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March 12, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:59:08

3228 Why Emotional Intelligence is Nonsense - Call In Show - March 11th, 2016

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	Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Hey, have you ever been worried that telling the truth won't get you laid or may get you not laid, whichever way you want to put it?
	A young man called in and he's kind of concerned that telling the truth might completely wreck his sexual market value.
	And I had quite a bit to say about that.
	As a guy who vaguely remembered what it's like having sexual market value, we had a very, very good conversation about it, which I hope can help get you laid.
	On the second caller, you know, emotional intelligence, or EQ, or EI, it's sometimes called emotional intelligence.
	This is a guy who's studying psychology at the graduate school level, and he heard me in passing mention some skepticism towards the concept of emotional intelligence, and since I talk About IQ quite a bit on the show and had a lot of experts in.
	Why?
	Oh, why could I possibly be skeptical about emotional intelligence?
	Well, the facts may surprise you.
	And the third?
	Yeah, very interesting conversation.
	With a fellow from the Middle East who's trying to bring peaceful parenting conversations to people in the Middle East.
	And he's having a little bit of trouble with it.
	And so we started talking about how best to bring peaceful parenting to a culture that's not overly receptive towards it, is a nice way of putting it.
	And then it turned into a general discussion about the Middle East and Islam and Europe and Christianity and compatibility and what might happen in the future.
	A very, very good conversation.
	I really appreciate him Bringing his honesty and curiosity to our chat.
	And the fourth caller is a very smart guy, kind of bored with his current occupation and wants to do something more intellectual.
	Should he, in fact, go to university and take a degree in the arts?
	Well, I've had some experience.
	I guess three colleges I went to before I got a master's degree.
	And I talked about some of the pluses and minuses of that and tried to help him come up with a decent framework for making a decision as to whether he should invest in college or whether there are other and better uses for his time, money and energy if he has particular goals in mind.
	Great conversations, all made possible because of you and your kindness and your generosity, which you can go and express at freedomainradio.com slash free.
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	Alright, up first is Logan.
	Logan wrote in and said, being a truth teller harms your sexual market value.
	Should a young man like myself risk it in order to help the cause of bringing truth to the world?
	That is Logan.
	Logan, how are you, my friend?
	I am well.
	How are you doing?
	I'm very well, thank you.
	Very well.
	And why would you imagine it lowers your sexual market value?
	Please explain this to me.
	Well, you mentioned it in one of your shows that if I'm the only one around saying the things that I'm saying, people are going to think that I'm crazy, right?
	Right.
	So that reason, I would say.
	Well, that's not the same as saying it universally, right?
	There's a pretty important caveat in there, which is that you have to be the only one saying this stuff, right?
	Well, it could seem like I'm the only one saying it because I'm the only one that they hear.
	What do you mean?
	Well, not a lot of people that I know have heard of, say, Austrian economics or the non-aggression principle, for example.
	How popular?
	Sorry, no, go ahead.
	And what they consume, what they look at, say, the TV news or The little news apps that they have won't cover stuff like that or philosophy in general, right?
	Right.
	So go ahead.
	Well, let's sort of unpack this a little bit to make sure that we don't paint with too broad a brush.
	Okay.
	So the question is, what are women looking for?
	Now, I'm going to assume that your sexual market value has to do with Yes.
	Okay.
	And so, the question is to understand what sexual market value is, my suggestion would be, the first question you have to ask is, what is sexual market value?
	What raises it?
	What do women respond to?
	Now, I'm just talking evolutionarily speaking.
	Right.
	Not...
	With the current distortions of the welfare state and all this kind of crap, but what are women evolutionarily designed to respond to?
	Well, you just said it on one of your last shows, assertiveness, right?
	Well, no.
	I mean, it's not just assertiveness.
	I mean, guys standing on a street corner screaming that the end is nigh and shaking dusty Bibles in the slanting afternoon sun Pretty assertive, but do not have a high sexual market value.
	Right.
	When I say assertive, I mean being able to express their own needs and not just think about the needs of the woman, think about their own needs and expect their needs to be thought of by their partner, right?
	Evolutionarily speaking, which means it's in common with all other species.
	What are the females of the species looking for?
	How about physical traits like height?
	That's helpful, I guess.
	I mean, although excessive height, you know, Andre the Giant stuff, can be a sign of a pituitary gland problem as far as I understand it.
	And also, guys who are really tall tend to have knee problems and they also live less long because their heart has to work harder to pump the blood all over the place.
	But it can be a proxy.
	But what is it that women, and by women I mean eggs, what are they looking for?
	What are they evolutionarily designed to pursue?
	Emetic resources.
	Yeah!
	Resources.
	Right?
	Sexuality is about children.
	Evolutionarily speaking, again, outside of the birth control pill and hot, kinky, fifty shades of grey, wax on the nipple stuff, it's about children.
	And women, the females of most species, but in particular The females of the human species are pretty disabled throughout most of their childbearing years, right?
	Which, you know, evolutionarily speaking, would start at around 13 and end at around 35 or wind down at that age, right?
	So for a couple of decades, they are big with child, they are breastfeeding, they are chasing around toddlers, they are...
	Disabled.
	And that's, you know, I always find it funny, you know, every time I put out stuff about men and women and dependents and the women are all like, I don't need no man.
	It's like, yeah, of course you don't.
	Unless you want to be a good mother, in which case you need a man.
	Because you need someone who's going to provide resources while you are pregnant.
	And you're going to need a good man because if the man is all about sex...
	Then when you are, you know, when your boobs are dripping with milk and you haven't slept in three days and your kid has been up coughing and, right, you're not a hot mess.
	I mean, you're a mess, but not a hot mess, right?
	And so it's got to be a guy who's got to be really devoted to family life.
