3196 The Young Earth Science Debate! - Call In Show - February 3rd, 2016
Question 1: [1:34] - “I have been an exotic dancer for nine years and I want to change my career by opening my own bar. How do I overcome my fear of failure in a new field that I don't know much about, and which seems to have a high probability rate for failure?”Question 2: [2:03:49] - “What is Young Earth Science (YES) and how does it relate to Philosophy? Should we waste billions on funding research based on old earth fallacies?”Question 3: [3:11:55] - “To what extent are monopolies caused by the government - and are monopolies necessarily a bad thing? By 'bad' I am referring to how monopolies are negatively portrayed worldwide.”Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Now, if you have thought to yourself, and you probably have, and often, that the one thing that Free Domain Radio lacks is strippers, well, we can't give you the plural, but we can give you the singular, which is a singular conversation with a young lady who has been an exotic dancer for close on a decade and is wondering what the next step in her life should be.
Well, we go into a lot of her history and...
Also, some fascinating tidbits about what is called the SOP trade, which is sexually oriented business.
So, I hope that you will find that interesting.
I know that I did.
Secondly, happy birthday, planet.
You are 4,500 years old, according to what is called Young Earth Science, or YES! And, okay, we did Flat Earth, let's do Young Earth as well.
And we had an interesting chat, good philosophical methodologies, a good examination of some of the arguments, and I think a good examination of the scientific method.
Now, number three, you may have heard in the past criticisms of the free market related to the following.
There are big evil corporatist monopolies that we need the government to protect us from.
Lo and behold, how will we save ourselves from these vicious incorporated demons?
Must we not forever run to the state to survive the onslaught of people who want to sell us stuff who are very good at it?
Well, we had a good chat about that, which I think you'll find very illuminating, and which you can, of course, glean for arguments to bring to your lefty friends.
All right, let's hit it.
All right.
First today we have Lexi.
Lexi wrote in and said, I've been an exotic dancer for nine years and want to change my career by opening my own bar.
How do I overcome my fear of failure in a new field that I don't know much about and which seems to have a high probability rate for failure?
That's from Lexi.
Hello, Lexi.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
How are you?
I'm well.
I'm well, thanks.
Um...
Do you want to start past or do you want to start talking about what you want to do next?
Either way.
Alright.
Let's go chronologically then.
And I just have some questions I think most people do about this kind of life.
So how did you get into exotic dancing in the first place?
So I grew up Mormon.
Okay, that was not the answer I was expecting.
I love the surprise elements in this show, you know?
How did you get into this?
Well, I grew up Mormon, so naturally the next step is doing missionary for people who want to do missionary.
Okay, sorry, go ahead.
When I started dancing, I was still a Mormon, so I was probably like one of the only Mormon strippers around.
That's, you know, and when it comes to, you know, your business in the future, a niche market is not a bad place to start.
Mormon exotic dancer, I gotta think, is kind of niche.
There's actually a lot of Mormon guys that come into the club.
You'd be surprised.
Oh, I'm not sure I would be hugely surprised, given that sexual repression and sexual exploration are not exactly opposite ends of the human spectrum.
But so, yeah, how did you get into it to begin with?
So, I grew up Mormon and I probably remained Mormon until I was about 22.
And now I'm 32.
And how it started, I think, was I was going to go on a mission when I was 21.
Because they tell you that's what you're supposed to do if you're a woman and you haven't been married off by 21.
You should consider going on a mission.
And they actually denied me and said I couldn't go.
And I was engaged to a guy that was on a mission.
Wait, why did they deny you?
They said that I'd come too close to having sex on one too many occasions.
If it was one time, they could have looked past it.
But because it was a couple times that I had gotten that close, they said they didn't want promiscuous women in the mission field.
And they'd raised the bar, they'd said.
And it was kind of crazy because my bishop...
No, go ahead.
Sorry.
Oh, you're fine.
My bishop had approved me and I'd actually taken all the courses and I'd done a whole year where I was morally clean.
And I'd actually was like ready to go in everything and had gotten rid of all of my stuff and got myself a passport to try to encourage him to send me out of the country.
And then he decided to bring in the stake president and tell him all the personal stuff that I told him.
And then they had a little meeting, the two of those men, with me and told me that they'd reconsidered and that God had something else in mind for me that he wanted me to do.
And so I should just get over it.
You told this guy your sort of personal sexual secrets and all that.
And then he kind of used that to deny you the mission after you basically changed your life getting ready for it.
Yes.
Well, that seems...
Pretty sucky, to be honest with you.
I mean, pretty wretched, right?
Because I assume you were talking to this guy with the expectation of some kind of confidence, right?
Yeah, and they have you do that from the time that you're young all the way up.
And they say that if you mess up again, that you have to retell all because then you're unforgiven because it's the same sin you were originally forgiven for.
So I had done that many, many times with this guy.
And he had also started off as my family home teacher, which is someone who comes to your house weekly and meets with your family and has little church discussions and stuff.
So it was kind of weird when he became my bishop.
And then I started telling him these...
Right.
So, I mean, how did that feel to be rejected in this way?
It was really hard because originally I was going to buy a house that I'd been renting because the owner had given me an option to rent to own and I was going to start school.
And I was trying to decide between the two options, staying home and doing that or going on a mission.
And I really had a hard time deciding.
And so I had to have you do a blessing if you're having a hard time.
And basically the bishop had In the prayer said, either way is good that I just have to decide for myself.
And when I was trying to decide, the story came into mind where Jesus says, give everything away and come follow me and to just have faith.
And I guess I wanted to test myself and see if I could be the kind of person that could drop everything and give everything away and follow Jesus and that everything would be okay.
So that was kind of the idea.
So I turned my mind and my thoughts to that and then Right.
a little devastating.
And then some other people said I should get a second opinion.
And then I was like, well, it's God speaking through the bishops.
So that's like saying I need to get a second opinion on what God's told me I'm supposed to do.
Right.
I mean, it's a pretty sweet gig if you're trying to convince people that you say, "Hey, don't blame me.
I'm just speaking for the omniscient guy." I mean, talk about like a non-negotiable position.
Either you say to the guy, I don't believe you're speaking for God, maybe you're listening to the devil, in which case you're really escalating things, or you've just got to knuckle down.
There's no need for a rational argument.
You've got this big giant tsunami of Godhead that you're surfing over everyone's opinions on, right?
Yeah.
So, I mean, and I guess the Bible verse you're talking about is Jesus saying, you know, all who would follow me, sell all your possessions, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow me with basically nothing but the shirt on your back.
And so you didn't, you were rejected for the mission.
Then what?
Well, I was engaged to a missionary, and he came home engaged to someone else.
And you're not supposed to do something like that on your mission.
Was he gone for a year?
No, he was gone for two whole years and the first year I waited for him and then in the second year he proposed to me through a little cassette tape thing he sent home and I'd been dating, you know, at first and I just didn't feel like anybody compared to him so I decided to become engaged with him and then because of him reading my emails and misunderstanding things we ended up breaking off our engagement and then we were supposed to date when he came home and Wait, wait, hang on.
I feel like I'm watching a sort of Mexican soap opera on Fast Forward here.
What happened with the emails?
What happened with what?
I'm sorry.
What happened with the emails?
You said he misunderstood some emails?
Oh, yeah.
He got bit by a spider and was really sick and in the hospital, and I guess he had too much time on his hands, and he started reading through my emails, and I'd started going country dancing on Tuesday nights because I was trying not to go out to Club dancing because it's more provocative and all this.
I was trying to be good.
Country dancing, a lot of it's like swing dancing.
I wanted to learn some of these cool moves like the candlestick and all this stuff.
There was a guy there and he said he could show me some of this stuff.
He asked for my number and I told him it wasn't appropriate because I was engaged and waiting for a missionary.
I gave him my email.
In an email, I told him, save this particular song for me because I wanted to learn this new step in the In the dance.
And so the missionary saw that and he took it all wrong.
Like I was telling the guy, oh, save me this dance.
Like it was all romantic and stuff.
So darling, save the last dance for me.
Right.
And how was he reading your emails?
We were pretty open about stuff.
And I guess he just knew that I used the same email for everything at that time.
So he just kind of figured it out and got in there.
And I didn't feel like I had anything to hide in there.
So I wasn't like trying to keep him out.
He hacked into your account?
Yeah, he totally hacked into my account.
And that's kind of when I told him, like, you left me for two years to go do this thing.
And, you know, you should put all of your thoughts and energy or whatever into that.
And we'll see where it goes when you come home because you're obviously not doing this right if you're going through my emails and stuff.
Yeah.
So thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness.
I mean, he's not exactly on the sunny side of at least some of the commandments doing stuff like that, right?
Breaking into your email without your permission.
Stress-bussing, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I've upgraded quite a bit from that guy.
Okay.
And what happened in the two years that he was gone?
What were you up to other than line dancing?
Oh, so I had a good job, but he wanted to come home and get married right away.
And I told him he should probably date people and make sure he wanted to be with me.
But he like insisted on getting married as soon as he came back home.
And I had a friend who was nanny and she was making pretty decent money.
And so I put a little ad up on this nanny website to try to go somewhere and To make the money nanny and this Jewish couple liked my resume and so they hired me and but they didn't give me enough time to give a two weeks notice to my job because they wanted me to be there for this cruise they wanted to go on and not have to worry about their kids.
I went with them on the cruise and gave up my other job that I've been at for a few years.
Then I guess we had a miscommunication on pay and they were not paying me enough for what they were asking me to do.
I decided to come back home.
But when I came back, I had no job and no apartment.
And my car was really jacked up and needed a lot of repair.
And so I tried to move in with my sister into an apartment.
And all this time, I wasn't hanging out with guys.
And I had a hard time making friends with girls at that time.
So I was pretty much really lonely and just trying to find hobbies to occupy my time.
So I ended up moving into an apartment with my sister and getting another job there.
So that's kind of what was going on.
I was just living in an apartment with my sister and working and waiting for him to come home.
Try to save money so that I could pay for our whole wedding all by myself as soon as he came home.
Because he would have no money, right?
Yeah.
And then did you break up while he was away or did you break up with him officially when he was back?
Um, so when he went through my emails and stuff, I guess we kind of broke up then, but we were, he'd like promised we were going to date and stuff when he came back.
And then when he came back, he was like, no, I'm done.
And I've met this other girl and I don't want to make her feel insecure.
So I don't want to talk to you ever again.
So even if you have some of my stuff, like never call me and never talk to me ever again.
And so I said, okay.
Yeah.
So this guy, he hacks into your email, reads them without your permission, and then he says, don't worry, we're going to date in the future.
And you wait for him for that, right?
For another year.
And then he waits until he's come home to tell you that he's met another woman and it's all over and you waited for nothing?
Well, I started dating another guy too right before then, but it wasn't...
Like, exclusive, but I didn't really have many other options.
But I was kind of lonely.
Wait, was I right, though, about what I said?
Yes.
Yeah, you're right.
Okay.
That's a douchebag move on his part.
Yeah, he was kind of a tool.
And I kind of fell off the wagon after that, I would say, because I was pretty depressed.
Oh, it's a horrible way to be treated.
I mean, asking someone to wait, and then dating someone else, getting really involved with someone else, and then coming back and saying, uh-huh, you waited for nothing.
That is like, I mean, I hate to say it, but it sounds like you dodged kind of a douche bullet there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
And then?
So then I was really depressed, and I got another job, and I was still trying to go to church and stuff, but I was pretty down.
And a lot of my coworkers were not Mormon, and they would go out on the weekends to bars and stuff.
And I kept telling them I couldn't go because I shouldn't go into those places.
And then after a while, I kind of felt like it was silly that I was separating myself from all these people who were my friends.
And so I started going to bars with them and started drinking and...
And it just kind of evolved from there.
Now, sorry, I just asked you what was next, but if we can circle back for a second.
How did the Mormon community as a whole deal with this guy who told you to wait and then it turned out you were waiting for nothing?
Were they like, oh, you just did a bad thing?
Or were they like, hey, no problem?
I don't really know because I didn't have any contact with him ever again after that.
So I don't know.
I doubt that anybody said anything much to him about it.
I tell you, if someone treats my daughter that way, they're going to get some business.
But anyway, so then you're out and you're going to bars and so on, right?
And I've seen your picture on Skype.
You're a very attractive person.
Young woman.
And so you're out in bars.
And of course, I guess guys giving you all kinds of attention, right?
Buying you drinks and asking you to dance, all that kind of stuff, right?
Right.
Right.
And then what?
So I started going out clubbing with my girlfriends and we would dress kind of skimpy.
You'd go out and, you know, drink a lot and have fun every weekend.
Yeah.
I got that new job selling cars.
I was a car salesman for Subaru for maybe two or three years.
There was just like a winter where it was a really really rough winter and it was like a two-week period that I was working at the dealership and scraping snow off cars and doing all this work and not very many people coming on the lot to buy cars and so I just bought a house and I was having a hard time making my mortgage that month because it's kind of like feast or famine sometimes with the car industry and One of the other salesmen said that I should try doing an amateur night at this
local club and that the winner would make $1,000.
And so I thought, well, it's worth a try and I'm already going out to the club on the weekend and dressing skimpy anyway.
And because I don't have a sexually oriented business license at this point, you don't get down to like pasties and a thong.
It's just like a bra top and little shorts.
And so I went to do the amateur night and I made like $450 or something in 10 minutes in two songs.
What?
Yeah.
I'm totally in the wrong business.
And I'm the wrong age.
Well, that's what I was starting to think.
And I'm the wrong gender.
What?
Okay, hang on, hang on, hang on.
I gotta tell you, when guys hear sexual market value stuff, it's literally mind-blowing.
It's like your vagina, it's just like the Federal Reserve, like just pump money out, so to speak, right?
So $450 in 10 minutes.
Yeah, and I didn't win because I guess amateur night is just anybody who doesn't work at that club.
Listen, compared to every guy on the planet, you won.
I just want to be clear about that.
Except for Magic Mike or whatever.
So wait, you went out in a bra and shorts, and you shake your money maker, and what, do guys put the money into your pants, into your shorts?
No, it's a little bit different.
There's like a three-foot rule, so they just set it up on the stage.
Oh, so you've got to stay three feet away.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, that's good because, you know, that's what they say for German women to do, to stay clear of migrant assaults.
Stay arm's length.
Stay arm's length.
Smart.
Now, how did it feel?
I mean, I guess you'd already been out dancing and having guys look at you loviciously with the devil's work on their mind.
And so how was it for you to get up there the first time?
It was kind of scary, even still, because even before I started going out clubbing, I hadn't really even changed my clothes in front of my sisters, and I was brought up modest.
It was definitely interesting.
It was nerve-wracking.
I always get a little sweat going on in a red face when I'm nervous.
I hear that helps in that line of work.
Yeah.
So you went up.
Now, the reaction that you got, was it very positive right away?
I guess $450 worth of positive.
Yeah, yeah.
What I noticed right away with contrast between dancing and selling cars was when I was selling cars, I was working for a lot of men that would talk down to me a lot.
Kind of belittle me and stuff like that.
It made me feel kind of stupid.
And I'd go home at the end of the day with a real low self-esteem.
And when I was dancing, I'd get compliments all day long.
And then I'd come home feeling really good about myself because everybody was nice to me all day long instead of telling me the only reason I could sell cars is because, you know, my boobs or whatever.
Right.
So in the car dealership, they're all like, what would you know about cars, little filly?
You know, and sort of patting you on the head kind of stuff.
But with the exotic dancing, then everybody was looking up to you and lusting and wanting and that, I guess, fed your ego, right?
Yeah, they were a lot more respectful to me in that industry.
In the...
I don't know.
I mean, I keep wanting to say stripping, but you mentioned exotic dancing, so I'm perfectly happy to use that.
Oh, no, no, no.
You can call it stripping.
I think that's descriptive of what's going on.
I don't want people to get confused.
Yeah, I don't want to get people confused that you're into doing something with drywall.
So, are you saying that you got a more supportive and positive and respectful reaction from men in a strip club than you did trying to sell them cars?
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah, much more.
I mean, customers selling them cars, they're nice if they really like you, then they want to set you up with their brother or their son or whatever, which is nice.
But like the co-workers that I worked with, they were talking down to me quite a bit on a regular basis.
It was really frustrating.
And I would go home at the end of the day after working many, many hours feeling drained.
So in a slow day on a car lot, it can take you days to make $450, but, you know, 10 minutes on a lit stage and you've got that in cash, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I had done two weeks at the car dealership that winter and had only sold one car and it was a new car.
And new cars you only make like a $100 commission on.
And so after they'd taxed it, I went home with $80 after two weeks.
And looking back, I probably should have gone and said, hey, you guys should at least give me minimum wage.
But I didn't know that at the time, you know, so it was kind of...
Oh, were you working pure commission?
Yeah, that's what they told us is it was pure commission.
But then later on, I heard that they're supposed to still give us at least minimum wage if the commission doesn't...
Yeah, I think it's like being a waiter or something.
You expect to get tips, but you've got to pay him something.
Yeah.
And so then, after that, 10 minutes and $450 in cash later...
Were you wrestling with your conscience about doing that more often?
Did you transition quickly?
Was it sort of a slow turn?
No, it was definitely slow because I was really worried about what my family and other people in the Mormon community would think of me.
And so I actually switched from Subaru over to Toyota thinking maybe...
That I could make more money over there.
And everybody there was like really sly and they were like trying to take half my deal all the time by saying that they'd talked to my customers before me and it was pretty shady stuff they were pulling.
And so I was struggling with it too because I was single and I was worried that if I was to be dating guys and they asked me what I did and I told them that they would just automatically assume that that meant I was slutty.
And so I was definitely worried and it was kind of like a slow transition at first, for sure.
Yeah, so I just, you know, I want to put a note out there to the car dealerships in your neck of the woods.
Time to up your moral game!
If the woman is saying, I need to go into stripping to get some respect, you might want to be treating...
Other people a little bit better than you are.
That's just my little community service message out there to car dealerships.
And so how long did it take for you to switch to that full time, to dancing full time?
It probably took me like two to three months.
It was probably about two or three months and it was really rough.
And then a couple of the guys there at the dealership said they knew of a couple of clubs that were not big.
They were just really small ones, kind of like a Cheers-style bar with a stage and a stripper.
And it's only two-hour shifts.
So I went in there to check it out and I walked in the door and they were like, are you here for a job?
Because if so, you're hired.
And I was like, oh, awesome.
That's convenient.
Did you have a winter coat on?
I'm just curious whether they have x-ray vision or something like that.
Although you're in a burqa, I'm pretty sure you can...
Wow.
Yeah, so I got hired at those two different what we call them as circuit bars because they're just the one stage and two hour shifts unlike the really big clubs that have like five stage going and then they want you to be there for like eight hours.
And so I just started at two of the small circuit bars.
And one of the other reasons that I really got into it was that I was originally taking from my car sales check just enough to pay my bills and handing the rest over to my mom because she was sick with cancer and I had a lot of things she needed to pay for and so I was just kind of working my life away with no time to hang out with friends and no time really even for family and then just handing my check over to my mom and so part of the things that was intriguing about dancing was that I'd be working way less hours and it was way more flexible so it
would give me time to spend with my friends and with my family and more money to be able to give over to my mom.
And so I was able to take care of my mom.
I hear flexibility is quite important in the business.
And in all seriousness, Lexi, I just wanted to say I'm real sorry for what you went through with your mom.
And that also makes it really tough if you're on commission because your mom's bills are pretty constant, I assume.
But if you've got a variable income, that's really stressful, right?
You don't know if you're going to be able to cover what you need to.
Yeah, exactly.
And I just wanted to be able to have money to help my family if they needed it.
And so after I started dancing, I was able to help quite a few people in my family who needed help with things.
And it felt good to be able to have the money to help them and have the time to also spend with them, you know?
So you were working, if I got it right, I'm sorry if I missed some of this, but you were working about two hours a day and what kind of coin were you pulling down?
Well, I was technically working more like four hours a day because I was working at two of those circuit bars.
But when I first started, I was averaging about $100 per two hours.
So if I worked two shifts in a day, I'd work four hours and make like $200.
Right.
And did that change after that?
Yeah, it's changed a lot.
One of the bars that I was at closed, and so some of the business went to the other one.
And then the big club in town got new management.
A lot of the girls didn't like it, so we got a flux of really good-looking girls coming to the other bar.
They used to call that other bar the Shitty Titty.
Excuse my language.
But it was a bunch of really older women, and one of them had an oxygen tank and a knee brace, and I was by far the youngest one there when I started.
No, come on.
Wait, wait, hang on.
