race relations because, you I mean, I think good people and, you know, I'm sure we're on the same side of this.
Good people don't like it and notice when lies are spread that cause a lot of damage in a culture and in a society.
And there's no circling back to figure out how things went so wrong and what's wrong with our culture and the media that this kind of stuff would happen.
anyway so I don't mean to give you a big lecture because you know tell you what it's like to be black or anything but that's not you know you know if we if we want to talk about poor people we can do that but that's not Michael Brown was not shot because he was poor you know He was shot because he decided to attack a cop.
Okay, so you've kind of branched into another area, which is the media, right?
What you're saying is, okay, the media told lies, the media wasn't balanced, the media Didn't really look at the story and gave the wrong information, right?
So then, yes, I agree with you.
I do agree with you here.
And you can say, well, now you can say, okay, the black community in Ferguson, when they look at the media coverage, of course, it's sort of echoing what they already suspected about police, you know, what they already thought was true about the police.
From their own experience, from talking to other people about, you know, interactions with the police.
So they kind of, it's all very believable that that stuff, what the media said, was true, right?
Because of, you know, what they thought of the police.
So are we saying now, you know, your criticism is mostly directed at the media?
I was trying to talk about your criticism of the black community, and I was trying to say something about...
Oh no, I have criticisms of the black community too, if you want to talk about those too, that's fine to me.
Sure, but what I'm saying is you've kind of...
At first you asked me about the black community, and...
Now you talked about how you went on a rant about the media telling lies, so I'm not sure which one I should address here.
Do you know what I mean?
Okay, I mean, let's talk about the black community.
I've done lots of stuff on the media, and I certainly have some thoughts about the black community.
But yeah, let's talk about the black community.
And I'm happy if you want to lead off, of course.
Okay.
So, I... So, looking at it from the perspective of the Black community, yeah, if I had been in Ferguson, and I wasn't, but even from afar, the things that I heard at first from the media seemed believable, right?
Later turned out to be false, right?
And I'm glad you pointed those things out.
Thank you.
Really appreciate that.
It seemed believable.
And then it wasn't controverted in the media.
I mean, I don't think a lot of the black community was listening to your show, sorry to say, in Ferguson.
So I'm sure that wasn't, like, kind of common knowledge.
Do you know what I mean?
So they must have probably thought, you know, here's the media backing us up, blah, blah, blah.
And so they protested, right?
They got upset.
Well, okay, okay, hang on.
Hang on, though.
I mean, this stuff was all over the internet, though, right?
I mean, I didn't go do my own direct research, right?
I mean, I just got stuff off the internet, and so it wasn't like this information was impossible.
Obama phones give you internet access, so you just got to type it in and look, right?
Again, or their own computers or their own cell phones or whatever, right?
But if we're talking about a sort of very poor neighborhood, I mean, they're getting free phones from the government with internet access, so they can look this stuff up, right?
I don't know.
I mean, are you saying that your expectation is that the black community is...
Using the internet the same way that you and Michael and Storian are using it, you know, at that level of critical eye and looking for countervailing arguments to what they already think.
Well, I do know that, hang on, I mean, because, and this is not to say that these two situations are identical.
But of course, one of the very just criticisms that blacks have is with regards to lynching, which is, in other words, do not presume guilt, but rather reserve judgment until all the facts are in.
The rush to judgment, the assumption of guilt with incomplete information, and of course, this was after Trayvon Martin, and the black community already had This giant example of intense media manipulation to provoke hostility between the races.
So this wasn't like, oh well, this is the first time this has happened, so how could we possibly be expected to know, right?
Off Trayvon Martin, there was a huge amount of misinformation that was put forward by the media.
I won't go into all the details because I've got this presentation, right?
I mean, on the web that did like over a million views.
I think we're good to go.
I'd already had this big giant experience, not a year and a half or two years before, of a massive amount of misinformation, a rush to judgment, an assumption of guilt, which turned out to be false.
And since blacks, of course, rightfully decry lynching, which is the presumption of guilt and the rush to judgment, then shouldn't those virtues be modeled by a community that disliked that violation of those virtues so much in the past, and rightly so?
So, here we're talking about what I feel are In my question, saying that people who are in The Matrix, I felt, even at that time, that I was not in The Matrix.
I've been watching your show for a while, at least a year, and when the Michael Brown case came up, I thought I was more skeptical and critical, but no, I felt I had the same reaction.
I believed what I heard At first, right?
The things that I heard reported.
Because it seemed believable to me.
Do you know what I mean?
But that's the whole point.
I mean, the whites who lynched blacks, the black crimes, quote, seemed believable to the whites.
But that was horrible, right?
Sure.
But, okay, just because I'm part of the black community, even though it was believable, I didn't go out and kill him.
And if I saw...
Michael Brown, I wouldn't have hurt him.
Do you know what I mean?
I would have protested had I been in Ferguson, but I wouldn't have hurt anybody.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, well, I mean, okay, but, I mean, in the Eric Garner case, I think a family member tweeted out to over 5,000 followers the home addresses of people that she claimed helped kill my father.
I mean, the New York Times was publishing people's home addresses.
I think they published the home address of Wilson's parents or something like that.
I mean, there was death threats floating all over the internet.
I mean, there was some pretty scary stuff going on.
Okay.
Fair enough.
I... Okay.
I mean...
Sorry to interrupt, but isn't it the job?
I mean, you're obviously a very smart and well-read and eloquent person.
Isn't it the job to stand in front of the mob to say, whoa, whoa, you know?
Let's wait until the facts are in.
Let's not, right?
Isn't that the gig?
I mean, if you're...
If you've got better knowledge and you've got better information and you've got more understanding, I think the job is to stand in front of the mob.
I get that as a black guy, I can imagine that standing in front of that mob would have been a little bit alarming.
I've paid my price for standing in front of the libertarian cop-hating mob by saying, "Hey, I don't agree with the police.
I'm an anarchist, but for God's sakes, let's not reject facts.
Let's not reject the requirement for the burden of proof.
Let's not reject the assumption of innocent until proven guilty, which would be part of any rational system of justice." I think you're right.
And it takes like, you know, A certain moral toughness and just a fiber and, you know, real confidence in yourself to hold to that standard.
And I realized I wasn't there a year ago, you know, for various reasons.
You know, I wasn't like that, you know, just my own level of self-knowledge.
I was kind of looking for Reasons to feel sinned against, you know what I mean?
And this is from a person who thought I wasn't in the matrix, who thought I understood what was really going on.
So for me, thinking about myself and then imagining somebody with less self-knowledge than me, how they would react to this information.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, sorry, and I appreciate your honesty in all of this, not that you've not been honest today, but what information in particular do you think people would react to very strongly or negatively against?
You mean what information from you?
Yeah, you said like you're sort of out of the matrix and trying to imagine how other people, I guess other blacks, would have reacted to this information.
What information in particular?
Oh, I was talking about...
Just the reports in the media and, you know, talking to other Blacks or other people, your neighbors, about what was going on and hearing what people are reporting is going on and then formulating an opinion about, okay, what to do about it based on just all the information that you're hearing around you.
I would try to imagine how would I react if I had even less self-knowledge than I did at the time.
That's what I meant by how people would react to the information, negative information.
Just the popular information that was out there.
I think that it's important to just get all the facts out.
Of course.
And the information that would give some, I don't know, you could say scant comfort to the black community.
This is from the Wall Street Journal.
Okay, I'm sorry it's from like Whitey Town Central, but you know, I just wanted to sort of point this out.
Okay, so federal statistics report 43 million blacks are African Americans in the U.S., 630,000 police officers, or about 68 blacks per officer.
68?
Okay.
Yeah, 68 blacks for every police officer.
Police are six times as likely to be killed by black civilians than black civilians are to be killed by police.
Right?
So, in an encounter between a black officer and a civilian, sorry, between an officer of any race and a black civilian, It's six times more likely that the policeman is going to get killed than the policeman is going to kill the black.
A parallel calculation suggests a yearly average of 530 killings of non-blacks by police officers and 27 killings of police officers by non-blacks for a ratio of 20 to 1.
There are about 430 non-blacks per police officer.
Police are 20 times as likely to be killed by non-black civilians than non-black civilians are to be killed by police.
And we'll put the links to this.
Blacks are 14% of the U.S. population.
They account for 47% of killings of police.
Now, of course, when we say blacks are 14% of the U.S. population, we'd say, okay, roughly half of those would be black males, and that would be, of course, 7%.
And now, you know, The elderly black males are not taking on 10 cops or anything like that.
So we're, you know, 18 to 30 kind of thing.
We're talking, you know, maybe two percentage points of the population.
And when we put all that stuff together, we're getting that two or maybe three percent of the young black male population is killing almost half the police who are killed.
Blacks are 5.6 times as likely as non-blacks to kill a police officer.
And this is important information to have.
Because, you know, I mean, I'm not a cop, of course, right?
But the cops all know this.
Whether they're white cops or black cops or Hispanic cops or Asian cops or whatever, that a tiny percentage of the population is killing almost half the cops who were killed.
And this information, if it were more widely disseminated, would certainly never excuse the unlawful killing of a civilian by a police officer, of course.
But in terms of understanding what the police officers of all races are facing, the idea that it's just simply racism that is causing all of this, well, I don't think that case could strongly be made.
I'm glad you brought up those statistics and you say that you rightly point out that it doesn't excuse the unlawful killing of a civilian.
But the lawful standard is that the police have to just fear for their lives.
So just by quoting those statistics alone, that's enough.
That can be enough for the police to fear for his life from any black male that fits that description.
You can say, well, I feared for my life because, look, you know, this tiny percent of blacks, this demographic, caused a huge proportion of cop deaths.