	You need a good man, a provider, someone who can go out and get the resources that the babies need, right?
	And so in terms of truth-telling, it doesn't matter fundamentally.
	What matters is, at least what women are biologically primed to respond to, is can you get resources?
	Now, how you get those resources is less important than whether you can get those resources.
	So the question to me is, can you get resources by telling the truth?
	Yes.
	That's your sexual market value question.
	What about...
	What about providing, like, having a community and a tribe?
	Isn't that also attractive to women, is knowing that you have a lot of friends and family?
	Right?
	Well, tell me how that affects resources.
	Well, you have more.
	You have...
	Friends and family that could help you guys out when you're raising those children.
	Well, if you have good friends and family, you know, if you've got some sort of Norman Bates-style guy who's got some creepy, overbearing, emaciated, intrusive, ghastly mom who's got a whole bunch of emaciated, ghastly, intrusive, horrible friends, then the woman will be like, okay, he's got lots of people around him and they're all horrible.
	So the reason why I bring that up is because where I live, there's a lot of different diversities, lots of different ethnicities, right?
	So for me, say there's girls of a different race, a different race, right?
	Which race are we talking about?
	Let's say Asian, right?
	Which kind of Asian?
	Vietnamese.
	There's a lot of...
	Vietnamese.
	Okay, so we're talking about a Vietnamese girl.
	Yeah, so there's lots of...
	So in my city, there's a lot of Vietnamese people, right?
	I'm not Vietnamese.
	I'm Hispanic, by the way.
	Right.
	So say...
	And I've also...
	And I've heard you mention before that...
	You're talking about regression to the mean.
	So say that my race has an average...
	IQ of something, and then my IQ is higher than that.
	So I get that.
	That could be a biological factor as well.
	But I also think that if, say, like, you know, my parents wouldn't be able to talk to her parents very well, and they wouldn't get along so well, right?
	Because we actually have that situation.
	I'm not married myself, but my brother, he's married to a Vietnamese woman, right?
	Right.
	And so...
	Over the holidays, I had dinner with them.
	I mean, I've had dinner with them before, and so I noticed that because they're a different race, my brother and her father, they can't really get along as well because there's language barriers.
	Right.
	And cultural barriers, right?
	Cultural barriers, yeah.
	And then obviously our two parents wouldn't be able to get along very well.
	Well, so as far as IQ goes, and again, this is just a rough benchmark, the average IQ in Vietnam is 94.
	Right.
	And the average Hispanic IQ is 85 to 90, sort of depending on origin.
	So, you know, it's not like you're trying to match up an Ashkenazi Jew, which is sort of the top of the range.
	With somebody from the outback in Australia, an Aboriginal with IQs in the 60s, right?
	So, yeah, there seems to be some potential compatibility there.
	And again, you don't want to collectively judge everyone, but it's not a bad place to start.
	No, no, no.
	It's funny that you mention that, because about a couple years ago, right, I was listening to one of your shows, and this is when you were just kind of first kind of diving into the race and IQ stuff.
	I remember, because you mentioned Ask Your Nazi...
	In your podcast.
	And then I said to myself, I've heard that before.
	Where was it?
	Well, a couple years back, or maybe like a year before that, I remember I took a DNA test on one of those ancestry sites, right?
	And that's where I seen it before.
	It was in my genetic profile.
	And just out of curiosity, what was your genetic profile?
	About 40% kind of North American.
	Uh, 40% Southern European.
	Hang on, sorry.
	40% North American, what is that?
	I don't know.
	That's a pretty broad category.
	What does that mean?
	Um, I'm guessing, you know, the humans that, once they left Africa, they went, you know, to Russia.
	Native American, yeah.
	Okay, okay, okay, got it.
	So about 40% Native American, and then what?
	Southern European.
	All right.
	So this is sort of stanyards plus locals, right?
	Yeah, and a tiny sliver of Eskenazi DNA. All right.
	Ka-ching!
	Excellent.
	Yeah, so, you know, good job to my ancestors for, you know, giving me that genetic job, Pop, right?
	Absolutely.
	But, yeah, no.
	Well, you know, if you don't mind slightly higher than that of neuroticism and other genetic diseases, but all right, I think you probably got the benefit out of that.
	That's why you need philosophy to keep you sane.
	Right.
	Yeah, and so when I heard that, it all kind of clicked because me and my family, we've never hung out with Hispanics, really.
	We usually hang out with higher IQ races, and I never really thought about that.
	But once I started hearing that...
	Hang on, sorry to interrupt, but what's it like for you guys to hang out with sort of average Hispanics?
	Oh, it's...
	I don't know.
	I'm trying to think of the words to describe it.
	A bit more...
	Is it a whole lot of pretending to get really excited about soccer?
	No, no.
	Baseball or football, I suppose.
	Right.
	These are Americanized, so...
	Oh, okay.
	Got it.
	Yeah, it's a little bit...
	It's a lot more drinking.
	You know, we'll drink more with Hispanics.
	Well, I mean, I can't even remember what we talked about, because Because my oldest brother, he has a lot of Mexican friends, and so, you know, we've gone to, you know, tailgates with them and kind of hung out with them in general, and there's a lot of drinking involved, so I'm guessing the conversation isn't memorable.
	Right, so you're spending a lot of time not connecting with each other because you're drinking, which then produces a bunch of, I can't believe I was so drunk, that stories, which is just another way of not connecting with people and so on, right?
	Yeah.
	When I was in my teens, I spent a couple of weekends drinking because, you know, that's supposed to be the big thing, right?
	A couple of weekends drinking.
	It was just, you know, it was sort of interesting.
	I mean, it was interesting being disoriented, but it wasn't a huge amount of fun.
	It certainly didn't, you know, so I didn't shut my brain off or anything like that.