She used the oxygen tank in the back room.
Oxygen tank and a knee brace?
Yeah, yeah.
So I stood out there because I was the youngest and, you know, so I made decent money.
But now we've got like the hottest light up in town because we got all those girls from the other club when they didn't like the management at that one place.
So now I'm averaging about $200 per two hours at that one club.
Right.
Okay.
Okay.
So you're up to like a hundred bucks an hour, which of course, if you were working full time would be like, what, $200,000 a year.
But of course, that's not how it works.
And do you get paid by the club or is it mostly tips?
It's pretty much mostly tips.
I get paid like $5 per shift.
So every two weeks I get like a $50 check, but it pretty much goes into the jukebox because we don't have a DJ. We just put the money in the jukebox.
So...
So I break even.
And did you, I mean, I guess would you have regulars that people would come to just see you?
Did you have any sort of rapport with them?
Did you chat with any of the people who came in?
Yeah, that was one of the things they liked most about our club because the original big club in town, the guy had this idea that he didn't want the girls talking to the customers.
So the customers could have like a fairytale idea of what this girl's like or a fantasy and then she's not able to ruin it.
And he felt like if girls came over and talked to you, maybe you would realize that they're not what you thought or something like that and it would ruin it.
They're not trying to do that now.
Now at that other club, they're making girls go sit with customers and getting them to buy them an $8 juice because we can't have alcohol on our shifts and the bar just wants to make more money over there.
So they've got girls going and sitting down with customers and then a cocktail waitress will come over and ask if the guy wants to buy the girl a drink and it's like an $8 juice.
Wow.
I don't like that style of club, so I've just stuck to the circuit bars, like the two-hour ones.
But like I said, one of them closed, and the one I'm at is the best one in town, and the other two are really, really hard to work at, and you really don't make very much money there.
And it's really because the people managing it have no business sense at all whatsoever.
Yeah.
So the industry in this town, it's like changing and it's become harder and harder to work and make money because of the way these people are running the clubs.
So that's why I kind of wanted to do my own.
Right, right.
Now, your clientele, I guess, at the variety of places, were they generally older, middle-aged, younger guys?
They're mostly like older, middle-aged guys during the day and then usually around like 10, 30, 11 o'clock at night it switches over to like the younger crowd.
So I make pretty decent money like during the day from like 1pm to let's say like 5 is your best hours.
And then around 6 or 7 like the older guys go home before the cops come out basically and before so they can go to dinner and be home to their wives or whatever.
So you kind of have like a little transitional period where it slows down around 7, 8, 9 and then around 10 or 11 it starts to pick back up with the younger crowd.
I get the older guy's calendar for the day, like, strip club, blue plate special, home to the wife.
It seems kind of odd that way.
Now, do you have to exercise?
I mean, obviously, I think maybe the woman in the knee brace with the oxygen tent or whatever it was accepted.
Do you have to stay in shape outside of dancing?
Like, do you have to work to keep your figure outside of just doing the dancing, or is the dancing enough exercise for that?
For some, maybe it would be I like to take care of myself and I like to look really good.
So I do hot yoga for like 90 minutes.
I just did a 30 day challenge where I did 30 days straight in a row, but I usually go like, you know, four or five days a week to keep looking fit.
And then I also do belly dancing and dancing at work.
Is it weird to do yoga and have people not pay you for doing yoga?
Like putting money around where you're doing yoga?
Is that unusual?
You're funny.
Do you yell at the people, you cheap bastards?
Come on, somebody buy me an $8 juice.
Actually at gyms you can get an $8 juice, I think so.
All right.
Yeah, so I mean I do stuff outside of work to keep in shape.
That's because I take my job really seriously and I want to look really good.
And I put a lot of time and effort into my stage performance as well, where in other states, girls are just lap dancing, so they don't put as much time into their stage performance.
And there's no lap dancing.
Well, there's two to three different styles of clubs.
If you have a full liquor bar, then the girls can only do pasty and thong.
So pasty is the little nipple covers, and then you've got your thong.
And then if you're wanting to have lap dancing or full nude...
then it's no alcohol and it's 18 and over and there's a cover to get in and I'm sure you're gonna have your girls trying to get you to buy them an $8 juice because that's the only way the bar can make any money since they're not selling any alcohol so there's two different clubs in town one does lap dancing one's full nude but they're both 18 and over with no alcohol wait are you saying that in your club under 18s can come in No, no, no.
In my club, it's a full liquor license, and so it's 21 and over, and it's pasties and a thong.
But it's kind of funny because the next stop down, an 18-year-old can go get a job there doing lap dancing because there's no alcohol.
Right, right.
Just another one of these weird regulation things.
Now, you were saying that you put a lot of work into your stage act.
What does that mean?
Well, I've traveled all over the country, so I've gone and seen how girls are dancing in clubs in different countries.
And then I've also started belly dancing just to make my movement and everything on stage much more fluid.
And so I go a couple times a week to belly dance as well.
Do you use props at all?
No, we're not allowed to use props if we have a SOB license, a sexually oriented business license.
You can't use any props at all.
I guess the oxygen thing and the knee brace, not considered props, I guess.
Well, she does those in the back room.
She has her little oxygen tank in the back room and then she would come out on stage and then she'd go back and do her oxygen thing in the back room.
But that was like, you know, eight years ago or something like that.
I've been doing this for like nine years now in April.
Now, does it stay interesting for you to do it?
Yeah, for me, I really enjoy it.
I always liked dancing, even in school, but I had a teacher who was really discouraging, and I had parents who didn't really pay attention to my dreams and aspirations, so one of the things I liked about the strip club was that I was getting paid to dance, and I loved dancing.
Right.
And how has it been, because I remember you were saying at the beginning that you were concerned about going full-time because of the effect it might have on your romantic life, and what effect did it have on your romantic life?
So at first when I was dating, there were guys that kind of treated me like I was a little slutty just because of my job, but I wouldn't give them that much of a time of day.
Like when I go out clubbing and dancing and stuff like that out at clubs, I would never date guys that I met there.
And even in the strip club, I had dated a couple guys from the strip club and I didn't like how they were and how they treated me.
And so I made a vow to myself that I would never date again somebody from the strip club until I met Aaron, who I've been with now for seven years.
He walked in and I couldn't help myself.
I instantly fell in love and we've been together ever since.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, I would guess certainly for a lot of the people when you have such a strongly sexualized first impression, sometimes it can be a little bit tough to get to know the person behind the glitter makeup, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
And your boyfriend is okay with what you do?
How does he feel about it?
He's okay with what I do and he trusts me.
When I first met him, I used to do bachelor parties.
And when we got really serious, I stopped doing those because I didn't feel it was right when we were in a serious, committed relationship for guys to be touching me.
And Aaron actually bounced my bachelor parties for like two years before I stopped doing them.
Oh, he was a bouncer?
Oh, I made him a bouncer.
Okay, right, right, right.
He said, if you're going to be doing these, I want to make sure that you're safe, so I've got to be there.
And so he was with me, and then there was just one time where we had a party that was really awkward and made me feel, like, really uncomfortable afterwards.
And we were driving home, and I just told him, like, hey, I don't think I'm going to do these anymore.
And he's like, well, that's good, because I can't handle it anymore.
I was going to tell you that.
So since then, I haven't...
Sorry to interrupt.
What would you get paid for a bachelor party on average?
So it's like $200 to show up plus tips.
And on average, I was probably making $400 in like an hour to an hour and a half.
Oh, God.
But there's been times where my record, I think, for a party was like $800.
For like an hour or two?
Yeah.
So that's like you could get a law degree...
Or you can get some pasties.
I just find that remarkable.
Remarkable.
All right.
And what is causing you, Lexi, to want to change what it is that you're doing?
I mean, certainly 32 may be a little bit old in terms of exotic dancing, but I mean, it sounds like you're taking good care of your body.
Is there a reason why you want to transition at the moment?
Is there something in particular or you just feel like it's time?
There's a couple things.
For one, the bar that I'm working at now, it's got like a waiting list for girls trying to get on there because the money per hour is good, even though we only get three to four shifts a week there.
I was concerned because the guy who owns the bar, he has an alcohol problem and he had already had previous DUIs and then I heard recently he got another one and I was Worried, one, that it might be a felony.
And if the liquor license is in his name, he might have to lose the license because you can't have a felony and have a liquor license.
And so if that happened, then somebody who would buy the license may not keep the club as a strip club.
They might just take the liquor license somewhere else.
And if that happened, then the only places left in town for me to work would be at the big club.
I tried that club for two or three months recently because I was unhappy with the other club I was working at on the other side of town.
I just was unhappy because I didn't like how the dance manager was running the girls.
She was hiring anybody who would walk in the door and The way she was doing the schedule was making it really hard for me and I'm the best employee they've got there and they were scheduling me after girls who are constantly bombing and trading shifts and giving shifts away and so I kind of had got into it with her and she's like well you're welcome to go somewhere else so I tried that big club for a little while and I was making half of what I was making to work at the big club And that's
really bad.
Like, it's not very good money.
I mean, it is for part-time, but for dancing, it's not great.
And it was hard because they were requiring me to wear high heels.
And I have tendonitis that I developed from dancing in high heels for, you know, eight or nine years.
And at the club I work now, I just wear these little socks and these little crocheted things that wrap up my ankles to make it kind of look fancy on my feet.
But It's really hard for me to dance in high heels.
So even after the two months, three months that I was working at the other place wearing the heels, I could feel that my tendons were starting to burn and hurt really bad in my ankles again.
And then I didn't like the drink thing that they were doing because they're basically saying if you don't get the customers to buy your drinks, you have to pay for them yourself.
And that's more of like a punishment than like an incentive to get you to go out and talk to people.
And I was pretty good at getting my drinks bought for me because I'm a pretty social person anyway.
But I feel like it's the bartender and cocktail waitress's job really to sell drinks.
And when I talk to somebody, I don't want it to feel forced or like I'm sitting there way longer than I should be if it's awkward.
Like I let a conversation kind of naturally take its course and then I move on.
the back room and kind of yell at us and say, everybody needs to go out and talk to customers.
Otherwise, they're going to open up all the stages and keep them open.
And it was kind of hard because most of the time you'd make most of your money on stage one and then the rest of the stages, you barely make anything.
So you're doing like five stages and only one of them you're actually making money on.
So they're wanting you to like do your, you know, 20, 30 minutes on stage and then get down and then spend your whole hour and a half or whatever it's going to be before you're back up on stage again, talking to customers and getting them to buy you drinks.
They're not even giving you a cut of it.
So you've got the girl on stage trying to make money.
You've got all the girls off stage distracting all the customers from the stage.
So it's making the girl on stage have a hard time making money.
And then, you know, when you're on stage and everyone's, you know, distracted, it's super hard.
the back room were saying that they have a rule there that if any customer gives you money out on the floor, like if a guy walks over and hands you a hundred dollar bill and says, you know, you're my favorite, you do a great job.
This is for you.
You're supposed to go and take it to the girl on stage and put up on our stage.
And I disagreed with that.
I feel like if a customer wants that girl to have that money, I don't want her to give it to me.
I want to earn my money and I want her to earn her money.
And if I'm going to be spending that much time out on the floor, I think it's nice to be able to, you know, sit down with somebody and then they say, hey, here's 20 bucks.
Thanks for sitting with me or something and then be able to keep it.
Yeah, I mean, it's different.
Like when I would work in restaurants, though, some of the tips we would put into a jar for the busboys because they weren't directly getting tipped.
But our tips required that they do a good job clearing the tables and all of that.
And that seemed fair to me.
But the idea that we would somehow pool tips or, you know, this kind of socialism thing, I don't see how that's much of an incentive, especially if there are some girls out there who are bombing.
You do a good job, the guy tips you, and you've got to suddenly give it to the girl doing a bad job.
That doesn't seem quite right.
Yeah, that's how I felt about it.
Right.
So good.
So you're into free market stuff.
And as far as that goes, that's a good grounding for entrepreneurship.
And of course, you've been entrepreneurial insofar as you've been sort of a sole proprietor of the pasty thong combo for close on a decade.
And you've been finding ways to sell that.
And of course, before with the car dealerships, you've got some entrepreneurial experience, right?
Right.
Yeah, I have really good work ethic.
I mean, before I started dancing, I did a whole ton of different jobs and a lot of them were 10 to 16 hours a day.
So for me, doing two to four hours is nothing.
So, you know, I do the best.
Is it hard to fill up the rest of your day?
I mean, you've got to get ready and you've got to commute out or whatever it is and then, I don't know, hose yourself off the body paint or something.
I'm just guessing afterwards.
But, I mean, what do you do with the rest of your day?
I keep the house really nice and clean so I do a lot of cleaning and I do my belly dance classes and I do the yoga and there's a lot of other classes too that in my little community that they offer so I kind of do do that and then but more recently I've had a lot more time because I stopped working at that club on the west side of town because I got into it with a dance manager when she told me she was scheduling me poorly because I wasn't tipping her enough and And so I told her just to take me off
the schedule, and I decided to use all my free time to start looking into how to start my own club or bar.
And so since then, I've been spending time talking to licensing and zoning and the head police officer, I guess, of Vice, who tells you what you can and can't do inside the club, and talking to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and And just doing a lot of research about it online, watching YouTube videos and stuff, and trying to figure out what I need to know to be able to do my own thing.
Right.
So a stripper who keeps a good house.
This is going to be a challenge sometimes for other women to step up to that standard, I suppose.
And you don't have to give me any details, of course, but have you been fairly good at saving your cash?
Because that's fairly important in the entrepreneurial world that you got a bit of a nest egg to start with.
Yeah, I've been saving all the time.
Aaron and I both are really, really good at saving.
And how it started, too, was that when we were living in the house that I said I'd bought and had a mortgage on, I'd gotten into a motorcycle accident, and because of the state's laws on marijuana, my life got pretty much ruined there for a while.
I could go into that if you want, but I ended up losing my house and then Aaron and I moved into a van and we lived in a van for like a year and a half to save money.
And we put a lot of money away during that time.
And then we've traveled a little bit too on...
I guess we've traveled quite a bit on some of that money, but we put the rest of it away to save.
And now we've been able to buy another house and we rent out the other side because it's a duplex.
And we have plans to build other properties for investment.
Right, right.
But we've got money in savings.
Okay.
Now, I appreciate that update.
You know, when I'm talking to people whose worlds I'm unfamiliar with, then I always like to get a sense of backstory and the stuff that I can glean out of just asking a bunch of questions.
So I really appreciate your openness in all that.
Yeah, of course.
I'm pretty much an open book, so anything you want to know.
Right.
A stripper with nothing to hide.
Yeah, I don't hide anything.
Now, we did, of course, and for those who don't know, you know, getting a bunch of new listeners.
Oh, by the way, we just passed 80 million views on YouTube, so...
Yes.
So we ask people who come on the show, if they don't have generally very abstract questions, and yours is very practical, about something called the Adverse Childhood Experience or ACE score.
And I think it's one to ten.
And you've got a seven.
Right.
And again, it's completely up to you.
But if I could just ask a couple of questions about that, because I think that may have some bearing on entrepreneurial stuff in the future.
So the verbal abuse and threats, could you fill me in a bit on that when you were growing up as a kid?
Yeah, so my mom and my dad got a divorce when I was a month old, and my mom went to work doing two full-time jobs.
And when my sister got a little older, she put my sister in charge of me, and my sister was a psycho beast.
How old was your sister when she was put in charge of you?
She was about 15.
She got pregnant at 15, 17, and 19, adopted her third child out.
My sister, just older than her, got pregnant when she was 16, 17, and adopted her child out.
Actually, the same woman.
Jesus God Almighty, hang on.
Sorry.
It's okay.
I'm so sorry.
I mean, it's not funny, but I just feel like...
Wham!
Tennis racket across the forehead.
Because it sounded like, you know, when you were talking earlier, Lexi, about, you know, it's the Mormon community.
They were so hypersensitive about even the potential that you might have had thoughts about a sexual relationship.
And your sister gets knocked up three times by the time she's 20.
Yeah.
I'm guessing she didn't go on a mission either.
No.
The only one who went on a mission in my family was my brother.
Now, what did your sister do that puts her in the psycho category for you?
Well, she was always like yelling at me and throwing things at me and threatening to put my head through windows and walls.
And she threw a knife at me once that I dodged out of the way, but I'm pretty sure if I hadn't moved, probably could have fatally killed me.
And she just has to say to that that she knew I was going to duck.
Now, I got to interrupt you, as I always do when people are telling me these god-awful things and laughing.
Uh-huh, sorry.
No, no, that's okay.
And you've probably heard me say this to other people, and everyone says, I'm not going to do that.
But then they do, right?
Because that's, I mean, that's vicious stuff.
I mean, that's life-endangering stuff.
Yeah.
And I just don't want people, because, you know, you're a very charming and charismatic person, which, of course, is part of your profession, or one of the reasons why you're successful in your profession.
And I don't want people Your charm and good humor to freak people out about the really horrible stuff you're talking about, if that makes sense?
Yeah.
Okay.
Now, did you get any of these verbal abuses and so on from your mom?
And or did your mom know about your sister's dangerous tendencies?
My mom did know about them.
My mom had some of those tendencies herself, but it wasn't as often.
Right.
And there was, I guess, not much that she could do because she was at work all the time.
Well, you know, it's a little early in the day for me to get the excuses.
I just want to get the facts first.
Right.
You know, there are...
When people end up with no options, that's because of bad choices beforehand.
It still doesn't mean that they get excuses for no options, right?
Right.
Something I have to explain first about my mom is that I think she was mentally at the state of a 13 or 14-year-old, and I think it's because of abuse that she went through.
So I'm not saying it as an excuse necessarily that she couldn't have done anything different, but I legitimately believe that she was mentally a young teenager.
And I sympathize with that, but again, my concern is that And the reason I sort of want to pause on that for a moment is for you and also for the listeners.
Because when people say to me that, you know, my parents did X because they were abused, my concern is that then people feel like the abuse is the domino that creates the dysfunction.
Now, the abuse, I assume, is necessary but not sufficient cause for dysfunctional behavior as an adult.
The...
Abuse that you receive if you, you know, get the help, get the therapy, pursue the self-knowledge and so on, can actually make you a better person.
It doesn't justify it at all, but it can make you a better person in the same way that a near-death experience can make you a better eater.
Like, hey, four heart attacks this month.
I think I'm going to cut back on the cheeseburgers or whatever, right?
And so I don't want people to get the impression that Your mom did what she did because she was abused and there was no choice about it unless she was severely mentally handicapped, which, you know, you say the mental acuity of a 13-year-old, I assume you just mean emotionally, like she could Pay bills and, you know, I guess do some other adult stuff, but it's not because she was abused and which was tragic enough and without the abuse she wouldn't have ended up that way, but it's not just that the abuse made her that way.
There were choices to avoid dealing with the abuse, admitting the abuse, getting the help that she needed that gave the abuse so much power in her life, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Physical abuse.
I guess we've got the knife.
Mm-hmm.
And anything else?
Well, she used to say things all the time to make me feel like I was fat.
She was one of those people that thought if she made fun of you that it would make you do a bunch of crunches and get thinner.
So there was that.
I'd ask her if I could borrow a pair of her shorts and she's like, yeah, if you don't bust the button off of them.
And she would say rude stuff like that all the time.
Yeah, I... I find that, you know, and of course that's particularly wounding to girls, but it also happens like I knew a guy when I was a kid, his brother, and he wasn't fat, but his brother always used to say, hey fatty, right?
And this guy was like, I remember him saying like, why?
And he's like, you're not fat, why would it bother you?
You know, like, I'm just kidding.
It's like, why?
Why?
Like, why would he put this guy in this complicated position of being called fat when he wasn't?
Like, it's just a mind screw.
But anyway, okay.
So you got the verbal abuse, threats, physical abuse.
Did she hit you or was it mostly just this circus knife throwing act?
It was mostly the throwing stuff and the threats until one day we got into a pretty good physical altercation.
And then I realized she wasn't as tough as I'd thought all that time and it made me feel a lot better, I guess.
Because I held my own pretty well.
Hopefully she wasn't pregnant when that happened.
That may not accrue to your combat abilities.
No, she'd actually, my nephew had just got circumcised and she went off to a Grateful Dead show leaving him home with me.
And I was only like 12 or 13 years old and then she got stranded out there.
What we got in a fight over was she came back after starving for weeks because their van broke down out there.
And I was putting too much cheese on my tortilla and she flipped out and told me that if I'd starved like she had, I wouldn't put so much cheese on my tortilla.
And I told her that was her fault that all that happened and that's what she gets.