Even though he didn't have a gun, I'm not saying that's what's happening, not talking about the Michael Brown case here, but just say that, you know, just me on the street, if I, you know, if I heard the police tell me to stop and I turn around and And maybe they don't have their gun drawn, but just I think, oh, you know what?
I want to record this by this interaction with the police.
I go for my cell phone and he kills me, shoots me.
The legal standard would say, well, you fared for your life.
You know, it's legitimate because, look, he fits the demographic.
There's a lot of arguments that can be made in saying, hey, any sudden movement by that black male Could cause a police officer to spare his life.
And that totally could be true.
That could actually be fear in his mind.
And therefore, he has lawfully killed someone.
Well, no, I don't think...
You can't just say, I was scared.
That doesn't work in the police.
It doesn't work under the law.
Your policeman can't just say, I was scared because he was black, so I shot him.
I mean, that guy is going to go to jail for sure.
There has to be some element of force.
Are you sure?
Are you sure?
I'm absolutely positive.
And you can look up these.
There's no way.
I mean, look, if the black man is refusing to comply and pulls something out of his pocket, then he might get shot.
If they say, keep your hands where we can see them, and he's not complying, and he's combative, and he's screaming at them, and then he reaches into his pocket, if he pulls out a cell phone, he might get shot because the cops don't want to wait to find out if it's a gun or not.
And that may be lawful, but you can't just say, well...
I pulled this guy over for speeding.
He was a black guy.
He looked at me funny.
I got nervous and shot him.
Right?
That would never work.
You could never get away with that in America.
I mean, certainly legally, right?
Who knows what weird stuff could go down throughout the process.
But it is not just fear that allows cops to shoot people.
I wish I could say that that's true.
I wish I could say that I agree with you.
No, no, man.
If it was true, we wouldn't need all this other stuff.
We wouldn't need Trayvon Martin.
We wouldn't need Michael Brown.
We wouldn't need all of these other examples if there were all these examples of people getting shot without any probable cause and without any of that stuff, right?
The fact that all of these...
the examples of racism when it turns out that the cases kind of fall apart, it's not like they're bypassing much more obvious cases in order to present these ones, right?
If you've got a slam dunk case of police racism, that'll go front and center.
But if all these other ones go front and center and then fall apart, I'm not assuming they have way better cases that they're not using.
I mean, the Justice Department's going to investigate that.
The media's going to dig in.
I mean, there's a huge amount of pressure on cops who shoot blacks to get charged.
And, you know, you've got protesters, you've got all these people out there, and you've got the media, bloodhounds and so on.
And the idea that they're bypassing all these really obvious cases of racism in order to present this nonsense, it just makes no sense.
How about, what did you think about the Tamir Rice shooting?
I don't actually know a single thing about the Tamir Rice.
I think I saw it somewhere on the media, but I have not.
She was an activist, is that right?
No, it was a young boy.
I think he was around 12 or so.
He was in a park playing with a plastic gun or toy gun.
Someone called in saying, I'm not sure if it's a real gun or not.
The police came, supposedly, to investigate, but the car came just barreling in right up to where the young boy was playing in the playground.
I mean, like, feet away.
And the passenger side police officer came out and just, from my perspective, immediately shot him.
Wait, again, I don't know anything about this, but didn't the boy have what appeared to be a gun?
Yes.
Right.
So, okay, in this case, I would say that shouldn't the police have used distance to a loudspeaker?
No, no, see, I don't know.
When did this happen?
Okay.
When did this happen?
June.
June 2015, right?
Okay.
I don't know.
I can't speak to this because I haven't looked it up.
Is it possible that there was a premature shooting?
I don't know.
Again, I reserve judgment until all the facts come in.
No, but you told me that it's not possible.
You said that, no, you're sure that this standard would never be used in the way that I described.
You were quite sure, but now you're saying you're reserving judgment.
Maybe it's possible.
I just found something here on USA Today.
The swiftness of the shooting was noted by Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Ronald Adrian, who found probable cause to charge the officers involved in the shooting.
Okay, I guess.
So isn't that exactly what I was saying earlier, that if the officers do something premature...
I'm sorry, maybe I got it wrong, but I believe that he was later exonerated and just never went to trial, even though it was a charge.
I honestly, again, you're jumping with information that I can't possibly look up during the conference.
Sure, sure.
Yeah, but...
Sorry, sorry.
I should have...
Yeah, you need to tell me ahead of time if you want to talk about...
Like, you can't jump me with things I can't possibly use.
No, no.
I mean, I didn't think I was going to...
I'm sorry.
I mean...
No need to apologize.
It's just that...
The judge found probably the cause to charge them.
I have no idea what happened in grand jury deliberations.
I have no idea what happened for the prosecutors or anything like that.
Let me just point this out too, Mark.
You said what Steph said afterwards contrasts to what he said earlier about shooting someone just because they're black and that not happening.
No, no.
I didn't say just because they're black.
I said it's because they felt scared.
Well, in this situation, there is, whether it's a toy gun or a real gun, there's another added element as well.
It's not just, that person's black and lots of cops get attacked by black people, therefore it's okay to shoot somebody.
There's more added elements than just what Steph was talking about originally.
So let's move on from that.
But I guess my question is, which I think is the question on A lot of people's minds, no matter what, ethnicity.
My question is, why do you think that young black men are committing so many crimes?
It's the trillion dollar question, literally, right?
I've obviously got some answers around parenting and other stuff.
But you've obviously got more useful stuff to say about it than I do.
What are your thoughts?
I think parenting probably has a large degree with it.
I kind of agree with a lot of your hypotheses and theses about this.
I mean, I think there's a lot of violence in the black community and, you know, the way that parents raise their children.
I was certainly hit when I was a child.
Yeah, so I think that's a major factor.
And I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I just asked you to give me your thoughts, but what was the degree or kind or frequency of hitting that you experienced?
Because, you know, when black kids say I was spanked and white kids say, or Asian kids, they're usually not quite talking about the same kind of thing, are they?
Sure.
I would, of course, you know, it's always hard going back into the memories of childhood, but I don't know, like, Maybe when I was under 10, something might happen once every couple of months.
That's my best guess, I think.
Maybe more, maybe less.
I guess once every couple of months.
But I felt terror.
I felt fear.
I felt like if I did something wrong, Fear of that beating was very powerful.
Right.
And when you say beating, what do you mean?
How was it achieved or what was done?
Sometimes with the belt, sometimes with the hand, but just like...
He really achieved, like, fear, right?
Like, he accomplished the fear aspect, like...
The physical pain, I don't really remember now, but the fear I felt, I can picture that.
And what was the fear of in particular?
I mean, it wasn't, I assume, just the physical pain.
As you say, the physical pain was bad, but didn't stick with you as much.
And this was your own father, I assume, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Just his face, his anger, his threatening voice, just the way his eyes looked at me.
All of those things were just, I felt so frightened.
I just of, you know, I think of being hit, but it's just the whole experience was, I didn't want it.
It was horrible.
I didn't want it.
Did you fear that he might lose control or did you fear that your bond with him would be broken or he might reject you from here on in?
Again, I'm not trying to lead you.
I'm just kind of curious.
Yeah, I get it.
These are great questions, but I haven't analyzed it that far.
I can't really say.
It's just terror.
I don't know of what.
I can't say bond.
I can't think that was the issue.
I never thought that was an issue.
Lose control?
Maybe?
I've never thought that.
It's just primal.
It was just primal of being attacked, being hurt.
You know what I mean?
You don't want to be hurt.
You don't want to be experienced.
Fear of heights.
When you go to the edge, there's this fear of falling that's just terror.
That kind of primal fear, there's just, okay, I don't want to hurt.
That's sort of a death fear, right?
Like, I mean, you, like everyone, we all learn how to ride a bike, and we take a whole bunch of tumbles off of that and get our raspberry knees and our skinned elbows and sometimes a black eye or a bloody nose or whatever.
But we get up on the bike, and, you know, so fear of injury, fear of being hurt and so on, you know, that's being a kid, right?
But this is something different, right?
I don't know.
I think it was...
Fear of injury and pain.
That was part of it, for sure.
But you must have done things that were physically risky as a kid, right?
I assume that didn't just stop you completely, right?
Right, obviously not.
So it's not just fear of pain.
I'm sorry.
I know these are really tough questions.
I appreciate you mulling them over.
I don't know the answer, but they're very tough to think of in the moment.
We can move on if you want.
But I've really got a visceral sense of just how scary that was for you.
And I just really wanted to understand that more.
Yeah, me too.
I absolutely do.
It's something I'm working on.
I don't know.
What about your mom?
Was your mom sort of floating around this environment?
Was she there in the background while your dad would beat you?
Yeah, in the background, yeah.
Sometimes she would say something like, wait till your father gets home.
That would add to the tension and fear.
She kind of removed herself from the situation.
When I picture being hit by my father, I don't really see my mother.
She didn't stop him.
didn't she wasn't maybe even in the room really so it's yeah it was all about my father and I mean, I think my mother would sometimes try to hit, but it didn't hurt, so it was not really effective.
But, you know, for my father, that was scary.
I mean, yeah, I don't know.
I didn't want to...
I didn't want the pain to continue.
I didn't want...
I just wanted to stop.
Right.
I wanted to stop.
I wanted to...
Were the beatings prolonged?
I shouldn't say.
Like, were they long?
Were they...
Like...
Yeah, I mean...
There were...
Sometimes...
I mean, in my mind, they felt long.
Yeah, I mean...
I guess at some points, I tried...
I learned to, like, overact...
To be, so that it would stop sooner, you know, just to be like, oh, so terrorized and so, like, even more, pretend to be even more, in more pain so it would happen, the beating would stop sooner.
