3144 The State of Modern Science - Call In Show - December 4th, 2015
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Alright, so Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
We've got a caller from California who's going to talk about the shooting that happened this week.
We've got a couple of updates.
Of course, we put out something yesterday and there's been some new developments and some revisions.
There were early reports of a third suspect in the California shooting, but that seems to not be the case.
Fox News originally reported that the two shooters wore GoPro cameras.
They have removed that report, although there are some other news outlets that are still reporting that that is the case.
The woman, Malik, was born in Pakistan, not Saudi Arabia, but moved to Saudi Arabia with her family 25 years ago when she was a child.
The FBI is now investigating San Bernardino mass shooting as an act of terror.
Barack Obama is still, I'm sure, sitting a little bit on the fence.
Right before the attacks, Barack Obama taped an interview for CBS on Wednesday, and he said, ISIL is not going to pose an existential threat to us.
Now, first of all, I don't know what an existential threat is in wartime.
Is it closing your eyes and disbelieving the other person exists even so that you become some sort of outgrown imaginary friend that vanishes in the Toy Story heap of forgotten history?
What is an existential threat, you know?
They're going to quote Sartre at you until you just don't want to live anymore.
He also went on and he said, we have hardened our defenses.
Our homeland has never been more protected by more effective intelligence and law enforcement professionals at every level than they are now.
Now, so you see, literally hours before this brutal terrorist attack, he says, boy, we're right at the pinnacle of keeping everyone secure.
He said, the American people should feel confident that we're going to be able to defend ourselves and make sure that we have a good holiday season and go about our lives.
By which he means keep shopping, prop up the economy so that the Federal Reserve is not exposed for the counterfeit machine that it is.
Now, I mean, boy, I mean, the affirmative action president just not coming off too well in this whole...
If Obama is your doctor and he tells you that you're fine and you can live a good long life, that's pretty much the time to make sure you have all your affairs in order.
On the other hand, if he says you're about to die, you can go to Vegas and have a fantastic weekend.
He's like the opposite.
He says, oh, why would you ever be worried about female terrorists?
Kaboom!
Hey, did you hear that?
I had some evil tits exploding.
So he is just absolutely just terrible at all of this.
It's strange, you know, you'd think that a community organizer would have the average...
Military acumen of say Patton or Machiavelli or Sun Tzu.
So the general updates, the FBI have confirmed that there were telephonic connections, which I guess sounds like they're plugging someone in.
We've tracked the Pony Express.
They've confirmed that there were telephonic connections between the couple and at least four people from the Los Angeles area who were previously under investigation.
Now, when they say previously under investigation, a little confusing.
Does that mean they were under investigation?
And they said, yeah, they are fine.
Previously under investigation.
I guess since it stopped, they thought they were fine.
Good job, FBI. The couple...
The couple attempted to destroy evidence and began erasing their digital footprint a day in advance of the deadly attack.
So they were deleting their email accounts.
They disposed of hard drives and smashed their cell phones.
So spontaneous act of workplace violence is starting to sound a little bit less believable, I guess you could say.
At the home they had 12 pipe bombs, tools to make more explosive and over 4,500 rounds of ammunition.
Now Female responsibility.
People seem to be quite surprised that a woman is capable of doing this kind of evil.
I don't know why.
I mean, evil seems to be pretty much equal opportunity offender when it comes to genders or race.
Actually, it does seem to pick on some races a little more than others.
But he reported meeting his future wife online.
I don't know if there's an Islamic version of Tinder, which is actually kind of appropriate since Tinder is actually used to start fires as well.
Farooq's wife, Tashveen Malik, had become radicalized.
That's the word.
Not consistent, but radicalized in her Islamic faith.
A Facebook executive speaking on condition of anonymity said that the Pakistan-born woman posted a message on the website praising Abu Bak al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. On the day of the attack.
Could be a clue there.
A co-worker of Farouk's reported that the man was different upon his return from Saudi Arabia last year, which saw him change his appearance by growing out his beard, and he was joined by his new wife.
When he was asked if he believed Farouk may have been radicalized, the co-worker replied, Yeah, by the wife.
I think he married a terrorist.
Okay, so on the one hand, you have billions and billions and billions of dollars being funneled into, what is it now, 49 different security agencies across the United States, massive vetting process, and all of the arrayed, sophisticated electronics eavesdropping and monitoring and recording of phone calls and NSA, and they're like, nah, she's fine.
And you've got a guy who works with him saying, oh yeah, he married a terrorist.
I think that this co-worker should just run the entire intelligence apparatus of the United States.
It would certainly be cheaper and at least we wouldn't imagine they were doing something useful.
Now The wife received her visa.
Now, to receive a visa, of course, she was subject to a rigorous vetting process.
At least, it's the vetting process the U.S. government describes as rigorous.
It includes in-person interviews, fingerprint checking, checks against terrorist watch lists, and reviews of her family members, travel histories...
And places where she has lived and worked.
And foreigners, of course, applying from countries that are home to Islamic extremists, such as Pakistan, undergo additional scrutiny before the State Department and Homeland Security approve their applications.
There have been 200,000 immigrants to America from Pakistan since 9-11.
So, here's the thing.
And this is something that you really, really need to understand and help other people.
I don't care how far they have their heads up their leftist, egalitarian, Islamophobic asses.
This is what you need to get people to understand.
Okay.
Pakistan is not currently undergoing a massive, records-destroying, soul-crushing, and humanity-erasing civil war.
Pakistan, I assume, has some relative degree of cooperation and their records are pretty intact.
And so when you go and vet someone who's coming in from Pakistan, you have a much higher chance of capturing somebody who's a potential terrorist than you do from people who are presenting you half-burnt, crayon, baked-on papers that say that they and their cat are both Syrian refugees from the place of blah-blah-blah.
Right?
So if they can't even remotely identify A woman who has been radicalized, who's in contact apparently with people who have been investigated but apparently cleared by the FBI, and are posting, I love you, crazy cleric, to ISIS leaders, then there's no chance whatsoever that you can rely on vetting from people from Syria.
If you can't vet people from Pakistan, stable government, cooperative government, good papers, you can't possibly vet people from Syria...
Civil war, papers burnt, all gone, and a huge amount of human trafficking of people who want to go and suck on the giant teat of Western welfare programs.
Now, according to Fox News, it is believed that on at least one of Farouk's two trips to Saudi Arabia in 2013-2014, one or both of the spouses reached out to suspected members of Al-Qaeda.
The ISIS-affiliated news agency, AMAK, has also come out to say that the two shooters were supporters.
of the caliphate but stopped short of claiming responsibility for the attack.
Now Farouk abruptly stopped going to his mosque three weeks ago following years of attending almost every day.
Farouk recently got into an argument over Islam with a messianic Jewish co-worker Who was murdered in the attacks.
The disagreement, and again, if you were to write this stuff, you'd be accused of comedy, black comedy too much on the nose.
The disagreement was over whether Islam was a peaceful religion.
Now, the Jewish guy was like, I don't really think it's that peaceful a religion.
And Farouk was like, listen, I'd like to continue this conversation, but I just left something in the car.
I'll be right back to prove to you that Islam is all about the peace.
Unbelievable.
Now, an attorney representing Farouk's family insisted that there was no smoking gun.
That is a direct quote.
No smoking gun to suggest a motive.
Okay.
I'm not a lawyer.
Okay.
I'm not a lawyer, but I have a slight sense of appropriate tone.
Now, when the crime involves half a dozen smoking guns and pretend pipe bombs and not to mention the massive amounts of smoking gun coming from the police who riddled the bullets, riddled the SUV with bullets...
I don't think you really want to describe this particular terrorist attack and use the phrase, no smoking gun.
Because there really were quite a lot of smoking guns.
Also the theory that it is climate change or global warming that is driving terrorism.
I mean, if they'd got the message, they probably would have tried to escape on bicycles, because as we all know, SUVs contribute quite a bit to global warming, so the fact that they were driving an SUV, well.
The attorney went on to say, both the sisters and the brothers, as they went through the information today, there was one silly thing that came up that some of his co-workers at some point made remarks about his beard.
It was just basic comments, but he used to brush them off pretty easily.
Okay, so again, I know this is the lawyer, and I know sometimes you have to pour yourself into pretty contorted containers if you have the liquid soullessness of your average lawyer.
I don't think anybody fundamentally had...
An issue with his beard.
The fact that the beard was at one point partially obscured by gun smoke as he gunned down with his wife and murdered 14 people and wounded dozens of others, it's really the fact that you couldn't see the smoke through the flying bodies and exploding body parts and gun smoke.
That's really the aspect of the beard, I think.
Probably bothered people the most.
Now he's saying the family is in shock, just as we are.
They had no idea something like this would happen.
No idea.
No idea that something like this would happen.
The house, the place that this couple lived in was an IED factory full of bombs, thousands of rounds of ammo.
They had to store $30,000 worth of guns somewhere, which somehow this guy afforded on a $57,000 a year salary, which he mysteriously got despite having a seeming inability to spell basic English words.
But that's perhaps a topic for another time.
So they had a six-month-old baby.
As is the family, genuinely, with a straight face, saying to everyone who has half a brain, they had no idea.
Did they never go to the couple's house who had the new baby?
You know, if you have a new baby, I've been there, people like to come and visit.
Also, they like to come to your house because babies are kind of hard to move around.
They sleep a lot and they often don't like being in car seats and so on.
So, if there's a baby, people come to your house.
Now, If you go to someone's house and it looks like a combination of, say, A toddler barn and a gun show?
Okay, that might be a bit of a, you know, unless you've got a really unruly baby, it's really not that subtle to figure out that something might be going down.
And again, it was not that big a place.
It wasn't like some big Transylvanian mansion where the West Wing can be entirely armed to the teeth and nobody could ever notice because we don't go there.
That's Blackbeard's private room.
So the fact is, in a relatively small place, there were a lot of weapons and bomb-making equipment.
Now, why would nobody, how could nobody know, especially if there's a new kid that people want to come and visit and coo over and do all of that kind of stuff and warn to stay away from the half-assembled landmines littering the place?
That's just a joke.
I don't think there were any landmines.
Now, the lawyer went on to say, but it's so slight and no one has ever stated that he has ever acted in a hostile or violent way towards anyone.
They were a very polite, conservative, married couple.
I mean, what do you even say?
Until they weren't!
And then, they were rather impolite.
I have no idea whether conservative fits into mass murder.
And they were still married.
Until they weren't.
Well, I guess maybe they're joined together in the afterlife now.
So, yeah, they were nice.
Until they weren't, you know?
You know, up until the time I drove over the homeless guy, I was an excellent driver, never even got a ticket.
I don't think that matters, because the rolling over the homeless guy is kind of what matters.
And there was hostile ways.
I mean, the arguments he was having with his Jewish co-worker, I don't know.
I mean, it's easy in hindsight, but...
I don't know.
If you really do believe there's a violent religion, it might not be a good idea to get into arguments with people about it.
But anyway...
Now, the lawyer went on to say, it doesn't seem plausible to us that this petite woman, Malik, would be involved in this sort of hyper-caricatured Bonnie and Clyde crazy scenario.
So, I don't know what that even...
Is he denying that this is the woman's body?
I assume that they've done dental records and fingerprints and so on.
So, is he...
And the fact that she's a petite woman...
Okay.
You see, women are so petite and they have tiny little tentacle arms that can't possibly wrap around things like triggers because they're just, they're petite and their angel wings get in the way when they try to run through places with bazookas on their shoulders.
A petite woman, for God's sakes, would be involved.
Hyper caricatured.
Caricatured.
Is that really how you want to characterize it?
I mean, if somebody talks about the Holocaust as caricatured, is that not just a tiny little bit insensitive?
Like, you don't.
I mean, you're the lawyer, so you have to represent this monstrous mass.
But I don't think you want to say like, oh, it's hyper caricatured and crazy.
Hyper caricatured is like, it's not Bonnie and Clyde, that's Tom and Jerry.
That's Mighty Mouse.
That's like old style Warner Brothers cartoons.
Hyper caricatured is the three stooges.
It is not a mass murder for terrorist intent.
Asked about the evidence uncovered by the police at the scene, the lawyer said, I mean, obviously, these things were found there.
How they got there, we don't know.
Actually, we do.
We do know.
They killed a lot of people, and then they got shot by the cops.
That we know.
He says, the lawyer went on to say, there were a lot of questions drawn with Sandy Hook, and whether or not this was a real incident or not.
Okay, now we're just through the looking glass.
Now, we're just through the looking glass.
And we're with the false flaggers.
We are with the false flaggers.
The insanely aggressive, hyper-contemptuous, verbally abusive people who scream at everyone that they're just too dumb to understand that things didn't happen.
Things didn't happen.
I don't know if this is people in general who have no capacity to react with positivity, sympathy, empathy, love, concern, grief to any human tragedy.
And because their own emotional inability to feel sympathy for the victims of murder and terrorism means that they react with rage whenever anyone else is sad.
Whatever kind of messed up mentality that is, I can't even imagine if they were raised by staple guns and a two by four umbrella.
I don't even know!
But this idea that in the midst of human grief and people genuinely dying and people genuinely bleeding out while trying to hug someone with their last breath of life, the idea, well, it just didn't happen and you're a stupid asshole shill for the New World Order for imagining that the dead is like, wow, you are horrible human beings!
Beyond horrible!
At least jackals and crows and...
Oh, vultures get some nutrition from the bodies they feed from.
They don't just hang around and haunt their bodies like ghosts in crazy, crazed projection of your own lack of empathy.
Dear God, maybe it never happened at all.
How can you believe it?
You people give me the shudders and the vapors and...
I mean, hey, I'm fine for skepticism.