And so she hit me.
And then we brawled around on the floor for a while and she slammed my head into the door and made me bleed.
And then I went off to my room and she was out there crying and I just laughed, laughed about it.
Because I realized she wasn't as tough as she thought.
Right.
What a nightmare.
I'm like, I'm so sorry.
This is...
I don't know.
I ask people sometimes about sibling stuff.
Because, you know, siblings, I've said this before on the show, but siblings can be the greatest ally and friend that you're ever going to have.
You know, because they're the only people who follow you all through your life.
Yeah.
You know, your parents are going to get old, they're going to die, and your kids didn't know you when you were young, but your siblings can walk, you know, with you.
And I've asked a whole bunch of people throughout my life, you know, what's it like with your sibling or how close are you to your sibling and so on.
And I mean, the answer is almost universally bad.
And I just, you know, I was watching a Dr.
Phil years ago and he said, you know, that 50%, half of all sibling relationships are like officially classified as abusive.
And it's not like the remaining 50% are all happy-dappy.
I mean, these are just the ones where it fits, I guess, a clinical definition of abusive.
And I think it's genuinely and generally one of the greatest tragedies in the world is the degree to which siblings take each other for granted, are mean to each other, abuse each other, are indifferent to each other's outcomes, are hyper-competitive with each other, are one-apping each other, are abusing each other.
I just think it's such a tragic tragedy.
Tragic shame.
These people who could be so helpful.
Sorry, go ahead.
Oh, you're fine.
It's just been hard because I knew she wasn't an adult and she was where I felt a lot of the abuse came from.
And so I feel like every year over 18, you're more and more responsible for your actions.
And so it's been hard for me because I still hold on to a lot of these things in our relationship.
So she'll message me sometimes to tell me she loves me and I won't want to respond or she'll want to come see me and I won't want to see her.
Hang on, hang on.
Just for a sec there because you phrased it in an interesting way.
You said, I hold on to these things.
Like you're holding a grudge or something like that, right?
Yeah, I feel like I don't mean to, but I can't help it.
No, but hang on, hang on.
I'm sorry, let me laugh, because I just asked you not to, but it's a negative to yourself that sounds like it comes from this sort of Christian thing, right?
Like, apparently in Iowa, sorry, yeah, in the Iowa caucus recently, Ted Cruz's campaign sent out all these messages that Ben Carson was suspending his bid for presidency.
Because there was, I think, an article that said he was going to take a break from campaigning for a week.
And they said, ah, he's canceling.
So give your votes to Cruz because Carson is suspending his campaign or whatever it was, right?
And then, of course, Ted Cruz originally said, I didn't do anything wrong.
I apologize to no one.
And then he said, I apologize.
Because...
And Carson said...
He said it was interesting.
He said, as a Christian, I accept his apology.
Right?
And this, of course, in Christianity is a very strong ethic as it is in other religions and so on.
Not in my particular perspective.
I think that forgiveness is fine.
But forgiveness, like love, like money, must be earned.
So I guess if you say that you're holding on to it, what has your sister done to earn your forgiveness?
I don't think she's really done anything.
I finally had a talk with her about it, thanks to listening to your show.
There was an episode where you're talking about if you can't be honest with your family and stuff that it's kind of an insult to your friends because those are the people you're the most honest with.
So I had a talk with her and told her about all these things and how I was feeling and she cried and she said she was sorry and said, I don't know what you expect me to do about it now.
It's all in the past.
All I can say is I'm sorry.
And did she ever bring it up again, or did it just go straight in the rear view, keep driving?
She never brought it up again.
Yeah, and this is this sort of catharsis idea that everyone has a big cry, and then it's all done.
Which is sort of like saying, well, I've eaten really badly for 20 years, but if I have one salad, everything's better.
And that is, you know, people have to earn your forgiveness.
And it isn't just saying, well, I'm sorry, with the passive-aggressive, what do you want me to do now, which puts the onus upon you, right?
And of course, she should have brought it up herself as something she did that was wrong, and she should have figured out...
What would make things better?
She should have been curious about you and asked you about how you thought and felt and how it had affected your life.
And she should have, over many months at least, worked assiduously and repetitively to earn your forgiveness by saying, well, you know, I'm going to go into therapy and figure out what I did that was so wrong, why I did it, how I can guarantee it's never going to happen again, and also why I never brought it up with you and why you, you the victim had to bring it up with me.
Once the victim has to bring things up to the abuser, it's usually not a good situation after that because it should be the abuser's job to bring it up with the victim, right?
Once you have to bring it up, and then she's like, well, it's in the past.
What do you want me to do now?
And it's like, I'm sorry, I'm probably characterizing the way she said it a bit harshly, but that is not a way to earn someone's forgiveness.
Yeah, she was really surprised.
I was telling her I was ready to cut her out of my life and she was really surprised.
I was like, we need to have a talk because either we talk about it and it starts to get better or we don't talk about it and I cut you out.
And she always puts this kind of, I feel like it's a manipulation on me where she always says, oh, I know I can always count on you.
I know you'll always be there for me.
I think she was really surprised when I was like, I'm about like two seconds from cutting you out completely.
And so we had that talk and she took it really well.
Like in the past, she would have just flipped out.
And there was an episode where you were saying, you know, you don't know what people are going to say.
They're not like they're robots.
You know, they could say or do anything.
So you throw it past them and see what happens.
And, you know, so she didn't react how I thought she was going to at all.
She reacted much better, but I struggle all the time with whether or not I should maintain this relationship with her or if I should end my relationship with her because I have such a hard time loving her with our past.
Yeah, I mean, and I obviously can't.
I don't know what you should do with regards to that, Lexi, but what I will say is this, that I view someone who's wronged me or someone that I've wronged, I view it like they just stole something from me.
And of course, she stole a lot of the peace of mind and happiness of your childhood and replace it with fear and anger and anxiety and so on.
And so I sort of say, okay, well, let's say somebody just, they stole $10,000 from me.
They know they've stolen it.
They know that I know they've stolen it.
And they never offered to pay it back.
And eventually I have to sort of corner them and demand that they pay it back or say, hey, you stole my money, right?
And they say, well, I'm sorry, but that's all in the past.
I'm not going to do anything about it now.
I'm not going to pay back the money.
I'm not going to do anything that's going to be difficult for me to provide restitution for you.
And if somebody said, okay, I'm going to give you the $10,000 back, that to me would not heal the relationship.
Because I'm the one who had to pursue them for that money.
They're not offering to pay me back with any interest.
They're not offering any security that it's not going to happen again.
Oh, I got caught.
Okay, here's your $10,000 back.
I view it as somebody who has stolen a lot of money from me.
If they've done me harm, significant harm in my life, they've stolen a lot of money from me.
And they have to figure out how to make it better.
Like, I'm not going to chase the guy down, find him, find the $10,000, prove that he stole it from me, and then just consider us even.
And him just saying, well, I'm sorry I took the $10,000 from you.
I guess I'm caught.
I'm sorry.
I feel bad about it.
Okay, let's go bowling, right?
That would be very incomplete.
And so she has stolen something from you.
And the question is, how hard is she working to pay it back?
There are things.
You know, she could go into therapy.
She could pay for you to go into therapy.
She could say, listen, I mean, if I run over someone's foot in my car, I can at least pay for their cost, right?
And she could offer to pay for you to go into therapy.
She could say...
I'm going to keep bringing this up every single time.
I'm going to ask you every single detail.
Really going to look in the mirror.
I'm going to keep a journal.
I'm going to write it down.
I'm going to figure things out.
I'm going to read all of these books.
What if you're an asshole abusive sibling, you know?
I don't know.
That's probably not the name of any book, but something like that.
There's six million things that she could do that if she did them consistently for month after month after month, she would slowly begin, I think, to help you regain your trust.
But a lot of times when people do you wrong, They may get an apology, and the apology is just a way of saying, okay, it's done, I'm never going to bring it up, and it's kind of a trap, right?
Because you say, hey, you did me a lot of harm when I was a kid, and they say, well, I'm sorry, and you're not satisfied with that.
And then you bring it up again, and they already said, I already told you I was sorry.
What else do you want me to do?
It becomes a trap.
Like now, you're a jerk for bringing it up again.
You know, like...
You have my $10,000.
Well, I'm sorry about that, but I stole it in the past.
There's nothing I can do now.
Let's move on.
Then the next week you see the person, you say, you know, you still have my $10,000.
Hey, I already said I was sorry.
What do you want me to do?
Like it becomes a trap wherein you further get harmed by pursuing restitution or bringing up an issue.
I don't know if this is making any sense or resonating with your experience.
No, it helps a lot.
I mean, with the restitution, before when you used to say that on the show, I wasn't sure of what those things could be.
I know that if I ever told her that I needed therapy and wanted her to pay for it, she's so bad with money and she would feel like I'm crazy for even saying that she should have to.
She would probably instead try to say, well, I was this way because of our parents and so it's not really my fault either.
And I was just a child, so, you know.
Well, okay.
And she could certainly say that.
And that's, of course, assuming she's never done anything, you know, irresponsible to others as an adult, right?
Right.
And also that's saying that she had no moral responsibility at the age of 16 or 17 whatsoever.
And it's like a plane taking off, right?
It's not like you have 0% responsibility when you're 17 and 99 100 years old.
And then, boom, 30,000 feet, full, complete moral responsibility when you wake up the next morning, right?
It lifts off.
From the latency period, like, I mean, moral responsibility, I think, starts with kids very early on.
I mean, they can do moral reasoning at 18 to 24 months of age, right?
So moral responsibility takes off from kids from quite early, and then it doesn't just boom, zero to 100, right?
I mean, there's an acceleration there.
It's not like she had zero moral responsibility when she was 15 or 16 or 17.
I mean, obviously, she was in a traumatic situation.
had a difficult or dangerous mother, but that doesn't mean that there's zero moral responsibility.
Right.
And the question then becomes, of course, would she have thrown a knife at you if there was a cop in the room standing there?
And the answer is, I would assume not.
And therefore, she has the capacity to control her behavior.
Therefore, she has some moral responsibility, right?
If somebody lashes out because they're having an epileptic attack and catches me on the head, then they would do that if there was a cop there because it's completely involuntary.
It's the spastic motion of an epileptic attack or whatever.
come.
But if there was a cop standing there and she knew she'd get hold off to the cop shop, if she threw a knife at you, she could get charged with attempted murder, she probably would have restrained her behavior, which means that she had some control over what she did, which means she has responsibility.
Right.
Hmm.
So I blamed her as well for, I felt at the time that she'd ruined my relationship with my mom, but I feel like that's probably my mom's fault too.
And why I say that is because...
But how did your sister ruin it?
time at home, whoever yelled at her the loudest was who she would cater to.
And I just remember like the very few times that her and I would be like, you know, out to eat some fast food or whatever.
And my sister would call and she'd be screaming at my mom saying, I need you to do this and that.
And my mom would just jump and run.
She would do that for my sister and for my older brother.
And so I felt like, you know, I didn't mean much to my mom because anytime we were trying to spend time together, if somebody called yelling at her and saying they needed this or that, she would jump and run to go to go to them and not and not to see how important it was for me to be able to spend some one on one time with her.
Okay.
Right, right.
Okay, I understand that.
And then, of course, you end up with the sensation.
No, go ahead.
Sorry.
It made me bitter towards my mom.
And so as time went on, I was just always really, really ornery with her.
And then as she got older, she became sweeter.
And I knew she was also getting to the point where she was going to pass away.
And so I was worried of having all these regrets of being ornery with her all the time.
So I was trying to Be more patient and everything with her and spend the time now that she had all this free time and now that she was you know just sick and so she couldn't go to work or do anything so there was all this free time to spend with her but I would try to spend it not being ornery with her but there was times where you know I just was in that habit because I was so upset with her for always pushing me to the side that that I have like I guess Almost nightmare,
like waking nightmares where I think about the times that I was on my mom and should have been more patient and made her cry and stuff like that.
And what age were you?
I tried to run on I tried to run away from home several times.
I'm sorry?
What age were you when you were ornery with your mom?
I was always ornery with her from my teenage years all the way up.
She passed away when I was probably 25.
Well, she passed away in 2010.
I'm 32.
That's five, six years ago.
But the last time I was ornery with her was not long before she passed away, maybe like six months or something.
Yeah, no, I get that regret.
There is a sentimentalization about dead people, though.
I've thought about that in my own life.
You know how people say, you should never speak ill of the dead.
Well, it doesn't make them come back as zombies, you know?
Why not just be honest about people's lives and the positive and negative effects that they've had?
And I just wanted to mention as well this...
The don't speak ill of the dead is one thing that lowers the quality of people's lives because they know they're not going to be spoken ill of after they're dead.
And so they can do worse.
And I also think that this idea when people can do significant wrong and harm to you and then demand, you know, an apology.
Also, they provide an apology and demand forgiveness in 20 minutes, you know, when they may have done decades worth of harm to you.
I think that's just terrible, because what it does is it means people are much more likely to do bad.
Because they can do wrong to other people, and then if it blows up in their faces, or if the other people get support, or the other people that they've harmed come and tell them that they've done wrong, well, they can just, everything can be made right in like 20 minutes.
And forgiveness should be hard.
Because that's the tax on doing wrong, is having to work really hard for someone's forgiveness.
If you hand out forgiveness easily, you are only subsidizing and encouraging people to do wrong.
In the same way that if there was, I don't know, some little machine that could immediately clean out all the effects of smoking out of your lungs in 20 minutes, then people wouldn't quit smoking.
Right?
People quit smoking because they're terrified of dying from it, right?
And so, people who've done wrong, of course, they want the subsidy of forgiveness, but if they haven't earned it, all you're doing is encouraging them to do wrong again, which is why forgiveness is not something that is willed by the victim, but something that is earned by the victimizer.
So, I just wanted to sort of mention that for the listenership as a whole.
Parents divorced.
You mentioned that your dad left when you were a month old.
Did you have any contact with him afterwards?
Yeah, we used to go see him every once in a while.
He lived maybe 40 miles north when I was a kid.
I remember finding out he was my dad when I was like five.
And then we would go up to his house maybe a couple Maybe every few months or something.
And then he moved all the way to the southern part of the state, which is like a four or five hour drive.
And so I'd maybe see him like once a year.
How old were you when that happened?
When he moved, I was probably like 10 years old maybe.
Right.
And I remember writing him a letter trying to make him be my pen pal.
And then he never responded.
And then years later, I was like, oh, you remember I wrote you that letter?
And he's like, oh, yeah, that was really cute.
And that's all he said about it.
So then I knew he got it and just never responded to it.
Right.
Don't you give me those laughs.
Yeah.
Don't try and distract me.
Your glitter paint laughter won't work on me.
And what was your relationship like with him before he moved?
I guess after he moved, you didn't see him much, but...
We never got one-on-one time together and he was kind of a jerk in the sense that he would tease us and make fun of us a lot and when I was like a young teenager he would make fun of how I wore my pants because I wore them baggy and then I dyed my hair well before I dyed it it was like long and blonde down my back and he used to say I looked like Wednesday from the Addams family but blonde and said my hair looked witch-like and then when I cut it off and dyed it black he Kind of teased me and said it looked like his mom's hair or grandma,
and she used to always have really bad dye jobs.
So he used to tease me a lot, and we never had much one-on-one time together.
Yeah, so we've just had a lot of relationships.
Sorry to interrupt, but obviously you probably do get this, but I'm just going to point it out to the audience that you had a lot of Harsh and unpleasant criticism of your appearance.
I mean, certainly from your dad and from your sister.
I don't know what your mom did, but...
So the fact that you then have a very strong thirst for the positive feedback that comes from being an exotic dancer is not too shocking, right?
You got a lot of insults regarding your physical appearance and now you get a lot of reinforcement about the positive value of your physical appearance, right?
Right.
It's filling in a hole, but it doesn't really fill it in, right?
Well, I've been wanting to get a nose job because my mom said that she hoped it wouldn't affect me with dating guys and stuff like that.
And I think that's kind of something that stuck.
There was another guy I dated who said I could be a model if it wasn't for something with my nose.
And so I've always had this insecurity.
And I've put it off a long time because I thought maybe I should get therapy before getting surgery.
But I've never liked my nose on my face.
Yeah.
So you're attractive enough to make a lot of money as a stripper, right?
Mm-hmm.
And yet your family thinks that your appearance is below par, right?
Substandard or problematic or something like that, right?
Yeah, as of growing up.
I mean, nobody says much about it now, but...
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry about that.
Because, you know, that stuff can eat into your brain when you're young, right?
Yeah.
My mom, too, like the way she would say things, it was like almost like she'd say, oh, well, I have this big forehead and these big, big earlobes.
And she would talk about how my dad would give her a hard time about it.
And then she'd go, oh, you have my big forehead and my big earlobes.
So, I mean, those were things, too, that I was...
Yeah, maybe you can get a man to leave you a month after kids are born too, honey.
No, and this downgrading of other people's physical appearance is incredibly destructive.
And the reason why people do it, at least the reason why people do it with each other horizontally, is that if you can lower people's perception of their sexual market value, then they're a lot easier to control.
Right.
I mean, you see this in relationships where the woman denigrates the man or the man denigrates the woman's physical appearance.
And what they're saying generally is, if you think that you're unattractive, I'm not going to have to compete with anyone who might take you away.
So I'm going to break your balls or bust your boobs or whatever so that you feel like crap.
And since you then will perceive yourself as having low sexual market value, you might not notice that I'm a horrible person you should run away from.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I kind of came to grips with how I looked and started feeling better about my appearance.
And then for a long time it was just that I felt like I looked alright but that I wasn't very smart.
And that happened too with the car dealership because they were making me feel like I was...
I mean, saying things that made me kind of feel like I was stupid quite a bit.
But I've done a lot of learning and growing since then.
And I'm pretty well read.
And I've learned so much in the last...
You know, six, seven years, especially since I met Aaron because he's been the biggest inspiration for me because he's really smart and really well-read and he's made me think a lot and go into my own philosophies and make sure that I'm consistent politically and religiously and philosophically.
Did he find this show or did you find it?
He found this show and introduced me to it.
And one of the other things that changed my life was when he introduced me to Atlas Shrugged.
So I've read a lot of really good stuff and learned a lot of really great things since I met him.
Yeah, no, I know a lot of academics who really liked Atlas Shrugged and failed to recognize that my quit academics and work in the free market is their John Galt moment that they're all failing.
Because, you know, it's a lot more fun to read about it than to actually do it.
But anyway, physical abuse towards female adults.
This was to your mom.
You mentioned a stepfather in your original response to us.
Was this a stepfather who was physically abusive towards your mom?
My dad was the one that was the most physically abusive to my mom.
He broke her jaw, and so it always popped when she ate.
I was too young to remember any of that.
When she married, again, I was like one years old.
The guy that she married was a con artist, and so he had us moving around quite a bit.
And, um, but they would, they would fight, fight quite a bit and I wouldn't watch it because it scared me.
So I would just run in the closet and hide and I could hear it.
And I, I don't feel like my mom was ever the kind that would just like lay down and get beat up.
She was super feisty.
So I had been there when I'd seen her unload like an entire dish rack from the dishwasher on my stepdad.
Um, so she was equally violent.
She gave as good as she got, right?
And I'm assuming sometimes she initiated it as well.
Yeah, exactly.
I remember one time my stepdad said the Lord's name in vain and she freaked out.
And I could just hear everything crashing around and I just would go and hide.
Still laughing, right?
Trying not to, sorry.
I know, and I'm just gonna nag you because I don't get to nag people enough.
Fair enough.
Um, Yeah, so your mother was physically abusive as well?
Yeah, she was physically abusive.
And then my oldest brother, too, who was an alcoholic, he was physically abusive to me a few times.
And then there was one moment when I could hear him screaming at my mom and I knew it was going to get violent.
And I raced through the house across the...
The bottom floor up the stairs and into the room and I threw myself between them and I said, if you touch her, I'll kill you.
And I remember his look on his face like he was so shocked and his girlfriend grabbed him and pulled it back and pulled him out of there.
And my mom started crying and saying, you know, never let them beat you and never let them, you know, break you down.
Always stand up to them.
Did you ever do that for the men that your mom was beating up?
No.
No, but the fact that you laugh is interesting, right?
Running to the defense of a woman who's being beaten up, but you never run to the defense of a man who's being beaten up.
Well, I was a lot younger when she was throwing stuff at them.
And the first stepdad, he was kind of like a dad to me.
So, I mean, I would have done that more for him than the second guy who was my arch nemesis through my later teens.
But, yeah, I ran to the defense of my mom, but I didn't have a lot of respect for either of my stepdads.