	It takes more than mere alcohol to slow down this beast.
	Of course.
	But it was never that interesting, and I always felt that a lot of people were kind of faking how much fun it was, and for me at least, you know, the next day I'd have a hangover and couldn't really do anything with my day, and it was like, okay, so the upside isn't really that much of an upside, but the downside is pretty considerable.
	I hate hangovers, like with a passion.
	I hate hangovers, and I haven't been hungover since probably one of my cast parties when I was an actor as a young man.
	And, you know, in my very early 20s.
	Because you can't do anything.
	You can't read.
	You can't watch TV. You just basically, you're in a slow time, vaguely nauseous state with a headache.
	And it's like, wow, you know, I'd pay good money to not have this illness.
	Why would I pay good money to pursue it when it's not even that much fun?
	Sorry, you were going to say?
	So, I remember one birthday, somebody gave me this little handheld video recorder.
	And then later on that night, we had a party.
	And so I was doing a lot of recording that night, and we were drinking as well.
	Anyway, so I looked at the video the next day, and I was just so horrified by just seeing what everyone looked like and what we sounded like drunk that I just deleted everything.
	So just a little story.
	Oh yeah, like if you ever want to give up drinking with people, just go out with people who are drinking and don't drink.
	Yeah.
	And just watch them progressively get stupider and louder and more embarrassing and watch them progressively make worse and worse decisions and then watch them the next morning not having any fun at all for the whole day.
	It's a pretty easy cure.
	And so the reason why I brought up this whole having compatible tribe is so let's say I go for an Hispanic woman, right?
	So on average, she's lucky to...
	Hold on, let me see.
	I want to say this.
	So basically, you know, my family's Hispanic, and then if I marry a Hispanic woman, you know, she'll have her Hispanic family, so there'll be more, I don't know, cohesiveness between the two, between the two families.
	Right?
	Right.
	Sorry, are you going to go on, or...?
	Well, yeah, so I just wanted to point out, that's why I brought that up.
	So should I choose to find a Hispanic woman, I think it'd be a little bit difficult, given the difference of intelligence.
	And, I don't know, we just don't generally have too much fun with Hispanics, you know?
	Well, I don't know.
	I mean, I'm going to guess that you're not conventionally religious.
	Right.
	So that's going to be a big factor, too, right?
	I mean, she's going to want to get the kids baptized, or whatever it is, right?
	Or if she's Catholic.
	I would assume something along those lines, right?
	And that can be That can be pretty, pretty exhaustive.
	That could be a factor, right?
	Right, right.
	So if I go, so let's say I go for a woman of another tribe, then, I don't know, because like I said, my brother and his wife, they're, you know, they're different races and I can see where, you know, where there are advantages and, well, disadvantages more so than anything of, you know, being a mixed race couple.
	Well, but do they have, do they have kids?
	No.
	No.
	Do they want kids?
	They say, but they're not really moving in that direction.
	So...
	Yeah, I mean...
	Do you want the rant, or do you want to put more info into the rant woodchipper at the moment?
	Do you need any more info?
	No, if you've got more.
	If you've got more that you think is relevant.
	I don't know.
	I would say I'm pretty good with women.
	You know...
	Competent, outgoing, popular, you know, good conversationalist, good-looking, I would say.
	Solid seven.
	Solid seven.
	I don't know.
	So I got a lot going for me.
	I got a lot going for me.
	But if I ever find myself attracted to a woman, and I just know that I'm only attracted to her because of her looks, that's when I kind of, you know, stop and think about it.
	Oh yeah, no.
	Dating a woman just for her looks is like having a friend just because he buys you things.
	I mean, it's pretty shallow.
	Yeah, so I've got to make sure I don't confuse the two because it's easy for guys to do that.
	Yeah, what your dick thinks is virtuous is not exactly the same as what philosophy might call.
	It may not be the opposite, but it sure ain't the same, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	So go on.
	Go ahead.
	Alright.
	You may be overthinking it a little bit.
	And listen, when I say overthinking it, Yeah.
	I'm shocked to hear that.
	I know, I know.
	You may be overthinking it a little bit.
	Wow, okay.
	Look, if you want the highest quality female, then focus on being amazing.
	Focus on being amazing.
	Focus on being the best conceivable version of yourself.
	Build amazing things.
	Have amazing ideas.
	Challenge people.
	Become the gadfly.
	Become the bothersome brilliance in your community.
	Aim at fantastic and you will attract a great woman.
	That is the way that I have tried to approach things in my life.
	I have not spent a lot of time pursuing women.
	In my life.
	I have spent a lot of time pursuing greatness in my life.
	And as a result of that, I have had some great women in my life.
	Currently, as you know, married to a stupendously wonderful woman.
	And how did we meet?
	Well, we were playing on the same volleyball team.
	She asked me how my day was.
	I said my day was great.
	I just got my novel published.
	He's got a publisher for my novel.
	And I did not make a lot of money from that novel.
	To put it mildly.
	I did not make a lot of money from that novel.
	Was it The Card of Atheist?
	No.
	It was one called Revolutions.
	Which is a 19th century Russian novel.
	I bought The Card of Atheist, by the way.
	Oh, thank you.
	I appreciate it.
	Did you read it?
	Yes.
	And?
	I thought it was amazing.
	It's a great book.
	It's a great book.
	Thank you.
	I appreciate that.
	I'm very proud of that book.
	But I didn't make much money, and I spent a year writing Revolutions.
	I wrote the ending twice, like the last half of the book.
	And all of the time that I spent writing that book and getting, I don't know, a penny an hour or something like that when it comes to how much money I made from the book, It was all worth it.
	Because I had written a book and I said to my wife, I wrote a book, right?
	Oh, to my future wife, right?