I really, really am.
I'm fine for skepticism.
But you've got to provide a hell of a lot of proof.
The more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the evidence is required.
And it's like, well, I don't think the angles could go that way.
There'd be more blood when you shot someone because I played GTA and that's what's on my graphics card.
Oh, man.
Oh, God.
You know, people are dead.
People are grieving.
Shut up.
Shut up and go away, you unbelievable black wholehearted scumbags preying upon the misery of others to further your own screwed up agendas.
Go away.
I love what the internet has done in terms of being able to communicate to people.
I hate what the internet has done in terms of being able to communicate to people.
And so...
This is Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who always makes me think of a country singer, pledged to a group of Muslim activists that she would take aggressive action against anyone who used, quote, anti-Muslim rhetoric.
That, quote, edges towards violence.
See, you don't actually have to advocate violence.
Not that I'm suggesting anyone does.
You don't have to advocate violence.
You just got to edge towards it.
I don't know what that means.
What does that mean?
Edge towards it.
No idea.
No idea what that means at all.
But that's great, because then she can just scare everyone with, we don't know where the line is, right?
Not that, you know, shouldn't suggest it anyway.
But this is fantastic in a lot of ways, because Attorney General Loretta Lynch must be fundamentally offended and wishes to take legal action against any language that edges towards violence.
I wonder if she's going to read, say, the Koran.
And just see, you know, if she reads and reads and reads, whether it's vaguely possible that she might find any rhetoric that edges towards violence in the Koran.
I just wonder.
And I wonder if she's going to take aggressive action against any of that language that edges towards violence.
Ha!
I wonder if we'll wait and see for that to happen.
Hate speech!
Loretta Lynch at a press conference yesterday, oh, God, I mean, just, these people are unbelievably tone deaf and have, you know, they're like the tin man who never gets to the end of the movie.
She termed the San Bernardino shootings a, quote, wonderful opportunity.
To change the nature of police work.
I don't know if you ever talked to your boss, Loretta, but Wednesday he was saying that Americans are protected by sophistication and excellence in law enforcement, the likes of which the world has never seen before in the history of mankind.
So he thought it was absolutely fantastic, and you're like, okay, it's true that there are 14 bodies riddled with bullets, but if I step over those and go to the org chart and, you know, fire up MS Projects, we can get some fantastic stuff out of this.
Yay, death!
Another thing you could do, say, if you are the attorney general, another thing you could do is you could do this shit before all the bodies hit the floor.
You know, it's just a possibility.
Like, you know, if you're running a hospital, And you have a habit of leaving, bleeding out emergency room patients in the basement by the garbage with the flies.
And then let's say 14 of them die.
And then you say, perhaps even to those relatives who have heard of their relatives dying in this horrible way, you could say, it's a wonderful opportunity to figure out a way where we can store the people bleeding out in a more medically conducive place.
A wonderful opportunity for us.
So thanks, dead people.
Now we can do a better job.
There was no way to do a better job before you died.
So what we're going to do is we're going to hold up your bodies and we're going to stare through the bullet holes in your bodies to a wonderful future.
It's a wonderful opportunity.
Maybe we'll just widen your bodies up and climb through.
You know, like water through a hole.
We'll climb through your dead bodies and your bullet holes so that we can do a really good job in the future.
What a wonderful opportunity.
Excellent.
Now, December 3rd, the Washington Post reported that gun crime has been on the decline for about 20 years.
Yay!
That's lead poisoning.
Ah, well, there is one exception for the diminishment of gun crime over the last 20 years, and that is high-profile shootings in gun-free zones.
Washington Post claims those shootings are on the increase.
So in 93, there were seven homicides by firearm for every 100,000 Americans.
By 2013, that figure had fallen by nearly half.
To 3.6.
Now 20 years, that's pretty good.
A study reported by Washington Post claims that high profile shootings began increasing in gun-free zones in late 2011 and early 2012.
The examples provided, gun-free zones, Aurora Movie Theater, Sandy Hook Elementary, as if that was real, and the D.C. Navy Yard, Arabajo High School, Fort Hood, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Chattanooga Military Offices, now that's sung in my head, the Lafayette Grand Theater, and Umpqua Community College.
So yes, shootings are down, except in gun-free zones, where they're kind of going through the roof.
Along with the bullets.
And the other thing I just wanted to mention very briefly before we get into the conversation.
Thank you for your patience, kind listener.
Is that people are saying, well, you see, but when crazy white people shoot up, it's not about their religion.
But when two terrorists shoot up, it suddenly becomes about Islam.
All right.
Well, you just need to do your research.
The media under reports or does not report at all non-white mass shooters.
So repeat after me.
And we'll put links to all this below.
The media under-reports or fails to report non-white mass shootings.
The worst one was the Asian fellow.
But you just need to look at some of this information.
Not a lot of white people, proportional to the population, not a lot of white people doing these kinds of crazy shootings.
It certainly happens.
But then white people are, at least for the next 12 minutes, still the majority in America.
So this idea that it's, oh, it's crazy white people, and they don't talk to white Christianity.
The media is saying, well, there seem to be a lot of white people, when we look at our own archives, it's like...
Yes, that's because it's all you report is the white people shooting stuff up.
Because you could hear the hunger in the media for like, please dear God, let this be a Republican.
Please dear God, let this be somebody in the Tea Party.
Please dear God, let it be an anti-government right-wing extremist.
Because if it's not, the narrative is...
Anyway.
So I just wanted to get this update out as the story, of course, still remains in flux.
But let's move on to the caller who has some more personal views of this.
Are you on the line?
Yes, sir.
How are you doing today?
I'm well.
I'm well, as well as can be expected.
How are you doing?
I am doing fantastic.
I'm really excited for the opportunity to be speaking with you.
It really is an honor.
Well, I appreciate that.
It's Nick, right?
Yes.
I was just wondering if Mike wanted to roll through my question first.
Yeah, not a problem.
Nick wrote in and said, I'm from California in an area that doesn't see much crime, but after the shooting in San Bernardino, I feel that terrorism is getting too close to home.
Are my worries about terrorism founded in today's realities, or am I just freaking out?
Am I right to try and protect myself?
And I would like to expand on that a little bit, that I live specifically in the Bay Area, just south of San Francisco, and this place is the liberal soup, and I quote.
So, what that tends to mean is that things that I see as constitutional values are often deemed wrong or shunned or at worst, they're called a racist part of our past. what that tends to mean is that things that I And that really bothers me.
Constitutional values are called a racist part of the past?
Yes.
Yes.
Right.
I'm a fairly opinionated person and I tend to back it up with history and facts and people tend to not like that.
Well, technically that's not opinionated.
laughing You know, I'm not opinionated if I say to someone that two and two make four.
But anyway, go ahead.
Yeah, yeah, I guess that is very true.
But the problem is that...
A lot of the times when I do talk to people about situations that our country's facing and the kind of direction that we're going in, I think a lot of solutions that we can make to bring us back towards the right track.
I'm often labeled racist or homophobic or misogynistic.
Or all three, because oftentimes my detractors have the mental acuity of a seven-year-old, and that's kind of tough for me to deal with.
Not really.
Not really.
Yeah, okay.
You know, because I tend not to discuss constitutional challenges with seven-year-olds because they're seven, right?
It's really not that difficult to deal with them because you just don't deal with them, would you?
I mean, why would you insult rational discourse by pretending to have it with people who are contemplating between rebutting your argument and eating their own toenails?
Yeah, that's one of my things that my pops has talked to me about.
He's got this old quote about, you don't go wrestling pigs in the slop because you'll get dirty and they love it.
I heard it with another four-letter word that began with S, but it wasn't slop.
But maybe he told it to you when you were young and delicate, but I get it, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, getting back to the main point here, I've watched a fair amount of ISIS's propaganda videos so that I could get a general idea of what they actually wanted to do.
So you could get a knock on the door from your friendly neighborhood FBI agents.
Yeah, that's one of those worries, of course.
But it's something that I'm willing to take.
You need to study your enemy to know who you're fighting.
Just leave a thumbs down or something.
Actually, no, don't.
Because thumbs down are counted by YouTubers' engagement and they're not actually bad.
I'll go ahead and write a nasty comment about how it's all propaganda.
That'll keep them off my back.
When you hear people who say, we're going to breed you out, Your daughter is going to wear a burqa and she's going to birth four children to me and I will have four other wives who birth four other children.
We will breed out your population.
When I hear that, that sounds like a fairly realistic proposition because that's exactly what the Turks did to the Greeks.
And there's several other times in history where populations have gone in and bred out other populations.
Right.
I mean, particularly when the domestic population is being taxed to pay for the breeders of those who wish to overturn their particular way of life.
So, I mean, it's one thing to just go in and breed, because, you know, at least you have to work and you're limited by what you can afford.
It's quite another thing to go in and breed on welfare so that the domestic population can't afford their own children and are breeding those people who wish to displace and destroy their way of life.
That's a particular kind of eugenics that is unbelievably immoral.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I like that you use the word eugenics because that is exactly what it is, by definition.
And I personally think that...
That, um, sooner rather than later, it's going to come and hit here, this area.
And while I live in a small town...
Wait, wait, hang on.
What's going to come and hit?
Uh, the kind of terroristic acts, the kind of radicalization, and I quote, that we've seen in, um...
In recent times, I think that's going to come here to the Bay Area, specifically San Francisco, because this place is Sodom and Gomorrah by anyone's normal standards.
And this is also basically a gun-free zone.
It's almost illegal to own a handgun in San Francisco proper because they have laws against transporting handguns even if they are on par with the state's transportation laws, which are tough enough already.
But...
My problem really comes to this, that after the shooting happened, I was driving back and listening to talk radio, and it came out that these two perps down in San Bernardino were Muslim.
And it really bothered me.
Not because they're Muslim, but because this is what terrorism is.
Using fear to make people who are weak and unarmed cow down.
And I fear that that's going to be here.
So what I did was I came home and I cleaned and cycled every single one of my firearms.
I got everything up and ready.
Most things loaded and just everything taken care of.
To be honest, I've started carrying every day to my behest because it's almost impossible to get a concealed carry permit here in California.
Now, I do have a concealed carry permit for over 40 other states.
Because the way the program works is that states tend to recognize each other's programs.
So I went to Nevada, got my Nevada concealed carry permit, got my Utah concealed carry permit, got my Arizona concealed carry permit, and my Florida concealed carry permit.
And that covered me for just about 46 or 47 states, excluding the one that I currently live in.
And the problem is with me carrying now is it's a misdemeanor for me to be carrying a legal registered firearm without a California concealed carry permit.
Can you open carry?
In my county, I can open carry without a magazine or ammunition.
And I would not open carry because somebody would beat me to take my gun.
Wait a minute.
You're allowed to open carry, but the gun can't in any way be loaded or useful.
Yeah, exactly.
You have a driver's license, but your car can't have an engine.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So it basically turns your gun into a Halloween costume.
Mm-hmm.
That's the point.
Although, it's much more dangerous because people who don't know all the fine details or don't know if you're obeying the law think that you're armed.
So, they're going to be more aggressive if they want to get.
So, it actually doesn't in some ways make you weaker than if you didn't carry anything?
Uh, yeah.
Yeah, in essence, because, um, not everywhere.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, even if the cops pull you over, they don't, I mean, if you've got a gun and they have no idea whether it's loaded or not, it's a bit of a more tense situation, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Here, specifically, in this small town, I know what the reaction would be, and it would be somebody would call the police, and the police would come up and walk Up to me and talk to me and ask me about, you know, why am I carrying a gun?
Blah, blah, blah.
Do you have any ammunition on you?
Blah, blah, blah.
And they're going to pat me down.
They're going to ask me to empty my pockets.
And I'll probably get a warning about it, even though it is completely legal.
And the problem is, the thing that really, really bothers me is the fact that The reason you can't get a concealed carry permit here in California is because county clerks will not sign the paperwork.
And I am not shitting you.
I have a friend who's a former Navy SEAL and receives death threats for what he did in Iraq and Afghanistan.
People know where he lives here in California.
And so you know what he did?
He went out and he got two letters of recommendation.
He got his carry permit paperwork signed off by his county sheriff and the head of the local police department.
And he goes into the county clerk's office and drops off the paperwork.
And they say, okay, we'll contact you within four weeks.
Six weeks go by and he goes back.
And he walks in, and he notices that the paperwork is in the same place it was six weeks ago.
So the county clerk walks over, grabs the paperwork, opens it, and flips through it, and she looks him dead in the eyes and says, is there a credible threat to your life right now?
Right now.
You mean in the office?
Yeah, in the office or outside of the building because we'll have an officer go out there and we'll arrest them.
That's simple.
But unless you have a credible threat to your life right now, we cannot give you a concealed carry permit.
So it's almost the exact same thing that the county clerk in Kentucky went to jail for.
Not signing paperwork.
She wouldn't sign the gay marriage thing.
She goes to jail.
These guys won't let you do something.
This is your friend.
Do something perfectly legal.
That's the Second Amendment right.
And they have no problems, right?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And of course, they don't.
In California, they have these sanctuary cities.
So they don't want to enforce legal versus illegal immigration.
Right, so they have no problem not enforcing laws that they're sworn to uphold, but they have a huge amount of problem actually letting people do things that are illegal.
Yeah, it's the liberal soup.
So what that tends to mean is that anything that is good and common sense is labeled ass-backwards.
And people buy that out here, either because they don't have enough of an education or enough of a historical perspective on where our nation came from.
I still have a hard time trying to figure that one out because it seems really simple.
I have a hard time trying to figure out why you're living in California, but that may be my confusion.
Yeah, I actually moved here from Las Vegas when I was 18 after I graduated high school.