Lived with alcoholic or drug user, that's your brother or someone else?
Yeah, my oldest brother was an alcohol abuser.
He used to scream in my face that I should never drink alcohol, which is why I probably started way later than most people.
I didn't start drinking until I was like 23 or 24.
Right.
Household member, depressed, mentally ill, or a suicide attempt?
Well, my mom told me that she was going to kill herself and she had a gun, but she didn't end up doing it.
How old were you there?
I was 18.
Jesus.
So she makes fun of your appearance.
She beats up on people.
She threatens suicide to her child with a gun in her hand.
I think we can speak ill of the dead.
You know, cancer doesn't make a halo.
Yeah, I was pretty depressed when I was a kid.
I wanted to kill myself, but in our religion, it's not acceptable.
And I don't know if all Mormons...
Oh man, you cannot bring your religion into this stuff because this is...
Well, it's not my religion anymore.
No, what I mean is that your mom was a Mormon, right?
Back then I thought the punishment would...
Right.
So your mom was a Mormon.
Your mom was a Christian, right?
Right.
Where in Christianity does it say, yeah, thou shalt threaten suicide with a gun in front of your kid.
I don't know, because even towards the end, like, she was trying to win money through, like, weird ways.
Thou shalt marry a con man!
Thou shalt marry a con man.
Yeah, she told me she wanted me to marry a Mormon, and I said, well, why?
Because it worked out so good for you.
Because your biological father was a Mormon, too, right?
Right.
Yeah, he was cheating.
I mean, you're not supposed to get divorced, are you?
Well, I mean, no, you're not supposed to, but people do.
Jesus.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
I mean, this is why philosophy is so necessary, because philosophy may be tough, but for a lot of people, religion is completely ineffective in terms of trying to make them be better.
Yeah.
How long have you listened to this show?
Sorry, go ahead, go ahead.
Oh, I was just going to say I thought if I killed myself that the punishment was that I was supposed to walk the earth alone until Jesus came and that I couldn't communicate with other spirits or with living people and I just had to see all the hurt and pain I'd put my family through and I was just supposed to walk around alone.
Yeah, that's what they tell you, but I don't know if everybody in the Mormon religion believes that, but that's what my mom told me.
And how long have you listened to this show for, Alexei?
I think it's probably been like four or five years.
And no therapy for you?
No, I haven't started it.
I've been doing what I called self-therapy by listening to your show and reading a lot of books that Aaron has recommended.
Listening to the show is not therapy.
That's like reading a diet book as opposed to dieting, right?
I mean, I'm not a psychologist or a therapist, but...
I just feel like I trust you more than I would trust a, well, like, random therapist.
I guess I don't know where to start to look for somebody who...
Is there a reason why you've...
I mean, I don't mean to corner you, right?
I mean, just my thoughts.
But is there a reason why...
I mean, obviously, I'm very pro-therapy with the right therapist.
And there's good empirical scientific reasons for that.
But is there a reason why...
Do you just skip over the parts where I talk positively about therapy or just they don't apply to you or...?
No, I agree with everything you said and I know that I need therapy.
And I just guess I don't know where to start to find somebody, to find like a good therapist.
I mean, I know that I need to go to a secular therapist because...
I know that a lot of the Mormon therapists kind of press an agenda, and obviously I'm atheist now, so I wouldn't anyway.
I'd obviously go to a secular therapist, but I guess I just don't really know where to start to find someone who I feel that I could trust and that I wouldn't just be wasting my money.
Well, I mean, I've got a podcast on my thoughts about how to find a good therapist.
I don't know if you've listened to that, or I think it's podcast1939, or you can just go to fdrpodcast.com and search for therapist, and it's just my particular thoughts.
There's nothing scientific.
And I brought it up to my dad that maybe he could help me pay for it, but it was kind of like in a joking way.
We were riding around together and he said, oh, if I'm old, will you put me up in this apartment, this part of town?
And I was like, yeah, if you'll help pay for my therapy.
And he kind of was like, yeah, sure, kind of laughed it off.
But I think he wasn't thinking that I was actually being realistic and meaning it.
He's like, I don't know why you think you need therapy.
I think you're the most well-rounded out of all my kids.
I suggested to my sister that she should get therapy, and she told me that she's a pro at psychology and that she doesn't need any help.
And that's the abusive sister, and I kind of laughed and said, like, yeah, right.
But apparently she thinks she's some master psychologist in her mind, so apparently she doesn't think she needs to live in.
But it's in the plans to do it.
I just haven't done it yet because we just barely got this house like a year ago.
And so the money's a little tight right now.
But you don't have to convince me that I need it.
I've been saying for the last couple years that I need it.
Okay, good.
I mean, I would suggest it.
I mean, you had a terrible childhood, my friend.
And...
You, of course, would not be the first girl who grew up with a distant or destructive father who ended up in sex-related trades, right?
Yeah, I got daddy issues.
Is that...
Now, is that...
I mean, I guess this is sort of a joke among sex workers.
And I'm not putting you in the category of sex worker, but it's in that, you know...
Was it SOB? Sexually-oriented business?
Is that how you phrased it?
Yeah.
Is that something that is joked about in, you know, there's that movie Ted...
Where the guy with the animated teddy bear and the strippers are over and he's like, I'd like to thank all of your bad fathers.
Is that sort of a joke in the sexually oriented business world that the girls have bad dads?
Yeah, I think that that's pretty common that girls kind of know that that's probably where a lot of it comes from.
Podcast is in 1927.
I knew it was somewhere around the pre-war era.
I just didn't know it was right before the great crash.
Podcast 1927 and my thoughts on finding a good therapist.
And have you talked to any of your other co-workers about their fathers or why they may do what they do?
Yeah, I think a lot of them has to do with just not good family relationships.
I mean, that's not all the reason why I got into what I do, but I feel like a lot of what I went through, because I went through, to be honest, like a pretty slutty period between the missionary and when I met the guy I'm with now.
And I feel like if I'd had parents who had built me up a lot more, that maybe I wouldn't have put myself through as much as I did during that time because I was pretty depressed.
But I mean, my dad did one good thing during that time.
I called him and told him that I didn't even want to be alive anymore.
And he told me that maybe I shouldn't be focusing on church and religion.
Maybe I should put it aside and find what really makes me happy.
And so that's when I started, you know, being more open-minded and looking to see what makes me happy instead of just trying to follow what the religion tells me should make me happy.
And it was a good time for me to meet the guy that I'm with because he asked me a lot of questions that brought up a lot of conflict for me and my, you know, philosophy on life at the time.
And...
It made me do a lot of research and looking into what I was saying that I was a part of.
And after that, I was like, I don't know what I am.
I don't know if that makes me a Christian because I'm not a Mormon anymore.
And then I did more research and I was like, I don't believe in this either.
So for the last, you know, seven years, I've been atheist.
And I've never been happier.
Right, right.
I mean, your father could have taken maybe a bit of responsibility about his role.
The issue was not necessarily your relationship with God, but your relationship with your family, but just wanted to sort of mention that.
And the growing up with the chaos, growing up with the instability, growing up with the violence, and growing up with either destructive or absent fathers or father figures, You know, you talked about your slutty period.
Of course, you know, slutty has a sort of negative moral connotation to it, but I don't know if you've watched any of the Gene Wars presentations that I've put together or the conversations I've had with people about that.
But you're kind of programmed for hypersexuality when you grow up in a father-absent household.
That's why a lot of people in the sex trade have father-absent or destructive father-figure relationships, because that kind of programs you for hypersexuality, because Your genes say, okay, well, the dads aren't around.
That means that we better go for quantity rather than quality when it comes to sexuality.
I mean, it's so foundational that, you know, a girl's puberty begins earlier in girls whose fathers aren't around.
That's how foundational father absence or destructive father figures are to a woman's sexuality.
And it's true for a man as well, but I'm obviously talking to a woman here, so...
It is a very basic biology that would put you in that particular tendency.
And I just wanted to pass, you know, because you had this slutty thing, and I don't know if you were joking or not, but it's obviously somewhat of a negative judgment.
And again, it's not something you weren't responsible at all, but there are significant biological drivers that occur in father absent or father destructive households for girls.
Yeah, I was just being really careless with myself, so...
Were you doing dangerous stuff or mostly just too much of it?
Doing dangerous stuff.
I mean, I had gone to a party by myself and got drunk and then woke up and everybody left the party except for the guy hosting it and ended up in, I guess you could say, similar to a date rape type situation.
I wasn't being very, you know, careful with myself, and I put myself in a lot of bad situations.
And then a lot of it, I was just like, oh, well, you know, I put myself in that situation, so.
Right.
Well, I'm certainly sorry to hear about that as well.
Of course, there is a kind of desperation for attention combined with almost a death wish in those kinds of situations because you never know how dangerous it's going to get, right?
Right.
Is there anything else you wanted to add about your childhood?
I mean, the thing with my dad that's been hard is that we were kind of like I said off and on and then when my mom passed away he didn't even call me to ask me how I was doing or anything and I wasn't able to be there at the funeral because she passed away while I was out of the country.
I wanted to be home to be able to grieve with my family and they ended up having this extra money that came from some deal with my mom's car.
And instead of helping me fly home, everybody was more worried about making sure everybody had a limo for the funeral and a bunch of huge flower spreads.
And I called my dad to ask him about bereavement tickets and he was really unhelpful and kind of had like a rude attitude.
And, you know, like I said, I kind of expected him to be like, oh, you know, your mom passed away.
How are you holding up?
And I didn't get that from him at all.
And so I was upset with him and I just wasn't messaging him or talking to him.
And then I posted some joke on Facebook like, oh yeah, sorry, on Sunday I won't be able to come over because I'm not allowed to drive or go outside my house on Sunday.
Ha ha.
And he sent me a message.
Through Facebook saying, you know, I feel inspired as your father to tell you not to mock things that are sacred to God.
And it caused this argument between him and I where I sent him a message back saying, I think it's funny that you don't even ask me how my mom's doing when she dies, but you feel like this is what you're going to message me.
Sorry, ask you how you're doing when your mom dies.
You said ask how your mom's doing when she dies.
Oh yeah, sorry.
No, ask me how I'm doing when my mom dies.
And so then we didn't talk for like four years.
And then he started kind of trying to talk to my sisters about talking to me instead of just calling me.
He's like, oh, tell Lexi that if she wants to talk to me anytime, I'm here for her.
And then it turns out it was because while he was having an affair on my mom back in the day, he'd actually got the woman pregnant.
So I ended up just a couple years ago finding out about a sister that I never even knew that I had.
And so I feel like he was kind of trying to rekindle this relationship so when we brought this new sister into the family that nobody was talking bad about him and that there wasn't all this drama and that we could just make her feel comfortable and accept her in.
And so I wasn't going to just drop it so that he could have that little happy scenario.
And so I wrote him this big letter telling him...
You know, all the things that he's done to hurt me throughout my life.
And he's always had this attitude like, oh, if you don't like the way it is, you don't like how I am, then just don't have anything to do with me.
This is just the way I am.
And I expected him to kind of have that attitude.
But instead, he was like, I'm really sorry.
And this, you know, let me clear this up for you and that.
And, you know, he was trying to be like helpful.
And And it was like the first time he'd had that attitude.
So since then, and he apologized for a lot of things.
Since then, he just tried to contact me at least by phone to talk to me every couple weeks.
And he used to have this attitude where if there was a picture of any of us daughters and we had our arm around each other and our shirt lifted up an inch, he would write us a letter about how immodest we were.
But now he had this little death scare where he thought he was going to die of cancer or something.
And it gave him this whole live and let live attitude.
So now we can have conversations where, you know, we couldn't talk about religion because he's Mormon.
But we can have these, you know, neutral conversations.
And so that's another thing that I've been trying to decide if that's like a healthy relationship for me or.
Yeah, so I don't know.
I don't know about the situation with my dad.
I just know that.
I mean, I certainly have some thoughts, but...
I mean, the fact that this guy moves away from his kids, leaves you with a violent mom, does not rescue you from a violent sister, does not rescue you from violent stepfathers, a sequence of violent stepfathers, and then he has a problem with you posting a joke.
I don't know on the scale of moral problems in his life He seems to be kind of focused on tiny little things to do with you rather than Absolutely sky blackening things to do with himself and those kinds of people can be pretty exhausting to be around to put it mildly Yeah We had our very first daddy-daughter date ever, like a couple months ago.
He came, drove the four hours and came up here and we went bowling and had dinner and all that.
And that was the first time that I can remember us ever spending like real one-on-one time together my whole life.
Well, if he wasn't your father, would you have him in your life if he was just some guy?
No.
No.
That's always been my answer with regards to family, but everyone, of course, can make their own choices with regards to that.
Now, let me ask you just one other question.
I'm sorry if there's more you wanted to add with that.
I didn't mean to sort of wrench it off.
Let's go in a new direction.
It's a really interesting question.
I helped my sister raise her two kids for several years up until they were like eight or nine.
And then I moved away from her to be able to have my own life.
And so unlike a lot of people where they have no idea what it would be like to have kids, I've spent a lot of time on her children.
Now they're adults.
My niece and I are still close, but my nephew won't even talk to me.
And I don't know why.
Maybe it's because he's I'm a Mormon and I'm, you know, me doing what I do.
Well, and sorry to interrupt, but of course you don't want to be judging what it's like to raise your kids based on being around your sister's kids because she does not exactly sound like in hot pursuit of self-knowledge as a whole.
And so having your kids will be a vastly, vastly different, if not downright opposed, existence and experience than being around your sister's kids, I would guess.
Yeah, and it was really hard because I had no control over what they were influenced by or subjected to.
And so, I mean, I thought of having kids, but I've also looked at, I've read in a few books that people are happier without having kids.
I know that sounds really bad, and I know you have a kid, and I think you're a great father.
Well, no, I mean, that's a spread, right?
It depends how you do it.
It depends how you do it.
And I don't want to get into a big sort of defensive parenting, although I wouldn't trade it except for my wife.
I wouldn't trade.
I'd trade this show.
I'd trade, you know, everything that I've built up for that experience.
But it depends how you do it.
Now, the typical people who like both people work and, you know, they have aging parents who perhaps need time, care and attention or want time, care and attention.
And they have extended family.
I mean, that's to me, that's a real treadmill.
I've seen people go through that and I was like, well, I pay good money to never do that.
It is true and the statistics do show that happiness goes down when people have kids.
But that's again for most people.
That's again for most people and most people...
Are not good parents and they end up having lots of fights with their kids that are completely pointless and useless.
You know, I have a significant conflict with my daughter maybe twice a year.
Maybe.
And, you know, she's a very strong-willed and smart and assertive and admirable young lady.
And she's completely delightful company.
I mean, she...
She's one of my favorite people to spend time with.
And I do have, of course, the privilege of spending a lot of time with her.
Yeah, I know it could be really rewarding.
It depends how you do it.
Sorry, go ahead.
I know it could be really rewarding, too.
Me and my sister.
Yeah, I can see all these articles.
I was reading this article the other day.
Like, well, parenting's not fun.
Not fun.
Well, it's not supposed to be fun.
And it's like, then why would you do it?
You know, I like what Phyllis Schlafly has.
She had six kids and she was like Illinois mom of the year or something like that.
And she said, who would not want to have...
The immense amount of fun that you can have raising kids.
It's become like this modern cross to bear.
I was reading this Little list of things that suck about parenting a little baby and stuff like that.
And it's like, oh man, come on.
This parent-martre thing, you know, like, well, it's a tough job.
And, you know, there was this woman who was writing recently.
It's like, well, a lot of times I really hate my kids, but they are my kids, so I love them.
And it's just like, oh, you lunatics.
You complete lunatics.
I mean, you know, it's not...
It's not that complicated.
You pick the right person to have kids with and you design a life so you can spend lots of time with your kids and it's a hell of a lot of fun.
But I can see why a lot of people do have their happiness go down.
There was this meme that was floating around recently where somebody was saying, hey, instead of doing fun adult stuff with each other, let's go to birthday parties where everyone's short and coughs or something like that.
And the denigration of Of parenthood is something I'm going to do a whole show of at some point because it's really annoying and offensive.
I'm not saying you're doing it because you're just going with the statistics.
But it's one of these things that is just going to make K people not breed.
So it's going to kill my tribe because K people are going to look down the road and say, well, you know, I got these options.
I got those options.
Parenting is going to take this much time and take this much money.
And our people are just like...
Oh, your condom broke.
All right.
I guess we'll just go on with it.
I mean, so it makes our idiots breed and cave people not.
And I think that's just part of the general dysgenics that's going on in culture at the moment.
And I just wanted to ask that not so much what the statistics are that you've read, but whether you looking down the road in your life, you know, because, you know, you say you're 32, right?
So Statistically, you've got, you know, probably more than half a decade to go on this planet.
And, you know, there is a time when you're going to get older and frailer and so on.
And, of course, your kids don't owe you anything.
But we assume that if you love your children, that the reciprocity is going to occur.
And, you know, they can give you grandkids and you can have a brood and continue your line and stay young with that kind of exposure.
Do you think that...
If you could be happy with it, right?
It doesn't mean you have to do it, right?
If you could be happy with it, do you think it's something you'd want to do?
I'm not sure because I've also got Aaron to consider because he's the one I want to spend the rest of my life with and Aaron doesn't have any interest in having children.
And there's been times where I've been really negative about it and he's, you know, really open-minded as far as, you know, just taking into consideration all sides of every argument.
And so he's given me a lot of the pros to it.
And then at the end of the conversation, I'm like, okay, so does that mean that you might want to have kids?
And then he's like, no, you need to get that out of your head.
Like, I don't want to have kids.
Why doesn't he want to have kids?
Why don't you want to have kids, Aaron?
I think he feels like he just has a lot of stuff he wants to do and having children will probably get in the way of all these things that he wants to do.
I think probably that part of the reason why he doesn't want to is because I feel like he didn't have a great father figure and so I think he doesn't want to be a father because he didn't have a great father figure either.
Well, but then that's the domino theory, right?
That you're just doomed to repeat bad things that happen to you, and it's not true.
Yeah.
So, and then there's also to consider that, you know, my line of work is not really conducive to have children because then you end up with stretch marks and, you know, your C cups turn into A cups.
Right.
Okay, so, and the reason I'm asking, of course, is that if you, you know, if you want to have kids, you don't have a whole heap of time to get busy on that, right?
Right, and so that's why we've talked about it a little bit, because I know that we're kind of running out of time.
And you don't want to be starting a business venture at the same time as you're trying to have kids.
At least that wouldn't be my...
Well, right, and I also don't have medical insurance.
Right, right, right.
So the only thing that I would suggest, you know, there's a couple of things that I would suggest.
And this is, you understand, and I don't even need to tell you this, but it's just more for the audience.
These are just my thoughts.
I can't tell you, and wouldn't tell you even if I could, what to do with your life.
But these are just some thoughts that are popping through my head.
I'm going to share them with you, and hopefully they will be vaguely useful.
And if not, I appreciate the conversation anyway.
Are you ready?
Yes.
Are you steady?
Yes.
All right.
Number one, bars are dysfunctional places.
You know that a lot better than I do.
And particularly, I would assume that the SOB, right, sexually-oriented businesses and sex-oriented businesses are kind of dysfunctional places.
It's not the creme de la creme of people who are into self-knowledge and so on in those places.
They tend to be for...
People who are kind of trying to avoid themselves in a variety of ways, through alcohol or through sexual stimulation or whatever it is, right?
So my concern is that although your history has very well adapted you to survive in dysfunctional environments, I'm not sure that you want to dedicate a significant portion of your adult life over and above the portion that you've dedicated already into flourishing in a dysfunctional environment.
That's my concern.
Obviously, the bar trade is something you know very well, having worked in that environment for close on a decade.
But I don't know if in terms of long-term happiness and mental health, that it's really the very best sort of environment for you to...
Continue to immerse yourself in and, you know, you'll be immersing yourself in it a lot more as an owner than as a dancer, right?
Because as a dancer, you've got a couple hours a day.
As an owner, you can be there 12, 14, 16, 18 hours a day sometimes.
I mean, you can know better than I do.
I'm going off the restaurants that I worked in and the manager's responsibilities there.
And that's one of my concerns, that your childhood has trained you on how to survive in dysfunctional environments.
And you're looking at starting a business in a fairly dysfunctional environment.
And I'm just concerned that that which you've adapted yourself for, which you can pursue now through working or owning a bar, that it might keep you in that sort of dysfunctional environment for longer than you need to be, if that makes any sense.
Well, I planned on dancing until I was 40 and then going to do something else, but I wasn't sure what I would do.