	I said to this woman I just met, I wrote a book.
	Well, she found that interesting.
	She'd never met anyone who'd written a novel before.
	Met guys who wrote books, but never wrote someone.
	So I aimed at the book and I got the girl.
	And that is my most successful piece of literature because it resulted in my marriage.
	Right?
	That is my best seller.
	That made me a billion dollars worth of quality woman.
	I aimed at something great and I got something great.
	Right?
	Go out and do amazing things.
	Aim high.
	Yeah, no, I definitely do.
	do.
	Now, you don't have to be as literal as Donald Trump and build giant Trump cocks across the landscape.
	Well, yeah, I'm glad you're talking about Donald Trump.
	Come on.
	You know, it's funny.
	So a couple of days ago, you released a show where you were talking about Melania Trump.
	And it's funny because earlier that day, I just spent the morning looking at videos of Melania Trump during the whole presidential campaign.
	Which is pretty cool, I would say, right?
	Yeah.
	So the reason why I was interested in that is because I remember one thing that Trump said.
	It was probably one of his rallies.
	But he said that she was a private woman and that there's something special about that.
	And that was kind of interesting.
	That she was a what woman?
	Private.
	She was a private woman.
	Yeah.
	And that there was something special about that.
	And I never heard that before.
	So I'm watching this interview.
	It's Donald Melania and Barbara Walters.
	And Barbara Walters asks her what she says to Donald, privately.
	And she looks at Barbara and she says, I don't want to answer.
	And then she laughs, she looks at Donald, and then Donald answers the question.
	Yeah, you nosy witch.
	Donald Trump is like, he's the alpha of the alpha as far as Western...
	And what's interesting is he's very interested in Eastern European and Central European women.
	Why?
	Why?
	Relatively uninfected by radical feminism.
	Yeah, that reminded me of a show you did before.
	You're right.
	I just read a study today And the study was significant evidence that the more a couple shares housework equally, the more likely they are to get divorced.
	Interesting.
	And what I like about Donald Trump's wife is, well, first of all, she...
	Like, when Donald Trump went to her and said, I want to run for president, I mean, I don't know what she would have thought, but, I mean, she certainly would have had some idea just how brutal it was going to be.
	That every single thing from the man's somewhat colorful past was going to be dredged up and flung against him, right?
	Yeah.
	And she obviously, more than...
	Gave him her blessing.
	He couldn't do it without her.
	Without her support.
	Without her enthusiasm.
	Without her willingness to go and be interviewed.
	And that's very impressive to me that the woman would be willing to do all of that.
	I don't know that she's ever had any particular ambitions to be like first lady or something like that.
	Although, you know, there are worse postage stamps to lick, I guess, in the future.
	And so I think it's very impressive that she's behind him in this.
	He's not isolated.
	His kids, his extended family, his business partnerships, his wife, they all have to be behind him.
	Guaranteed.
	Guaranteed.
	And that's one thing that's cool.
	The other thing that I thought was cool was that Donald Trump is one of these weird vampires who has a ridiculously unfair advantage in life in that the guy needs like three or four hours of sleep a night.
	And Bill Clinton's The same way, you know, after he's feasted on four or five interns, he, you know, drinks their blood, youth, innocence, and hope, and future careers, and then, you know, feasts on them, and then needs only a couple hours sleep, and then, you know, he's back up and at them.
	And it's completely unfair.
	For me, it's like, I had less than seven hours sleep.
	I don't know if I can function like my...
	I'm a sleep whore, as far as that goes.
	Like, I need my sleep.
	I need my sleep.
	I need my sleep.
	And the idea for me of like three hours sleep, it's like, oh God, what a nightmare.
	So totally unfair.
	Guy gets like way more productive hours in the day than I do, but we'll survive.
	Anyway, so Donald Trump stays up too late, like he stays up too late and he gets up too early and she doesn't think he gets enough sleep.
	And the interviewer, I'm paraphrasing obviously, but it was something like, well, what do you say to him?
	And she's like, well, what do you mean what do I say to him?
	He's an adult.
	He He can make his own decisions, right?
	That he has habits she disagrees with and she's like, yeah, but he's an adult.
	He makes his own decisions.
	And that idea that you have a beautiful woman who supports you, who says, if you run for president, you're going to win.
	Listen, when it comes to trying to achieve something great in this life, my friend, If you have people around you who don't fully believe in you, you can't achieve it.
	Success is not something you will for yourself.
	Success is something you assemble via the people around you.
	Because if you have people saying, oh, I don't know, I don't think you can do it, it might be too risky, it could be, you know.
	It's like you're trying to cross a wire without a net and people are just Throwing little cactuses at your balls.
	You're not going to make it.
	You're not going to make it.
	And this is not a selfish thing.
	You need to believe in the people around you and support them as well and all kinds of cool stuff.
	But I think she's an amazing woman.
	She is very intelligent.
	And obviously very attractive and very self-possessed and willing to be in the limelight, although she's a private person.
	And she's willing to make sacrifices for a greater goal, a greater good.
	I mean, they certainly don't need the money.
	I mean, Donald Trump could spend the rest of his life sipping champagne and caviar by a pool.
	And, you know, he's off there doing...
	Apparently, four to five hundred rallies a day, if I read the internet correctly, you know, rather than tripping and falling over his wife, which, you know, would probably not be a bad way to spend 20 or 30 minutes.
	And so, the fact that she's willing to support him in this mad venture that requires a lot of guts and requires a lot of energy and...
	You know, Donald Trump said the idea is, you gotta be tough to run for president.
	You gotta be tough.
	And he is a sensitive guy in a lot of ways.
	Does like to get along with people.
	But he has a higher calling.
	And he can't do it without his wife.
	So he is aiming at amazing things.
	And that is what is attracting these women.