I moved up here to the Bay Area.
Wait, wait.
An 18-year-old leaves Las Vegas?
I thought that basically by the time you were 22 and looked 80, they let you out.
I thought you had to stay and you're complaining about the Sodom and Gomorrah of California.
Okay, I thought 18 is like, where would you want to be except Las Vegas?
But that may be just my perspective.
Oh, well...
It was culture shock for me, to be completely honest.
It was a massive amount of culture shock because I thought I'd seen everything down in Las Vegas.
I'd done the whole party lifestyle.
I'd been to all kinds of hotel parties and suites.
I saw a dude snort coke off a stripper's ass.
I thought that was it, dude.
I thought that was the be-all, end-all of crazy things that you could see.
And then I moved back here.
And then you walked into a California clerk's office and it's like, wow, that hooker's ass thing is pretty tame.
My memory of Vegas is every time you take a cab in Vegas, you have to take a lot of cabs in Vegas.
I called it Vegas voice because the story was always pretty much the same.
Like, I like chatting with cabbies.
I like chatting with everyone, right?
I do what I do.
But I was coming to Vegas to say, hey, how's it going?
And the cabbie's like, good.
You always have the same voice.
It's the Vegas voice.
I'm fine.
Yeah.
It's like, do you actually smoke?
No!
Vegas just does this to you.
And it was always the same, you know, like, I came out here about eight years ago with a couple of buddies and they headed back, but I just stayed.
And I was thinking, it's like, are you an indentured servant for a gambling dad?
Or did you get a hooker pregnant?
Or like a stripper has got you chained to the basement and lets you out to drive hack?
But yeah, I was also saying, I don't know, I really should leave, but I guess my roots are here.
Can you clear your throat?
I have.
This is me after my throat is cleared.
Anyway, go on.
Yeah, that's completely true.
Number one, it's smoker country out there.
So just about everyone and their mother smokes.
And it's a real transient economy where People tend to move there for two or three years, work in a casino, and then move back to wherever they come from.
And then they realize that the lifestyle is killing them slowly or quickly.
And they're like, I gotta get out of here.
I miss my old voice.
I can't do blues singing anymore.
Okay, so why are you in Cali then?
I moved out here with my folks.
And, you know, while I didn't agree with it at the time, I still was excited to leave Las Vegas.
I was excited to see a new place and to get to see new lifestyles.
I mean, at that point, I was still a fairly dumb liberal kid.
I get the 18 and I don't need the detailed line by line resume.
You don't have to answer.
I'm just kind of curious.
If you want to stay there because your family's around, I mean, it's fine with me.
Obviously, you can understand that.
But it just seems like I really, really need my guns.
There's 46 states I can go.
I'm in the one I can't have.
Yeah, I've tried, honestly.
And I've looked at places out in Colorado, which is where I think that I'm going to go when I have the available funds.
Because you can buy a house out there, a nice three-bed, two-bath for about $50,000.
So I'm praying that within the next couple of years I'll be able to get out of here.
I could go to Montana, where I think cave redecorating is pretty big.
Or, you know, setting up those barbershops to make sure that your hair always stays about three inches shorter than your beard, like your head hair.
No, I think Colorado's beautiful.
I've only been once.
So let's pull back a little bit on the details of your life, because the question is sort of around...
Yeah.
And so on, right?
Now, of course, look, the odds of you dying in a terrorist attack, you know, you're more likely to survive, to die before the end of our conversation from an asteroid strike or something than...
But, of course, the point of terrorism is not to kill people.
The point of terrorism is to terrorize people, right?
The point of terrorism is to make you anxious, right?
In your skin.
To make you a little edgy.
To make you a little nervous, right?
Mm-hmm.
Oh, there's a guy in a turban and a baggy jacket.
You know, like it's just...
It's to make you...
It's what people felt getting on planes after 9-11 or whatever.
It's just a little...
You know, it's designed to erode your quality of life.
See, white people and Asians, the K-selected people that we've talked about on the show before...
Are very good at for worrying.
Like worrying way down the road.
That's how you survive in a cold climate.
I mean, you can't take this Jamaican approach to like a cold climate.
Because in Jamaica, it's like, ah, you know, there'll be bananas tomorrow.
If I don't get them today, it's no big deal, right?
Save up for what?
You know, it's summer all year round.
But in a cold climate, you have to think ahead and you have to anticipate and you have to really be aware of bad things that could happen.
You need to hoard, you need all this kind of stuff, right?
And so, Europeans and Asians and so on, really good at worrying.
Really good at...
Just getting that slow backburner anxiety going.
Because the way that the European, when I say European, I'll include Asian, I keep saying it over and over.
But the way that the European brain works is if something hinky is going on or there's something that could be a potential threat and so on, your brain just hits this low-grade anxiety until you deal with it and then it turns it off.
And that's how you don't starve to death during the winter, you know, the ant and the grasshopper thing.
And so terrorism works particularly well against Europeans because Europeans get that low-grade, ooh, it could happen, anxiety, and that's a very effective weapon.
So the purpose of terrorism is to have you worry about being killed as not to kill you.
Which is why terrorist attacks tend to be, you know, France accepted somewhat spaced out.
You know, like Obama was saying, well, you know, these mass attacks, they don't really happen in other countries compared to America.
It's like, you narcissistic, jug-eared, beanpole douchebag.
I mean, France, just in 2015, had more mass shooting deaths than occurred in America during the entirety of Obama's presidency.
But hey, it's overseas.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Am I right, big nose?
So, yeah, I mean, so, terrorism...
Has sort of two purposes, right?
I guess you could say three.
Number one is to put you in a state of anxiety.
And people in a state of anxiety tend not to want to have kids.
So it's a way of dysgenically diminishing the domestic population.
Because they're like, you know, I see this in comments sometimes on YouTube.
You know, the way the world is, you know, why would you even want to have kids?
It's like, you, case elected, end of the road, extinction beast.
And, of course, it's to get...
Western countries to be drawn into expensive retaliations that bankrupt the economies, and it's to provoke just this general low-grade anxiety.
So that's the stated goal, that's the purpose, and it's very effective.
It's very effective.
It doesn't tend to be effective against our selected cultures, but it's very effective against K-selected cultures.
And so the purpose...
It's to make you worry.
And the purpose is to trigger a hysterical response on the part of the general population so that government power will expand.
And as government power expands, then more R-selected people can vote for additional government benefits.
More K-selected people will have fewer children because they'll be concerned about increased taxes and increased social instability and so on and so on, lack of quality for the education of their kids.
There's more and more different...
Cultures and languages come pouring into an already overstretched and underproductive government school system and so on.
And so the purpose is to simply reduce your quality of life and hopefully convince you not to breed and hopefully convince enough people to have a hysterical overreaction that the government will become bigger and bigger and eventually bankrupt itself.
And that's the general idea.
And so far...
The terrorists are saying, America, go over there.
America's like, oh, I'm going over here.
And then they say, okay, now go over there.
Okay, I'm going to go over here.
And it's like, it's ridiculous that the terrorists overseas say exactly what their plan is.
They say exactly what their goals are.
It's published.
It's known.
It's clear.
Ah, let's drag them in, provoke them into, you know, we can't get into America and fight the American army there, so we're going to provoke them into attacking countries over here where we can beat them down with blending into the local population and crying collateral damage every time there's any kind of conflict, and then just wearing them down economically and destroying their military capacity to the point where nobody wants to engage in any more wars, right?
It's like, that's it, that's exactly what they want to do.
It's exactly what the CIA wants.
It's like, even with this roadmap, America, for you to lose, you need to do A, B, C, and D. And America's like, okay, A, got that.
B, oh yeah, we can definitely do that.
C, I'm all over that.
D might be a problem, but I'm telling you we're going to get there.
I mean, they're basically just throwing a knife into a palace and saying, insert here, move up here, left here, Guts pour out here.
I'm like, okay, in here, up here.
And that's kind of the point for me where it turns from, is this really malfeasance?
Or are we stepping into the conspiratorial lands here?
Because it doesn't seem like such a great nation really wants to commit suicide.
It really just doesn't seem right.
No, a great nation doesn't want to commit suicide.
But I'm going to make the case, and I think you're going to be with me on this, but, you know, obviously tell me if you're not.
America had aspects of greatness in the past, but ever since it deviated so far from the Constitution that the Constitution isn't even a speck of dust in the distant rear view, it has not been a great nation.
It's basically just turned into every other asshole nation throughout history.
You know, what has America not done?
Well, first of all, income tax, unconstitutional.
Restrictions on freedom of speech, unconstitutional.
Getting into wars without congressional approval, unconstitutional.
Central banking, unconstitutional.
And so if America had stayed on the teetering, straight and narrow path of constitutional limited government and so on, then you could make the case that there was greatness in the nation.
But ever since you could really, I mean, it's been over 100 years, but you could really say ever since the federal government domination of the southern states refused to secede all of the civil war mess, followed by the institution of government, Education, which was some,
depending on where you look, around the same time, followed by the Federal Reserve, followed by the giant socialist policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First World War, and all of the incredible restrictions on liberties that occurred in the First World War, where Eugene Debs, the leader of the Socialist Party, was thrown in jail for a decade and almost died there.
That incredible destruction of civil liberties where criticizing the war effort could get you landed in jail.
The Great Depression, this endless series of socialist experiments that further destroyed the economy.
The Second World War and then a brief respite in the 50s but then you go straight in Korea and Vietnam and just this endless foreign meddling that is going on.
700 plus military bases all over the world.
They just turned into another asshole empire but with more resources.
And Now it's come to the point, I don't know, the white population in America tried unilateral disarmament of cultural interests.
And they said, okay, okay, let's try this experiment where we're not going to defend European culture, we're not going to defend a white country, we're not going to defend white interests, we're just not going to do any of that.
And we're going to bend over backwards to try and accelerate the progress of other cultures, other ethnicities, and other races.
In the hope, of course, that everybody would follow suit and This kumbaya, lay down your arms and everybody becomes a pacifist, would be the approach.
That has not happened, and it's just taking European culture a little while to figure out that laying down your arms in a cultural battle is a very bad idea.
And hopefully we can pick it back up again in time, but it's crazy.
The subsidy, of course, that the American economy has had because of reserve currency status around the world has been an entirely unjust subsidy as well.
And now it's gotten to the point where people would rather risk death than appear politically incorrect or xenophobic or racist or Islamophobic or whatever.
People will literally choose the risk of death There is a political correctness death toll, or there's a death tax called political correctness.
And it has gotten to the point where people have abandoned common sense to the point where, you know, some crazy Middle Easterner could be rushing at them with a scimitar and they'd say, I don't know.
Sure he wants to give me a haircut.
It's just become that lunatic to the point where little old ladies from Idaho are pulled aside pretty much as often as, you know, young Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern men.
It's just become that lunatic.
And I don't know this for sure, but I would guarantee you, at least in my opinion, at the TSA, That they don't like pulling over Middle Eastern men because they're afraid of being accused of racial profiling.
Oh, you're just pulling me over because I'm a Middle Eastern.
Of course, the media and the news, and in particular, the stories are all about that, like the...
Racial profiling is always portrayed in a negative way in stories and shows like The Good Wife and so on.
It's always, oh, it's terrible media.
I'm a professor of anthropology from the University of Cairo and I'm pulled over.
It's like, oh, God.
I mean, come on.
I mean, racial profiling.
Yeah, that stuff's just propaganda.
You know that.
Well, yeah, I know that.
You know that.
But people have become so incredibly dumbed down.
And, I mean, the media obviously is so ridiculously biased.
It's like getting a full frontal pravda fart up your nose every single day trying to consume the mainstream media because it's so predictable and so relentlessly biased.
And we know that, but...
I think the average person has become dumber throughout the West.
And there's lots of evidence to show that IQ has peaked in the past and is coming down now for a variety of reasons, which we don't have to get into now.
But, yeah.
12 years a slave.
Geez, I thought that was about government schools.
Yeah.
So I guess to come back to the original point...
Should I be taking the risks that I am to protect myself?
I mean, I do understand that me dying from a terrorist attack is just about as likely as the Chinese coming and invading the coast, which probably is not going to happen.
I doubt that it will happen in my lifetime.
But I just cannot shake that feeling that...
If the situation arises where I am somewhere where I should not be hearing gunshots and I hear them I cannot be the one who runs away.
I can't.
Why?
I can't do it.
Because that's what pussies do, damn it.
And real American men who are armed and ready and trained, they're not pussies, okay?
We've done a lot to make sure.
Okay, okay.
No, I get it.
I get it, G.I. Joe.
But let me give you a pushback here and see if this makes any sense, all right?
Who are you gonna be saving?
My fellow Americans.
That's who I'm going to be saving.
You told me you were in liberal soup land.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean that they deserve to die because they think they're...
You're not killing them.
I know.
You're not killing them.
Are you going to go and risk your life to save a bunch of socialists who are going to hug their killers if they get half a chance?
Yes.
Why?
Don't you have any pride in your genes and your life and your future and your children to be?
They're Americans.
And that's what you have to do as a real American.
You don't have to do it.
And don't give me this word real like it's a philosophical argument.
Make the case.
Look, it's as simple as the fact that...
Without people who are willing to stand up to evil in our communities or around the world, we are not going to be a nation anymore.
I get that, but can you stand up against evil when you're six foot under the ground?
The conflict is not you throwing yourself In front of some fat government worker who's going to bleed you dry of pension money, all she can get.
That's not the courage that's needed to fight evil.
You don't have to block a bullet to fight evil.
No, but the courage to shoot back.
That's just like, good guy dead.
What you need to do is talk with people and confront people and speak truth to power.
That's how you fight evil.