But yeah, it was, I don't, I can't give, put a number on it, but it was, you know, It would go on.
It's somewhat how I would try to escape or run away because that would make it last longer, right?
Just, you know, trying to chase me or hold me down or threaten me like it's going to be worse or something.
So there's some element of the, I don't know, chase, you could say, that made it longer.
Could have been minutes.
So if you tried to sort of back down or get away or even overact to prevent it, there was a real...
Subjugation?
Like a subjugation, like I now own you.
I don't know if I felt that, but what I felt was I needed to show terror.
I needed to show that I was scared and I know that I was wrong and this terror shows me that I'm wrong.
You know what I mean?
That By showing how scared I am, I'm showing that I'm learning a lesson.
Right.
Imprinted, right?
Like it's got to really imprint upon you.
Yeah.
Right.
Did this tie into any religious education that you went through?
Yeah.
My father was very, very Christian.
He was very, very church-going.
Yeah.
It was big time.
Sometimes he did Sunday school service and things like that.
It was always very religious.
And did you get, like, a lot of the, you know, hellfire and brimstone and all that?
I wouldn't say a lot.
I wouldn't say a lot, but enough, I think.
Enough to say I didn't want to go to hell and I wanted to go to heaven.
Just that kind of thing.
I didn't...
Yeah.
But, I mean...
I'm sure religion had an aspect to it.
I went through a major depression.
I just got out of it a few weeks ago.
I couldn't leave my room for months and I kept watching atheism videos and police brutality videos and building videos for some reason, like video games where people will build things.
But I think that atheism had something to do with that childhood I'm trying to, I don't know, make sense of it and be right about, maybe like thinking like, you know, yeah, no, I'm right that religion is all fake and it's not good somehow and that makes me a good person for not believing it.
That's why I was watching.
I don't know exactly why.
How did you first head down the road to atheism?
To atheism?
You know, I think it's kind of like typical North American way, which is like you get, as you become a teenager, you sort of, you know, you learn more things at school and it's not really,
it doesn't seem like such a realistic kind of thing and people around you are not the same religion as you and it's like, okay, It doesn't seem, like, there's not, there isn't really a strong reason to believe,
and my parents were, you know, allowing you more and more independence by that age, so you sort of stop going to church, and then you go to university, and you're like, okay, you don't go to church at all, and then you're just like, okay, I don't really believe it.
Like, it's just not logical stuff, right?
Especially when you're at university and talking to other people about Like, you know, very deep stuff and it's all, like, science-based.
I studied physics and astronomy, so, you know, it's just kind of, yeah, there's no logical evidence for it, so it doesn't seem intelligent to talk about and say you believe in it.
Great.
And what has your experience been, you know, based upon, you know, the genius stuff that you're studying, what has your experience been With the black community or the people you grew up with.
If you grew up in a black community, I don't know.
Maybe you did, maybe you didn't.
But given your educational goals and all that, there is, from my understanding, certain elements within the black community is like, oh, you're acting white or the education is considered to be a sellout or something like that.
Did you ever experience anything like that based upon your goals and achievements?
No, not really.
I never felt strongly connected to the, quote-unquote, black community in my neighborhood.
They seem, I mean, you know, it's multicultural, of course, but the people who were, quote-unquote, acting black, so to speak, they didn't seem like my kind of crowd, you know?
They're like, okay, you know, they're good at sports and, you know, they're good at dancing and music and cool stuff.
I was never in the cool crowd.
So, you know, I was, you know, there were also like smart black kids and there was, you know, all different, like smart kids hung out with smart kids and, you know, cool kids hung out with cool kids and We were just talking about this in the last call, too, you know, just about how it's intelligence that matches us up, not in particular race, right?
Yeah.
So I never thought I was, okay, part of some kind of black community, so to speak, in growing up.
I just hung out with people.
So that's interesting, and that makes it all the more interesting to me, Mark, about how when this brutality...
I mean, I assume you've not experienced a lot of...
You haven't attacked too many cops in your day, am I fair to...
You've kept the number under a dozen, is that fair to say?
Yeah, a few under a dozen, maybe a dozen.
You're not wildly contributing to these statistics we're talking about.
Okay, good.
But it's interesting then that when you...
Read about these media reports about Mike Brown or these kinds of things that then you feel an affinity.
You know what I mean?
Yes, I do.
Yes, I know exactly what you're saying.
Help me understand that.
I don't think that's bad or anything.
I'm just curious about where that comes about.
I don't know.
I think when this stuff sort of blew up in the media, started to go, I was also going through I was spiraling down towards my depression, and I guess part of it was I was attracted to injustice somehow.
I felt like, oh, if I could be a part of a group that felt that was being sinned against, somehow that would make me okay, or at least I had that kind of thing.
You know, I'm not satisfied with my life, but at least I can say that, oh, here I am, this is something that I'm being wronged, and maybe that can explain my behavior.
Right, so if I understand this rightly, and I'm sorry to interrupt, was it the idea that victimhood would save you from anxiety or depression?
Yeah, yeah.
Victimhood could help.
Maybe, of course, this is all very unconscious, right?
But now that I'm thinking about it, maybe that victimhood could save me from dealing with my issues.
Like, I didn't have to think about what I was doing wrong and how I needed to change my life and what I needed to fix in my life.
I could be part of that victimhood.
I can fight for justice and rightness without dealing with that inside myself.
My own personal problems pale.
In the face of this terrible injustices, my own personal problems should vanish.
Yeah.
Right.
So you want to wind yourself into a larger cause and thereby overstep or overleap your own personal problems.
It's a way of, in a sense, suppressing your own emotions by linking yourself into a cause by which your emotions are petty and selfish.
Does that make sense?
Yes, it does.
I would say it's a form of avoidance, right?
Like, You know, you can wrap yourself up in this cause and say, well, you know, I'm doing something good, right?
Even though, at heart, I'm avoiding what I really need to deal with.
Right.
And again, I don't mean to pry.
I don't talk about anything you're not comfortable with, but do you have, like, in hindsight, a sense of the issues that gave you that anxiety or depression?
Oh, yeah.
I'm still working through it, but at some point I was afraid to leave my apartment, I was afraid to meet anyone, even my neighbors, see anyone's face.
I was just afraid of people criticizing me, and I was afraid that they would be right, their criticism would be right, and I didn't want to face that.
And so I... this is all my...
And what were the criticisms that you thought they...
was it anything in particular or just as a whole?
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like, okay, just things like, well, during my spiraling depression, I stopped answering people's calls, I stopped answering emails.
I stopped responding to people, so I wasn't responsible.
I've always been a procrastinator.
These things, I tend to avoid conflicts all the time.
I don't deal with things on time and well.
So I felt like Yeah, yeah.
If you noticed any of those things, I would have to say, yeah, you're right.
That's true.
I didn't answer that email.
That's true.
I did procrastinate.
That's true.
I didn't handle something in a timely fashion.
Yeah, all of that's true.
So I didn't want to face that kind of criticism because, yeah, it was true.
And I knew I was wrong, but I couldn't Figure out...
I just...
The way I dealt with it during the depression cycle was to avoid more and more.
And just...
Well, yeah.
Would you...
I'm just sort of going off my own gut feeling here.
So, you know, obviously, Mark, tell me if I go astray, as usual.
But I... You know, from my own childhood, the things that were the hardest for me in some ways were the inflicted criticisms...
That I had to agree to, but which I deep down didn't agree with.
You know, like, I don't know, like penmanship.
You know, this is a little stupid shit that went on in school, but, you know, like, you know, I'd be sitting there writing poems and stories and all the stuff that I did when I was a kid, and, you know, they were, I think, very creative and very good, and were recognized that way, but people would bitch at me about penmanship And, oh God, you know, it's like, how petty and useless can it be?
You know, like, does it really matter how well and how tidily and how nicely Hamlet was written?
And again, I'm not saying I was writing Hamlet or anything, but it's like people, like the teachers would focus on penmanship or layout or something like that, you know?
Or, you know, rather than Liking a drawing that I had done, they, you know, questioned whether the drawing was appropriate in some manner or, you know, just stuff like that.
And, you know, these were all, you know, criticisms like, you know, I mean, I've always been good at organizing things mentally.
That's kind of the gig, right?
Organizing my physical space, well, it's not quite the same.
You know, the sort of messy, somebody who's organized in their mind but messy in their environment, I hit that stereotype.
Or at least I used to.
I'm better now.
But I used to hit that stereotype.
Foo-tee!
And, you know, like I'd be writing, you know, 50,000 lines of code and I'd have it all organized in my head and then somebody would ask me for a piece of paper and I couldn't find it.
And I always felt that sort of given the giants, you know, there's a scene in the Facebook movie, what was it called, The Social Network or whatever it is, where Zuckerberg is basically saying, you know, what I'm thinking about is so far beyond this little room of lawyers that I can't even tell you, you know.
And I just, I don't want to take over the conversation, but When people would criticize me for things that were...
I mean, you'd sort of give up and say, okay, well, if penmanship is important to you, I guess I'll work on my penmanship.
But you notice that I just wrote a haiku and I'm nine, right?
Or whatever it was, right?
And so I always felt sort of like there were a lot of criticisms floating around me that I just didn't care about.
And in many ways, I still don't care about I'm just much more comfortable not caring about them, and I've got to a place in life where I don't need to care about them, if that makes any sense.
So the criticisms around procrastination and so on, you couldn't have procrastinated that much if you were studying physics, and I can't remember what else you were studying, but that's hard work and all that.
Were these criticisms that you agreed with fundamentally, or were these criticisms that were just floating around?
That you kind of had to accede to, but you didn't necessarily agree with.