	Guaranteed.
	Right?
	If you...
	If you worship a woman, all she sees is putting her on a pedestal means you ain't out there getting resources for the eggs.
	Women want men who aim at life, who are out there building amazing things.
	Then the women will come to you.
	And in terms of thinking about your sexual market value, The only sexual market value that really counts is to be thoroughly, enjoyably and deeply and powerfully yourself.
	Well, there's only one of you.
	Whatever you can create a value that is unique to your identity, you automatically have a monopoly on.
	You know, say, oh, you're going to be a fast typist.
	Okay.
	Well, lots of people can type fast.
	It has to be something that is unique to you if you want to.
	Make some money and do some amazing things.
	And this doesn't all have to do with making money, but that's in a lot of ways how it actually translates.
	Because making money is a sign of providing value, as you know from Austrian economics, right?
	Right.
	I mean, people say Donald Trump has made 10 billion dollars.
	No.
	He has taken a small part of the value he's produced.
	He hasn't made 10 billion dollars, he's produced a trillion dollars.
	And he gets to keep a small percentage of that.
	Or whatever the number happens to be.
	So don't, you know, sexual market value is one of these things that's easy to get distracted by.
	Do great things and see who's interested.
	Do great things and see who's interested.
	That's all it's about.
	And that's what I mean when I say you're overthinking things.
	If you're doing great things in this world, great people will want to spend time with you.
	And if you're not, then you're going to be stuck pursuing low-rent people who will then trap you in their small world.
	See, if you're aiming to break through the biosphere of historical limitations, If you're aiming to bust out, to break through, to break beyond, to break orbit from your history, then people will find you who are also interested in surmounting history and breaking out of history.
	But if you go for low-rent people, which is what happens when you think too much about sexual market value rather than going out and doing amazing and great things, then you'll end up pursuing people who are relatively small-minded, And then, if you get married or have kids with those people, there'll be a ball and chain around you forever.
	Because you went for the low-rent world, and that means that you'll never get out.
	Whatever you try to do, they'll pull you back down.
	Does that help, bro?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It helps.
	Yeah, because you're right.
	I agree.
	I was overthinking it.
	And when I mentioned that, what Donald Trump said about his wife being a private person, it just, it kind of reminded me of that.
	That, you know, I'm going to have a lot of, I'm going to have a lot of women that are going to, they're going to pursue me, and I'm going to have to, you know, pick a, find a good woman.
	So I got to find, just, um, I got to, you got to know what to look for.
	You know, it, um, I don't know, little personality traits that I never thought of, like, you know, being private and being able to keep a secret and to be, you know, trustworthy.
	Right, and the reason people end up living these small lives is quite simple, that they think everyone around them is really great and really loves them.
	But if that's true, Then the people around you, if they're really great and they really love you, they should value and encourage when you aim for the stars, right?
	Yeah.
	They should really be pro and positive, all of that.
	And what happens is that people pretend that everyone around them loves them and cares for them and wants the best for them.
	But they studiously avoid any kind of challenging ambitions because they know deep down what's going to happen.
	If they go for some challenging, tradition-breaking ambition, they know that everyone around them is just going to attack them or undermine them or ignore them or neglect them or avoid them.
	But they're going to signal negative.
	They're going to signal their disapproval.
	And that's why people stay small and play small because they don't want to reveal that those around them Don't want them to grow.
	Don't want them to change.
	Don't want to provide any higher vista or any bigger view or greater vista or more lofty ambition.
	They just want to stay small.
	They just want to stay small.
	And there's almost no viciousness in the world more destabilizing and ugly than watching a low-rent group of people struggling to keep a great soul down.
	It's a grim, grim battle.
	I never really bought this whole Marxist thing about it's the capitalists who exploit and keep down the workers.
	Bullshit.
	That's just complete bullshit.
	It's the other workers who exploit and keep down the workers.
	Try and go and become a foreman or try and expand your education or try and go and become a manager.
	Oh, I guess you're too good to hang out with us now.
	They'll just reject you to try and keep you down.
	It's where real class structures come from.
	It's not from the capitalist.
	Capitalists are thrilled when a worker wants to really work hard and wants to provide value.
	Capitalists are thrilled with that.
	But it's hard to have a culture among the workers where worker excellence is praised, is venerated.
	You try and You try and climb up, and people just want to claw you back down.
	Just want to claw you back down.
	And you have a choice.
	I mean, you have a choice, right?
	You can either stay down in the gutter with these people and pretend that you have friends and give up on your potential, or you can just keep moving, keep up, keep moving, keep up.
	And whoever wants to come along can come along.
	In my life, it was precisely no one from my past, but...
	It's not my choice fundamentally.
	Do you see this at all?
	I mean, when you sort of, in the Hispanic community or in your community, that if anybody has ambition or wants to do better or greater things, that there's some sort of subtle or not so subtle pressure to not do that?
	I can't hear you.
	Did you mute?
	I guess we'll just have to move on to the next caller.
	But yeah, Logan, just aim at being great in your life.
	Aim at being the deepest and most powerful version of yourself.
	And just see who comes along for the ride and who's interested in that.
	The best filter is mad ambition and deep authenticity.
	So I hope that helps.
	And thanks a lot for your call.
	I really, really appreciate it.
	Let us know how it goes.
	And Mike, let's move on to the next caller.
	Up next is Josh.
	Josh wrote in and said, on a prior show you, in passing, expressed skepticism towards the concept of emotional intelligence.
	IQ is a regular topic on your show, and I'd like to hear you expand on that comment and tackle the larger concept of intelligence.
	That is from Josh.
	Well, hello Josh.
	How are you doing tonight?
	I'm doing great, Steph.
	It's a pleasure to speak to you.
	Well, thank you.