It's not you taking a bullet for somebody to have you thrown in jail for following your own conscience.
Some statist...
I've been trying.
I've got to reorient you.
This is not the Wild West.
You're not throwing yourself in front of your wife and children so that the boar gores you rather than her pregnant belly.
I understand that and I'm not trying to be a cowboy.
I'm not trying to be a G.I. Joe.
It's just the fact that I have got this tie to this nation that is so much stronger than the people around me, and I will hang on to the last clutching threads as they fall through my hands.
Right, okay.
Then I'll tell you what, if someone's shooting the dirt, you can throw yourself in that path if you want, because that's the country, right?
But if you say, I've got a tie to the country, but not as much the people in it, then risking your life to save people.
Look, if you can save people, great, you know, I mean...
I'm not saying, you know, just don't call 911 or don't help or whatever if there's a way you can do it safely.
But, oh man, I'm telling you, you have got a pure case-selected thing here and it's deadly to you.
Which is, first of all, would anyone try to save you?
No.
Unlikely, right?
I mean, people won't even listen to common sense, let alone take a bullet for you.
You and I know how to save people.
Think, be clear, get some basic principles, stop being a cuck, just be somebody who's honest and understands differences in culture and understands differences in ethnicities and treasures...
The society that was built off post-Enlightenment European values informed by Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman theology and philosophy.
Just, we know, we know, follow the Constitution at the bare minimum.
We know exactly how to save people.
I don't know about what you've been doing with the last 30 years of your life, but I've been saying this kind of stuff to people over and over and over and over again.
And most of them, not all, but most of them, Have called me crazy, have called me a bad person.
Why on earth would I throw my body in front of bullets to save them?
I've been saving them, if they want it, for 30 years.
I've been reaching down to the pit of error saying, come on up, man, I'll stretch.
You can climb up my back.
You can leave a fucking Kodiak boot print on the side of my head if you want.
I'll help you out.
And they spit up and they spit up.
They think they're hitting me just in that, hey, it's raining.
Right?
And so, if you're a doctor and you've been saying to people who are ill, here's the pill, here's the pill.
It's a little jagged little pill, but here's the pill.
It's going to hurt a little going down.
It's going to hurt a little coming out, but you'll be all better when it's done.
And they say, you're sick, man.
You're trying to poison me.
You're evil.
And you're the only doctor who can generally help people.
Why on earth would you take bullets for people who think you're sick and refuse to take any cures and if you're dead, there are no more cures?
Gosh.
I'm happy to be corrected.
I'm just telling you what this is not an argument I've really thought out before.
I'm just giving you some of my initial response and, you know, feel free to talk me out of it, but...
That's what I think.
No, no, I completely understand.
I just, I, you know, I'm currently 24, and I've spent the last probably four years trying to reach out and trying to preach to people who don't want to hear it.
And would you take a bullet for them who have not listened to Reason?
It's not.
Okay, let's clarify one thing.
I'm not going to run in arms open and say, shoot me first.
This is the whole point of being armed.
No, but you're going to go risk your life.
You're going to risk your life to save them.
It's risk taking a bullet for it, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you know what?
With the situations that have been going on now where there will be 14 people dead and 21 injured, I think that that is a risk for me to take because no one else will take it.
No one else will take it here.
and if no one else will take it, then by God, I will.
Right.
it.
At least that's okay.
And maybe that's something that I need to fix.
I've had several people who are close to me say, you know, Nick, you can't save the world.
And I completely understand that.
I'm not trying to save the world.
I'm not trying to save everybody.
I don't want to be a cowboy or a cop.
I just feel that if it's not there, somebody's going to walk into a mall.
Somebody's going to walk into a theater.
Somebody's going to walk into a public building.
And they're in essence going to get away with what they did.
Because when you get gunned down by the cops after what you've done, you've gotten away with it.
You get your 72 virgins, you fucking asshole.
That's how I feel about it.
And I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe it's just me.
Maybe it's just me.
But when somebody declares jihad on me...
I feel the need to be prepared.
And I believe that comes back to what you're talking about in terrorism does actually a very good job of terrorizing people.
And it makes people like me extremely anxious.
And it does.
It does.
And listen, Nick, I want to be clear.
I mean, look, if, God forbid, my friends or family were in some mall where there was a shooter of any ethnicity and you were around, I'd be like, yeah, shoot him.
Then just shoot him again once more just to make sure he's dead.
Then drive a truck over him, shoot him again, dig him up, shoot him again, throw him down the sewers, drown him, shoot him again.
Yeah, yeah.
Until he's dust in the wind, keep shooting him.
So don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying like, oh, I'm not a pacifist.
So I understand that.
But the chilling reality...
Is that you could seriously risk your life, get shot, get killed, get wounded, be put in a wheelchair for your life, get your balls shot off, be unable to bear children, to save a bunch of people who will then vote to take away your guns.
That's my issue.
Or vote to increase your taxes.
Yeah.
Right?
That's, you know, I get the big blob of goo in your brain called America saying, But America is not chock full of people like you anymore.
Yeah, I guess so.
It didn't used to be this way.
Shit, I remember when I was a kid, it wasn't this way.
Oh my God.
In America, in the 1950s and the 1960s, when it was still, what, 9 plus percent white, kids could take guns to school for target practice at recess.
Mm-hmm.
Nobody cared.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Now you've got to go through a metal detector just to get into one of these prison-like hellholes of miseducation.
God, ain't that the truth?
Sheesh.
I learned so much more not going to college than I ever learned in high school or could have learned in a classroom.
It's kind of ridiculous.
So you have a tribal loyalty, which I admire.
I really admire it.
And I'm not saying...
Don't have those feelings, and not that it would matter if I did, but I get your tribal loyalty.
You are Alpha Wolf, protect the tribe, right?
Yeah.
And I get that.
That is heroic and noble and fantastic.
Experience, feeling, and set of principles to have.
But you've got to figure out who's actually your tribe.
Because we case-selected people have the mistake or make the mistake of thinking everyone in proximity is part of our tribe.
And it's not the case.
Now, we're evolved that way because when you're a wolf, everyone who's a wolf who's around you is part of your tribe.
So proximity being tribal, you said they're all Americans.
That's your tribe.
And I admire your desire to protect that.
But we are not a nation of wolves anymore.
Neither your nation nor my nation are a nation of wolves anymore.
There are backstabbers and betrayers and weasels and counter-wolves, anti-wolves, hunters of wolves, people who want our pelts on their fucking walls.
You've got to know who is your actual tribe because proximity doesn't count anymore.
Yeah.
Yeah, I understand.
And it's a terrible thing.
It's a terrible thing to recognize.
Jeez.
This really does bother me, though.
It really does bother me.
Because I can't accept that the entire country has become this way.
There have got to be places where freedom still rings abound.
And...
I don't know.
Maybe that is Wyoming.
Maybe I'm going to have to move to BFE Idaho.
I don't know.
But, um...
Well, I do really...
Well, maybe the liberal soup is not your natural environment.
You know, maybe you're a wolf trying to have sex with rabbits hoping to have some weird hybrid.
Like, I don't know.
Rabbit banging!
It's the wave of the future!
Half wolf, half rabbit.
Giant and fast and a vegetarian.
It's perfect.
Yeah.
Yeah, you've got to find your tribe.
And the tribe is fundamentally not ethnic.
It's certainly not racial.
It's just people who think.
You know, I've had great multi-ethnic callers call into this show and great conversations with black guys and Chinese women and you name it, right?
Oh, yeah.
They're my tribe because they're thinking.
They're my tribe.
Way more in common with them than some other white 49-year-old socialist shitlord.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean just way more in common your tribe is the people who think your tribe is the people who question your tribe is the people who are willing to put principle above pleasure Because that's the only thing that civilization is is the desire and the willingness to put principle up above pleasure To having the maturity in the balls to say no to your impulses to hedonism and put principle above pleasure if pleasure was all we needed for civilization then the most civilized people on the planet would be We're
got to find your tribe.
Now, if your tribe is not where you are, then you can try and help people elevate themselves to your tribe.
But if they simply refuse, you got to find your tribe.
And like you, I will fight to the death for my tribe, my tribe being people who think, but we're kind of scattered.
And I try and put out as much energy as I can every time I do a show, trying to encourage people to join the tribe, join the thinkers, join the reasoners, join the empiricists, join the people who can put two cogent thoughts together and use it to overcome prior That's the price of admission.
But those who are exposed to philosophy and choose selfishness, who choose mysticism, who choose collectivism, who choose superstition, after being exposed to philosophy, before they're exposed to philosophy, they're in a state of nature.
I get it.
It's fine.
After they've been exposed to philosophy, well, sorry.
After you're exposed to philosophy, you're either with us or you're against us.
You may think there's a middle ground.
I know there isn't.
And don't risk your life for the enemy.
Don't cross lines and say, I'd die for these Germans as a Brit.
Right?
You've got to know who's in your tribe and who's against your tribe.
And I was hoping, of course, at the beginning of this show, not this show, but this show as a whole, at the beginning of my sort of philosophy project of the last 30 years, where we just spread reason and evidence and everybody becomes part of the same tribe.
But I have to be an empiricist, which means I have to track what's actually happened.
I have to look behind.
I can't just drive as if I don't have a rearview mirror.
I've got to circle back and evaluate.
And the reality is we have a stronger tribe of thinkers, I think, than has ever existed prior in history, and we have a more dedicated tribe of enemies than has ever before.
Right?
Appeared in history.
Yeah, I would agree.
Because there are people who profit from thinking and there are people who profit from exploitation.
Thinking and exploitation are two of the opposites.
Thinking makes you productive vis-a-vis reality.
Exploitation makes you parasitical vis-a-vis the thinkers.
Right?
It's the moochers and the producers as Ayn Rand used to talk.
And we've got, you know, a whole presentation called the death of reason which people can go to sort of understand more about this.
So figure out who is your tribe and fight to the death for your tribe.
But give nothing to the enemy.
No succor to the enemy.
Not a cup of water.
Not a bowl of gruel.
No.
Not shelter.
Not kind words.
Not conciliation.
Not forgiveness.
Because the only way at this point to increase the tribe of the thinking is to be merciless against the anti-thinkers.
And that's my concern.
Because you've got the case-selected thing, which is everyone around me is my tribe, and that makes perfect sense in the Stone Age when all of our emotional and intellectual apparatuses developed.
Right now, a lot of spies in the tribe, man.
You've got to know who is who.
Right.
I really appreciate your time, Stefan.
I won't take any more of it.
I just want to say thank you again for the opportunity to come on here and speak with you.
It has been pretty enlightening, I'll say that much.
Well, it's my pleasure, man.
You're welcome back anytime.
I assume a new IP address next time we talk.
But I would also remind you that, and I do have to...
I do always have to make this point, which is when it comes to jihad, the Muslims are far more sinned against than sinning.
Because they view these invasions.
I mean, everybody knows Iraq and Afghanistan, but the meddling that has gone on in Syria and in Lebanon and in Libya and so on.
I mean, I read last show or the show before the number of the list of countries invaded by Western powers who are Muslim countries.
The Muslims are far more sinned against than sinning, and that is a violation of the Constitution.
See, the Constitution says you declare war.
And when you declare war, there are consequences to declaring war, which is you don't take refugees from the people you're declaring war against.
This is so unbelievably R, I can't even tell you.
It's so R, it's like a fucking pirates convention.
R! Yes.
You declare war and it's fuck them until we're done.
Like, I don't like war, but that's what war is.
Fuck them until we're done.
We don't take them in.
We don't send them food.
We don't send them shelter.
We fuck them until we're done.
That's war.
I don't like it.
And it sure as hell shouldn't have been done against Iraq or Afghanistan.
But they go and they interfere and they bomb and the no-fly zones and the embargoes and shit like that.
And it's like, are we at war or not?
If we're not at war, stop doing this stupid shit and getting people killed.
We are at war.
Do it until it's done and don't take any fucking refugees even after it's done.
I mean, can you imagine Churchill at the end of the Second World War saying, oh, yes, we'd love to take ourselves.
Perhaps three, four hundred thousand Germans should really come.
Like, oh, my God.
You just bombed these people for four years.
Yeah.
Yeah, I understand.
So, from that aspect, like, it is the anger that you feel.
And I get this.
I mean, the anger that you feel, like, those bastards came over here and shot up 14 Americans.
That is...
That anger, okay, 14 Americans, 140 Americans, 1400 Americans, 14,000 Americans, 140,000, 1.4 million, 14 million Americans.
How would you feel?
Pretty fucking pissed off.
And when you start looking at the death count, in Iraq alone, never threatened the United States directly.
Certainly did not invade.
Never attacked the United States.
And out of a population of 30 million, between half a million and a million dead, America's got a population of 300 million, the equivalent is 5 to 10 million dead.
You're pissed off at 14 people?
How do they feel?
This is not to say, oh, sympathy and so on.
It's a way of understanding that How it looks from the other side.
And people, you know, I made this comment in the show, like, stop bombing Muslim countries.
And people are like, well, that was the crusade.
Yeah, I know.
We did a whole presentation.
We haven't released it yet.
Timing, timing.
I get all of that.
Islam has been an aggressive and expansionist religion.
I get it.
Since 10 years after its inception.
And it was very quick at that.
Very quick at doing that.
However...
They're not attacking Paraguay.
Yeah.
Right?
They're not attacking Japan.
They're attacking America and France and England and Germany, all countries that participate in huge arms sales and a part of the coalition of the willing that attacked and invaded Iraq.
Now, the over there...
For the majority of the American public is the exceedingly fucking over here for the Muslims.
The Sunnis and the Shiites and the others in Iraq.