A couple of things.
I agreed with them, and looking back, I still agree with them now.
I mean, people didn't actually criticize me, though, for this kind of thing.
It didn't come up that much, very rarely.
I imagined that they would criticize me if they knew the truth and I tried to hide it.
And I wish I had your confidence.
People's criticism of me doesn't just flow.
It really bothered me to be criticized.
I didn't want to be disliked or something being said bad about me.
It really hurt and I really I was afraid of it, and I realized that that was a kind of underlying fear with interacting with people that's been there at a low level my whole life.
Right, like they have a power over you to make your day good or bad that's out of your control, right?
Yeah, so that's why I had this kind of inner shy streak that I had to work to overcome, and eventually I became an English teacher.
ESL English teacher, and so, I mean, I did overcome it in certain aspects, but it still continued, like, just talking to strangers on the street or on the bus or subway, I always feel this twinge of fear before I talk to them, like, what if something bad happens with this interaction?
And even, like, the worst-case scenario, why would that terrorize me?
I was afraid of things Like people's reactions, like any negative reaction.
And yeah, that stopped me from doing a lot of things and I realized that's the core.
That's how I eventually climbed my way out of depression is by constantly facing that fear, by actively, whenever I felt that pain in the pit of my chest of I don't want to do something, I just pushed myself to do it and to even do a little bit of facing that fear.
And I did it constantly, day after day, every single time.
And eventually it became a habit.
And now I'm actively looking for things that challenge that fear response.
And I'm doing well now.
Right.
Right.
It struck me you said the building videos and the police brutality videos.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Why is that?
What do you think the police brutality videos did for you?
The police brutality videos?
Yeah.
As I said, I think I looked at it and I said, oh, the cops are wrong.
The cops are wrong in this situation.
They're wrong and I'm not like them.
See, they're the bad guys.
I understand injustice.
I understand what's right in this world.
I can somehow stand up for this and call out something that's wrong in this world.
I can point to that and say, that's wrong.
Even though I was...
Not good myself.
I wasn't doing things the way I wanted to do and I was just running scared and being afraid to deal with my own problems.
I could deal with this one.
The brutality videos, I'm just curious, were there any type?
Was it beatings or shootings?
Actually, it wasn't just police brutality.
It was like any kind of police injustice.
I watched a lot of videos of like People doing, like, First Amendment tests, like taking a video of the police station and the cops come out and like, oh, give me your ID. Like, anything where people were exercising their rights and cops were infringing on their rights, anything like that, all of those videos I was watching.
Like, police brutality?
Sure, I mean, it's, like, kind of the gold standard of injustice, right?
But I would look for anything.
I assume that it was usually police men, right?
Yes.
Because, I mean, in general, and this is, of course, highly variable, so to my way of thinking, in general, police are often standing for a father in our minds, right?
Yes.
Because the police take over where our father's authority ends, the police...
Takeover.
And you know this old thing like women they say oh you know like I was I was raised and I was subjugated to my parents and then I went to school I was subjugated to the teachers and then I was subjugated to the priests and then I got married I was subjugated to my Husband and I never got to make my own decisions and be independent and so on.
And it's kind of interesting to me that technically the moment you turn 18 or whatever the adult is, you then pass from the authority of your parents to the authority of the police.
And I think that a lot of people's relationship with the police has a lot to do with their relationship with their fathers.
I mean, it's not a coincidence that I have theorized a lot about a society that Without police, when I grew up without a father.
Yeah, I think you have a lot.
There's a lot to that.
You point out a very, very good point that I can see the connection now.
Yeah, you know, even now, I'm afraid to interact with my father.
I want to talk to him about the things that I've been doing and thinking recently, but I'm afraid to bring him up.
I'm afraid.
You're afraid to bring stuff up with your father?
I mean, what about the atheism?
Yeah, I'm afraid to bring it up with him.
What do you think would happen if you did it?
What do I think would happen?
Honestly, I think he would probably just be dismissive and probably not try to get involved in the He might say a few counterpoints, but I think he would not really engage in a discussion about it.
I think he would just try to end it as soon as possible.
Maybe avoid it.
That's maybe the same strategy that I used for a long time of avoidance.
Probably I learned it from him.
Right.
And how do you see the future of your relationship with your father?
I mean, I guess my concern or the concern that pops into my mind, Mark, is the degree to which you're going to have to hide who you are to a large degree, right, from your father for one time to come?
Yeah, yeah.
I hardly ever see him.
The last 10 years or so, maybe longer, 15 years.
I've seen him only occasionally, once every couple of years, I would say.
Oh, you really only see him every couple of years?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I saw him recently just by accident at my younger brother's place, and he popped in.
I talked to him, but before that, I hadn't spoken to him for two years.
Was that because there was any big conflict or fight?
No, no.
There wasn't a specific moment where the break happened.
I think there was an incident in my mind that happened really early on.
Where he was so angry at my older brother, and he criticized him so much for something I thought was...
No, for me, it was the opposite.
I thought my brother was doing well in his life.
He had his own business.
He was making money.
He was doing a lot of things.
My father got so angry at him, and I felt like, man, that was so unfair.
Like, what you said was so unfair.
And after that, I didn't want to be in a good relationship with my father.
I didn't want to have a good relationship with my father if my brother gets that level of criticism.
It would just be unfair.
What was the criticism?
I think he was just angry about, you know, clean up your room, get organized.
You don't have a real job.
You know, you're living in the basement.
You should be paying rent.
It's like a whole rant, a huge long rant of just everything possibly wrong.
And it was, I don't know, it wasn't like coherent.
It wasn't like, okay, here is logically what.
It just seemed like anger.
For the sake of anger.
And what do you think the anger was really about?
That's a good question.
I never thought to think about it.
I think, man, I'd have to totally guess.
Maybe in my mind, my brother was doing well.
He was, at a young age, Like, maybe doing better than my father was doing at that age, perhaps, and maybe he felt, you know, he wanted to point out areas where my brother wasn't doing well to bring him down a notch.
This is a guess.
This is a total guess.
No, it's what they call leveling, right?
Which is if you feel that you've somehow become diminished in status relative to someone else, that you've A lot of people have an urge to bring that person down.
Yeah.
And the things that he was criticizing your brother about, they don't sound hugely important.
Yeah, I agree.
They were not.
Because we were just talking about this earlier, like about how criticisms that you can't deny But which you think are much less important than the people criticizing you for.
Right, yeah.
You know, like when I was in boarding school, it was like, Mr.
Molyneux, your lace loops are of a different size, right?
Like it was that level of just stupid, stupid consistency, you know?
Your lace loops are of a different size, and this must be fixed.
Yes.
You know, to which I can literally only roll my eyes and say...
It's this where we are as human beings in this environment that I now have to...
Oh, you know, like your garters are not pulled up.
Somehow.
That's what keeps your socks up, right?
Somehow this is disrespectful to God.
Like just, okay, I can't disagree with you.
Yeah.
My lace loops are in fact of a different size.
Mm-hmm.
But God, I hate to live in a world where you consider this an important thing.
Like, I hate to live on that planet of just tininess.
And again, I'm not trying to condition your response or anything, but that's sort of what comes to mind when he's nagging at your brother about stuff that is not particularly important.
Yeah, but yeah, the funny thing is that he...
My father nagged my older brother about that, but he didn't really bring up that kind of stuff to me, and he was much...
Softer and gentler if he did criticize me about such things.
And I always felt like my dad kind of respected me and thought I was doing well.
I was kind of doing well in school, headed towards university.
He had a positive opinion of me.
But when he got mad at my brother, it felt like it It was all laid bare and I was like, okay, how can you accept your father being kind of nice to you when he's criticizing your older brother for such petty things, right?
I couldn't...
It was like the truth came out, like atheism or something, you know?
No, like you see the mechanics of a personality really deeply.
That is really tough.
Yeah, when you see the dysfunction of a personality.
I mean, when I first realized that my mother could never admit fault, I mean, I was like, oh gosh.
Like, when you really see that, I was pretty young.
I can't remember how old I was, but it definitely was by the time we came to Canada when I was 11.
So it was before that, I just, I really realized that my mother would never, ever admit fault.
She would never admit to being wrong, even if she was obviously wrong.
And, um, When you see deeply into that kind of pettiness, it is really tough to unsee it, you know?
Please poke out my eyes.
I wish I hadn't seen that in a way, but once you've seen it, you've seen it, right?
Yeah.
What's your father's relationship to the larger society, to the police, to...
I mean, is he a justice warrior?
Does he not so much focus on that?
No.
Nothing like that.
Uh...
He's a perfectly law-abiding citizen, pays taxes.
I mean, sometimes my brother brought up the idea of when we discovered, when my brother first discovered fiat money system and terrible the way things are done, he brought it up to my father and My dad said, yeah, I already knew that.
I studied banking.
I wanted to be a banker.
And it was just very dismissive.
Like, yeah, I knew all that stuff already.
But he didn't seem to see, like, the larger implication about society, right?
So sort of like, yeah, that's just the way it is, right?
Well, and also, you know, when my daughter says that she's discovered something cool, I don't sort of say, well, I've known about this for years, because the whole point is that it's her interest that matters at that moment, not my knowledge, right?
Yeah, yeah, right.
It's funny.
Like, Dad, did you know the Earth is a sphere?
Oh, yeah, I've known that for four decades.
Let's move on.
It's like, no, it's the fact that she, right?
I can't say circle because I'm speaking to a physicist.
I know I'm going to get those comments.
It's the fact that she's excited about it and interested.
What do you think?
Where did you find this out?
Isn't it weird that we're on the bottom but not falling off?
Yeah, for sure.