	I appreciate that.
	And you too.
	So what's your understanding of and history with emotional intelligence?
	Well, actually, I'm an adjunct lecturer and I teach psychology.
	And I'm a prospective doctoral student, God willing.
	But I interviewed at this clinic and the woman who ran it was offering a book that she sold to her clients.
	Emotional intelligence by Daniel Goleman, G-O-L-E-M-A-N. It's from 1995, I think.
	Right.
	She's basically making this big case, emotional intelligence, really, really important because she had different notions about treating borderline personality disorder.
	Anyway, without getting into super minutiae detail, when you said that you thought emotional intelligence was bunk, It shocked me, and I've been listening for a few years now, so I kind of thought I got to the point where I was like, nothing can say if it shocked me.
	Oh, trust me, there's always something to be shocked about.
	So, I mean, I kind of agree with you in regards to we live in somewhat of a gynocentric culture because my whole life, emotional intelligence was of very high value.
	Everywhere I went, education from a very young age, people, it's a big, big deal.
	So, I just was curious why you didn't think it was so important or less important than regular intelligence.
	Well, because numbers, right?
	Because I'm an empiricist, and when people make a claim that emotional intelligence is superior to intelligence, intelligence, or IQ, I'm like, okay, I'm always open to hearing the case for things.
	What are the numbers?
	And do you know what the numbers are?
	Actually, I did a little bit of reading before this call, and I actually did not see those numbers.
	All right, well, I'll give you some numbers.
	But should we do a tiny bit of history first?
	If you feel it's necessary, sure, go ahead.
	Okay, so the book Emotional Intelligence came out in 1995, which was a year or two after which book came out?
	Oh, you probably got me there.
	That talked a lot about IQ. I'm not sure.
	You got me there.
	Ah, The Bell Curve.
	Oh, okay.
	Right.
	Right, so...
	Charles Murray, who's been on the show, and Richard Hirenstein, who hasn't because he died shortly before the book came out, they wrote a book and they said intelligence is very important and it's a very great predictor of success and failure and all the other kinds of good and bad things.
	Health and marital stability and mental health as well.
	Higher IQ people have more robust mental health.
	They're less prone to pathological dysfunction in thinking and so on.
	And in one of the chapters, I think it was chapter 13, they said that blacks do poorly in America, blacks do poorly in Europe, blacks do poorly in Africa, blacks do poorly kind of everywhere.
	And, you know, one of the main reasons is because blacks in America score a standard deviation or so, 15 points or so below whites in IQ. I think it's like 18 points of IQ it ends up to being.
	I think that the gap has narrowed a tiny bit since the 1970s.
	You know, again, sort of better nutrition, better education.
	There seems to be some slight narrowing, but it's still a gulf, to put it mildly.
	And, of course, you know, there are almost two standard deviations below Ashkenazi Jews and, you know, 20 points or so below East Asians and so on, right?
	So, we've talked about this before.
	Now, the American Psychological Association, of course, was, you know, outraged and they convened a whole bunch of people together to look at the data and they said, yeah, okay, it's true.
	It's true.
	Yes.
	Blacks score a standard deviation 15 points or so below whites.
	In the IQ test, the IQ test is not culturally biased, and the IQ test is a significant predictor of future success in life.
	And the significant majority of discrepancies in the outcomes between blacks and whites in America are due to IQ. In other words, it's not blacks who do poorly, it's everyone with an IQ averaging out at 85.
	If you take a group of whites and Have them clustered around an average IQ of 85.
	In other words, if you take the bottom slice of white IQ ability, they do about the same as blacks.
	And if you take Asians and you cluster around the IQ 85 Asians, they do about as well as the whites with an IQ of 85 and they do about as well as the blacks.
	So it's...
	The market is measuring IQ, it's not measuring race.
	And that came out in the...
	I think it was 93, 94, something like that.
	And what happened...
	Was everybody went insane.
	Yeah.
	And next thing you know, there's a book which comes out which creates a new metric.
	Don't you know?
	A new metric.
	Can I play devil's advocate for a second?
	Yeah.
	I don't know necessarily that they're saying it's superior so much that it's an alternative or rather it's a way to measure other fundamental life skills.
	I could be wrong about that.
	Well, let me check the title of the book.
	I think it's why it may be more important than IQ. Right.
	But that's a provocative title, no?
	To sell the...
	Well, it's considered to be a parallel.
	Right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Okay.
	Let me just check the title of the book.
	Okay, it's got a couple subtitles.
	The groundbreaking book that redefines what it means to be smart, and then also why it can matter more than IQ. Ah, why it can matter more than IQ. Okay, so it's some sort of parallel universe thing where intelligence, right?
	Now, Daniel Goleman's book, which came out, had no science behind it.
	No studies at all.
	Oh, nothing.
	No, it's just all...
	Nothing.
	Completely.
	Nothing.
	And I gotta tell you, the fact is that it seems to appeal to lower IQ people while having no science behind it.
	I'm not sure, it's a complete accident!
	Right, right.
	No science behind it, whatsoever!
	No studies!
	Yeah, it was actually frustrating to read.
	Or liberating, depending on how you look at it, right?
	Well, I mean, it did give me some things to think about.
	No, no, no, no.
	I understand that.
	Look, self-knowledge, we'll get to the pluses, right?
	But let's just talk about the data first, right?
	Now, since then, some studies have been done.
	The problem is nobody can really define what emotional intelligence is.
	I checked up the psychology wiki and there are like, I don't know, three or four or five major definitions of emotional intelligence.
	That's kind of a problem to begin with.
	The second thing, of course, is it's all about self-reporting, right?
	Of course, yeah.
	And self-reporting is, I don't know, I just assume bullshit until significant amounts of data show me otherwise.
	Right.