And you simply cannot wipe out five to ten percent of a population and genetically destroy the rest Significant portions of the rest of the population with depleted uranium weapons, destroy the infrastructure, drive out the intelligent people who've got any capability to leave.
You can't do all of that and not expect radicalization.
You're feeling pretty radicalized on 14 dead, right?
Yeah, and it's also different because that was a government's decision.
That wasn't my decision.
And I have now been left with, well, the ashes and the burning house.
And I've got to figure out how to put it out.
Well, you've got to understand, though, that America says that the government represents the will of the people.
And are there massive protests against the war in Iraq?
Are there tax revolts?
Is anyone being tried for war crimes?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, they're getting fucking presidential libraries and book tours and speaking tours.
They're going to go on postage stamps, these war criminals.
Obama, re-elected!
George W., re-elected!
Obama got a fucking peace prize!
Yeah.
Which they later admitted was more encouragement than recognition.
Oh my goddamn Girl Guides bullshit.
Yeah.
Even in the Girl Guides, you've got to work for your fucking not badge.
And they view this, they're all Christian leaders, not an atheist among them.
All Christian leaders.
All the Christian leaders and all the Christian soldiers, you and I know...
Look at you, case-elected son of a pastor.
You know military guys, religious or agnostic.
Oh, yeah.
W said, George W said, God told me, the Christian God told me to invade Iraq.
Yeah, I know, and George W. is a piece of shit.
We know that George W. is as much of a piece of shit, if not more, than Obama's a piece of shit, as much as Woodrow Wilson was a piece of shit.
If we're going to go back and look at historical figures...
But how does it look overseas?
Yeah, I understand.
It looks like they speak for us, when in reality they don't.
There is a large portion of...
I speak for a lot of people.
They speak for a lot of people.
Yeah, maybe.
Maybe.
I'm just saying that this is not to excuse any of the deaths, but it's a way of understanding that 14 deaths an hour away have really got your K-selected anxiety juice flowing.
Your fight-or-flight mechanism is kicked into gear.
All right.
Five to ten million deaths all around you.
No food, no medicine for your sick child.
No hospitals that can take you because they're all chock-a-block.
Children born deformed.
Cholera in the water.
We got a whole Iraq decade of hell as a presentation.
I talked about it on RT television as well.
Understand how it looks from outside the empire.
And you will understand what's happening inside the empire.
And again, this is not dominoes.
Everyone has free will.
And the people who did these murders were initiating force and they were in the wrong.
But the amount of anger that Americans feel about these 14 deaths?
Yeah.
Multiply it by hundreds of thousands.
Yeah.
And an entire society destroyed.
There's nothing left in Iraq.
Yeah.
Syria, destabilized by Western powers.
Weapons sold to these tyrannical dictatorial leaders in these countries.
Yeah.
They got some complaints.
Yeah.
I just fear that people who don't understand their own government are the ones making these decisions.
Oh, God, don't even get me started.
I'm going to get all Ward Churchill on people's asses, which is not where I want to go.
But let me just say this very briefly.
It was horrible that these people died, and they should not have died.
And they should not have died.
What was their relationship to a war being waged in their name?
What was their relationship to a war being waged in their name?
When someone came up to these people, and maybe they were all anti-war protesters, maybe they did the petitions, maybe they wrote their blogs, and maybe they were all heroes in the course, and that is entirely possible, not probable statistically, but entirely possible.
But when the news of the war came on, did they change the channel?
When people talked to them about the war being declared and done in their name against the Muslims, Yes.
Yes.
I don't know the answer to that.
No, that is an absolute yes.
Because people would rather ignore hard issues than face them straight up.
There's a Pollyannaism that's taken over a vast majority of Americans.
People don't like being uncomfortable.
Yeah and I think part of that is because we have not seen half a million boys go to Europe and not come back.
No, and you can't find pictures of Iraqi dead in any of the media in America.
Oh, absolutely not.
I gotta go digging for that kind of stuff.
Right.
So people don't want to see.
They don't want to see what's being done in their name.
Because it's uncomfortable.
Also uncomfortable is terrorist bullets in your gut.
So I suggest to people, a little discomfort now is worth a whole lot of fucking not being discomforted at all because you're dead later.
So that's why I... Mention to people that in between getting fucking Victorian and hysterical and fainting on your couch and needing smelling salts because you're getting microaggressions, how about dealing with some of the macroaggressions being committed overseas by Christian leaders in your name against Islamic people who did not initiate force against America?
Yeah.
Yeah, I do.
So there is a responsibility.
People got to have these conversations.
And if they don't have these conversations, I guarantee you this shit is going to keep on happening and it's going to get worse.
You can have an uncomfortable dinner conversation or you can have fucking nutjobs come in through your windows with grenades.
One or the other.
That is your choice.
You can have uncomfortable conversations and begin to defuse This homicidal Roman with a flaming crossbow with the devil whispering in his ear, imperialism overseas, you can have uncomfortable conversations about that shit and say, well, this is really bad.
This is really evil.
I don't think these people are Christians.
There's a thou shalt not kill that seems kind of important.
Yeah.
It's being done in our name.
It's being done with our money.
It's creating enemies who have easy access to our civilization.
Because we have a free, relatively free, open, relatively open civilization.
So people are out there poking the hornet's nest, we're allergic to bees, and we got no fucking suits.
And...
Either people can have those conversations which I've been encouraging on this channel for years and years and years or they can just not talk about it and avoid the uncomfortableness of having these difficult conversations about millions of people being killed in your name and in your God's name or they can just keep their heads in the sand until some rocket launcher goes up their ass.
And you're telling me I should not be trying to pull people's heads out of the sand anymore.
If they openly decide after being given the information to just walk away, I should walk away.
Here's the job, man.
Here's the job.
This is the only fucking job.
This is the only job for gay people right now, in my humble opinion.
You are running through a crowd.
You got a backpack full of pills.
Let's just say red pills.
You're running through a crowd.
People are sick.
One pill, one cure.
And you say, do you want to be cured?
Do you want to be cured?
Oh, man, this is a lot of running.
Do you want to be cured?
And you'll go past 100 people who will say, what are you doing, man?
You're sick.
I'm healthy.
You're weird.
You're stupid.
You want you to get...
Okay, keep going.
Keep going.
And one guy's going to be like, man, you got a pill?
You can save me from this.
You got a pill?
Give me the goddamn pill.
I'll give you anything.
I will give you anything for this pill.
And you're like, it's free.
And he's like, you know what?
Give me five.
Because I know five people who know that they're sick and desperately want to get out of this fucking zombie town while they still have brains enough and are not eaten.
Give me five pills.
I'm going straight down the street.
We got a meeting.
We got people down there.
We pretend to be playing Dungeons and Dragons, but we're actually thinking.
Give me five.
You know what?
Give me six pills.
I just thought of some other guy.
We'll meet you back here tomorrow.
We're going to get more pills.
We're going to go find more people.
And you go running down the line.
Want a cure?
Want a cure?
Want a pill?
Want a pill?
You're sick.
You want to help?
You're sick, man.
You're stupid.
Bernie Sanders has got a much better pill than you have.
I don't even have to take it.
He'll take it for me and I'll just fight in rainbows and everything will be free.
Okay, keep going.
Running down the hall.
Running down.
You want a sick?
You want a pill?
You want a pill?
And then you wait for the next guy or the next woman or whoever, right?
Yeah.
But you don't sit there and engage with people at some deep, detailed level who think that you're sick when their fucking rotten zombie arm is coming out their mouth.
Just keep moving, you keep moving, you keep moving, you keep moving.
Because the people who know that they're sick were so desperate for a cure, they'll trip you, sit on your face until you give them the pill.
Other people will bite your own arm off if you try and get it down to them because they think that you're poisoning them because they're too far gone.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
Thanks, man.
Great call.
I appreciate it.
You're welcome back anytime.
Keep us posted, all right?
Thank you very much.
It's really been an honor getting to speak with you tonight.
I really appreciate your time.
Thanks, Nick.
Take care of yourself.
Thank you, Nick.
All right.
Up next is Matthew.
Matthew wrote in and said, I'm a clinical scientist who works in a government-funded hospital laboratory.
Having worked here for some time, I have concluded that the current model of funding and completing research only breeds fraud and is a waste of resources.
This is not incredibly surprising considering this is generally the case for government-funded anything, but what I have found depressing is the degree to which many of my colleagues, whom I consider intelligent individuals, vehemently reject this conclusion irrespective of the fact that the evidence is near irrecontrovertible.
What bothers me more is the disconnect between public perception of scientists and the personalities I am surrounded by on a daily basis who are willing to make monumental logical leaps, cut corners, and distort reality just so long as they can be published.
I enjoy my profession, in the technical sense, but watching dishonest people lauded as saviors and showered with government grants has sapped my motivation.
What is Stefan's view of government research?
Is it worth being a part of a system that is laden with so much fraud?
Does it make me immoral for taking money through taxation from the unassuming public to pay for my salary?
Does the current system simply need to be abolished?
That's from Matthew.
Hey Matt, how you doing?
Do you mind if I say Matt?
Is that alright?
Yeah, that's fine, thanks.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, yeah.
Now listen, I have a weakness.
Would you like to hear what it is?
Sure.
My weakness, Matthew, is gossip.
Okay.
Now, I don't want any details and certainly no names, but can you give me some gossip about lab life?
I will certainly get to that, but do you mind if I just make a comment real quick?
No, no, please go ahead.
First, what I guess I wanted to say was I'm probably the inverse of your last caller versus the hyper-masculine American male rushing toward gunfire to fend off terrorists and socialists.
I am the...
I guess the pussy government scientist from Canada.
But I guess it's a fairly- All you had to say was Canada.
No, I'm kidding.
I'm kidding.
Okay.
No, you know what?
Canadians are an incredible fighting force.
Just so you know, I mean, Canadian history, Vimy Ridge and so on is like- Canadians were, like, feared around the world as a fighting force.
But anyway, neither here nor there, but go ahead.
Right.
So I just wanted to mention, I have a minor case of expressive aphasia, so if I start to ramble or make a lot of sense, just stop me.
Wait, so your minor case is somehow going to come back with my possibly terminal massive case.
So, okay, we'll try and focus ourselves away from the ramble.
But it's interesting because you brought up in the previous call the RK selection theory that I've I briefly heard about in undergrad and it sort of jogged my memory because I remember my first year of undergrad I had to take some stupid sociology courses for a breadth requirement.
And, I mean, you probably know the context of sociology where everything down to your eye color is apparently a social construct.
For our final essay we had to write...
Well, no, hang on.
Except for homosexuality.
Right.
Homosexuality is not a social construct.
It's not chosen.
Race doesn't exist, but homosexual impulses are entirely genetic, and it's the only thing That is genetic.
Our choice to not have tails, apparently, is just anti-tailism.
But boners liking boners, totally genetic.
That's the only exception.
But go ahead.
Anyway, so for our final essay, I remember we had to write a paper on race and context of sociology.
And I don't know if you ever came across the work of Philip Rushton.
He wrote the book Race, Evolution, and Behavior.
And it sort of applies the context of the RK selection theory to race and sort of makes the argument that within human populations, you have R selection more on African black population, whereas K is more Asian population, whereas whites tend to fall somewhere in between.
My essay was written on society obviously has an influence on society.
What are you crazy?
You brought up J. Philip Rushton, a professor of psychology, late professor.
He died, I think, recently, a year or two ago, at the age of 67.
I think he was at University of Waterloo or something.
You brought up J. Philip Rushton in a Canadian sociology course?
It was my very first year of undergrad.
How did that work out for you, Matthew, just out of curiosity?
I ended up getting, I think, a D-minus on the paper.
And it's funny in retrospect, because I remember my friend who wrote a, his paper was on the insensitivity of racial jokes.
I think he ended up getting like an A+. So anyway, it was just interesting because you, yeah.
Anyway, just bringing up the RK Selecting Theory just brought that story up.
But anyway, so I guess And just so you know, I mean, we haven't released this yet because, again, timing is everything, but I had a close to two-hour conversation with Dr.
Linda Gottfridson, which is probably going to go next week.
Do you think next week, Mike?
Do you think we're going to?
It really depends.
I have no idea.
Sometime soon.
In December, I gotta think.
We gotta surf the news cycle or whatever, right?
But anyway, she's very much an expert on Rushton's theories, and we talked quite a bit about it.
So I'm certainly aware of his theories, and I find it a very great shame.
He died of Addison's disease, but he's not alive.
Otherwise, it would have been quite illuminating and instructive and challenging to have him on the show.
But I certainly do know about it, and his work is definitely worth reading.
If he's right...
It's genius.
Like stone genius, in my opinion.
I don't know if he's right or not, because source data, I don't have the time or the competence or the experience or the expertise to grind through it all.
But he makes a strong case.
I don't know whether it's overwhelming or not.
And I don't know if other people...
I think Jensen and he died within a day or two of each other after being friends for many years.
I don't know if anyone's picking up the...
The mantle.
But I certainly know Anonymous Conservative, whose book I continually like to plug.
You can just look in Anonymous Conservative.
His book has gone into it not in exactly the same way, but I'm certainly aware of his stuff and aware enough to know that they can't fail you because he's got lots of data.
It's not like you're quoting a Klansman or something, right?
They can't fail you because a lot of data...
But they sure as hell aren't going to give you the minimum mark possible, right?
Right.
But I guess he's pretty much been blacklisted from the world of academia since writing the book.
And I remember having a very hard time finding that particular book.
The professor brought it up briefly in class sort of just to derail it.
But anyway, I guess it's beside the point.
But I guess in respect to my question, I guess I can probably start with what I would consider my central thesis to both of the points that I brought up.
So one considering the disconnect between Sorry, sorry.
Fraud is a very wide term.