A lot of that stuff is missing.
Man.
And are you out of your...
Where do you stand with regards to your anxiety or depression now?
Where do things stand with my anxiety and depression?
No, I'm doing amazingly well.
I basically started by walking every morning and then facing my fear by talking to people, facing my fear by sending messages to people I haven't talked to in a long time.
I've been constantly doing that, facing my fear by applying to jobs.
I started working just a week ago.
I'm starting my own business at a very small scale right now.
But facing my fear are things I had thought about doing for a long time, but I never had the courage to do it or go follow through it.
Every time I think about these things, I just put myself out there I face the risk, I take the risk, and I'm feeling more and more confident every time.
I'm pushing myself every day, and I'm getting good results.
And things that don't go exactly so well, I kind of take it as a learning experience, and I continually go to the next step.
So I feel like a changed man.
I feel like, wow, just by confronting my fear every time, I've moved I've moved mountains.
I've transformed my life.
My apartment is clean, cleaner at least.
I'm more organized at work when I'm planning my lessons.
I'm more positive.
I'm happy to talk to people.
I'm smiling more.
I talk to people, I see people, and I want to interact with them.
If I'm afraid to do it, I want to interact with them even more.
I push myself more.
It's night and day.
I feel like a new man.
I feel like I'm capable of anything.
I mean, that's great.
And I commend you, obviously, on your wisdom to notice that if you're afraid of something, if you take a step backwards, fear takes a step forward.
If you take a step forward, fear takes a step backwards.
And that's really a very fundamental thing to understand.
This is obviously not in this category, but this is my This is my issues with the women who heard rape statistics that they didn't like, and they need the hug rooms, and they need people to avoid talking about these topics.
And it's like, okay, so you're afraid of data, which is kind of like a weird thing, like you've got some irrational pathological fear of Star Trek characters or whatever, right?
But you're afraid of data, and therefore, but if you take a step backwards, then the fear takes a step forwards, and eventually it just crowds you, and you're like thinner than paint against the far wall.
It crowds you out of your whole life.
You have to grit your teeth and you have to walk into the fire.
And then you'll find that, like Moses with the Red Sea, it parts in front of you.
But if you run away, you drown.
And if you step into it, you walk on solid ground.
It's just one of these weird counterintuitive things.
But I had to almost drown in order to really, really realize that.
I was just at the bottom.
I couldn't go any more limited in my life.
In my own room, right?
And, you know, the rent wasn't being paid.
It was ridiculous.
It was to the point of, okay, I'm going to get kicked out and get evicted.
So that level of just...
There's nowhere else to go.
That's the point where I had to start facing my fears.
Right.
Now, I mean, I don't want to...
And I hugely commend you for that, and...
I mean, there is a certain amount of mental health that I believe is dependent upon willpower.
Now, I mean, you know, you need to have good information to know where to exercise your will, but as you said, like I was scared of something, just had to force myself to do it.
Just had to make myself do it, and next thing you know, I, um...
I'm doing better and the fear diminishes and so on, right?
Because it was sort of struck when you said like I was watching these police brutality videos and these people building their own worlds videos.
Yeah.
their own worlds, that's sort of like repetitive thinking or to some degree propaganda or a repetitive exposure to the same kind of information.
Like you're building your own world, you're building your own not empirical world, but it's a world of mental constructs like Minecraft or whatever, like you're building your own world.
And in the same way, paranoia or anxiety or depression tends to have you go back to the same repetitive stimuli.
Like whenever I notice that I'm stuck in a rut, I just try and expose myself to new information or make different choices than I was making before and that usually sort of shakes me out of any kind of rut that I'm in.
So I commend you for getting that and acting on it and of course for sharing your story which I hope will encourage other people.
You do have to take that step forward.
If you run away from fear, it'll just hit you like a tsunami, but if you step towards it, it usually backs off.
My advice to people out there is practice.
When you're afraid of something, that's a signal to act.
Practice overcoming fear with the little things.
The small things that you're afraid of, push yourself to do that.
And if you keep doing it a lot, you start to realize how powerful pushing yourself is, and you start to act it in more and bigger things, in bigger things, and you've kind of relished the fear because you realize, oh, good things come when I face it.
So, you know, practice facing your fear.
That's my biggest advice.
Take it as a practice.
Yeah, and you have to assume that your actions...
We'll give you the maximum amount of control possible.
I mean, I'm very much one...
I want to sort of return to your earlier criticism, Mark, but I'm very much one for...
Assume maximum freedom until proven otherwise.
Assume maximum self-responsibility until proven otherwise, right?
And so, you know, when it comes to the black community and the relationship that I have with the black community...
It's probably quite annoying to a lot of people in the black community, right?
Which is that my basic perspective is, okay, let's try living as if there's no racism until you've reached the absolute end of everything you can do to improve as a community.
And this is true for all communities, not the black community in particular.
But live as if there are no limits.
Take 100% self-responsibility.
Once you have done that, For a considerable period of time, everything that's left, then you can start to look at racism.
But right now I'm concerned that when you were facing your anxiety and you began to focus on the externalities and the injustices and the racism and the police brutality and so on, that it drains you to some degree of your will to change your own environment for yourself.
If you look at a tall enough mountain, you ain't gonna climb, right?
And so my particular approach has been, and I know it's an annoying approach, and I'm not even saying it's a fair or valid or true approach.
I just think it's the most practical and helpful approach, which is to say, okay, let's pretend there's no such thing as racism and nothing that limits us coming in from the outside society.
So if we assume that, and if we assume that all the deficiencies within society Our demographic are due to things under our control.
Then for sure, as much as can be solved internally will be solved.
100% responsibility.
And As you know, I came from a very disadvantaged and abusive background, and at some point I had to either say, this is going to run me, or I'm going to assume that there's nothing that's going to stop me from achieving what I want.
And to a large degree, that has been the case.
And again, I'm not trying to say that my experience is, you know, directly transferable to the black experience and so on, but my goal has always been to communicate, to say, once you have done everything you can do, then you can blame the rest on racism.
But my concern is that by blaming things on racism, particularly structural racism where nobody has to be racist or say something racist, It's just there somehow, you know, even without the evidence.
And if there's no evidence for it, it means it's buried and it's the unconscious.
Like, it's just, like, that to me is like I'm limited by ghosts.
You know, I can't achieve because unverifiable imaginary things, right?
And so my encouragement has always been pretend that there's nothing outside there, outside of the world, limiting your potential as a community.
Now, If there is excessive arrests of black people, excessive police brutality, or excessive deaths among blacks from the police, grit your teeth and say, what can we do differently as a community to affect this?
Because my concern is, you know, run to the government, run to the media, and racism, racism, racism, and so on.
Okay, that's racism.
I get it.
I mean, the weird thing is that as a white man...
I get it in some ways even worse than other demographics because it's perfectly permissible to say absolutely horrible things about white men and there's no media that runs to the defense of white people so there's kind of helplessness when you see all the negative things associated with I think?
I'm not supposed to talk about it.
You're not supposed to talk about it.
Or maybe just not with me.
I don't know.
I'm glad we have the conversation.
So my goal has always been, assume everything is 100% your responsibility.
Because, now, is it?
Of course not.
Of course not, right?
Are there limitations on the black community that come from outside?
Yes, there are.
But you don't know.
Nobody knows the degree to which.
Like, if black people do exactly what Asian people do, will they end up like Asian people?
Well, it can't just be white racism because Asians are different ways from whites just like blacks are.
So if the black community says, you know, forget it.
We're not even going to try and act white.
That's not good enough for us.
Acting white is aiming for the middle.
Let's act Asian and go for the top, right?
Because in almost all societies, Asians are at the top.
And let's just sit down with the Asians.
Even in Asian societies.
See, there's Asian privilege everywhere.
I mean, it's like in these kung fu movies.
It's like they've never even heard of Chuck Norris.
I don't know what the problem is.
But no white privilege in kung fu movies.
But forget acting white.
Go act Asian.
Because I think white people should act more Asian sometimes too, right?
But, you know, if you can aim for, like if the black community can say, okay, well, Asian illegitimacy is like 20%, right?
20% of, it's 18, 20% of Asian kids growing up without a dad.
Black communities, a lot of places, over 70%.
So let's aim for getting our illegitimacy rate down.
Let's aim for committing fewer crimes, which, you know, to some degree is to do with illegitimacy in all communities where there's high illegitimacy, there's high crime.
And, you know, let's focus on getting as much information from the internet to even counter our own preferred narratives, right, which is important for any self-critical community, and self-criticism is really the basis of progress, right?
If you never take any criticism, you never get to the Olympics, right, because everybody needs to improve at the beginning, right?
And so, to me, I think it would be the most empowering thing to do is to say to a black or any community that feels hard done by, pretend that there's no external limits to your achievement, and then Once you've done that for a generation or two, anything that's left over, okay.
Now we can really start to talk about it because there's nothing else that can be improved internally.
But you know and I know and everybody knows that there's a lot that the black community can do to improve internally.
And I'm not picking on the blacks.
It's true of all communities.
But in this case, there's this big get-out-of-self-criticism card called institutionalized racism, slavery, Jim Crow, whatever, right?
And were those things true?
Are they factors?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Absolutely they were.
But at some point, this is either going to continue, and the externalization of solutions, which generally involve more government power, and it's not like the government has been super friendly to blacks throughout the history of any country in the known universe.
I mean, it was the government that enforced slavery.
It was the government that enforced Jim Crow.
It was the government that forced Rosa Parks to sit in the back of the bus in Birmingham.
It was the government that did all of this stuff.
It was the government that introduced marriage licenses to prevent black and white marriages.
It was the government.
So the idea, let's run to the government for a solution, it's like, oh, come on.