	So, some studies have been done since then.
	And what they've done is they've tried to figure out if people score really high on EQ tests, what effect does that have on their job performance?
	And they've managed to narrow it down to a percentage.
	And do you know what that percentage is?
	I do not.
	It is 3.
	It is 3.
	IQ is 27, I think it is.
	25, 27%.
	An EQ is 3.
	Now, that may be overstating EQ enormously because somebody who's very intelligent will know how to answer an EQ test.
	We'll figure it out, right?
	And so an EQ test may just be measuring intelligence.
	Do you know what I mean?
	Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
	I mean, there's some significant correlation between IQ and EQ tests.
	Because my question would be, what if somebody scores really low on IQ and scores really high on EQ? Okay, now if they do better than people who score high on IQ but low on EQ, that might, but how do you say, I don't know of studies that have separated these two.
	So it could just be that the EQ is functioning as a substitute and low-rent IQ test.
	So job performance, you can guesstimate about 3% of job performance varies with regards to IQ. EQ, sorry.
	And much, much more, many times more by IQ. Now, of course, the pushback is that people say, well, yeah, but some jobs, it's some guy typing it away in a back room.
	He never deals with any customers.
	He never tries to make any sales.
	He never really tries to influence anyone.
	So those jobs...
	Have a low EQ requirement, and so let's test those.
	And they found EQ predicts 0% of the jobs they put into that category.
	I suppose it's not startling.
	Yeah, and that's not startling.
	Now, there are jobs, and I don't know what the classifications are, but there are jobs, and we'll put a link to a video where a woman's explaining this.
	We can put that in the show notes, but There are jobs with, you know, much more, you could say, touchy-feely kinds of interactions.
	And there, high EQ scores versus low IQ scores can predict up to 7% of job performance.
	And again, that's still a lot lower than IQ. But that's not insignificant, right?
	Out of a year, that's like three to four weeks additional productivity.
	If you sort of can up it 7%.
	But again, I don't know...
	If the IQ and EQ are separated so that you know that the improvements in a high EQ score are not due to underlying IQ, high IQ being good at figuring out what to answer in the EQ score.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	Now, there are some indications that outside of job performance, General happiness, general well-being and so on, that there may be some relationships between EQ and general happiness and all that kind of stuff.
	But again, using what definition of EQ has it been sufficiently separated from IQ? Because people who are smarter are more emotionally mature on average and they are more emotionally healthy.
	People who are smarter, like, oh man, let me tell you, have you ever dated somebody who's not too smart?
	I'm afraid to say I have, yes.
	Right.
	How was that in terms of conflict?
	Well, I mean, I guess the use of the word dated would be relative because it didn't really last more than a few weeks ever.
	Okay, and why?
	Figure out that the person was not as intelligent as I would like them to be.
	Right.
	Have you ever had conflict with somebody who's not intelligent?
	Yes, I have.
	And what's that like?
	Very unpleasant.
	Very unpleasant, right?
	Do you have any sort of characteristics that you could describe of what it's like to have conflict with lower IQ people?
	It can be explosive.
	Just very, I don't know, aggressive and explosive and just unpleasant.
	I mean, not to be redundant.
	Right.
	I find that, if I could just add one more thing, that there's...
	Usually one kind of concept or argument that this type of person will cling on to and then they'll just repeat it endlessly hoping that by sheer brutality of their words they can, you know, win the disagreement or something.
	Yeah, they pick a position which serves their immediate self-interest and just hang on to it like a puppy with a bone, right?
	Right.
	And they just they repeat and they repeat and repeat and dig in and repeat and dig in and have it seems like a pretty much physics inability to admit that they're wrong.
	Yes.
	Like in my experience with low IQ people I actually expect them to be able to levitate before being able to admit fault and change their perspective.
	Right.
	Right.
	And when people have a fixed position Low-intelligence people don't really process the long-term costs of what they're doing.
	Right.
	Their timeframe for a positive outcome is only in the now.
	It's never, what's this going to do to our relationship two months from now?
	It's just about winning in the moment.
	Mm-hmm.
	And, you know, there's that old, you know, the marshmallow test, right?
	Yeah, impulse control.
	Yeah, impulse control, the ability to defer gratification, to bite your tongue rather than say something unpleasant because, you know, it might give you a momentary satisfaction, but it's going to do damage to the relationship in the longer run, right?
	Right.
	And so, more intelligent people are more diplomatic.
	They are generally more patient.
	They are less verbally abusive.
	They take fewer fixed positions.
	They're willing to compromise.
	They're willing to admit that they're wrong.
	And I have, for various historical reasons that aren't really that important to get into right now, but I have a visceral disgust with people who cannot admit that they're wrong.
	Oh, it's probably one of the most awful qualities a person can have.
	Yeah, I agree.
	Totally.
	Yeah, because everything becomes win-lose.
	And because they never admit fault, you always have to just knuckle under or run.
	There's no other choice.
	You either self-erase or you get the hell out.
	And I'm sure it's not that subtle in this show, we're constantly weeding.
	Constantly providing arguments that people are going to find startling.
	So that we can weed out.
	the lower IQ people.
	I want to maintain the higher IQ audience.
	Which means every now and then gotta present ideas that are gonna be startling the people, gonna push back or ask skeptical questions about their particular sacred cows.
	And some proportion of the audience is gonna explode in rage.
	Call me an asshole, tell me how disappointed they are.
	Because I entirely guide my life by anonymous people's typing about disappointment.
	That's how I run my life.
	It's nothing to do with values or the respect of people I love or philosophy.
	It's just, is an anonymous typist claiming to be disappointed with me?
	Oh, I must change.
	Yeah.
	It's so funny.
	It's so funny.
	It's so sad.
	I mean, sad and funny.