I assume you mean data fraud.
I assume you don't mean financial fraud, although you might, but what kind of fraud are we talking about?
Well, I mean, I guess when you're talking about acquiring government grants that you bring in the realm of finance, But I'm talking more about data fraud and sort of the difference between the truth and the truth as is published, if that makes any sense.
Not quite.
Not quite.
Okay.
Well, I guess what I found is that there...
I mean, usually scientists are lauded as, I guess, these objectivists that are in search of the truth.
But what you find is that they generally throw this concept right out the window if it doesn't conform with their central hypothesis that they're pushing in order to get published in whatever journal they're going for.
So data fraud definitely is the main concern.
Yeah, sorry, and I don't mean to keep plugging interviews, but we just had a chat today with Dr.
Barbara Oakley, who was talking about this cherry-picking of data.
Oh my goodness, it's horrible, yeah.
They basically just keep reproducing things until they get data that they want, and nobody publishes their negative results.
Oh no.
There's very little follow-up, very little rebuttal, very little review.
The peer review is largely a joke, and in...
I can't remember which field exactly it was.
She was talking about the educational field, 0.13%, 0.13% of the data is reproducible, or has been reproduced, sorry.
In another field, it was 30% of the data has been reproducible, which is less than chance.
And so it's terrible.
And people believe that this is science.
They believe that managing your own data, being published, peer review, they believe that this is science.
It sounds like they stole a lot of my points, but I was planning on bringing those up.
And what I really think it boils down to is the fact that within the world of government research, very few people or labs are developing any sort of product or service.
It's more about generating information.
And in terms of public perception, the information for one is difficult to access.
It's usually behind some sort of paywall at a journal.
There are some open access journals that are accessible, rarely just with an internet connection.
But even if you're able to get those, they're written in such a way that with a scientific jargon, it's incredibly difficult to even comprehend what they're talking about.
Sorry to interrupt, but there's not any justifiable reason as to why they should be behind paywalls.
Because the taxpayers have already paid for this.
They're not customers out there buying this shit.
The taxpayers have already paid for all of this data.
And it's not like they're selling a lot of it, right?
Because the people in the field usually get stuff relatively cheaply, although the journals themselves, as we talked about in a previous show, are ridiculously expensive.
Tens of thousands of dollars sometimes per year.
But the only reason this stuff is behind a paywall is to keep people out.
Right.
It's got nothing to do with, oh, well, there's costs to produce it.
No, those costs are already covered by the taxpayers.
Already paid for the salaries, already paid for the government grant.
Taxpayers have already paid for it.
So the idea that you then have to pay for it again, you know, like it's with the climate change or global warming stuff.
You have, you know, these people finally got a whole bunch of the source data and, you know, some really good statisticians ran through a whole bunch of stuff and found some real problems.
Right.
Didn't come out, like, the peer review process is usually got nothing to do with peer review in the academic sense.
It's interested lay people out there with decent computers and mathematics skills grinding through the data, which is why people have stopped a lot of times releasing their data.
You've got these academics with their $50 Kindle books, for God's sakes, you know, because Come on!
We already paid for this!
With respect to the peer review process, it's generally a joke, and all the reviewers can really do is...
Assess, one, the interest of what you're putting forth and look for either internal or external consistency.
I mean, it's not as though they actually attempt to reproduce any of your findings before they give it the go-ahead to be published.
I mean, nobody really has the time for that, nor the money.
So I think that's, again, it sort of boils, comes back to the point of, in the generation of information, you're really on the honor system.
And what I've found over and over again is When I read something that's been published, I have a library subscription, so thankfully I don't necessarily have to pay for every paper I download, but if I can't reproduce it, there's so many degrees of plausible deniability that I don't call it fraud if I can't reproduce it.
I mean, I'll contact the authors and ask.
Like, you know, I tried to reproduce your findings.
I couldn't do it.
Can you give me some points?
I mean, most of the time they won't bother to respond to you.
There's no reason why they don't have it.
Sorry, you say most of the time they don't respond to you at all?
Right.
I mean, if you contact the corresponding author, which is usually the last author on the paper, so the head of the lab that produced it, if you're somebody that's not too particularly important, they won't respond to you, especially if your inquiry is questioning their data.
It's just not going to happen.
And I mean, if they do respond to me...
Nice to have that with Revenue Canada, eh?
Right.
I'm sorry, I just don't feel like responding to this inquiry.
But anyway, go on.
But I mean, even if they do, I mean, let's just say there is a case that somebody has committed fraud and they respond to your email.
I mean, generally what they can say is there's so much variability in what we do in terms of cell lines, reagents.
They'll just say, well, you know, you're probably not getting the result that I did because you're not using the same cell line.
You're not using the same...
The same what?
Cell line.
So, I mean, they generate these immortalized cell lines that are basically used for in vitro research.
So, it's basically just cells in a dish that are immortalized.
So, there's a lot of variability within...
Immortalized?
Sorry.
I feel like we're dealing with a tiny version of Highlander.
What do you mean, like, immortalized?
Well, I mean, most cells, if you were to extract from...
The human body are from an animal.
They will only divide a certain number of times before they reach what's called the Hayflick limit.
Damn mortality!
Right.
So there's ways to sort of trick the cellular machinery to continue to divide.
So that's really what they're referring to when they talk about immortalized cell lines.
There's primary cell lines, which are extracted right from an organism, which is secondary cell lines, which are these usually immortalized cell lines that you use for A lot of your research.
And of course, there's a lot of variability between batches of cells.
I mean, from my own experience, they're called passages of cells.
So you culture them and then you keep them going.
And then if they die off or you need them for an experiment, you start a new batch.
And just reproducing your own data from a previous batch of cells, it's so incredibly variable with these cell lines.
Oh, yeah.
I had a friend once who's like the big job was to carry the tray without spilling anything.
It's like the worst waiter job.
Here is half a million dollars.
Get it from one table to another and don't spill it.
Right.
I mean, so there's always that first thing they can go to, right?
Like, again, assuming they had committed fraud, they can just say, well, yeah, it's probably your cell line is just, you know, it's not the same as ours, or your cell line has, you know, faced some sort of detriment.
And that's the reason why you're not able to reproduce our data.
But I'm sorry to interrupt, but doesn't, is it, as an outsider, Isn't it not science if there are so many variables that you can't reproduce it consistently?
Isn't that, like, not science?
I mean, reproducibility is one of the cornerstones of the scientific method, isn't it?
How can you say that you have any conclusions if reproducibility becomes functionally impossible because of variability in X, right?
Well, I mean, again, since you're not, you don't really have a vested interest in generating any sort of product or service as opposed to just simply getting published in the highest impact journal.
I mean, you'll generally say, and this happened to me before, where your supervisor or whoever, if you don't get the same results, they'll say, well, oh, you know, your previous results were fantastic.
That's when your cells were working properly, but this new data, well, just forget about it.
You know, there's X, Y, and Z problems that probably happen.
So just, you know, throw the data and try it again.
And I see that quite often occurring, especially with newer graduate students where they'll have, you know, an initial Finding, and then they'll spend the majority of their time here just simply trying to reproduce the great findings they had initially.
But, I mean, their supervisor liked the initial findings because they were exciting and interesting and would get them published, and it's just not reproducible.
That's great.
I mean...
That is just fantastic.
It's literally like a tone-deaf singer who accidentally hits some right notes and then starts on a career and just say, well, you know, I hit some great notes once, just discard all this stuff, but I really want you to buy tickets to my singing anyway.
I mean, that's just being able to throw out stuff that doesn't match your thesis.
I mean, what are they, central planners?
I mean, that's fantastic.
I mean, that's so much beats having customers and voluntary interactions.
Right.
I mean, it's like if you're a restaurateur, it's like, oh, you know, I once cooked a meal that people really liked.
I just throw random shit together in the kitchen now, you know, some bolts, some oil, some husks of bread, some stuff that the rats left behind.
And people don't want to eat it.
They've got to pay anyway.
It's more difficult to produce a good meal.
If people have to eat at my restaurant, and even if I kill them, it doesn't matter.
I mean, why would you bother getting any quality ingredients or doing any good chefing?
Anyway, that's delightful.
I mean, from a black comedy standpoint, that standpoint.
You know, as an entrepreneur, I've never ever worked in a field that...
You could ever get away with that kind of stuff.
Oh my god, no.
I mean, it's just there's so much disparity between what they state they're doing and what they actually do.
It's really depressing.
So basically they're theologians.
You can twist it to make anything, right?
Well, what I find is that a lot of – there's sort of this distinction between a basic researcher and a clinical researcher.
Thankfully, or maybe the field that sort of began to push toward was called – A translational research where they're attempting to get the basic researchers, which are basically people who are studying in vitro phenomenons of cells in a dish, to get them to apply it to more of an in situ, which is more of a tissue setting.
So, versus cells in a dish, it'll be within a brain.
And then you sort of take that data, and the next step is to take it into the organism, the in vivo.
And then from there, you'd go to actually generating some sort of product.
So they're attempting to push for that.
There's a lot of pushback, unfortunately, from a lot of basic researchers saying that we should be able to study Whatever we find.
I can't believe that you people might humiliate me by demanding that I produce something of value to humanity.
I'm far too refined for that.
I exist in a platonic world of science with full thought and no empiricism and certainly no voluntarism.
Oh, how common, how petty.
Well, no, but I mean, what they'll say generally is along the lines of, well, you know, there's a lot of studies in the past.
That weren't necessarily looking for anything of clinical value.
So for instance, this guy was studying swamp bacteria, just out of sheer interest, or this person was looking at why do zebras have stripes.
And oh my god, they found the basis of SIRNA or the Krebs cycle, just out of their sheer interest.
So as government scientists, and this was actually a seminar I went to not too long ago, we should be given money to study whatever we find interesting.
I love it.
I mean, that's called having a hobby.
And it's great if your hobby finds a cure for something.
That's called having a hobby.
Right.
I mean, have a hobby, but don't expect me to pay for your model train set that might produce some virus that produces some cure for some goddamn thing.
I mean, what about all the cures that weren't developed?
That's totally analysis, right?
It's all the opportunity costs that matter.
Right.
I mean, what I was thinking was, I mean, a parallel analysis would be that, I mean, the government should be in the business of buying lottery tickets because we can all point to somebody who won the lottery and say, well, yeah, look, just by chance alone, they amassed this massive resources.
But what you miss in the analysis is a number of people that went to study something they found interesting and found absolutely nothing.
Once I sneezed out some seeds and a beautiful flower grew, I am both a farmer and a florist.
So give me money for both.
Right, and just thinking of how that could possibly work in terms of, I mean, right now, in terms of deciding who gets government grants, I mean, generally what granting agencies will require is that you write your research up.
I mean, there's different granting agencies in Canada.
Things like NSERC, which is more of the basic...
No, don't go through the alphabet soup.
It's too depressing.
It feels like somebody is shitting the alphabet in my wallet, so sorry.
There's a lot, and let's just keep going with the story.
Right, but I mean, generally, they ask you to write your grant in such a way that you define a problem that you're trying to solve.
So, I mean, from the perspective of basic research, I just don't see how it could possibly...
I mean, interest is something that's completely subjective.
And I mean, it's not like granting agencies can say, well, my God, this is interesting, but oh, this other grant.
It's just really interesting.
It's generally madness in that sense.
No, it's like government bureaucrats I mean, oh, these guys are going to be really successful.
I don't think these guys have.
It's like nobody knows.
The only thing is to put as much on the line as humanly possible and hope that people's panic produces something useful.
That's entrepreneurship in a nutshell, you know?
Here, I'm going to throw you out of a plane.
I'm going to throw a parachute out of a plane.
See if you can angle it so you end up somewhere together before the big splat.
That's entrepreneurship in a nutshell.
But this idea that people can choose it ahead of time, particularly if they have no investment.
I mean, just look at the green energy scam.
Green energy is basically, hey, is money green?
Okay, we'll call it green energy because we'd like to take a lot from the taxpayers, please, and not really show much for it.
Well, I mean, I always say that sort of the paralogue to, I mean, the climate change science that goes on in terms of the molecular biology world is cancer research.
It's just...
And I know this sort of touches on a soft spot for you, so I won't overstate where I'm going here.
I mean, cancer research for me is just an absolute nightmare to try to wade through when reading any of the research.
There's so many inconsistencies.
And there's just been so little that has been accomplished in the last decade in terms of...
Oh, come on.
Are you saying that poison and massive radiation...
You think there could be something better?
I mean, basically, cancer treatments are like, you have a cold virus, we're going to shoot it.
I hope it's not near any vital organs.
But trust me, we'll wipe out the virus and, you know, maybe you'll pull through.
I get it.
I mean, listen, I went through it.
And I'm like, really?
This is what we've got?
You're going to poison me and then irradiate me.
So basically, I'm like an unwanted rat and a burrito in a microwave.
Is this really the pinnacle of treatment that we have for this godforsaken illness?
Uh-huh.
Right.
Oh, my God.
And I think...
But, you know, and what annoys me is there could be real cures.
Right.
Like every single...
Oh, you know, it's scattershot.
You know, we'll just throw a bunch of shit over there and maybe we'll get a soup.
It's like, you know, you could just plan to make a fucking soup.
No!
Random ingredients.
And, you know, once three years ago, we got a soup that didn't make us throw up.
So my soup randomness should really be funded by...
It's like, how about you try and sell some soup to people and then see what they like?
So what bothers me is the degree to which, well, there's two things that bother me, and I'll rant very briefly to get back to you.
Number one is that, yeah, all the cures that could be developed, but aren't, because these people are sucking up all the money for their own fucking hobbies, number one.