Come on.
At some point, we've got to say...
If there's a solution to be had, it cannot be found in the arms of the government.
It cannot be found in political power.
It cannot be found in more redistribution.
It cannot be found in affirmative action.
It cannot be found in the arms of the government because it's the hands of the government that strangled the opportunities for the black community for so long and now the idea of running to the government to solve the problem is kind of what I rail against both as an anarchist and as a moralist as a whole.
And so if I err on the side of 100% responsibility for the black community, which I get is as annoying as shit.
I mean, I really get that for a lot of blacks.
It's just like, don't you understand these problems?
Yes, I do.
I do.
I really do.
But my concern is that at what point do we stop self-improvement because we blame externalities?
And at what point does that then become a self-fulfilling prophecy that has outlived its historical facts?
Yeah, I really appreciate this perspective and I really agree with this approach in the sense that, yeah, that's what works for me, right?
Stop externalizing and now I'm working on myself and I feel like that's a solution to all problems.
I feel like that's the way I'm trying to To assume my life is going to be, you know, I have to, whatever comes across, whatever comes my way, I'm going to deal with it.
You know, I'm going to use my resources to deal with whatever comes, and that's the best way.
So it's a self-responsibility kind of approach to all the problems in the world.
You know, this is, what can I do to fix it in my own life, right?
That's great.
I really love that.
However, can I say that, yeah, that level of self-responsibility is great, but I wish you also applied that to the police and the government.
I know you do in other contexts, but when you're doing the videos that are about Criticizing the black response, it almost sounds like you're defending the government in that same way.
You defend the system in a way.
No!
I'm defending black people, for God's sakes.
Have you seen the murder statistics that have come out of the anti-comp movement in the inner cities?
Do you know that this great 20 to 25 year decline in violence in America has begun to reverse itself since Trayvon Martin and in particular since Ferguson?
No, I didn't know that.
Do you know that hundreds of black people have been murdered because the cops are afraid to police?
There was a cop recently who let himself get beaten up by a black guy Because he was afraid of defending himself.
Because obviously the cops know what happens, right?
This is not defending the police.
This is defending the four-year-old kid that got shot in a drive-by because the cops don't want to go into the neighborhood.
Homicides in 35 big U.S. cities are up almost 20% this year.
Non-fatal shootings are up 62%.
Washington, 23% increase in homicides.
Baltimore, Maryland has seen a 57.6% increase.
Los Angeles, 20% increase in violent crime through the beginning of August.
New York City saw a 20% spike in its murder rate over the first two months of the year.
This is not happening in the gated communities.
This is happening in the poor communities and in particular it's happening in the black communities.
In an East Holland precinct, shooting incidents are up 500% in a single year.
South Central LA Police Division shooting victims are up 100%.
You know, Birmingham, Alabama, the police detective was pistol-whipped unconscious with his own weapon by a black suspect.
He said he hesitated to use force because he didn't want to be accused of needlessly killing an unarmed black man.
The officer said a lot of officers are being too cautious because of what's been going on in the media.
The officer, he asked to remain anonymous for the safety of his family.
He said, I hesitated because I didn't want to be in the media like I am right now.
And so when I'm pointing out, and I, look, I've never, ever, ever defended a cop who's been found guilty of a crime.
Never.
What I demand is that We do not lynch people in the media before the facts come in.
Right?
We do not do that.
That is contrary to all rational principles of justice.
The black inner cities are currently being overwhelmed by a criminal population.
That criminal population has had a lot to do with provoking the anti-cop sentiment.
They don't want cops around because they're criminals and there are a lot of them in these inner cities.
And they're setting up their own no-go zones, like the Muslim ones shooting up throughout Europe.
They're setting up their no-go zones where the police have been paralyzed.
Well, what happens to criminal activity when the police are paralyzed?
More terror for black children, more trauma for black children, more trauma for black women, more trauma for honest law-abiding black citizens, more flight of decent people from neighborhoods where they bloody well don't have anywhere else to go at this point.
So the idea that saying, let us...
Not rush to judgment, let us get all the facts before condemning people as evil.
This is not something that is somehow pro-cop and anti-black because the whole effect of this has been hundreds of black bodies in the streets.
Can I say something here?
You should.
You absolutely should.
I agree with this principle.
However, who is gathering the evidence?
And can we trust the system of the police investigating themselves?
Police don't investigate themselves.
I mean, there's a whole Justice Department, especially under Holder, that has been overseeing this stuff a lot.
And the media investigate like crazy.
And there are tons of people on the internet who investigate like crazy.
It's not just this black box that no one can see in.
That nobody can see the evidence, that nobody can see the facts.
I mean, this isn't like Hillary Clinton's personal emails vanishing, right?
It's not like they go off to some secret chamber and come out with a verdict and no one gets to ask any questions or see any of the facts.
I mean, don't get me wrong, you know, I'm a voluntarist, I'm an anarchist, so none of this stuff should be happening at all.
But the fact that I'm an anarchist doesn't mean that I get to reject facts.
Right, and the facts are that Zimmerman and Michael Brown and all of this stuff, this is all manufactured.
I remember once you said that we have a system when we give the government the power that if there's any dispute between you and the government, the government is the one that gets to decide Make the decision what the resolution will be.
The resolution with the government is always the same.
It's force.
It's comply or die.
It's what I've said from the very beginning.
And the fact that people get killed for resisting cops or for running away from cops after they've assaulted them or whatever, that's the state.
Every time everybody asks for a law, that's what they're setting in motion.
Absolutely.
But that's regardless of race.
So if you want to keep black people alive, commit fewer crimes and stop attacking cops, I'd say that to anyone.
Because cops will escalate until you comply or you're dead.
That's the nature of the state.
Everybody knows that.
I mean, there's nobody alive who doesn't know that who's able to tie their shoes, right?
Yeah, I agree.
I just feel that when I'm watching the system at work, I see a lot of problems in the police and government and justice system that don't really get Addressed in your videos, it's...
No, no, no.
You're back on this, okay?
What profit is it going to...
How is it going to profit the black community to focus on police reform?
What is going to be more powerful for the black community?
Is it going to actually get married to the mother of their children?
Yes.
That is far more under the control of the average black person than police reform.
Would it be to complete education?
Yeah.
Would it be to not commit crimes?
Yeah.
It's not a matter of poverty.
You know, there's lots of poor people who've just come over from China or Japan, and certainly throughout history that's been the case, not poverty alone, that causes this criminality.
You know, don't use drugs, right?
I mean, don't speed.
All the stuff that brings you in contact with the police, don't do it.
I don't, right?
Because I don't want to be in contact with the police.
I get my stickers done on my car.
I don't speed, right?
And so you can say, oh, there's a system of this and that, but that's my concern.
My whole point is that that is taking the focus off that which can be achieved and improved within the community.
I mean, Michael Slager and Walter Scott, you know, I took a lot of heat for my presentation on that.
Did you know that Walter Scott had cocaine and alcohol in his system?
Uh, no.
Of course you don't.
And I'm not saying you should.
It's just, you know, you don't have to follow this stuff like I do.
Toxicology report says Walter Scott had cocaine and alcohol in his system.
Level of cocaine, 36 nanograms per milliliter.
He also had 1,300 nanograms per milliliter of benzo-like gnocchinine.
Hang on.
Benzoilignin, a byproduct of cocaine metabolism and cocaethylene.
Hey, I can do that one.
A metabolite that forms when cocaine and alcohol are in the bloodstream at the same time.
An analysis of blood found on Slager's clothing.
Reports from two lieutenants and a police chief, all stating that Slager told them that during a scuffle, Scott had taken his taser and pointed it at him.
Data from Slager's taser, which indicates that it was fired six times in 61 seconds.
And, you know, what was the original story?
Scott and his friend were volunteering at a local church before the shooting.
Well, I don't know.
I'm not an expert on drug use, but having alcohol and cocaine in your system, and apparently his DNA was found on Slager's taser, so why did he run?
Was it because historically there's been a bad relationship between the police and And blacks?
Well, no.
It seems more likely that he ran because he was impaired.
And when you're impaired, if you're on cocaine, you know, you're not noted for making very good decisions, right?
He didn't want a DUI. He didn't want to lose the car.
He just poured the money that should have been going towards his kids into getting special new rims for it, right?
And again, I don't know what the final answer to all of this is going to be because I reserve judgment.
But these are very important facts.
Listen, you understand the bias in all of this, right?
In that, imagine if Michael Slager had been found to have alcohol and cocaine in his system.
Do you think the media would be reporting that?
Right.
Of course.
Of course they would because that would be negative towards a white person.
And it would fit the narrative of nasty, abusive, racist, corrupt cops.
So if Michael Slager, the white guy, had had alcohol and cocaine in his system, you wouldn't be able to live on this planet without seeing skywriting of that fact everywhere.
But the fact that Walter Scott had the alcohol and cocaine in his system is a non-cognitive Fact, non-issue, non-publicized nothingness.
You have to go to the obscure recesses of the internet to even find these facts.
I really appreciate the facts that you bring to bear.
And I have a new perspective after listening to the message that you have.
Really, the new perspective comes from going through it myself, dealing with my own issues instead of externalizing and avoiding my issues.
That makes me realize how important your message is, the way you're presenting it.
I applaud you for that, and please continue, please keep it up.
But can I give you one example during the Michael Brown case?
I'm not sure if you have enough time, if time is an issue, but one example of the other side that I wish you could have seen on the Michael Brown case, like what was wrong with the police or the government side?
Is that okay?
When I was watching your coverage after the grand jury came back with no indictment, and you said during that coverage that, in your opinion, that if you're not indicted, that means you're proven innocent.