Oh, so it's not imminent, the bar decision?
It's not like you've got your eye on someplace or anything?
No, instead I'm just doing all of the research.
I'd thought of, instead of doing a strip club to do, I guess you could call it a burlesque A burlesque kind of club where you have girls doing aerial silks and aerial hoop and trapeze and making it more of a performance-based environment instead of it just being what I'm used to, which is just a 15-minute set and you're pasty and thongs.
Maybe instead you have belly dancers there or all different styles of entertainment instead of just that.
That one.
So a little bit more like circus-like or Cirque du Soleil sort of performance stuff?
Yeah.
Right, right.
When you look at the girls that you work with and the bandages that you work for and the people in the bar, is my sort of outside view of it somewhat accurate about dysfunctionality?
Yeah, I think so.
How so?
I mean, well, that's what Ayn Rand said is that a lot of people will drink and do a lot of these things to just avoid looking at themselves and really living their life.
So when you said that, that's what it reminded me of.
Okay, so I'm a little bit accurate in that, right?
In sort of saying that it's a dysfunctional.
It's a lot different.
I feel like a lot of the girls that you would meet in the club there, if you'd met them outside the club, you wouldn't maybe even have an inkling that that's what they do for a living.
A lot of them are moms and they're in long-term committed relationships, a lot of them.
But I do see definitely girls that come through there that have a lot more blatant, obvious dysfunction.
Do you know of a dancer that you've met in the course of your career who had a stable, happy, peaceful, loving upbringing?
I mean, I since I started dancing, there's only maybe two or three girls in all of these years that I've gotten really close to that I even hang out with outside of the club that I know that much about them.
The ones that I know, I don't think they've had very stable relationships.
I'm sure there are girls that have.
And I think part of the reason why those girls would be drawn to this industry is because if you take away the title of what it is and you ask somebody, you know, would you like to work a job that you get paid right away every day?
It's part time.
It's flexible.
You can travel and do it.
You know, you make X amount of dollars per year, you know.
I think a lot of people would be like, yeah, where do you sign me up?
And then you tell them, well, you've got to take your clothes off, and then the whole moral thing comes into it.
Or, you know, some of these self-esteem.
Well, again, I wouldn't, you know, I'm certainly no prude in these areas, and I would not make it, ooh, taking your clothes off, immoral.
You know, you're not initiating force, you're not initiating fraud, and neither are the customers, so it is not...
To me, it's not a moral issue.
I want to be sort of clear about that.
If you're looking for bad girl condemnation, you've got to keep looking for...
You're not going to get it from me.
That having been said, the question is, is it...
Everything has its costs and benefits, right?
So you get the benefits, which you've just listed, and the costs are not just people's moral condemnation.
The costs are, you know, as you said, you've got to find a guy who's willing to be okay with it, and you also have to perhaps, I know you said that some of the girls haven't, but you have to perhaps have some hesitation about motherhood because kids are going to find out at some point, right?
And that might be a challenge.
Yeah, I have friends who are struggling with With that, where they don't want their kids to know.
And then their kids get older.
Do you get cellphoned?
Do you get cellphoned video?
Does it end up on the internet?
I mean, are you going to...
Are the girls' routines sort of carved on the spine of the internet from here to eternity?
No.
Nobody's allowed to record inside the club.
So if they suspect that you're doing it, they'll take your phone and they'll look through it.
And if you've made any video or photo, they'll delete it.
Okay.
Could happen, though, right?
Right.
I'm not sure how it happened, but a friend of mine at the club, she has a son and he's about 15 years old and one of the girls at a school is like, oh, your mom's a stripper.
And he asked her about it and she goes, oh, that's weird that she would say that.
And then she never told him.
She just like kind of dropped it and he hasn't brought it up again.
But for a while there she's like, what do I do?
Hang on.
She's working as a stripper and her son who's 15 doesn't know?
Yeah, no, he doesn't.
He doesn't know.
What does she say she does?
Well, she also does hair.
And she does a lot of performance stuff.
She's an amazing aerial hoopist.
And so he'll see her perform in these shows where she's doing aerial hoop and stuff like that.
And she's also worked as a bartender.
So I think he probably thinks she just goes and bartends and does hair and does her aerial shows.
Yeah, that's a...
That's a lot of lying, right?
And that's not great.
And that's, of course, you know, there are benefits and there are costs, right?
One of the reasons why exotic dancers get paid so much is because there's a significant downside that doesn't have anything to do with morality in particular other than the fact that this woman has to lie to her son for many years.
And at some point, she's going to have to confess that she lied to him for the majority of his childhood, probably, once he understood what her job was.
Yeah, he knows.
Yeah.
I mean, if his friends know, he's going to say, you're a liar!
And she's going to be like, no, I'm not, and here's why.
Oh.
So now they're living in the same house, different worlds, right?
Yeah, now I have no idea how that girl from her school would even know that, because she's the same age as him, so I don't even know how she would know that.
That does not really matter.
I mean, that doesn't...
It's a public-facing position, right?
Yeah.
So...
Wow.
That's...
Yeah, so I mean, you can talk to people about the upside of anything, and it seems really great.
You know, hey, would you like to be paid a million dollars a year?
Sure, what do I have to do?
Be a hitman.
Ah, and again, I'm not putting you in the same moral category.
You could say, do you want to be paid a million dollars a year?
Say yes.
Well, what you have to do is spend, you know, 14 hours a day working and two weeks of the month traveling to Podunk City.
Knew wherever the hell it would be in Podank and, you know, go to a bunch of conferences and press a lot of flesh and go and sit in a booth for 12 hours and try and get people, you know, and then you'll end up being CEO of some company after 20 years of that.
And people will say, actually, I don't really want to, you know, I mean, everybody looks at the upside, but you got to balance it out, right?
And there's a reason why the pay is high.
And that's because there are people who look at the downside and say, it's not worth it, which restricts the supply.
And that drives up the prices for others, right?
Right.
Okay, so as far as having the confidence to go forward, I certainly would give the thought out about having kids.
And, you know, with regards to your boyfriend, you know, he's certainly welcome to call and talk about it.
I think saying, I had a bad childhood, therefore I'm not going to have any kids.
Well, if your parents had followed that thinking, you wouldn't be alive, right?
Right.
Yeah, and I wouldn't be here to know the difference or care either way.
Right, and you know, you love your life, you like your life for sure.
I mean, you're not standing, you're not calling me from a cliff edge or something, right?
So, the idea that Only people who understand how bad their childhood is should never have kids.
Well, those are the people, because they've actually understood and processed some aspects of their childhood, who we'd kind of want to have kids, right?
I mean, as far as because you're smart enough to know what happened and its effect and so on.
So, just knowing that your bad childhood could have a negative effect on your parenting puts you leagues ahead of a hell of a lot of parents out there who aren't even.
And my concern, and I'm not trying to sort of spook you with possibilities or some Pascal's wager of infinite regret or something, but Lexi, my concern is that, and I've seen this, God, I'm old.
I'm going to be 50 years old this year.
But I've seen this in people and it seems to hit women pretty hard when they get into their 40s.
And they get, like, baby rabies, right?
It feels like they gotta pee all the time, or they're hungry all the time, or whatever.
And, you know, talk about locking the barn door after the horse has left, right?
And they're too old to have kids, or at least too old to have kids with any reasonable degree of safety.
I'm sort of mid-40s or whatever.
And they've got another 40 years to go in their life, and they can't seem to shake hands.
The regret, you know?
You're young and you've been busy a lot, but it's hard to stay that busy your whole life unless you're a total workaholic.
And if you were a total workaholic, you'd go nuts trying to...
That's why I asked you about what do you do with the rest of your day.
And if you're like, oh, it drives me crazy.
I'm so bored.
Right?
Then I'd be like, okay, well, maybe being a parent or an entrepreneur.
But you're like, no, I'm pretty happy with all that free time.
So you're not a workaholic.
And your joy in...
Work, your joy in income, your joy in your career, your profession diminishes over time.
You know, once you've done your thing, you don't have anything left to prove in your career.
As you say, you're the best employee, the best dancer around, and so you don't have anything to prove.
And my concern is that if you sort of can trundle along or maybe get involved in some other business or just keep dancing for another eight years or so, and then...
It begins to sort of hit you.
Nature is going to creep up on you.
And your nature is really, really going to want you to have kids.
Right?
That's going to hit you like a hunger.
It's not just for women.
I never particularly thought about...
I always knew I'd be a great dad, but I never really thought particularly about having kids until I met my wife.
And then it was like a hunger.
Right?
I had to do it.
And so my concern is that if you just look at the downsides, the downsides in child raising are kind of immediate.
And everyone's talking about them and there are studies out there and, oh, the baby spit up on me and it's gross and all this kind of thing.
And I remember seeing some comedy where the woman was talking about bridesmaids.
The woman was talking about how gross it was to be around Ejaculating little, like, ejaculating boys, right, who were, like, in their early teens.
And she says, like, I can't even bend the sheets.
You know, like, it was just gross.
And, like, everybody talks about all those negatives.
And, of course, there are enough people now who haven't had kids that there's a hunger for that kind of thing to stave off the baby rabies.
But...
My concern is that you may end up regretting it.
And the problem is, of course, that by the time you regret it, oftentimes the ship has sailed and can be a difficult thing to live with.
Now, that, of course, doesn't mean go and have kids because you're afraid of regretting it.
I think that therapy will really help with that.
Because the decision to not have children is...
There's three big decisions in your life.
What you're going to do to make money, who you're going to do it with as a romantic partner, and whether you're going to have children.
Those are like the three big decisions that have the most foundational impact, I would argue, on your happiness.
Work and love, work and love, work and love.
Now, you have the guy you want to spend time with, which is great, but the guy you want to spend time with is not And so that third decision, whether you're going to have children or not, is a huge and powerful and significant decision that has a massive impact on your happiness, particularly as you get older.
You know, you're young, you're healthy, you're limber, obviously, and toned.
And so, but you know, you get into your 60s and 70s, you know, you're not quite doing as many cartwheels and it's nice to have people who really want to spend time with you.
And of course, at some point, you or your partner are most likely to die one before the other and most likely it's going to be your partner that you're going to have, you know, probably close to a decade where you're old and there's nobody around you who's got any investment in spending time with you.
And that's 10 years.
You know, that's 10 years where you really need people's resources, right?
Because you're getting old and you need people to come and help you and so on.
I just think, you know, think a little bit about that, you know, over the horizon kind of stuff.
But therapy will really help you with that.
And of course, if you want to get into business and so on, I think therapy is really important because you're going to really need to have to trust your instincts.
You're also going to be working in an environment with lots of unstable people, right?
the bar environment, the sexual marketplace environment, lots of unstable people.
And you're really going to need to know how to deal with them without slipping into childhood habits and unconsciousness, which is probably going to mean that you're going to get exploited.
Because if you end up in situations where you regress childhood, other people will generally exploit you.
And that would be pretty disastrous from a business standpoint.
I say this with not entirely abstract experiences with regards to this.
So, you know, to me, all roads point to therapy.
And, you know, but really, really seriously think about this decision.
Don't let the decision to have kids or not have kids just happen to you.
And certainly don't let it just happen to you from your partner, right?
Really have to dig in and figure out what you want.
And...
Therapy, I think, will help with all of that stuff.
You, of course, have some time.
This is why I said, what are you doing with your day?
You're one of the few people who has the income and the time to be able to do it.
I know you said you just got a house and all of that.
Certainly, if you're going to be an entrepreneur, then therapy is really, really important.
If you make mistakes as an entrepreneur, you can literally spend A decade or more paying those off.
And therapy is real cheap relative to that kind of disaster.
So that's my thoughts on it.
I'll certainly give you the last word as always, though.
If you have any.
I mean, as far as the thing with kids, I mean, Aaron's definitely the person I want to spend the rest of my life with.
And So, I mean, it would be us having to decide together.
The only thing that we've done in regards to that is not making anything permanent because there's definitely been, you know, the thought to, you know, do something permanent since we're not, you know, I can't be on this birth control forever.
But we decided to wait till we were 40 before making any permanent decisions.
Right.
Okay.
Well, you've got time to mull it over then.
Yeah.
And how was the conversation for you?
It was really enlightening.
I appreciate all of your input and I've listened to your show for a long time and I really appreciate all the good work that you're doing and I'm a big fan.
And we've been contributing also with money for several years as well because we believe in what you're doing.
Well, I hugely appreciate that.
That's very kind of you both.
If you're tight and that money can better go to therapy, please stop giving it to me and give it to a therapist.
That's my only request.
But thanks very much to you both.
I really appreciate the call and I hope you'll check in with us again soon.
For sure.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Take care.
Okay.
All right.
Well, up next is Jay.
Jay wrote in and said, What is young earth science?
Yes.
And how does philosophy relate?
Should we waste billions on funding research based on old earth fallacies?
How does young earth science relate to public policy issues like school choice and government funding of research?
That's from Jay.
Hello, Jay.
How are you doing?
We're doing real good.
How about you?
Good.
There's one thing I really like about the young Earth theories, is that relative to the age of the planet, it makes me feel a lot younger to have a significant percentage of the age of the planet tucked under my aging, middle-aged body.
But how are you doing tonight?
We're doing well, thank you.
All right.
So, do you want to...
Take the questions one by one.
Do you want to make a pitch for the Young Earth thesis?
What's your pleasure?
I'll take the first question.
In terms of a general philosophical perspective, like what we come to the table with, either from our background, how we were raised, our general worldview.
I think it was time-life books introduced me to the idea that the world was billions of years old.
So I just accepted it.
You know, these were the sort of things I saw at school.
This is what my teachers were telling me.
So I go with that.
So the importance of kind of a starting point, what do we assume?
What do we start out as?
And my history of science professor was David Kitts.
He studied under the well-known paleontologist G.G. Simpson.
And he gave me an interview and he basically said that the reason When we look at the fossils, that we assume that evolution is our starting point.
So, kind of the idea that we have to look at assumptions and worldview and where that comes from.
And one thing I looked up was a current book on evolution.
It was called Randomness in Evolution.
And I just searched for key terms like presume and assume and guess and things like that.
So, that's one aspect that I think is...
Okay, I'm sorry, I gotta interrupt you here.
And you have the typical mentality of somebody who's well-versed in a discipline, who wants to start halfway through for people who don't know what you're talking about, okay?
Okay.
So, the Young Earth thesis, or hypothesis, I guess we should say, is that for a lot of people, it's around that the world is 4,500 people.
Years old and I assume that this of course has to do with the biblical creationist story.
I think it was in the 18th century where somebody looked at the generations that are described in the Bible and worked backwards and figured out how old the world was.
And that's given kind of an ancillary argument that if you start with Adam and Eve and double the population every 150 years, you end up with something similar to the current world's population.
And so that is the general thesis that the world is a few thousand years old was created by a God and that is a defense of a theocratic worldview or theocratic universe.
And that's sort of the I just want to give people the general overview before we delve into the details.
Is that a reasonably accurate way of portraying the approach?
Well, in my book, Yes, Young Earth Science, what I do is I try to defend a young earth from history, from philosophy, from geology, biology, and physics.
And two philosophers that actually had a similar viewpoint would be David Hume.
David Hume looked at Columbus and wondered, well, haven't there been other Columbuses before?
And then he gave the funny example of like garters to hold your socks up.
As technology progresses, we kind of extrapolate it.
So if we're at this point, Like when I was reading my weekly reader in school, in grade school, they said we'd all have flying helicopters by now.
We haven't.
But the point is, over time, technology increases.
So it kind of gives us a hint that, well, maybe man hasn't been on the earth that long.
And Lucretius, he referred to Homer and said, why aren't there stories of maybe, say, the Neanderthals and all the fantastic things they did?
How come we don't have lots of stories before Troy?
And he mentioned the Theban Wars as well.
And so basically what I'm using is a straightforward argument using an omnicultural approach where I use history and science to argue that the world is thousands of years old and not billions, which is the current consensus.
All right.
Good stuff.
And which one do you want to take on first?
Which aspect of the proof?
Well, I would make a number of arguments.
So if we look at different cultures that considered time and kept track of their records, you know, a lot of the civilizations, especially if you keep it to, say, the ancient king lists, where you can kind of connect them up.
Kind of like what you were suggesting, is that most of the cultures started around 2500 BC, and then bringing it home to the Americas, there was a scholar who wrote a book about earthquakes, and then he also discussed about Mesoamerican traditions.
And there was a writer who was the great-great-grandson of an Aztec leader, And if you take those dates, you kind of have to tie it to the beginning of the Toltec period.
You come up with it.
Their understanding of when the beginning was, was somewhere between 3600 BC and 4200 BC. So somewhat similar to the date you suggested.
My knowledge of the term Toltec is mostly limited to a John Anderson album.
But I'm not sure I can understand the argument.
And again, I'm going to have to interrupt you from time to time because otherwise the questions pile up in my brain and I start to forget them.
So is the argument that because recorded history is only a few thousand years old...
That the Earth can't be much older than recorded history, is that right?
Or written history?
Yes, I'm saying that there are some traditions, say as the Sumerian king list, that bring it back to what I'm claiming is the beginning of humanity, yes.
And there's other reasons to look at the geologic record, which we could get into that.
Okay, now hang on, hang on.
Hang on, hang on.
You can't just give me the avalanche of words, right?
This has to be a conversation.
This can't just be a filibuster on your side.
Right.
So, the argument is something like this, and I'm not trying to paraphrase it, I'm just trying to understand it accurately.
So, the records of human civilization go back, I don't know, 5,000 years, if you sort of look at ancient Egyptians and so on, right?
I guess 5,000 years BC, perhaps.
It's the argument that because human beings were created at the same time as the Earth...
And there are no records that go back more than 5,000 years BC that human beings and the Earth must have been created at around that time.
Is that right?
Essentially, that's right.
Okay.
I'm not sure how that follows because, as you know, and I'm not going to insult your intelligence by pretending you haven't thought of these things a lot, right?
So I'm just giving you the outside question.
I'm not trying to imply that you haven't thought of these things.
But I'm not sure how logically it follows that if it takes life 4 billion odd years or 3 billion odd years, I can't remember exactly how long it's been since the primordial soup is supposed to have coughed up the first organism, but if it's taken life a couple of billion years to come up with Language,
like written language or recorded language, why would it be the case that the time between the beginning of life, according to biologists and so on, to the beginning of life to the beginning of recorded history, why would that not exist?
I'm making the assumption that there may be something to these different traditions that do put the two together, and that would lead to other conclusions that our traditional geological interpretations have to be flawed.
I'm not sure how that answers the question.
I'm taking it that I think there's some truth to these ancient myths, ancient legends.
Which ancient myths?
I don't know which ancient myths.
Well, the Sumerian king list Is where they take the kings from before the flood that the epic of Gilgamesh relates.
So that takes it back to the beginning.
And that, if you change the math from a base 60 to a base 10 system, it adds up to about 6,000 years.
I'm not quite following that.
Are you saying that the genealogy of these ancient myths goes back to about 6,000 years?
6,000 years before the great catastrophic flood that many cultures record.
Okay, so there was a great flood 6,000 years ago.
Okay, I have no problem with imagining that that would be the case, or accepting that that's some evidence that that was the case.
But if we're talking 6,000 years ago, that there are epics or ancient traditions that talk about a flood 6,000 years ago, what would that have to do with the age of the Earth?
Because, of course, the Earth could be a lot older than a flood 6,000 years ago.
Right.
There aren't many cultures that have a specific number that go all the way back to the beginning.
You mentioned the Hebrews, that's one.
The Mesoamerican culture...
Wait, back to the beginning of what?
The beginning of the world.
The beginning of Earth.
But you're talking about ancient stories written down by people who have no concept of Geological time, no access to carbon dating, not a very thorough understanding of tree rings and sort of scaling them back over time.
And so the fact that they would not talk about a world older than the world that their religious texts said it was, when they have no access to science to contradict that, doesn't seem too surprising to me.
I understand that side of it.
I'm saying that there are some cultures that put the two together and that the evidences you brought out actually support my position.
So something like carbon dating would support that the world is a few thousand years old?
Correct.
In fact, in radiocarbon, they listed a number of coal samples that were dated.
They shouldn't be there, and using the most advanced method, which is the AMS method, that dated it, say, 40,000 years.
Now, coal is often, you know, hundreds of millions of years old.
So just that fact, in other words, they almost have to say, well, it has to be contamination.
Again, it's kind of an out, in my opinion.
I believe the evidence is that since carbon-14 gives those dates, maybe the hundreds of millions of years is incorrect.
Alright, so I'm no expert on this, but my understanding is that there's carbon-14 and there's carbon-12.