Number two, James Watson, from my understanding, was for many decades, was running a pretty sophisticated cancer research center until he got fired for saying the Basic facts that Africans have a lower IQ than Asians.
And then he had to get fired.
And it's like, oh, that's great.
So political correctness might have killed the cure for what might kill me.
Oh, that's fucking great.
Social justice warriors, you are now in my crosshairs because you assholes took a researcher out of the field who was working on a cure to a disease that might come back to me.
So fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
I think also, within any area of research, it's incredibly difficult to detect fraud.
Again, this is data fraud.
I don't know if you ever came across the site Retraction Watch.
It sort of monitors The retraction watch is basically like the New York Stock Exchange ticker feed, right?
Digga digga digga.
Here's another one.
Digga digga digga.
Here's another one.
It's like watching the retraction of the New York Times, which sometimes seems bigger than the entire newspaper.
But go on.
Right.
So it's basically just tracking in real time retractions that occur at any of the journals.
Fraud has been discovered and the paper is what's called retracted.
So the researchers or the journal puts a big notice on the title of the paper saying this research has been retracted.
So it's been proven to be either non-reproducible or somebody in their group has blown the whistle on them.
Well, but to be fair, on the plus side, at least we last heard immunity out of fear of autism.
So at least lots of people are dying because illnesses that were formerly protected by herd immunity are no longer protected because people, because of a Lancet article, are afraid to give their kids vaccines because lies.
Right.
So, I mean, I'm on this site often.
I'm interested in this area.
And what I find is that there's really three different types of papers that are retracted.
So, there's three different reasons as to why a paper is usually retracted.
So the first two, which are usually in the vast minority, are for one, somebody discovered that they made a mistake in their methodology when they publish a paper.
And out of sort of the kindness of their own heart, they notify the journal and have the paper attracted.
That's very, very rare that that ever happens.
I mean, when you attract...
And I assume it's because someone's being blacked.
blackmailed.
Oh, I don't know.
But I mean, it's really a black, it's really a stain on your resume when you have a retracted paper for whatever reason.
I don't think it necessarily matters.
Sure.
Um, so the second type of retraction is usually a colleague, uh, turned somebody else in or notified the journal saying that it was just a bunch of bullshit.
Um, And the vast majority are papers where there is obvious fraud that's just blatant and stupid.
So for example, they'll have an image of their control and then in their treatment it'll just be the same image but just stretched and inverted or whatever.
But the outright fraud, whereas you...
Like, for example, if I were to run a protein blot and just in one of the lanes I don't load any sample, and then I say, well, look, in comparison to my control, my protein is gone in this treatment, and I just didn't load any sample.
It's very difficult for anybody to ever detect that as fraud if I publish it, unless they take the time to reproduce the experiment.
And many times, right?
Right.
And they have to – one failed to reproduce could be a error.
And even still, I mean, even still after that, if they can't reproduce it, like I mentioned before, there's all of these layers of deniability.
Rather, I mean, most – there's sort of this mindset of you want to produce this plausible deniability in your research.
There's all these layers you can sort of detract them away from you again.
So you sort of say, oh no, it was a cell line, it was a reagent.
So the detection of actual fraud in what's published, it's incredibly difficult to detect because it's almost like it's on the honor system.
Where you're just hoping that the people who are writing these papers are just, you know, at least in some sense adhering to the scientific method, which from my own experience is very rarely ever the case.
And this stuff can, not to put too fine a point on it, but if people put out research that's fraudulent or just false, other people will build upon that research.
Exactly.
things that would actually be productive.
It's not just the individual, it is the discipline as a whole that may charge off in that direction.
And huge amounts of resources then get squandered on something that's fraudulent, whereas they could have been spent on something that would be productive and cures aren't realized and treatments aren't realized and people die as a result.
This isn't just like, well, accounting fraud where people lose money, which is bad enough.
But this is medicine, right?
This is life and death stuff.
Yeah, absolutely.
But unfortunately, I think the way the system operates right now, it's sort of, well, it's not sort of, it is that the cheaters win.
And if you want to remain within government science, it's gotten to the point where you just have to lower your standards.
And if you adhere to the scientific method and you're willing to put out that your hypothesis is false, well, you're just never going to get published.
And the people who distort the truth and publish their half-truths in slightly significance...
And this brings a different kind of personality into the scientific world.
Yeah, totally.
Absolutely.
People whose conscience is not particularly bothered...
I assume yourself are, you know, wrestling with this kind of dilemma in the dark.
Right.
So, I mean, when I first started at this institution, they outlined quite clearly their ethics in terms of what they expect the researchers to adhere to.
So what constitutes authorship, what constitutes plagiarism, what is considered data fraud.
So they send you to all these different seminars, and they very clearly go through examples as to what's what, what you can't do.
What you should be doing.
But I mean, nobody implements any sort of standard once you actually get to the bench side.
I mean, I've seen it happen here where three different people have reported the same person for committing data fraud and just absolutely nothing is done.
And it gets to the point where they go to the people who are reporting and just say to them, well, look, we can attempt to You know, do something about this, but you have to consider the ramifications for the institution, you have to consider the ramifications for the supervisor, and it's probably in your best interest to say nothing.
Also, there are That person may have obviously had grad students or other people that supervised and passed their PhDs.
I mean, it has a huge ripple effect.
Plus their management, since they've committed to these ethics, if somebody has been openly practicing in violation of these ethics for a certain amount of time, could be years, could be decades, then yeah, there's a huge snowball effect.
And people, of course, would much rather not have that happen.
Exactly.
So, I mean, there's a lot of standards that are stated but nothing's really ever followed.
Right.
Whereas, of course, fraud is punished in the marketplace quite strongly.
Like, I mean, if somebody says, I'm going to sell you a computer with an i5 chip and it comes and it's got a 286, right?
Then I'm going to complain.
I'm going to try and get my money back.
I'm going to go to the Better Business Bureau.
I might even go to a small claims call, whatever, right?
And so in the marketplace...
And fraud, you know, oh, this is gluten-free, right?
And then I feed it to someone with a gluten allergy, they get really sick.
Well, okay, that's a problem.
Or in an R&D department, if I say, oh, you know, I've designed this chip that runs three times faster, right?
And they're like, wow, that's fantastic.
You know, here's all this money, and here's a great team, and it turns out that I've changed the data.
Yeah.
Well, you're severely punished.
And I mean, that's jail time.
That's significant fraud that has resulted in losses to people.
And this is a...
And even if it's an accident, like I read a book many years ago by Andy Grove, who was then, I don't know if he still is, probably not, the CEO of Intel, talking about some problems they had with multiplications in spreadsheets in one of their chips or whatever, somebody put the wrong calculation in a table in the chip.
This was not fraud.
This was error.
And, you know, What they had to do was considerable.
I mean, the recalls that go on for cars for seemingly minor things are huge.
And so even with accidents, there's a significant punishment in the marketplace.
But fraud is enormous.
And of course, any company that...
Fraud results in significant misallocation of precious resources.
And if your competitors...
Like if I'm the guy who says, oh, I've got a chip that runs three times faster when it's actually twice as slow, and everybody pours, you know, $5 million into this...
And then it's fraudulent.
Well, the competitor who poured $5 million into actually a better chip is way ahead of me because we've fallen back and they've leapt ahead and we have all these internal problems to deal with and they have a streamlined operation.
Plus, we then lose people to them because people are like, well, it turns out this guy cooked all the data.
I've lost my motivation to work at this company, so I'm going to go jump ship, right?
So fraud is really significantly and badly punished, strongly punished.
Badly punished sounds like not punished at all.
Strongly punished in a sort of free market environment and doesn't mean that it never happens and so on and so on, but it is very inefficient and it results in significant misallocation of precious resources, which because there's no voluntarism, no market, no competition in the area that you're in, well, it's a Soviet factory, right?
They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.
Well, not many people around here are fans of the free market.
But it's interesting.
If you look, I sort of do this side-by-side comparison with the biotechnology field, which is usually the companies that provide us with the reagents and tools to assess whatever we're studying.
And just the amount of innovation and new technology that comes from the biotechnology field is just absolutely astounding to me.
Compared to us and what we're studying, it's not even comparable.
Why don't you go there?
I'm considering it, actually.
Well, I just finished my PhD not too long ago.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
I guess I wish the work that went into it I could be a little more proud of, but it's something that I completed nonetheless.
But yeah, I'm considering it.
So I'm sort of considering either medicine or just getting out of science completely.
Well, I mean, I think that the biotech companies, it's not like they're not doing science.
They're just not doing government science.
Well, no, sorry, that's not what I meant.
Sorry, yeah, sorry, I didn't bring that up properly.
Get out of government science.
Yeah, exactly.
It's not as easy as you would think, unfortunately, to find a job in the biotechnology field.
But, yeah, it's definitely something for me that's worth looking into.
I forget where I was going with this.
Why is it to get a job in the biotech field if you've got the education and the drive?
I'm not sure.
It's just the...
I find that the jobs just aren't really there when I look for them.
It's almost as though I feel as though I'm overqualified for a lot of them, which a lot of people with PhDs tend to have a problem with.
They become a bit of a flight risk for the employer.
So it's...
A bit more difficult than I would have thought to find a job in biotech.
But it's not something I have exhausted, for sure.
But the good thing is that once you get a job, you'll be facing less competition for it.
So it's tough to get in, you know?
Right.
It's really tough to beat the lead in a movie, yes, but once you get that status, not a lot of people competing for the leads in the movie.
What brought about this question in the first place was, I work at this building that's a relatively new research center that was funded by some rich benefactor.
And they often have these, I guess, tours that go on for the public.
They come and see what we're doing here.
And when I was working, they had one of these tour groups coming around, and these people, I didn't even know who they were, but they just came up and started talking to me, and they said, They're like, oh, we're right near a hospital.
We're technically part of a hospital.
But they come up to me and said, oh, my son just recently underwent some traumatic brain injury.
And it gives us so much hope to see young scientists like yourself actively working for a cure.
And I just think to myself, oh my god, if these people actually knew What we do here like they would just have no hope whatsoever.
I guess it just really it really bothered me and because I don't think What I've done and What I'm doing is necessarily useful to anybody.
So Anyway, that's sort of where the question Well, it's useful to some people.
It was certainly useful in terms of your sponsor.
You're not your your Your supervisor, sorry, I should sponsor it.
You may sponsor it as an addiction.
But your supervisor, you know, it helped him get a paycheck.
And your work probably helped people get grants.
I mean, it's useful to someone.
Right, I guess I meant...
I get that point.
But I guess useful in actually generating something that would be considered useful to society as a whole.
Not so much.
So yeah, that's...
No, and listen, the...
There's a movie called Shadowlands.
It's not that great.
I mean, Anthony Hopkins is such a great actor.
It's worth just watching it for him.
But there's the academics, right?
There are academics, Oxford or Cambridge or whatever, and they have the big flowing robes and they bark at their pupils and all that, and they spend time in the library wearing out their glasses.
And Anthony Hopkins says to another academic, do you ever just feel this unbearable sense of waste?
And the other academic says, of course.
And then they both basically shrug and go back to their books, you know?
It's like the shortest parody of a Russian play.
You know, one of these 19th century god-awful Russian plays.
It goes something like this.
I believe it's been 10 years since Uncle Ivanov died.
No?
No, it's been 12.
Yes, you're right.
And still...
Nothing has changed.
The end!
And so you have to, I think, it's wise to be careful of embedding yourself in a system that you become dependent on where there is that increasing sense of waste.
You have a powerful intellect and your communication skills powerfully.
But you have a considerable and formidable intellect.
And I view that as gold in the general gravel of humanity.
And I think that intelligence, as you know, is largely heritable.
You have inherited a gift for intellectual work and hard work.
It's not easy to get a PhD, particularly in the sciences.
And I think as the person who has received an accidental gift through genetics, there is a case to be made that using it to serve humanity the best is not a bad way to spend your life.
It's not like you have to or you've got to do it in a way that makes you miserable.
My case is it's win-win.
Like I think what I'm doing is using my intellect to best serve humanity and I love it.
So I'm not talking like do something you hate for the sake of serving the board collective who can't match your achievements.
I don't mean that.
But I think that if you take the safer and more predictable route – Your life has a great danger of becoming futile and useless and a waste.
And secondly, you'll be around people who have made that choice and have no problem with you making that choice.
And that, to me, is worse than the prison of the lab is the prison of the other prisoners of the lab.
Right.
Well, I mean, currently I have an open offer of admission from medical school.
I'm considering that.
I don't know.
I find that a lot of people who finish their PhD and are not necessarily enthralled with what's next.
Well, I guess medical school is the next best thing, so they head in that direction.
I can't wait to prescribe SSRIs for bad parenting.
Exactly.
There's a lot of problems there as well.
I'm sort of at a crossroads right now.
I guess that was reflected in my question, just considering the morality of the entire situation.
I mean, I guess...
Well, let's just deal with that.
That's very brief.
Okay.
Shockingly.
But the reality is just in a moral system.
Because it relies on coercion.
Right.
Right?
I mean, the people are not funded voluntarily.
Right.
And it has struck me, you know, when you were talking to...
The people whose kid was ill.
Now, of course, if you were in a free market environment working hard for a cure, even if you spent your life and failed, that's a good way to spend your life.
Because you will have at least closed off avenues that other people shouldn't go.
There be dragons!
Okay, let's not sail over there.
I'm sorry that guy got eaten by dragons, but at least we know enough not to go over there, right?
So, you know, it's that great Richard Dawkins thing.
It's like, it's so incomprehensible, it's not even wrong.
It doesn't even block.
It's just so bad, right?
Right.
So if you spend your life trying to do something noble in a voluntary environment and failing, you have spent your life well.