And I felt like, you know, one of the reasons you said that, you said that, well, because grand juries hardly ever Do that, right?
They almost always have an indictment.
So therefore, if this is a rare case where they don't even bring it to trial, that means totally proven innocent.
Okay.
I gotta tell you, I don't think I said totally proven innocent.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Maybe I did.
Maybe I did, but go ahead.
I'm definitely putting words into your mouth there.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
You said, in your mind, If there's no indictment, you are proven innocent.
Okay.
Well, but technically that's not even the case.
You are innocent until proven guilty, and if there's no indictment, then there's no...
Sure.
Like, technically, of course, technically.
But I think you're...
No, no, no, not technically, logically.
If you're innocent until proven guilty, and then there's no indictment...
And, of course, not being found guilty is not the same as being proven innocent.
It just means that there's not the reasonable doubt or whatever.
It's not the same as being proven innocent.
But if there's not even enough to indict, otherwise, anybody who has anything thrown against them and they, you know, someone sues them and then the lawsuit is thrown out, does that mean that they're still kind of guilty?
I mean, at some point, we have to say that this baseless, right?
But anyway, go on.
But we can criticize the judge or the way the evidence was presented in that situation.
You presented the case very well, but here's what I felt wasn't presented.
Prosecutors say that if It's a slam dunk to prosecute.
They can get an indictment if they want to.
Because they're allowed to present evidence in a biased way during the grand jury testimony.
They're allowed to present evidence and leave out whatever evidence they want to.
There's no obligation to be fair.
During grand jury, they're free to do it the way, present it the way they want.
So they can create an indictment or not, just the way they present the evidence.
This is what prosecutors say about the process.
And the prosecutor in Michael Brown case, Bob McCullough, there's evidence of his kind of bias or unfairness when dealing with the black community.
I'm going to quote one here.
No, but hang on, so we don't have to get into this level.
Sorry to interrupt.
I mean, Eric Holder's Justice Department cleared him as well.
Fair enough.
Now, I mean, Eric Holder is a real race warrior, right?
I mean, Eric Holder was once asked, relatively recently, he was asked, when does affirmative action end, right?
It's been going on for like 30 years, right?
It's a whole generation or more.
When does affirmative action for blacks end?
And he's like, oh, it hasn't even begun yet, basically.
Like, he's a real race warrior.
And Eric Holder's Justice Department declined to bring any criminal charges against Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown.
They said in the report that came out, the prosecutor said, quote, Wilson's actions do not constitute prosecutable violations of federal civil rights law.
Okay.
That's fair enough, you know.
Civil rights violation is a very narrow standard, and that's very hard to prove.
But no, I do agree with the conclusion, but my feeling was at that point...
I didn't feel like you noticed the bias in the system and the unfairness in the system that makes me feel like, okay, you can't really always trust a grand jury non-indictment.
Wait, hang on.
Bias in the system?
This guy was repeatedly accused of gunning down A black unarmed teen execution style in cold blood.
And your concern is that this is somehow biased against the black?
No, seriously.
I mean, you need to see this from a non-black perspective, maybe even from a white perspective.
This guy, and I don't care that he's white, it's not like I've got some affinity with the guy, plus he's a cop, so, you know, that whole thing with me, right?
But But this guy, people were calling death threats against him.
They were tweeting out his address.
He had charges laid against him.
The media was calling him a cold-blooded killer.
Everybody was saying that he shot this kid execution-style in the back, all of which were lies.
People were lying to prosecutors, and they weren't prosecuted.
People openly lied to prosecutors.
Like, Michael Brown's friend?
Dear God, he lied!
He lied about what he saw.
He was proven to be a vicious, community-destroying, riot-provoking liar.
Was he ever prosecuted?
No.
Michael Brown's father said, I'm gonna go, if I remember rightly, I'm gonna go start a riot.
And he went out and gave a speech that started a riot.
Neighborhoods burned down.
People beaten up.
Businesses destroyed.
All based upon lies.
Were any of the people who spoke these lies ever prosecuted?
In a free society, they damn well would be.
Sure.
And you're complaining that there may be anti-black bias in this?
Okay, on the other side, how many police are ever prosecuted for lying in their police report?
How often?
Oh, no, no, no.
Now you're moving the goalpost.
Okay.
You were talking about this specific case.
Okay, I wanted...
Can I bring up a point about...
No!
We're talking about this specific case.
If you want to change the argument to stuff in general, you brought up this case and I'm giving you a rebuttal to this case.
I would like to point out that at that point, although I agree with the eventual conclusion, at that point I didn't feel that Bob McCullough was a trustworthy prosecutor in the process.
And I have evidence of that.
Can I mention that?
Or have I moved the goalposts?
You want to go back to the prosecutor of Darren Wilson?
Yeah, who presented the evidence to the grand jury.
Okay, and you're saying that the prosecutor was himself biased?
Yes.
And what was your evidence for this?
Okay.
So, this is from Wikipedia.
In 2000, in the so-called Jack in the Box case, two undercover officers, a police officer and a DEA officer, shot and killed two unarmed black men in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box fast food restaurant in Missouri.
In 2001, the officers told the grand jury, convened by Bob McCullough, same prosecutor, That the suspects tried to escape arrest and then drove toward them.
The jury declined to indict, just like in the Michael Brown case.
McCullough told the public that every witness had testified to confirm this version.
But the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch journalist Michael Sorkin reviewed the previously secret grand jury of tapes Released to him by McCullough and found that McCullough's statement was untrue.
Only three of the 13 officers testified that the car was moving forward.
A subsequent federal investigation found that the men were unarmed and that their car had not moved forward when the officers fired 21 shots.
Nevertheless, federal investigators decided that the shooting was justified because the officers feared for their safety.
McCullough also drew controversy when he said of the victims, these guys were bums.
The two men, Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley, had cried.
I don't know what that means.
What does that mean?
Bums?
Sorry?
Oh, bums.
Sorry.
These guys were bums.
Can you give me the name of the wiki page?
I did.
Or just the name of the person?
Just Bob McCullough.
Bob McCullough's Wikipedia page.
Bob McCullough.
I don't know how to spell.
M-C-C-U-L-L-O-C-H. Wiki, you know, wiki is not exactly the gold standard of information.
Just so you know.
Let's see here.
And what was the name of the...
The case?
The Jack in the Box case?
Oh, it's called Jack in the Box case?
Yeah.
Okay, give me just a sec here.
do do do do do do we have and that's it yeah just Martin bomb like a lot of Okay.
In the year 2000, it says?
It says in 2000.
In 2000.
All right.
Shot and killed two unarmed black men in the parking lot of a jack-in-the-box fast food restaurant in Berkeley, Missouri.
In 2001, the officers told the grand jury convened by McCauley the suspect.
Okay, so why did the officers fear for their safety?
Okay, it's obviously not given in this paragraph.
Well, no, but I mean, if you care about this, you've got to follow the links, right?
So why did they fear for their safety?
I'm not saying whether it was justified or not.
What reasons did they give for fearing for their safety?
I'm sorry, I didn't look that up.
Oh, dude, come on.
You didn't even follow past the first link past Wikipedia?
That's not the most objective approach to things, right?
You're kind of going for confirmation bias.
Yeah, I understand I didn't do enough research.
I'm sorry.
So you're concerned that I don't present a complete case and then you don't go past a wiki with a link that I just clicked on here.
No, you're right.
Your criticism is fair.
I can't say no.
I can't say no.
You're right.
I should have.
Alright, yeah, because you're putting this as proof of something and, you know, there's something on wiki and...
Yeah.
Okay, but let's see here.
Let's see here.
Jack in the box.
Okay.
Times.
It doesn't say here.
Yeah, it doesn't say why they feared for their safety.
Fair enough.
You know what?
I can't ask you to research it now.
I'm going to go research it.
I apologize for doing that.
You're absolutely right.
To be fair, I mean, which is whether this is fair or not, I don't know, but the two men who were killed had prior felony convictions on drug and assault charges.
And...
So, I don't know.
It wasn't like Dylann Roof in a church or something.
But again, we don't know exactly.
So, yeah.
I'm going to go do the research.
Yeah, yeah.
Send us something and we'll look into it.
I have to tell you, I'm certainly willing to overcome my skepticism, but after a whole bunch of media bullshit, About race and cops.
I'm skeptical.
You know, this is the price.
This is the price.
And I'll tell you something else.
That riots are cheating.
You know, I'll tell you this right up front.
Common law tradition, you know, call me an old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon fogey white asshole.
I don't care, right?
But riots are cheating.
Because everyone now...
Who comes across a racially charged incident is worried about rioting.
Right?
I mean, there's no way that Freddie Gray went down the way it went down if the shadow of potential rioting was not hanging over the deliberations.
That's cheating.
That is not how you get justice is threatening riots.
And that is something that is not acceptable in these kinds of situations.
Look, O.J. killed two white people.
And he was as guilty as you could possibly imagine.
And he got off.
And it was a cold-blooded murder...
Of two white people.
I mean, I don't think the race was any particular factor.
But, you know, he saw a pretty young white woman's head almost clean off.
And everybody knew he was guilty.
And he got off.
And white people didn't riot.
The rioting is not the way you do it.
Because now everybody knows that the threats of riots is having a huge impact on whether to prosecute, on who to prosecute, on what verdict to pile in.
And I have virtually no doubt, this is just my own personal opinion, I could be proven wrong, I have virtually no doubt that the charges levied against the six cops Who were around when Freddie Gray was, according to the witness,
banging his head against a van, maybe hoping to win the ghetto lottery of suing for damage while in police custody, that those charges would not have been brought against those people except for fears of rioting.
I mean, there's so much that was so fishy about that, right?