Carbon-14 comes when solar radiation hits the other upper atmosphere or something, goes into the air, is breathed into organisms, and then slowly decays back to carbon-12 over time.
And the degree of its decay can be measured empirically and empirically.
It's known ahead of time and so the amount of carbon-14 that's left in a particular organism and it only works with organisms, it doesn't work with rocks or anything like that because there's uranium which can cause decay as well.
So when people can dig up some organism or something that once was an organism like I guess, dinosaur fossils, or I guess, I don't know if it works with things like oil, I guess so, because it comes from trees.
They can actually find out how old something is by using this carbonating, figuring out what the ratio is of carbon-14 to carbon-12 atoms.
And through that, knowing the half-life of the decay, they can figure out how old something is.
Is that a fair way to characterize it?
You've certainly studied it a lot more than I have.
Yes, but I would say that the coal is a problem because they realized that's what they were not expecting.
So the only explanation they can come up with is the contamination theory.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what the problem is.
Are you saying that they have found coal that is relatively new?
It still has the radiocarbon in it, therefore they can date it.
And when they date it, for many samples, you get a date of less than 50,000 years, sometimes as young as 40,000 years.
And that's something you could do yourself.
You could go to your nearest coal mine, ask for a sample.
Of course, it involves some money, but I'm saying, theoretically, anybody could do that.
Have a coal sample dated.
And what percentage or what proportion of the coal is dated relatively recently?
That, I don't know.
But in terms of the threshold of the measuring device, it's significantly above that.
It's not just right at the very tip.
Well, no, hang on, hang on.
Hang on, hang on.
Dude, you've written a whole book about this.
Now, it seems to me that if 50% of the coal samples were dated relatively recently, it would be pretty hard to To know whether that, like it would be pretty hard to argue that that's contamination, right?
Because that's 50%, but if it's one in a thousand or one in ten thousand, then that could be, that could easily be contamination, if that makes sense.
So if you don't know the proportion, then it seems to me you're missing some pretty important information when it comes to your thesis, right?
Yeah.
Well, for that argument, I think you have a point that I haven't studied that aspect of it.
It's just that in the journal, they didn't consider that as a possible explanation.
Consider what as a possible explanation?
That it was only a few thousand years old?
Yeah, that some of the samples were like a minority, but apparently it happens pretty often, is what I'm saying.
Pretty often.
Again, see, because I don't know anything about what contamination likelihood is in carbon dating, pretty often, you know, it's a fairly important thing.
This is the first argument you've brought up, right?
So it's fairly important to know what proportion of this coal samples seem to have the incorrect or impossible.
Carbon dating.
So my suggestion would be, you know, you've got a book out there, you're probably going to put out a second version, that if you can say, well, 50% of the samples give this way to Way too common.
But if it's one in 10,000, then it's more believable that there's been some sort of contamination.
You know, maybe when it was brought up from the ground, it brushed against newer stuff.
And that kind of got mixed in.
Or maybe, I don't know, someone touched it and it blended.
I don't know why.
Maybe there's uranium around, which is causing accelerated decay of carbon-14 to carbon-12.
Or, you know, lots of other explanations.
But it would have something to do with the proportion of the...
Of the samples that were giving erroneous results.
So let's move on to another example of that.
Of course, even if you say that some of the coal is carbon dated to only 40,000 years ago when it should be much older than that, 40,000 of course is still a lot, as you know, past the 4,500 or whatever it's going to be and how is that resolved?
Or does that mean that the carbon dating is incorrect as a whole?
No, I'm just saying that that invalidates the hundreds of millions of years for the rock record, say, since the Cambrian around 500 plus million years ago.
Wait, sorry.
So are you saying that if there's coal found that dates 40,000 years back, that is found among rocks that are dated hundreds of millions of years back?
That I'm saying it brings that we should at least consider that as a possibility since the carboniferous is say like 300 million plus years ago.
Now, I just want to put this out here.
A sample can be contaminated if organic material rich in fresh atmospheric C14 soaks or diffuses into it.
Such contamination may occur in the ground or during the processing of the sample in the laboratory.
However, such contamination will make the sample appear younger We're good to go.
Dating various portions of a sample is another kind of check that may be performed.
So if the coal is even exposed to a bit of air from the surface, which of course would be much more rich in atmospheric carbon-14, then it can contaminate it.
So it's not like that rare because it's in the air sort of all around us.
And so any exposure to air could contaminate the sample.
So it's not that impossible for it to be contaminated, if that makes sense.
Right.
But there are numerous examples in the article that was in the journal Radiocarbon, I think it was 1989, that they went through extreme efforts to try to create a blank and they couldn't because there was still radiocarbon within the sample and there should be none after that length of time.
Well, again, I mean, I can't sort of speak to that, but they do have other ways of validating some of the carbon dating, right?
I'm sure everyone knows this, of course, a cross-section of a tree because there's the rings, right?
Because the trees are growing more in the summer and not growing in the winter and there's different thicknesses because sometimes the conditions are better for the trees to grow.
And so you can cut a tree and you can count it back and you can see the different pattern of thickness and thinness in the tree's rings.
And then you can find an even older tree where The younger part of it matches the older part of the tree you already have and you can kind of step back and match all of these tree rings to go back thousands of years and my understanding is that they have been able to go back 8,000 years with these tree rings and they can of course validate that with carbon dating, right?
So they've found trees that they know for sure are within a decade or two of being 8,000 years old And they can then measure the carbon dating in those trees and predict whether it's within the range of that which would be expected by the carbon decay.
And they have found that it does match.
So there is a way of validating the carbon decay.
And of course, since the tree rings get back 8,000 years, that would be a bit of a challenge to the 4,500-year-old Earth.
It's almost double.
I'm sure you've, of course, looked into that.
And what are your thoughts about that?
Well, I would question the correlations, and sometimes an extra tree ring can go relatively fast.
But when you break down these correlations, sometimes those can be off.
So it's a little tricky, and I realize I'd try to add them together.
When you actually look at some of the oldest trees, just like a single tree, it goes back so many thousands of years, and that is actually one of my main arguments, and it has to do with tree rings in the fossil record, and there's a limitation on that, which would not be expected if the Earth is really hundreds of millions, or at least to the Cambrian, hundreds of millions of years that we're dealing with.
I'm not sure what that argument is.
Well, the thing is, if you look at the oldest tree that we have, a fossilized tree, it has about 816 rings.
Today, we have many, many trees with thousands of rings.
Junipers, olives, bristlecone pine, of course, the redwoods and such.
If we look at the fossils that have the rings, the fossil trees, they've been around for 300 million years plus, but we don't find in the fossil record these trees with, say, 3,000, 4,000, or 5,000 plus rings.
Okay.
So, I'm not sure, again, I'm not sure why.
I mean, fossilized stuff is really rare.
I remember reading, hang on, hang on, still talking.
I remember Bill Bryson was talking once about how rare fossils are.
In that if the entire population of North America went through the same process of fossilization, you know, hundreds of millions of people, we'd find like one shin bone.
You know, that's how rare fossils are with regards to that.
And so, you know, the fact that they, I mean, I'm sure you're right, that they can't find fossil trees with...
Thousands of rings.
Well, I mean, fossils of any kind are extraordinarily rare.
And of course, there may be some reason for that in terms of maybe those trees, you know, if there was a fire, maybe they'd be burned down.
Maybe there was something in being underground for hundreds of millions of years that has caused the rings to decay.
Just possibilities.
Again, I'm certainly no expert, but I would be a little skeptical about hanging my hat on that one.
But go ahead.
Yes, there's the hundreds of millions of years that also helped to give the fossilization a chance, since that's such a long period of time.
And the other thing is, as we collect more and more, we kind of get an idea of how complete that fossil record is.
And there was a book published specifically on that topic, The Adequacy of the Fossil Record, that in general, the data is there.
So like when Darwin wrote his Origin of the Species, he used that as kind of an out for why don't we find so many transitional forms, but today we can't really use that excuse.
Oh, this is the argument that says that you can't find transitional species.
Is that right?
Yes, yes.
Right.
And I don't have the answer to that.
I don't know if there is an answer out there that is...
Accepted.
But again, the extraordinary rarity of fossils.
It's something that, you know, we go to a museum and we see tons of fossils and we say, wow, it's a lot of fossils.
They're everywhere.
Or we see these, you know, where they found these tar pits, you know, where the prey dinosaurs died there and then the predator dinosaurs tried to come in and eat them and also got stuck there and you end up with this mountain of bones.
And it gives people the impression that Fossils are somehow common and they are again extraordinarily rare relative to the population of say dinosaurs and so on in the past and so the fact that there aren't transitional species when there is an enormous number of missing fossils and so on is one aspect.
There is some And you can go to this website, transitionalfossils.com, which I don't think is necessarily a...
I thought it was going to be a website devoted to the stripper's friend with the oxygen tent that we heard of earlier.
So it says here, all species undergo gradual change over time.
But in the fossil record, we find evidence of some changes that are particularly striking.
These are called transitional...
Fossils, of course, right?
And so there, I'm not even going to try this, these transitions, apes to humans, right?
So there is Ardipithecus ramidus, Australopithecus afarensis.
Oh, I'm very pleased with this going along.
Homa habilis, I could do that, and Homo erectus.
And so there are...
This one, the first one, about 4.4 million years ago, had a brain the size of a chimps, but possibly walked upright on the ground while still able to go on all fours in the trees.
The one that's 3.6 million years ago, a more advanced walker with non-grasping feet.
I guess that's the big difference between chimpanzees and us, right?
Non-grasping one of them.
But it still had the brain size of a chimpanzee.
Homo habilis, about 2 million years ago, had a brain about 50% bigger than a chimps, still voted for...
Bernie Sanders, the fossils are found with a variety of stone tools.
The earliest humans were sure used tools, two million years ago.
Homo erectus, one million year ago.
Toolmaker, brain...
A size of about a thousand cubic centimeters, still smaller than her own.
Homo heidelbergensis had a brain size approaching her own, shows a mix of Homo erectus and modern human features.
That's sort of one example.
I will go through all of these.
There's fish, tetrabods, dinosaurs to birds, synapsids to mammals, land mammals to whales and dolphins, and proto-horses.
Two horses, and then a bunch of miscellaneous one, and this goes on for quiet.
And there's, you know, lots and lots of references down at the bottom.
So, you know, I don't know what is considered to be a transitional fossil.
There certainly are transitional fossils.
Of course, people can always say, but what about the transitions in between the transitional fossils?
But of course, that's a guard of the gaps and sort of a moving the goalpost example.
Yeah, there are many like that and many evolutionists admit to it and then try to deal with it.
In fact, my history of science professor, David Kitz, was famous for kind of pointing that out.
But I would like to...
Sorry, pointing what out?
The fact that there are expected transitional forms and we do not find them.
But again, that is a problem that, say, you have punctuated equilibrium and some other concepts.
Maybe evolution occurred faster, and so we don't see the fossils.
But I see it as a pretty critical problem.
Well, I think one of the things that I've sort of been reading about lately, and I've mentioned this book before, The 10,000-Year Explosion, is I was always taught that when I was growing up that evolution was slow, really slow.
And certainly with human beings, it can be incredibly rapid, right?
We've talked about and had an expert on the show about...
Not the Sephardic, but the Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence that over a mere 700 years, or about 30 generations, of selective breeding for intelligence, they have got a standard deviation higher.
And with, of course, some instability and neurosis that comes with that high octane brain.
But there has been incredibly rapid evolution, or evolution can be incredibly rapid, and of course it's described in Richard Dawkins' book, The Greatest Show on Earth, which did actually surprise me about the degree of Empirical validation there does seem to be for evolution, but it can be incredibly rapid.
It's not this, you know, really slow process, but can be under pressure, can be extremely rapid.
And so that may be, if you look at all of human history, you know, if you sort of look, you can say, well, human beings sort of emerge in their prominent Present form, about 200,000 years ago, then 50 or 60,000 years ago, there was an exodus from Africa, probably because of very loud music.
And if you look at 200,000 years, well, that's obviously, at least not geologically, but as far as evolution goes, is a pretty large stretch of time.
If you take 700 years out of those 200,000 years, that is absolutely, completely and totally tiny.
And so if you were to look at sort of Jews who weren't considered to be that smart in the ancient world and showed no particularly brilliant expositions or skills or abilities, over the 200,000 year history of modern Homo sapiens, would you find necessarily the brain development that has gone into Jews over the past years?
700 years.
Well, it would be very unlikely if out of all of North America, you're only going to find one shin bone in the fossilized record.
So the fact that evolution can happen very quickly, and that there are massive natural gaps just because it's so rare, is not too shocking to me.
Well, I like to emphasize the overall picture of, like, biological essentialism, like that Aristotle held to, and man's unique character.
Like, when Hamlet says, what a piece of work is a man.
And those unique characteristics, like you talked about, you know, walking on two feet, and some of these other things.
Because man is, it really stands out.
And like, say, when a Noam Chomsky talks about the uniqueness of human language.
I think those are things that a lot of people realize that that's a big gap.
But if the gap between man and the animals is large, maybe each individual essential type of life, there's also a big gap.
Well, I mean, I certainly agree that I would not want to be having this show with a phyloplankton because it would be, well, kind of one-sided.
So, human beings are...
Like nothing else in many ways in the entire universe and I It's not just like, you know, lots of animals communicate and all that, but human beings, especially with concepts, with abstractions, and again, you can see some primitive stuff with this with some animals,
but the degree to which human beings' mental capacities outstrip other animals, well, it's just why we've become the dominant species on the planet to the point where we pretty much own or control every other life form on the planet in one form or another.
And so...
I completely agree with you that human beings are like a weird, unexpected plus.
But it simply turns out, you know, I've sort of made the argument, which is not biological, but it's just, I think, pleasing, if that makes sense, that particularly in colder climates where you have winter and you have to defer gratification or die, you know, if you live in a place where food is fairly plentiful.
But there's random dangers than you get with this R-selected stuff.
But in colder climates, where you do have to defer gratification, not eat your seed crop and do a lot of work, which doesn't pay off for a year or more, sometimes you go clear a plot of land and you've got to plow it, you've got to plant it, you've got to fertilize it, and you know, maybe two years after you start that you get something out.
And So, to me, the deferral of gratification and the additional calories provided by agriculture per acre, you know, like hunter-gatherers, like a small tribe needs thousands of square kilometers to roam around in and it's very hard to survive.
Which is why the human population never grew very large.
And 70,000 years ago, according to some reports, there was a series of volcanic eruptions.
I don't know, maybe some giant meteor hit somewhere.
A series of volcanic eruptions that reduced the planet's temperature so much that the entire human population was reduced to about 10,000 people, some in India and some in Africa, I guess the last warm places on the planet.
And so the deferral of gratification is so essential to surviving, particularly in a cold agricultural environment And so,
the fact that human beings Developed enough cranial capacity to figure out agriculture, which then in turn rewarded so enormously those who developed additional intelligence.
And we're talking like 10,000 years ago, which is a tiny slice.
And so it's still only 5% of the length of time human beings have been alive in a tiny slice.
Of course, a minuscule slice in the history of life, let alone the history of the planet.
But the fact that the deferral of gratification is so rewarded and so stimulated in a relatively free market, non-welfare state environment that human beings would have ended up with a 10,000 year evolutionary pressure on the deferral of gratification, which is the result of intelligence, that there would be such a positive stimulation for selecting for intelligence that we would end up with sort of the modern mind.
It's an incredible story and a pretty remarkable development, but I think falls well within the parameters of what would be encouraged or supported by evolution.
Okay, that's the end of my speech.
I'll let you talk from here.
What is your opinion on the intelligence of Neanderthals?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, I was always sort of raised to think of Neanderthals as our historic low-rent cousins from the wrong side of town.
But I've heard some arguments that Neanderthals were more advanced than we thought.
But then in particular, the blend of Homo sapien and Neanderthal DNA with these...
Low rent, you know, biological cousins screwing wastrels and reprobates from history that the mixture of Neanderthal and Homo sapien DNA gave rise to a particularly potent form of intelligence within Europe, which is, you know, of course, has done so much for the world for good and ill over the past 2,500 years.
So I do think that there does seem to have been some More advantages or greater intelligence to Neanderthals than I was first told about when I was younger.
But in particular, the breeding combination, you know, the wider the gene pool that you can breed with, the more advantageous mutations you can get.
And so maybe the mixture of Neanderthal and Homo sapien DNA produced sort of the modern European species of intelligence.
That's what I've heard.
Again, I obviously can't verify, but that's my thought.
Well, the figure I've heard is that up to, at least for non-Africans, up to 4% of our DNA come from Neanderthals.
And I make an argument, we were talking about population earlier, and again, there could have been some disasters, I admit that.
But I make an argument from the population growth of Neanderthals.
Supposedly, they started around 300,000 years ago, and they left around 25,000 years ago.
So if you kind of set that timeframe and assume just one one-hundredth of a percent of a population growth, you come up with 27 trillion, which is kind of a lot.
Wait, I'm sorry.
Your argument is that with a smaller early population that you might have some sort of linear population growth?
Exponential.
I'm using the exponential formula to get that number.
No, you're right.
Sorry.
Linear in terms of a certain percentage increase every year.
Exponential in terms of the actual number.
But that's not how...
I mean, you know this, right?
That's not how...
Life works.
Life will expand to exploit the available resources, but when it runs out of resources, then it has to stop expanding because it can't feed its young, right?
So there's no way that population would ever increase in a linear fashion.
You could sort of say, well, prior to the modern age where we're much better at getting resources out of nature and exploiting them for human consumption.
But The fact that the population remained relatively low is because hunter-gathering was incredibly inefficient relative to modern farming.
Ancient farming was incredibly inefficient relative to modern farming, and there just weren't enough resources to sustain a growth in population.
Otherwise, we'd be like moon-deep in rabbits, right?
That's exactly my argument.
And the Neanderthal range is much wider than a lot of people are aware of, from Spain to England, to the Middle East, to near Mongolia.
So they're all over the place.
We have a lot of, not tons, but in terms of their geographical distribution, there are a lot of Neanderthals.
We know they bury their dead in a ceremonial way, and they were quite intelligent.
They made this one kind of glue for their spearheads.
I think it was from a sap, but it was heated so hot to get it to stick like they did that we haven't quite figured out how they were able to produce such a high heat.
Okay, so there were lots of Neanderthals, and then I would assume that the Homo sapien-Neanderthal hybrid was better at War or better at exploiting resources and therefore drove out and demolished the, you know, two subspecies generally don't inhabit the same geographical area, right?
You get a bunch of gray squirrels moving in and the red squirrels move out.
And so two subspecies don't generally inhabit the same area.
And since Neanderthals and Homo sapiens would have been competing for the same resources, I would assume that the Homo sapiens were slightly better at something.
And in particular, the Homo sapiens Neanderthal combo was even better at those things and displaced both of the originals.
That's possible.
All I'm saying is that given even very tiny population growth, the timeframe seems wrong for the length of time that Neanderthals lived in considering their intelligence.
But there is no such thing as linear population growth in an environment where the resources are somewhat fixed, right?
Well, that's why I'm using such a small number.
In the 60s, you know, we had a pretty big population growth.
In about 2009, I think it was a little over one percent.
So I'm using not one percent, but one one-hundredth of a percent.
No, but it still doesn't matter because it doesn't matter how small the growth is.
It can't possibly be linear because you bump into the edge of resources, right?
Agreed.
But I'm saying even assuming natural disasters, sicknesses and whatnot, the lower population group helps to account for that on average in the long run.
No, no, no, it doesn't.
Listen, let's say that you have an island with one square kilometer.
It's a one square kilometer island, right?
Yes.
Then you can't put a million people...
You know, outside of Hong Kong, right?
You can't put a million people with ancient technologies on one square kilometer island and have them survive, right?
True, but their range is a huge part of the globe.
The Neanderthal range is very large.
No, no, it doesn't matter.
What I'm saying is that it doesn't matter what their range was.
With the technology available at the time, they could not extract much food from the ground, right?
Especially in a place where there's winter, right?
Where it's really hard to find food.
And so because certainly hunter-gatherers cannot exploit enough resources to grow beyond a few dozen members, maybe 50, maybe 75.
And so you say, well, if we just assume that the hunter-gatherers grew by a hundredth of a percentage every year or whatever, but that's not how it works.
They grow until they can't get enough food to feed their young, and then the population tends to stabilize.
Now, if they figure out some way to get more food, like once they figure out agriculture as opposed to hunter-gathering, well, you get more food per calorie expenditure, then you can get a population increase until you run up against those limits.