Not as well as if you'd succeeded, but well.
And that, of course, is the view from the outside.
The taxpayers are like, wow, it's great that these people are working so hard for the cures, right?
And they don't know, right?
And I've had some friends who've gone through this sort of process before.
And so when people, you know, when I criticize this stuff, you're anti-science!
I'm not.
I'm anti-violence.
I'm anti-coercion.
And what happens in government science now is the results of taxpayers being forced to fund things and all of the inefficiency and fraud and corruption that often, though not always, results from that kind of situation.
And of course, I think a lot of the great scientific advancements, if you look at them, did not come out of government labs.
Sorry, it's just the way it was.
I mean, the two big ones of the 19th and 20th century came out of people who weren't even employed in government science.
Darwin with the theory of evolution and Einstein with the theory of relativity.
You know, one was a private naturalist and the other was working in a goddamn patent office, for God's sakes, right?
I don't know if you know, sort of the father of genetics, Gregor Mendel, which is some priest with pea plants and...
I mean, he was by no means a scientist, but he was just interested.
I mean, by no means did he have any sort of government grants or research.
Yeah, science happens because people love to explore and they're curious.
And those are the people I want doing science, not career bureaucrats who don't get what they want and end up typing new crap into spreadsheets.
I mean, that's not the kind of people.
I want people doing science...
Like, I hope and I think that the world says that they want me doing philosophy because I live, eat, and breathe philosophy.
It's what I think about after my family and friends the most in the world and sometimes to the detriment of those things more than that, right?
I mean, I live, eat, sleep, and breathe this stuff.
I was doing it for years before I got paid a penny.
In fact, it cost me a lot to do it in terms of education and books and lost social relationships and so on, right?
So I'm so ridiculously enthusiastic and dedicated towards philosophy that you don't need taxpayers to force me to have a chair in philosophy for me to bring value to the world.
In fact, if taxpayers were funding me having a chair in philosophy, I'd be trying to argue whether nouns exist in the objective, newer, demeanal realm of Plato's arse farts.
I mean, it would be completely useless.
I am facing the world because, you know, when I say it's really great to develop cures for stuff, yeah, okay.
I'm trying to develop cures for evil.
Sort of the job of the moral philosopher.
Hey, got a plague of evil?
Send out the bat signal and the bald one will come.
I mean, that's what I should be.
This is exactly what I should be doing with my life.
I'm like the drummer for U2 in Rattle and Hum.
You know, this is it, man.
This is what I should be doing with my life.
This is the best service of my considerable intellect.
I'm very humble in my approach to it and grateful that people are interested and work very hard to make it engaging and entertaining and enjoyable.
So philosophy is happening and people say, well, you know, but it's not a doctorate in philosophy in an ivory tower teaching a bunch of bored post graduates who only hope is to get the same $150,000 a year work three days a week effort.
Every five years you get a sabbatical and summer's off job!
No!
That would be a terrible way.
People are like, wow, you should be a teacher.
You should go be a doctor of philosophy.
It's like...
Oh, so I could teach, say, five people instead of five million people.
Yeah.
Good plan.
Good plan.
You should build one iPhone, Steve Jobs.
You should run for office.
Oh, so that way I have to have stupid people believe me rather than intelligent people understand me.
I don't think that's going to really enhance.
Ah, for my political speech, I give you...
A rousing rendition of universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics.
I think I'll vote for him if he stops talking.
So, you know, this, it's not anti-science, it's anti-coercion, and you are in an environment that is funded by coercion.
Doesn't mean you have to leave.
It doesn't mean you have to leave because my argument has always been if you are honest with yourself, and I'm not saying you're not, right?
But if anybody out there is honest with themselves, anything's permitted as long as you're honest with yourself.
We just had this conversation, Cheryl's not out yet, with a British teacher who was talking about the same sort of conversation.
So you can stay if you want, but there are particular consequences to it, which is that the money that you're going to get paid by is not there by choice.
You know, the woman you're dating is there at gunpoint.
If you can still enjoy the date, okay, but I don't think you're that kind of person myself.
Right.
So, you know, it's like Chairman Mao wrote a poem.
Who'd like to applaud?
It's the best poem ever.
Like the Chinese communist seal pups who have to clap or die, right?
It's like...
In Gulag Apicalago, as I've mentioned before, there's this terrifying but real scene where some party functionary was giving a speech and everybody was clapping and their hands were hurting and turning into hamburgers, but nobody wanted to be the first to stop clapping because you might end up in a Gulag.
Yeah.
And so the money that you would be receiving is not there by choice.
It's there by coercion.
And you're surrounded by people who are really okay with that, in fact, really like it.
And if you like the free market, and if you like voluntarism, and you like uncoercive human interactions, you're going to have to shut up a lot for the next 50 years if that's your goal.
And I think life is too short to do a lot of shutting up.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I understand that.
And I guess a lot of researchers here, they don't understand that type of perspective in terms of the free market doing anything.
And it's sort of like, oh, well, what we're doing is too important to leave in the hands of the free market.
Oh, come on.
This is part of the lying.
I'm sorry to bring you up short on this, man.
They know exactly what it's all about, which is why they dislike it so much.
They know exactly.
It's like, oh, well, in the free market, I'd have to be productive.
I'd have to be accountable.
And the free market requires you curb your ego.
And people say to me, oh, Steph, you're so egotistical.
You're so arrogant.
It's like, I don't like the cut of your sophistry jib, my friend.
No, I mean, the idea that I'm somehow in charge of an entirely voluntary conversation, I'm a dictator of, hey, stay if you want, and don't stay if you don't.
You know, I have the ultimate control of, hey, can you click on my head or not?
It's really your choice.
It's like the least empowering dictatorship in the known universe.
Now, who's arrogant are people like, I don't know, Political leaders who think that they could just wave their pens and wave their guns and solve all social problems.
Me just saying, hey, come and be entertained and hopefully enlightened by some challenging philosophical conversations and ideas if you want to and pay if you want to.
And if you don't, I guess you won't.
That's not arrogance, that's real humility, which is I have to continue to provide, you know, after eight or nine, what sometimes feels like long years, I have to keep providing new insights, new intelligence, because there are people who donate, who've been listening from the beginning, and there are new people, and there are people who are very experienced, and people who are not experienced, and people who are very knowledgeable in philosophy, and people who aren't knowledgeable in philosophy have got to spread everything out.
I've got to do this dance where I'm like teaching postgraduate and kindergarten at the same time in the same venue and There are people who like swearing.
There are people who don't like swearing.
There are people who like the rants.
There are people who hate the rants.
And I've got to balance it all out every single time I get in front of a mic or a camera.
That is the real challenge.
And knowing who to talk to and who not to talk to, what's going to be a good opportunity, what's not going to be a good opportunity, what we're going to focus on, what we're not going to focus on, who we're willing to alienate and who we can't alienate yet because we're still building a case.
So, I mean, this is all very complicated stuff.
There's a lot of stuff going on.
You know, hey, that duck is just mysteriously gliding along the lake.
It's like, no, there's a lot of paddling going on, you just can't see it.
And so, you are around very arrogant people who are so arrogant that the idea that someone, and insecure, and insecure, arrogance and insecurity tend to go hand in hand.
security are two sides of the same coin.
Because if they genuinely believed that they had something of incredible value to offer people, they'd be entrepreneurs.
They know that they're producing useless crap that people don't want.
And the reason that they don't want to go on the free market is that then they'd have to work for a living.
Right.
Thank you.
Like, work and produce...
I'm not saying they don't work.
Work and produce value, that is determined by the customer.
That is the humiliation sometimes and the humility of dealing with the free market, is that I can't...
Like, I've done some shows which I think are the best that get, like, eight and a half views.
Like, someone didn't even up-click.
They got so...
Oh, I clicked.
I thought that was porn.
Worst porn ever.
I thought it was.
And then there are shows that I thought, you know, like...
Like the European migrants crisis one, I just got fired up and did 15 minutes.
And it's like, I don't know, 600, 700,000 views on YouTube.
Other stuff we work on for two weeks and we're lucky to break 30.
And it's like, oh, come on, people!
Like, don't you know quality?
Well, no.
You have to humble yourself before the free choices of free people.
And that requires, you know, you've got to subjugate yourself to what people want.
Give the people what they want.
You know, it's like...
Can you play your one hit from the 80s?
It's like, you know, I've written 200 songs since then.
No!
Story of your enslavement again and again.
And so that, I think, is a challenge.
And I think that people instinctively know that out there in the free market, they're going to have to humble their egos and they're going to have to serve the customer.
And it doesn't matter what they think is great.
They can make the case to the customer.
The customer can say no.
And you have to interest people who are busy with other things.
And they have to provide value to the customer.
And that means to serve someone else's needs, often at the expense of your own ego and what you would necessarily prefer in the moment.
That's natural.
And it's healthy.
That's healthy.
I mean, it's kind of narcissistic otherwise.
So that's...
I would say, well, if they don't really know much about the free market, the test is, do they react with irritation when you bring it up?
If they do, then they know.
Like, if they were bored, like you said, oh, I don't know, I studied this really interesting hilltop language singing style from Huanan in China or whatever, right?
They'd be like, oh, okay, well, I guess I'll hear, why don't you rip off a ditty for me, right?
And so if it's something they genuinely don't know, I would assume as scientists they have more than a tiny bone of curiosity in their body, so they'd be curious.
But you know what happens when you bring up this kind of stuff.
They're immediately annoyed and irritated and superior and aristocratic about it.
That's because they know deep down, and that's what I don't want you to lie to yourself about.
I'm not saying you were lying.
I'm just saying that that is the reality.
When people react with irritation and hostility to a particular argument, they can't then also claim that they're ignorant of all its implications.
Right.
Okay.
Well, I guess I'll leave you with two pieces of gossip as you requested.
Oh, man.
I wasn't going to get any gossip out of you at all.
I thought I was going to have to get you drunk.
They're not that great.
But I mean, when they happen, I sort of question, like, what am I even doing here?
I mean, like one of my colleagues who sort of shares a lot of my frustrations, she was doing measurements with her cells or whatever, and their contraption.
And when you're done with them, you throw them in the garbage.
And once they're out of the tissue culture hood, they're no longer sterile.
And that's, of course, a big concern.
So she threw them in the garbage.
Her supervisor comes around and says, no, the measurements weren't completed.
And she told her to take the cells out of the garbage and just continue along as though, you know, nothing ever happened.
And I guarantee you, if they got the result that they wanted, they would include it in whatever publication they're working for.
And I've seen, well, I've heard, I know these, what has occurred where a group that I work alongside with, they were studying a particular protein.
So when you express proteins within cells, it's from an expression of plasmid.
And so they published this paper saying it was a particular protein.
And then, you know, two or three years later, they had a new graduate student and their first job was to sequence protein.
The plasma that she was working with.
And lo and behold, it wasn't even the protein that they thought it was.
And of course, this was a big concern for them at the time.
But their publication, of course, isn't retracted.
They just said it's taken care of.
And that's the last I ever heard of it.
So, I mean...
They said it's taken care of?
Right.
I mean, that's...
Did the graduate student ever show up again?
Or did he find himself in a Clinton-style self-suitcase packing trip to nowhere?
No, actually...
That just sounds...
Don't worry.
It's taken care of.
We found a way to liquefy him and drink him through a slurpy straw.
I mean, that just sounds so mafia-style, you know?
It's taken care of.
Anyway, go ahead.
But that's pretty much it.
I mean, I guess if anyone...
No, you said two pieces of gossip.
That was two.
I mean, the first one was the garbage cells and the second one...
Oh, okay, okay.
Okay.
Well, I mean, but I guess if anybody who works here ever comes across this...
This interview, I guess, and probably be booted out of here pretty quickly.
I think you're helping yourself find a launchpad.
I'll be out the door pretty fast.
Well, listen, Matt, I really appreciate it.
You're welcome back anytime.
Do keep us posted on what you're up to.
And, of course, if there's anything we can do to help, we certainly will.
But I think that it's going to require a fair amount of ignoring questions.
What's morally obvious, to be genuinely happy in that environment.
And I think that comes out the cost of happiness.
But keep yourself out there as far as opportunities go.
And, you know, I don't think you're exactly jumping to the free market in Canada if you go into medicine.
Well, no, actually, that was my concern.
When I was an undergrad, I always wanted to be a doctor.
But I mean...
I've dealt with the Canadian medical system, and it's horrors.
Not too long ago, I had to go to the US for treatment, and just the comparison, it was just mind-blowing.
It was just absolutely mind-blowing.
The doctor came to my hotel room to take care of my shunt.
I was just shocked that the specialist I was seeing was actually on time.
You know, I got an MRI done within a day, whereas up here, it's just you hope for the best.
You cross your fingers and whatever specialist you have.
Well, no, actually, if you cross your paws, you're okay.
Like, if you're a dog, you can get an MRI the same day.
If you're an actual human taxpayer, you've got to wait months.
No, I mean, I won't go into details, but yeah, the guy, the doctor sat down with me for like half an hour, diagrammed everything that was going on.
Everything was on time.
Everything was great.
I didn't have to go back into the hospital.
He came to my hospital.
He gave a house call in a hotel I was staying at to take out the shunt and asked me how I was doing.
There was follow-up.
I mean, the paperwork was perfect.
Oh my god!
Like, I mean, if I have a cold, I'm just like, can I fly to Oklahoma?
Because, you know, it's going to be cheaper and easier than me driving to my doctor here.
But anyway, I actually have a pretty good doctor or GP here.
But yeah, the moment you start going to specialist land, it's like, yeah, good luck.
But thanks, Matt.
It was a really, really great chat.
Keep us posted, alright?
Okay, bye.
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