Marilyn Mosby's husband, like Marilyn Mosby told the police to go and arrest people in Freddie Gray's neighborhood because her husband was running for re-election in that district.
And the police went and arrested them.
The police all know this.
We have such a wide disparity between what the police know and what the public is allowed to understand.
It's creating a massive chasm.
You cannot be rioting around police decisions or justice decisions that people just don't like.
That is not a fair way to run a justice system, and that is putting so many fingers on the scale that nobody even knows which way justice is pointing anymore.
And so, look, yes, have disagreements.
I have disagreements with the police.
I have disagreements with the system as a whole, as you know, probably more than most.
But rioting?
No.
No, that is skewing the whole system completely.
And the fact that there just isn't these prosecutions for these riots, for these incitements to violence, for this lying to police.
Look, lying to police about how Michael Brown was killed was an incredibly inflammatory and incredibly destructive falsehood.
And, you know, you try lying to police on something relatively unimportant...
And you are going to be in some serious trouble.
But this lie regarding how Michael Brown was killed was unbelievably inflammatory and has indirectly led to hundreds of deaths.
Because the lie provoked the charges or the potential charges which provoked The riots which provoked the pullback from the police, which provoked further criminality and death within the black communities in the ghettos.
And to my knowledge, maybe I'm wrong, I don't think I am, he never suffered any Negative repercussions.
Brown's stepfather incited an outright riot.
He was on tape saying, I'm going to go and start a riot.
Let's go burn this motherfucker down.
And nothing.
No charges.
And people talk about white privilege.
I mean, this guy openly says he's going to start a riot, goes out and starts a riot, which is very much against the law.
Hillary Clinton's email server is being investigated.
You know, I mean, right?
Yeah, I agree with you.
And for me, it shows, like, how...
For me, it's like, this is the last place you can go for justice.
The police are so inept.
And the prosecutors and the judges and The whole system seems like it's a joke.
Like, what are they doing?
Maybe I spent-- - But that's the whole point.
Look, I get that the system is corrupt, which is why I don't commit any crimes.
Don't give them an excuse.
I've been pulled over once in my life.
I'm very polite.
I keep my hands where the officer can see them.
I understand that he's in a stressful situation.
Do you agree that the police have the potential to pull you over for a huge array of things, right?
The regulations are so many that people are constantly breaking rules without even realizing it.
Absolutely.
Of course.
I mean, Tom Woods has an argument that everybody commits three felonies a day without even knowing it.
Right.
And so you want to minimize your contact with the police as much as humanly possible.
So pay your taxes.
Don't smoke drugs.
Don't speed.
Don't commit any crimes.
Don't text and talk and drive.
Don't do any of the stupid shit that's easily avoidable that gets you in contact with the police.
Look, if blacks commit...
Crimes at the same level of Asians do and still end up in jail far more often?
I'm with you, man.
I'm right in front of the march.
But this is not the case.
And until blacks stop committing as many crimes, it's kind of tough to blame it all on police racism.
I'm not saying you are, right?
But I'm just logically, right?
I mean, surely knowing the danger, if you really do believe, and a lot of people do believe in police racism and police brutality, the last thing you want to do is give them an excuse.
It's true.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm just, I'm talking from a person who was, I think, partially in the Matrix in terms of just my own self-knowledge, like, I thought That I didn't want to, like, bury my head in the sand and not, you know, like, oh, I have to bow my head to this oppressive police presence and, like, watch everything I do and,
you know, because there's a risk of police brutality.
There's a risk of police doing something wrong.
But yeah, I realize that that's true.
I should do that and do everything in my power to minimize these things and do everything in my power to bring about the change by modeling it in my own life of moral behavior.
I realize that now.
What I'm saying is I didn't get it.
Do you know what I mean?
No, and I think it's a terrible shame.
Sorry to interrupt.
I'm really angry at the media.
Because the media should be providing all of this information instead of it having to come out from people like me in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah.
You know, Mike Brown, you know, it's a case study in how not to get shot by a cop.
Number one, don't do a whole bunch of drugs.
Number two, don't strong-arm robbery, a convenience store, on camera, thus sending the cops out looking for you.
And number three, don't mouth off to the cops when they ask you what you're doing and do you have this Swisher box of...
Number four, don't reach in and punch the cop in the face.
Number five, don't try and take the cop's gun away.
Number six, don't maybe even pull the trigger of the gun and have it go off near the cop's face.
Groin, you know, number, I don't know what number we're on, number seven, you know, don't run away, but instead say oops and surrender and take your lumps.
Number eight, don't turn around and charge the cop you just tried to kill.
You know, this is not just magic racism.
There's no one, I don't care if you're a Klingon, you're going to get shot.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Stay away from the cops.
Obey the law.
Sorry, that's the rule.
You know, if you're Jewish, you're Jewish.
You can't stay out of the concentration camp.
But you can, and it's not just racism, right?
As I've said on this show before, the number of arrests by race matches almost identically with victim reports of crimes.
It doesn't happen that someone gets robbed by a white person and says, goes to the cops, fills out a report, wants the person prosecuted, and then says, oh no, he was white.
That doesn't make no sense at all.
I agree with what you're saying.
Maybe just the only thing I would like to hear more of is the message of The police and the government are violence.
Don't...
Oh, man.
No, no, no.
Oh, man, Mark.
Oh, come on.
Not for me.
Sorry, sorry.
There's lots of media outlets that you could complain are not talking enough about the violence in the state and the reality of political power and government and police power.
And there's lots of things I could be accused of.
Not focusing on the reality of government power You can't put that on me.
I mean, maybe you're frustrated with other people.
That's not me.
I meant in the context of these issues, but okay, you're right.
You do talk about it more than any media outlet you can mention or even like the libertarian ones.
So, yes.
And we also have a wider reach.
2.5 million video views last 30 days.
And the other thing too, sorry Mark, I hate to, you finish your thought.
I'm sorry, I've been interrupting too much.
Go ahead.
No, I mean, when I was watching those videos during my depression or spiral, I was wanting you to say the stuff you had said about the state during those videos.
And just didn't come out.
So that's where this is coming from.
Okay, go ahead.
Do you know why?
I mean, no particular reason why you would know why, but I don't know if you want to...
I think I do now.
I think because that was not the right message for the audience you're trying to speak to.
If you want the black community to To take responsibility to not play the victim, to focus on being the victim, then you wouldn't try to, oh, here's something to feel victimhood about.
You wouldn't present that in that show, in that context, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, I hit that very hard in the Eric Garner video, and it did very few views relative to – that was sort of the experiment.
And I think it's because the – you know, I have to speak – and this is the very delicate balancing act.
I don't know if you even care what goes on behind the curtain.
But the very delicate balancing act is I'm teaching all the way from kindergarten to grad school.
And I have to reach out to people who know nothing about philosophy or the non-aggression principle.
And again, this is not racial.
As many whites are stupid about this as everyone else.
But when I'm taking on a major media story, that is not the time.
To bring about the massive challenges of the non-aggression principle.
If I can just get an anti-spanking message in that's powerful, I'm thrilled.
People are more curious.
But you can't do the entire background to everything in a current events story in general.
Maybe I should make those videos.
If you want to, maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe you can find a way to show me how it's done and I'll be your acolyte in this area.
But if you could, I'd be thrilled.
Yeah, what I've learned is it's worth the effort to make an attempt.
Even if you fail, even if it doesn't go well, you learn something in the process.
I'm not afraid to try at least.
Yeah, I'm obviously very sensitive to failure because I want every video to lead people more to peaceful parenting and all the other good stuff that we have to offer.
So I don't want to limit outreach in order to preach to the choir, if that makes any sense.
Because, you know, you want more of that, but you already accept that stuff.
I want to get information to people who don't know it, don't accept it.
But that's a slow process.
Of course.
So, I mean, maybe if I see things from a different perspective and if I can develop a video that hits different notes, hey, maybe I can get an audience that way.
Well, send it to us.
Maybe we can help you promote it.
All right.
Why not?
I appreciate that.
You guys are awesome.
I love what you're doing.
You've helped me a lot.
More than just with the non-aggression principle, you helped me with self-knowledge, which is actually the biggest thing you guys have helped me with.
And that's the message I want everyone to get.
Well, I appreciate that, Mark.
And I've got to tell you, I love the chat.
How was it for you?
Fantastic.
I talked about everything I wanted to talk about.
Including the personal stuff.
Good.
Thank you.
Good.
No, I appreciate it.
And you know, like they say, everybody wants to have an honest conversation about race and stuff like that.
I think we actually achieved that.
I think you had great points to make.
We actually had an honest conversation about race and I really appreciate you bringing that stuff up.
It's a real pleasure and I hope that we can continue the conversation.
If you do more research and want to bring more stuff back, just let us know.
I absolutely do.
You've encouraged me.
Thank you.
All right.
Well, thanks, man.
I really appreciate that.
Thank you, of course, to everyone who listens to, spreads, supports, loves, and hates this show, freedominradio.com slash donate.
To help us out.
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To help us out and have a wonderful, wonderful night.
Don't forget, we're going to be doing an analysis of the Republican debate.
We contemplated buying airtime, but Mike is all selfish about wanting to keep both of his kidneys.
He's kind of a biter, so I couldn't get good purchase or leverage on his side.
I think he's charging like half a million dollars for ads.
I'm not sure if that's a 30-second spot or a 60-second spot, but Trump brings the ratings.
And the prices have gone through the roof.
Always has.
Always will.
And please check out my interview with Dr.
Charles Murray.
I think I may have mentioned freedomainradio.com.
Thanks everyone so much.
Thanks to all the great callers.
Have yourselves a super night.
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