And then maybe you figure out crop rotation, maybe you figure out manure, maybe you figure out how to plant winter crops like turnips and so on.
Maybe you figure out, hey, we can drink this weird white goo coming out of the Teats of the cow.
We could be vampires.
So it grows until you run up against the edge of your resources.
There's no such thing as it just continues to grow and take into account disasters and so on.
Once you run out of resources, you can't grow until there's some technological advancement.
And even then, you grow until you've reached the maximum amount of your resources, right?
I mean, you have a really great...
Harvest, right?
And you maybe have twice as much food and everyone's like, great, let's go make some babies, right?
But then next year you have a drought and then your babies, half your babies die, right?
Because you just don't have enough food.
So even if you grow to the limit of your available resources, the circle that you can grow into is expanding and contracting all the time.
Even if you're getting better at it, it'll expand maybe 10% one year because you figured out something new.
But then next year you get a bunch of locusts or some crop rot or something like that and it contracts 20%.
And then you maybe get another 10% further back out.
So it is a very unstable carrying capacity whenever you're dealing with particularly ancient technology.
So I don't see how you can get just, well, just even if I apply a very small number, it doesn't account for it.
I just don't know how you can apply any number outside of what the carrying capacity of the environment is.
Well, I'm not a Neanderthal expert, but what I'm arguing is that their wide geographic range, it gives evidence that they had the survival problem somewhat solved.
Well, until they died out, in which case they didn't have the survival problem solved.
Yeah, but that's a time period of 275,000 years.
Right, and they would grow to the carrying capacity that they could figure out how to get from their environment, and then they would stop growing.
Anyway, let's move on.
I think we both made our case with that, but if you wanted to bring out something else, that would be fine.
Oh, sure.
One thing is...
On the ROC record, we find sometimes amino acids and amino acids for life are predominantly left-handed.
But over time, they break down to left-handed and right-handed to pretty much it's a 50-50 mix.
I'm sorry, I don't know what left-handed and right-handed means.
It's like if you connect your tinker toys that you might have used in a chemistry class, of course now we do it with 3D animation, and say what coffee looks like, and you make a chemical diagram of it.
If you take it and you flip it over, that would be kind of the mirror image.
So if you look at your left hand and your right hand, there's an arrangement to the parts.
So certain amino acids...
Have a left form and a right form.
So in nature, in living things, they're virtually all left-handed.
But over time, just left alone, they'll start to decay, in a sense, to a mix of about 50-50.
Half of it will be the left-handed form, half of it will be the right-handed form.
As if you put a big pile of left-handed gloves in a box, you come back a year later and half of them are left-handed, half of them are right-handed.
Something like that.
All right.
So we find in the rock record that there are some that haven't completely got to that point, even though the process didn't take all that long.
And again, it's explained away as contamination.
So that's just one aspect in terms of the rock record.
And the name for that, if you want to research it some more, is just racemization.
That's the name for that kind of dating method.
Okay, a bit of comment here.
here, researchers analyzing meteorite fragments that fell on a frozen lake in Canada have developed an explanation for the origin of life's handedness, why living things only use molecules with specific orientations.
The work also gave the strongest evidence to date that liquid water inside an asteroid leads to a strong preference of left-handed over right-handed forms of some common protein amino acids in meteorites.
The result makes the search for extraterrestrial life more challenging.
Bummer.
This is a quote from Dr.
Daniel Glavin.
Leader author of a paper on this research to be published in the journal Meteorotics and Planetary Science.
Quote, our analysis of the amino acids in meteorite fragments from Tagish Lake gave us one possible explanation for why all known life uses only left-handed versions of amino acids to build proteins.
And we'll put a link to this.
And listen, I mean, I have no, obviously no problem whatsoever with your skepticism.
I think skepticism is fantastic, Jay.
I guess it just seems like the skepticism is kind of one-sided insofar as I think it sounds like you have a thesis that you want to prove that the world is a couple of thousand years old.
And you're very skeptical of even the slightest evidence that goes against that.
But, of course, there is a lot of evidence that goes against that, and I'm not sure that you're skeptical as much of the evidence that you are claiming supports it, if that makes sense.
No, I understand that, and that's...
An idea that before radiometric dating, there were all sorts of viewpoints.
Even some more respected scientists say in 1900 thought the Earth was just 10 million years old.
And of course, Lord Kelvin's argument about the heat of the Earth in his last estimate was around 24 million.
And often we accept, you know, kind of an argument from authority.
Well, you know, a big scientist says it, so I will accept it.
And in fact, Mark Twain basically said that.
Well, Kelvin's the top scientist.
I'm going to go with what he says.
But what's interesting is many people think that what throughout Lord Kelvin's argument about the Earth is cooling off, and we know, like, you take a A hot ball of iron, we kind of know how often it takes to cool off.
He took those laws of physics and extrapolated it to come up with that date.
But it's very seldom realized that the person, his name was Perry, who actually had the correct argument against it wasn't radioactivity.
It's the fact that just like you churn your soup to kind of cool it off, it's the convection inside the Earth.
And he mentioned that in the late 1800s, but many people kind of overlooked what he had to say.
So it's like there was a bias against accepting Kelvin's date, because how could evolution happen that fast?
And even in Darwin's sixth edition of The Origin of Species, he wrestled with that.
So he adopted Lamarckism, and even to some extent adopted a form of catastrophism, that a lot of things happened more rapidly, both geologically and biologically.
So, in other words, I've seen this story before that the argument for the old earth is just the zeitgeist at the time and people accept it without considering alternatives.
Well, but I mean this was prior to a lot of the modern techniques for doing dating, right?
This is prior to carbon dating and so on.
So talking about 19th century scientists and the fact that they would have been incorrect in underestimating the age of the year seems perfectly relevant to me, but of course the The timeframe has been getting longer, not shorter, right?
And of course, if the timeframe had been getting shorter, then it would be an argument for the Earth being younger than, of course, 24 million.
But it's going the other way.
It's getting longer and longer and longer, right?
To now where the Earth is, I don't know, what is it, four and a half billion years old that it's considered to be.
So it's going the wrong way to where you want it to go with additional measurement.
And I'm wondering how you tackle that.
Well, it wasn't actually until 1929 that a scientific organization basically gave the thumbs up for the radiometric dating.
And the paper was written by Arthur Holmes, who wrote like 70%, to an extent of that report.
So to an extent, you can put a whole bunch of why radiometric dating is so big to Arthur Holmes.
No, hang on.
It's not just some guy who made it big.
It's the fact that it seems to be quite accurate to the degree with which it can be verified with other dating metrics.
As you know, sedimentary layers in the earth are all considered to descend in terms of age.
As you descend in sedimentary layers in the earth, you ascend in time ago, years ago.
Correct.
The lowest or the oldest, right?
Right.
And so when carbon dating is done, first of all, there is, based upon some rough estimate of what the age is, you should have a range that the carbon dating is going to work in.
The carbon dating can be verified at least 8,000 years back with the tree rings and so on.
So it's not just, well, some guy made it popular.
You know, it's not like Pringles.
It is something that has a lot of independent, or I guess you could say at least cross-verification to it.
Well, the early researcher, one of them, was John Jolly.
And he, again, he had his preference on the age of the Earth, which was much younger, based on the salts in the ocean.
Maybe you're familiar with that.
How long would it take to accumulate the different salts that are in the ocean?
But he was one of the early researchers with radiometric dating, and some of them are inconsistent.
And I give numerous examples in my book about that.
Sometimes the different methods are hundreds of millions of years different.
But if we start, as you did, with a carbon dating, I have a quote in my book, because we can use carbon dating for historic objects.
That before 400 BC, it really goes wonky and it's not as accurate.
And again, my argument about the tree rings would be I believe there are flaws in the correlation.
And if we just look at single trees, those only go back thousands of years.
Okay, so if you are...
Opposed to arguments from authority, which is sort of what you're talking about, that we shouldn't just take what the scientists say as valid.
And I agree with that.
I mean, all science, as Feynman said, is based upon skepticism of authority.
Okay, so would you not say, though, that...
Given that it is a religious argument that the world is thousands rather than billions of years old, that that is also an argument from authority.
It's just an argument from textual authority believed to be inspired by God, right?
Is that also subject to the argument from authority rebuttal that you've applied to the scientists?
Right, but I'm also using, like I said, some of the ancient traditions, as well as the scientific evidence.
So the idea that we don't have- Ancient traditions, look, man, come on, you can't.
Ancient traditions are not sources of objective knowledge, right?
Well, I'm saying, if they recorded the history correctly, I'm claiming that the Babylonian king list is probably close to reality.
That's actually what I'm claiming.
And others similar to that.
Okay, but before, like when they started writing down things as far back as they can remember, you can't just say, well, after that, the planet wasn't there, right?
That's like saying if I get hit on the head and can't remember anything from before yesterday, the planet was created yesterday, right?
I mean, just because people's memories don't go further back...
Given that memory was also evolving along with the brain as a whole, you can't say, well, they can't remember any further back or they haven't got any records further back.
And therefore, there was nothing but void, right?
I mean, just as far back as their memory and records could go.
Well, some cultures put the two together at the beginning of the world.
In other words, say the Mesoamerican cultures specifically do that.
Not just the beginning of humanity.
Sorry, put what two together?
The beginning of humanity and the beginning of the world itself.
I get it.
That's the religious argument that the world was created by God for people with people, at least two people in it to begin with.
I understand that.
There are lots of religions that believe that humanity was created at the same time or shortly after the earth.
But saying that this is some sort of proof You know, there are lots of religions that have like elephant headed blue deities with like six swords in six arms.
You know, that doesn't mean that we've got to put something new into the Encyclopedia Britannica of biological organisms.
What I'm saying is it's a possibility and it's a starting point that leads to some interesting scientific investigations.
It is not a starting point.
Ancient myths are not a starting point for scientists, right?
Well, there's a whole book...
Otherwise, you'd say to biologists, well...
You know, go read about dragons and then that's a starting off point for scientific exploration of dragons.
It's like, no, unicorns or I don't know what, fairies, leprechauns.
I mean, I don't mean to make fun of you, but you know, the dryads that live in trees believed in by the druids.
I mean, you don't go to an arborist and say, well, let's go and find these because there was an ancient myth about it.
So let's start a scientific investigation from that.
Where else would you put this?
Would you look for tooth fairies?
No, I'm Native American.
Just to give an example from a Native American tradition, when the governor Of the Louisiana territory, he confronted some Native Americans and they started talking about the Yellowstone region.
And they said, oh yeah, it's a volcano.
But the last volcano was 70,000 years ago, volcanic eruption of Yellowstone.
There was a huge one that gets a lot of attention, and you may have heard of this.
It was about 600,000 years ago.
But there was a more minor one that by mainstream dating is about 70,000 years ago.
And there is also a book, Mythology and Geology, and puts the two together.
It's published by the Geological Society, and there is an island, I think, part of Fiji, and there was, again, a volcanic explosion, a volcanic eruption that created an island, say, similar to Circe.
And the natives had a tradition that an island just pop out of the water and within their great-great-grandparents' memory.
But yet, according to the standard dating, it was something like, I forget the exact number, but maybe something like 30,000 years ago.
So what I'm saying is these ancient traditions have validity.
No, but not when they contradict the basic facts of reality, right?
So when people say, well, first of all, this thing that 70,000 years ago there was a volcano, that could be coincidence.
I'd want to see a whole bunch of those examples.
And even if we said that was true, okay, maybe there was something handed down in tradition for 70,000 years.
Lord knows that the Native American culture did have a little bit of staticness to it for quite some time.
But a volcano is not something that contradicts the basic facts of reality.
Like if they said...
There was a volcano floating in the air, that would be different from there was a volcano there or there was an island that came up out of the ground.
Now, if they said there was an island that slowly floated down from the sky, pulled by unicorns and dragons, we wouldn't say, ah, we better start examining unicorns and dragons bringing giant islands down from the sky.
So it's one thing to say there are ancient traditions That may describe things that are perfectly possible or at least plausible within reality versus ancient traditions that vehemently contradict the basic facts of reality like the ancient tradition that the world is 4,500 years old or something like that.
Those are two very different categories.
Yeah, I'm not proposing that there's islands in the sky.
Okay.
So then how do...
How do you overcome the basic, the carbon dating, the geological record, you know, all the stuff that indicates an extremely old universe.
The fact that they can even figure out how old the Sun is.
The fact that there are light years that go way beyond 4,500 years.
Like they can detect things that are more than 4,500 years ago, which means the light, sorry, more than 4,500 light years away, which means the light must have been traveling for a long time.
I mean, everything kind of points to one thing, and you'd have to explain away all of those.
And that seems like a pretty impossible task to me.
Well, there are those that realize that there's weaknesses in evolution.
Often I get a better response from the historians of science and the philosophers of science.
Alexander Byrd, he's a philosophy professor at the University of Bristol.
And he did not endorse my book, but I quote him on the back.
And basically, he admits, well, how do we know the Earth is old?
Well, look at the rocks.
They've been dated.
Well, how do we know that?
Radioactivity.
Well, what does that depend on?
The radioactive decay rates and such.
And so there's a weak hypothesis.
Wait, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Why is that a weak hypothesis?
Because the radioactive decay rates can change based on, say, the solar activity can have an effect on it.
And there's evidence that the solar cycle was actually more frequent in the past based on tree rings.
Yes, but you can't jump from imperfect to impossible.
This is what people frustrate me, and I'm sorry to take this out on you, man, but people frustrate me when they say, well, science isn't perfect, therefore unicorns.
Science isn't perfect, therefore impossibilities can exist.
Of course science isn't perfect.
It's an empirical discipline.
There's going to be holes, there's going to be problems.
This is why science at its best is skeptical and is...
Hypothetical, right?
But the idea that because science can't perfectly describe everything, I get to have my pet invisible unicorn is not valid.
That is not how rational thinking works.
So saying, well, you know, there's incompleteness in the fossil records and therefore I can make up whatever I want about past and the history and the future and I can have mythical descriptions of the past be somehow objective, verifiable information and so on.
Chipping away at the imperfections of science is exactly what science does.
So the fact that scientists have been wrong in the past, of course, that's exactly how science works.
But the fact that Scientists have been wrong in the past doesn't mean that people then get to say that whatever crazy theories they come up with could also be true because scientists have been wrong in the past.
The question is, Jay, and it really comes down to this, are there any standards by which your hypothesis of the young earth could be falsified?
Tell me how it could be falsified.
In other words, what standard of proof would you accept to abandon the thesis?
Well, if we could invent a history observation device, not a time machine.
I'm not going, doctor.
No, no, come on.
No, come on.
Come on.
That is plausible within the framework that we're working in, right?
Time travel is not possible, to my knowledge, in any practical sense or in any practical way.
Give me something, because that's a ridiculously high standard, right?
And it's not a standard that you're applying to evolution.
With evolution, you're saying, well, there are a couple of holes, so maybe we can just toss out the whole damn thing.
Or you're saying, well, maybe there's some uranium in the ground that screws up some carbonating, so let's just toss out the whole damn thing.
You can't have really low standards for disproving scientific hypothesis and then demand a time machine to disprove your own hypothesis.
Give me something that you would accept as proof within the current context of science that your hypothesis of a young Earth was false.
Well, there's a distinction between historical science, and if we go into the chemistry lab, And really break bread and blow up the laboratory.
So there's certain things we can experiment today and repeat them, and anybody across the world can repeat it.
But in terms of the past, we can't recreate continental drift in the laboratory.
We have some very good theories and proposals, but to get a certain aspect of the past, we're giving reasonable evidence that shows that this is possible and this could have happened.
What I'm saying is it is possible that the Earth is young.
I realize that the standard theory goes against that.
I understand that.
But I'm just saying there are pointers and there are evidences that it's not proof, but they lead us to the idea that this isn't such a crazy idea after all.
You didn't answer my question.
Well, outside of the history observation device, which has been written about, of course, in science fiction, I don't know that it's possible or not, but I'm just saying that sort of a thing would give us a more sure verification of it.
But I'm saying because it's historical science, it's not absolute proof at all.
So you have no standard in the present by which your hypothesis of the young earth could possibly be disproven?
Well, if we found...
Yes or no?
Just yes or no, man.
Come on.
Don't filibuster me.
If we found trees with, say, 100,000 rings in it, that would be a very strong indicator.
Trees don't live that long.
Try again.
Trees don't live that long.
Try again.
Well, that's the point.
The fact that the sequoias live so long, they seem to be almost impervious to everything, seemed to indicate...
That there must have been some great catastrophe that wiped them out.
That's exactly what I'm arguing.
No, trees don't live to be 100,000 years old.
Well, that's...
You know that, right?
That's a claim.
What?
In other words, what I said was 5,000 or 6,000 years.
We don't find those.
Or even, like I said, 816 rings.
That seems to be the oldest one.
Okay, so what I'm getting, Jay, is that there's no standard by which, with any current technology that's not currently Jetson-based, that there's no standard by which your hypothesis could be disproven.
In other words, your hypothesis is immune to disproof.
I would not phrase it that way.
It has nothing to do with science.
I would say that in historical science we have indications but we don't have proof.
A good indicator for an older Earth would be a fossilized tree with multiple thousands of tree rings.
I won't go to 100.
I just gave the extreme to prove the point.
Okay, so an organism that has never existed to anybody's knowledge is what you would accept as evidence for.
So you have a very, very high standard of proof.
Sorry, you have a very, very high standard Of proof required for scientific theories, right?
Despite all of the evidence that conforms geologically, biologically and so on with the multi-billion year Earth.
You chip away at those little things and you're willing to take pure skepticism because those things aren't a hundred percent proof.
But when it comes to disproof of your thesis, you need hundred thousand year old trees and time machines.
You see that there's a real imbalance there.
The level of proof required for the scientific theories is extremely high.
And the level of proof required for your theories doesn't even exist.
Like, you just have to accept that it's true because apparently people wrote down Babylonian king lists thousands of years ago.
You get that that's a ridiculous double standard.
And it's extremely hypocritical for you to be very skeptical of science while advancing your thesis, which has no support empirically.
Like, that's just a very huge double standard that you don't...
I'm not going to change your mind.
This is for the audience, right?
You're obviously fixated on this probably for religious reasons.
But I just want people to see that that's a ridiculous double standard to say the science has to be perfect.
But to disprove mine, you've got to have 100,000-year-old trees and time machines.
Well, a history observation device is different.
But I gave several examples.
A juniper, an olive tree, a bristlecone pine, the giant redwoods out in California.
There are many trees right now we could go visit.
Some you can drive your car through.
I'm sure you've seen the postcards.
So they exist right now in the real world.
And those trees and those tree rings are what lead you back past 4,500 years, right?
To almost double that.
So, already the Earth is almost twice as old as a lot of the young Earth people think, if the trees are important.
Well, I'm questioning the conformation by radiocarbon, and I'm questioning the correlation methods.
Because sometimes you have fewer tree rings, sometimes you have more.
No, you're not questioning.
What you're doing is sticking your hands in your ears and going, la, la, la, la, la.
You're not questioning.
Because the first thing that you came up with was skepticism around carbon dating, and I asked you what percentage of these things were incorrect, and you didn't even have that answer.
You're avoiding examining the question.
You're avoiding the basic requirement to examine the question.
It's that their statement is, look, the air contaminates carbon dating, so of course we're going to get some misreadings, because air is kind of everywhere up here.
And so you don't even know the proportion of...
Quote, false or contaminated readings out of the carbon dating.
So saying that you're being a skeptic is not an accurate portrayal of your position.
You are very much emotionally, intellectually, theologically wedded to the young earth because that supports the theological view of when God made the world and when God made the universe and when God made people.
And maybe like the flat earth guy, it makes you feel special to be a glowing child created by a deity or whatever.
But the idea that you're being a skeptic Is not true.
I mean, you're not being skeptical.
You are pushing away a narrative that threatens you emotionally, which threatens your faith.
It's nothing to do with skepticism.
You're simply wedded to...
And I've given you good opportunities to explain yourself.
And if you listen back to this, you'll realize just how incomprehensible your arguments are.
But...
You are emotionally wedded to a particular worldview, but the idea that you're going to climb up on some scientific mantle of skepticism and say, well, I'm just being skeptical, that's not even remotely accurate to what you're doing.
Well, I would just challenge those that have the wherewithal to go to their nearest coal mine and have a sample dated.
Again, make sure that it's not contaminated.
Go through the established procedures, use the AMS method, and I predict a date of less than 50,000 years.
All right.
Well, I guess if anybody wants to go out and spend the tens of thousands of dollars to try to find out if the Earth is 50,000 years old, which is still more than 10 times the estimate, people can go and do that.
But listen, I really appreciate the call, and it is always fascinating to speak to people who have a very different perspective from myself.
And I appreciate the call, and I guess we'll just do one last caller.
Thanks very much.
Thank you so much.
Alright.
Up next is Donnie.
Donnie wrote in and said, To what extent are monopolies caused by the government?
And are monopolies necessarily a bad thing?
By bad, I'm referring to how monopolies are negatively portrayed worldwide.
And that's from Donnie.
Hey Donnie, how you doing?
Hi Stefan.
Thanks for having me on the show.
You know, I've been watching you and listening to your podcast for a long time and I never actually thought I'd be on one of them, so it's actually...
Quite a privilege.
Well, welcome.
I appreciate you being here.
It's a great set of questions.
Yeah, thanks.
Do you want to expand on the question?
I don't want to just launch into a rant or anything.
I have a little bit of bottled up young earth ranting in me, but I'm not going to do that topic.
But do you want to expand on the question anymore?
I don't want to sort of blow away your inclusion in the program with my rant.
Yeah, sure.
I wrote a couple of questions a while back when I sent the email and I remember writing this and wanting to talk about it because I was having a conversation with a friend from my economics class and he was very adamant on the fact that monopolies are solely a product of the free market and that they need to be regulated by the government.
But I told them that, you know, there are natural monopolies that exist, definitely.
I can give an example about, say, a railroad.
It's very difficult to set up like a railroad company or an oil company, whereas it's relatively easy to get into, say, the restaurant industry to set up a restaurant.
So, yeah, there are high barriers to entry for some industries.
And some businesses do have better capital and resources.
Fair enough.
But at the same time, monopolies are also formed through, you know, government interference, through patents and protection laws.
And, you know, just look at the prescription drug industry.
So, yeah, you know, I'm basically just curious to see what your take is on monopolies.
Yeah, I mean, I always find it fascinating, this question of monopolies.
I think generally...
To sell God, you have to have a devil, right?
To sell subjugation to the good, you have to have a virulent and marauding evil that is going to take people down.
And it seems to me that socialists invent these corporations.
And I've got a whole series from years ago about how corporations are just kind of the new devil.
Sell you stuff, right?
And...
To sell you protection from the state...
What used to happen was the king would say, there's an evil king across the valley and he wants to come and kill you and rape your women and impale your children on spikes and so subjugate yourself to me because that bad king over there, blah, blah, blah, right?
And during a sort of time of relative peace in Europe, I mean, I have overstated this case before because I got some information from Ayn Rand that I never got around to triple checking, but there was the Franco-Prussian War and so on.
But at least on the sort of western side of Europe, there was a relatively peaceful century from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the beginning of the First World War in 1914.
And during that time, you see the rise of The evil capitalist, right?
So because there was relative peace and because there was prosperity and the governments had taken a big blow in the 19th century because governments always said, well, we're here to protect you and make your society better and so on.
But then when they shrank the power of the state significantly, reined it in, you know, the corn laws, the anti-tariff movements and so on, when they let the free market operate and the government shrank, Society got a hell of a lot better.
Like, crazy, infinitely, wildly better than it had been at any other time in human history.
So this is not good for the ruling class, right?
It's not good for the ruling class that when they're reined in and constrained, society flourishes.
Because then the next logical step is, well, let's keep reining and constraining these people until things get worse again.
And if they had continued that process, we'd end up with a full-fledged voluntarist anarcho-capitalist society, whatever.
So...
You know, when your standard threat, the threat is twofold.
A, there's an external enemy, and we've got to protect you from them.
And B, if you don't surrender to our power, there'll be disaster chaos, you know, the stereotypical Mad Max-style anarchy.
The 19th century took a big hammer to these two because restraining the state, restraining its power, More freedom of speech, increasing rights for women, more property rights, fewer tariffs, and so on.
Restraining the power of the state caused fewer wars, and there were fewer wars, and society got a hell of a lot better.
So this is a big problem for the ruling class.
So the ruling class needed to invent another demon to frighten the people with in order to control the people and have the people surrender their power to protect, right?
And this happened to be Corporations, robber barons, you know, as we talked about in a show recently.
Gotta invent some new demon so that people will surrender their power to us to keep you safe.
Ooh, bad things are out there.
Surrender to me and I will keep you safe from the boogaloos just outside the firelight.
Trust me, they're there and they'll come and take your soul.
So give me some tax money and your children if I need to go to war and your women if I feel like it.
And so, this fear of monopolies was something that was created by the ruling classes, or the wannabe ruling classes, who were the socialists and communists, who actually became the ruling classes in many places around the world, and the socialists became more of the ruling class in the West, and the communists, of course, in China and Russia and other places.
And the reason why it's so weird to me is that people are afraid of monopolies.
People are afraid of monopolies.
So they say, we need the state to protect us from possible economic monopolies.
We need the state to protect us from possible economic monopolies.
To which one can only ask, is the state not a coercive monopoly?
Is the state not a monopoly?
If you're so scared of voluntary economic monopolies, why on earth would you run to the protection of a coercive political monopoly?
If monopolies are so bad, why would you run to a violent monopoly to protect yourself?
It's sort of like saying, well, there may be only one good-looking guy in town So I want to get raped by an orc.
I mean, it makes no sense.
Okay, so maybe you won't get the one good-looking guy in town because he's got a monopoly on his handsomeness.
But why on earth would you then want to substitute a voluntary monopoly, good-looking guy in town, with a coercive monopoly being raped by an orc.
Orked by a rape, I don't know.
So it makes no sense logically, even remotely.
And so people talk about, well, there's natural monopolies.
Well...
There are two kinds of natural monopolies.
The ones that are risky and the ones that suck.
And those are really, really important.
So, the ones that suck we'll start with first.
These are natural monopolies.
So, there's a town, let's say, some of the towns that I worked in when I was working up north when I was in my teens, right?
And there are Towns of like 200 people or 100 people or whatever, right?
And in that town is a dingy, crappy, dusty, only early 70s music kind of non-working jukebox crappy bar.
Crappy, crappy bar.
And it has a monopoly because there's not enough business for...
Two bars.
So there's one bar and it's barely scraping by.
So it has a monopoly.
But that monopoly is controlled by social pressure because the guy who runs the bar lives in the town, right?
It's not a town with like another town a kilometer or a mile away because then it's competing with the bar in the other town.
Right in the country, you've got to drive everywhere, right?
So let's say that there's no other bars for like 30 miles around.
It says one bar, just dive in this town.
Okay, so because the other towns are so far away, the guy who runs the bar lives in the town.
Grew up in the town.
His friends are in the town.
His social circle is in the town.
His kids play with the other kids in the town.
He's part of the Rotary Club.
He's embedded in the town.
Whatever, right?
And so he's not going to start jacking up The price of beer, because he knows everyone, and they'll hate him for it, and they'll ostracize him, and they'll say, you're a jerk, and you're an asshole, and so he's got a monopoly.
And his monopoly sucks because it's barely enough for him to scrape by on and he can't raise his prices because he's embedded in the social environment.
Or maybe he's got the grocery store or something like that, right?
And this is what people say.
There's some town in the middle of nowhere and there's a guy with a grocery store and he's going to jack up the price of groceries and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
Okay, well...
He's living in the town, isn't he?
I mean, he's not going to be able to jack up the prices because he's going to be ostracized socially, which is...
Social ostracism produces the same biochemical reaction as torture for human beings because we're social animals.
We need each other to survive and thrive.
Particularly raise our kids, guard our kids, guard us while we sleep, you know, the whole deal.
And so that's the monopoly that sucks, right?
And there aren't that many of them.
And let's say that the guy does decide to jack up the prices...
In his grocery store.
You can say the bar, you don't go to the bar or whatever.
Okay, well, the people there are already paying very little for their housing because nobody wants to live there, right?
I mean, nobody wants to live in these out-of-the-way places.
People just generally get born there and IQs are too low to leave.
Whatever, right?
So, okay, so they're paying, I don't know, 5% or 10% for their housing compared to a big city.
Okay, so they've got a little bit of money left over for their groceries.
So if the price goes up a little bit, that's all right.
And of course, if the price goes up too much, then people will ostracize the guy or people will ship groceries in from elsewhere.
They'll just create a demand, right?
And so all people can move.
If he triples the price of groceries, okay, well, I'll just move one town over or whatever with some friends and the guy's going to be out of business.
So there's those monopolies that suck.
Now, there are other monopolies like you say, okay, well, a railroad, right?
But a railroad is not a monopoly.
A railroad is only a monopoly on that rail.
That's it.
That rail is the only monopoly they have.
Because having a monopoly on a railroad doesn't matter that much because you still don't have a monopoly on people moving around, right?
Because they can drive.
Ooh, look, there are roads as well and so on, right?
So you don't have the kind of monopoly that you think about.
Ah, he's got a monopoly on his railroad and then people got bicycles and there are helicopters and there are cars and whatever, right?
And, of course, people can boycott as well, right?
I mean, people can just say, I'm not going to buy anything until you lower your prices or do anything more reasonable or anything like that.
And so there are the monopolies that occur because nobody else wants to bother to compete with you.
And there are the monopolies that occur because you've invested in a railroad, but they don't have a monopoly then on people moving.
And, of course, if you jack up your rates too much...
Then people will simply stop traveling on your railroad.
And this can, of course, even cause people, like entire industries, sorry, entire towns to shut down.
You know, like when the mine is exhausted, everyone just moves away.
And if you've got a railroad going to a town and you start saying, I'm going to charge 10 times as much, well, people will drive or people will move and you'll destroy the value of your railroad in pursuit of short-term profit and everyone will hate you.
And your shareholders will sue you for destroying the value of their business, right?
No, you want to make a decent, comfortable profit.
You don't want to make so much profit that you invite in alternatives or you invite in other competitors and so on.
You don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
So the only way that people can really get profits, monopoly profits, the rent seeking.
There's an old statement from Adam Smith that says people of the same industry almost never get together except they're gathering results in some conspiracy against the public, right?
So let's just take the example of there's five people who make computer chips.
Right?
I don't know, Qualcomm, AMD, Intel, Google, I think, is making some now, too.
So a bunch of guys get together, and they want to create a monopoly, and they say, we're all going to double our prices for computer chips, right?
Well, that's really, really tough, because everyone might be nodding there, and, oh, yeah, absolutely.
But, of course, you have to keep it quiet, you have to keep it secret.
In a free society, you'd still have to keep it secret, because you don't want to really annoy your customers, so they'll go overseas to get their chips, because they don't trust you anymore, or whatever.
Right?
But here's the problem.
Let's say everyone except one person, like every company except one company, doubles the price of their computer chips, right?
Or let's say they all double the price of their computer chips and then three weeks later, one of them goes back to the regular price, right?
Well, their market share is going to expand enormously.
They will be economically very well rewarded for breaking the cartel.
They will be rewarded with massive gains in their market share by breaking the cartel.
This uncertainty is why these cartels don't work in the free market and never have historically worked.
Of course, people all try and get together, all the bread makers will get together and try and raise the price of bread, but the first guy to break that makes a fortune.
He is well-paid, well-compensated for breaking with the monopoly.
And so the fact that these contracts can't really be enforced, the fact that you don't ever want to have a formal contract, even in a free society, for fear of annoying your audience, then that means that these voluntary cartels don't work in the free market because the incentive to break them is too high.
So then what do the People who want these cartels do.
Well, they go to the government.
And they say to the government, we need to limit foreign competition.
We need to limit barriers to...
We need to raise barriers to entry.
We need to raise tariffs.
We need to keep foreign products out.
We need to make it really difficult to get into our business.
And then we're going to give you a whole bunch of political donations if you allow us to set minimum prices.
Or something like...
Or just create the conditions by which minimum prices can be established.
So...
You know, a hundred years ago, there was a huge crisis in healthcare because it was too cheap for the doctors.
They weren't making enough money because too many other people were offering these kinds of healthcare options that only the doctors felt that they should be able to offer.
There were midwives and other people and so on, snake oil salesmen, too, varying degrees of quality.
So they ran to the government and said, well, you know, there's a lot of bad doctors out there, a lot of, you know, thumbscrew McDucks who were just hacking people open, unscrupulous, sore doctors and so on, right?
And so the government said, okay, fine, we'll make it a license requirement.
And then they restrict, right?
So first you've got to be a license to practice medicine.
And then they restrict the number of people they'll give licenses to.
And then they sort of expanded.
They banned midwives.
And then through Congress after the Second World War, they got the right to exclusively write prescriptions to give medicines.
They took it away from pharmacists and other people and so on.
And then, of course, they like the fact that the government mandates all of these healthcare initiatives and commandments, and you've got to have this included in your healthcare plan and your insurance.
And then they like the fact that the insurance has gone through because you weren't allowed to give people raises in the Second World War.
The companies just paid healthcare insurance, which took it off the table in terms of personal negotiation, which means they can jack up the prices.
You just go on and on and on.
And so now you have this cartel called doctors, just as you have cartels called plumbers, just as you have electricians, just as you have cartels called lawyers and so on.
And all of these are monopolies.
But they're not products of the free market.
Right.
So first of all, again, just to sum it all up, first of all, say to the guy, if monopolies are a problem, what the hell do you think the government is?
Secondly, who cares about natural monopolies that are occurring because nobody else wants to compete?
Who cares?
It's a tiny segment of human society which is easily escapable.
Just go somewhere else or find an alternative.
Monopolies like railways are not monopolies on travel, right?
So they have to compete with all other forms of travel, which means they're going to keep their prices down.
Social ostracism for people who gouge others.
Is a very powerful way.
Shareholders who wish to maintain the value of their company will prevent overcharging because it destroys the value of the company in the long run.
And last but not least, of course, people will try and set up cartels, but the economic rewards of breaking the cartel is always why they never last in a free market, which is why everyone runs to the government to create monopolies.
It is not the government who will protect you from monopolies.
Government is the only way monopolies can last.
Does that help at all?
Yeah, no, that's very helpful.
So just to summarize, monopolies and businesses in general are just as afraid of ostracization as competition, right?
And that's just as impactful.
Is that what you're saying from one of your early days?
Oh, yeah.
Listen, if you're running the only bar in town and you triple the prices of drinks, people will be really upset with you.
And they will let you know.
Because the only way you have a natural monopoly is it's a very small, secluded community.
Which means you're even more dependent on your social life.
Which means you don't really want to annoy everyone around you.
And people's lack of faith.
You know, it's funny.
People on the left have this lack of faith in horizontal enforcement of rules.
And then they use political correctness and screams of racism, war on women, misogyny, Islamophobic and all to enforce their dictates.
I mean, people on the left don't like the spontaneous self-organization of a horizontally enforced society, but that's exactly how they enforce their edicts, is through horizontal condemnation and criticism.
I'm not saying I want the entire world to turn into the left, but it's just kind of ironic that the left needs government, but enforces most of its edicts through all voluntary and generally pretty slanderous mechanisms, if that makes sense.
No, definitely, yeah.
So I'd just like to move on to the next question I have, which is...
Okay, it's got to be quick because I've been doing this for three hours and 40 minutes.
So let's keep this one quick.
Yeah, around three.
I don't know how you do it for this long.
But next question, do you think...
Catheter.
Sorry, go ahead.
Do you think a return to the gold standard will happen?
And if so, do you think it'll happen within our lifetimes?
Or do you think the exact opposite is going to happen and it's just going to, like in the past, be made illegal?
Yeah.
Donnie, I love you.
I just wanted to say that right up front.
For the fact that you would say our lifetimes, given how young you are, that's a beautiful thing.
Big, giant, hoary-headed, spotty air kiss.
Well, something's going to replace fiat currency.
And, you know, for sure, in our lifetimes, something is going to have to replace fiat currency.
That having been said, if there's some, you know, massive advancement in human technology, like everyone gets a portable thorium reactor that they can strap to their ass and jet ski around the planet and creates.
I mean, if there's some 20th century motor company get electricity from the static in the air thing that happened in Atlas Shrugged, if something like that happens, it'll extend the lifetime of this predatory system longer, just as computers have kept the system going where it normally would have crashed by now.
So there could be some thing that happens.
But, you know, if trends continue and certainly innovation in many ways is declining, if trends continue, it will be replaced by something.
I'm not a huge fan of the gold standard relative to some cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and so on.
But that's, you know, obviously kind of quite a bit of guesstimation.
It will have to take a crash.
I mean, we're too far to have this institute in an illegal fashion.
So it'll take a crash and then they'll try and rebuild from the rubble just as they have many times in the past and hopefully they won't many times to come.
But yes, certainly something will replace this dying system and it will be something more limited.
And then of course all the Chiseling, grabby, narcissistic weasel bags will start trying to get fiat currency back up so they can steal in the unseen way.
But we'll continue to fight the good fight, or at least I will, until they put me in the ground.
Right.
What advantages do you think Bitcoin has and other cryptocurrencies have over gold and silver and other commodities?
Well, it's the same...
Advantages that emails have over physical mail.
It's just electrons, and therefore it's much more efficient.
It doesn't require storage costs, it doesn't require transmission costs like movement costs and so on.
At least they're much, much lower.
So, and I've got a whole, I've got the truth about Bitcoin presentation.
I also did a debate some years ago with our good friend Peter Schiff on Bitcoin versus gold.
So I won't go into all the details about that because I won't be able to reproduce everything I remembered from back then, or at least knew back then.
There are advantages.
That doesn't mean, of course, in a free society, you can have both standards.
You can have neither.
It could be something else, right?
It could be a currency relegated to my last few straggling hairs and the count thereof.
I mean, whatever is going to be most efficient will be worked out by the free market.
There will be advantages to Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies and there will be advantages to gold and they will all complement each other and society will allocate resources in their most efficient and productive and long-term sustainability format.
And the retention of value It's the most essential aspect of currency.
I mean, if you know what your currency is going to be worth in five years, that takes a massive amount of risk out of your economic calculations.
Right now, economic calculations are just playing darts in a whirlwind while blindfolded.
I mean, nobody knows what the hell money is going to be worth in six months or three months, let alone six years or three decades.
Yet people are signing contracts for, you know, 10, 20 or 30 years in terms of long term mortgages even.
And what the free market would need to deliver the most is to reduce the amount of uncertainty in economic calculations would be to provide a currency that retains its stability over time.
And that, of course, has been traditionally occupied by gold.
But there are lots of other electronic mechanisms that could do the same thing in many ways.
So that would be my guess.
Of course, I guess as long as there's no institute out there that can produce more of the currency, I guess that's the most important part of the next.
Right.
And that's baked into Bitcoin, right?
That it's going to go after 21 million and change and then stop.
But it's pretty much virtually infinitely divisible.
You can divide Bitcoins up to as many pennies as there are in all the currencies in the world.
So it is very divisible.
And of course, Bitcoin being the internet Of currency is not just the Bitcoins themselves, it's also a whole programming environment and triggering environment and you can store deeds and you can have certain events occur when other events occur and it's a whole...
Bitcoin to gold is the same relationship as the internet to a book.
Not only is it non-physical, but it is infinitely extensible and programmable.
And so it has that value as well.
But anyway, I've got tons of stuff on Bitcoin.
And people can have a look at that kind of stuff.
But, you know, it's fantastic that there's something so optimal to replace what can't last.
I'm very excited about that.
Right.
Okay, last question.
What's your overall gut prediction, I guess, for the global economy within the next two or three decades?
Because, you know, I mean, there's a ton of news, economic news.
Okay, Donnie, that's a great question.
I've got to tell you, here's where our love affair must come to a crashing end.
That is such a big question.
I can't do it justice after three hours and 48 minutes or whatever.
So, I will...
Send that question in by email, and I'll do something on it.
But I can't give you something good right now.
I can't hit the high notes after so much singing.
So it's a great question, but I'm going to have to give you an annoying rain check on that, if that's alright.
No, sure, I understand.
I mean, you've been doing this for almost four hours, so it's not easy.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks everyone so much, of course, as always, for a very, very enjoyable show.
And I really, really appreciate the variety and interest and fascination that I have with everyone's stories.
It's something that I have yet to reach the edge of in terms of my interest.
So I really, really appreciate everyone who calls in to keep the show interesting.
And thanks, of course, to the donors of freedomainradio.com slash donate.
To help us out, if you're going to do some shopping, FDRURL.com slash Amazon to give us a little tickle on the affiliate links.
Doesn't cost you anything and throws a few bits our way.
Thanks everyone so much.
Have yourself a wonderful, wonderful week.
Check out the Hillary Clinton video that I just put out on her email scandal, which I think is very good and hopefully instructive.