	It's a bittersweet comedy.
	Right.
	So when it comes to emotional intelligence, it has a lot to do with the deferral of gratification.
	In other words, I'm willing to admit that I'm wrong, which is going to be unpleasant in the moment, but it's going to build trust and honesty in the relationship.
	Right.
	And see, when you're with smart people and you admit that they're wrong, they appreciate it, they respect you for it, and they reciprocate that, right?
	When you're with idiots and you tell them that you're wrong, what do they say?
	I'm sorry, can you say it again?
	I spaced for a second.
	I apologize.
	When you're with idiots and you admit that you're wrong...
	What do they say?
	What do they do?
	They definitely kind of Ronda Rousey gloat in it and throw it in your face.
	Yeah.
	Aha!
	I knew it!
	Yeah.
	You finally admitted that you were wrong.
	I told you the whole damn time and you told me I was wrong and you refused.
	Now I got you, you son of a bitch.
	You knew you were wrong.
	You finally admitted and I'm going to throw this in your face from now to eternity.
	Yep.
	Aha!
	Victory!
	And then they do a big dance showing their hairy plumbers crack.
	Yeah, they lured it over you for sure.
	Yeah, they have now won.
	And you are now fucked for having to admit that you're wrong.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	I have a small caveat, I guess.
	Because generally speaking, I don't disagree with you.
	And even when I first heard you make this argument, I kind of...
	I mean, my personal feeling about intelligence is that it is a universal kind of ability.
	And it's more of like the firepower or the horsepower that your engine can exert in pursuit of things.
	So yeah, someone who's reasonably intelligent or exceptionally intelligent will generally have...
	Greater self-control and greater ability and demonstrate more aptitude for skills and things like that.
	I feel like the conversation slightly ignores the fact that basically everybody going around is traumatized.
	Even the high IQ people are operating at somewhat of a lower decibel level, if that makes any sense.
	No, I get all of that.
	We'll talk about, you know, in a sec, the ideals, but I just sort of want to lay out the map.
	Sure.
	So EQ is also a test that is pretty subjective.
	IQ tests, by their very nature, have to be somewhat objective, largely objective, right?
	There's a right or wrong answer.
	Right, so, you know, you read somebody the five numbers, can they repeat them backwards to you?
	That's right.
	It's not subjective, right?
	Right.
	He's not.
	How much can you say that you empathize with another human being?
	Come on.
	Come on.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	Someone is crying.
	Are they A, happy, or B, sad?
	Right?
	I mean, obviously, I don't know what the questions are in an EQ test, but clearly they're subjective.
	And also, you're asking people, Whether they understand what someone else is feeling.
	But sociopaths and con artists are very good at doing that.
	Right?
	So the fact that you know what someone else is feeling, you know, torturers are really good at knowing what other people feel because they want to cause them maximum pain, right?
	Right.
	So I don't know even that truly understanding what someone else is feeling and being able to tease out their emotional state or whatever, I don't know that that has anything to do with being a good person.
	Now, again, you could argue that IQ is not, but IQ is associated with certain improvements in morality as a whole.
	Higher IQ people, less fraud, less theft, less murder, less assault, less rape, you know, these are all low impulse control.
	IQ 85 average crimes, right?
	Sure.
	On average, yeah.
	And so, yeah, on average, of course, right?
	And so, I don't know.
	This subjectivist, touchy-feely self-reporting test, it's such a chick thing.
	It's such a chick thing.
	Like, you know, before this show, I watched a bunch of...
	And it was all women trying to talk about...
	Oh, no, there was one guy.
	Somewhat loosely using the term.
	And they all made these statements with no empirical backup whatsoever.
	IQ is super important.
	EQ is the biggest predictor of your success.
	There are no facts behind that.
	And so I don't like disciplines where people make outlandish claims, which is not backed up by the data, where the founding book of the entire movement, which is still in print, I think, has no data behind it whatsoever.
	Where there's a whole bunch of different definitions of what EQ actually is and where there's not a skeptical approach taken to what is actually being measured.
	Thank you.
	What is actually being measured.
	You know, like you could maybe measure the EQ of someone by secretly recording them in a conflict when they didn't know they were being recorded and didn't know that anyone...
	And then you could analyze what they were saying.
	That would give you some non-self-reported facts.
	But there's none of that in the EQ stuff.
	And, you know, I can think, oh, all successful leaders have high EQ. Oh, bullshit.
	Oh, bullshit and a half.
	Do people honestly think that Bill Gates has high emotional intelligence?
	The guy smelled and had dandruff.
	Do people really think that Steve Jobs...
	Steve Jobs, yeah.
	Explosive anger and just hostile...
	Explosive anger abandoned his daughter when he was a multi, multi, multi-millionaire.
	His daughter was struggling to survive on...
	His ex-girlfriend's welfare check?
	Oh yeah, all about the EQ. It seems like kind of a con to me, that's all.
	I don't know what's being measured.
	The limitations of the data are significant, to put it, as mildly as possible.
	And that having been said, self-knowledge is fantastic.
	I believe in improving one's emotional skills.
	How many times have I suggested to people go to a therapist versus how many times have I suggested to people go and take a doctorate in philosophy?
	I believe in emotional self-knowledge and so on.
	I think it's very, very important.
	But I don't like the subjectivist, relativistic, self-reported, data-averse nature of Of emotional intelligence and that whole field.
	In other words, self-knowledge I think is great.
	I don't really believe that what's called emotional intelligence accurately describes self-knowledge.
	And the last example I'll give is Who is to say that being overly sensitive to other people's feelings...
	Sorry, that's a bit of a...
	That's poisoning the well by...
	Who's to say that being very sensitive to other people's feelings is a good thing?
	You know, if you're a coach, you're going to have to push people when they don't want to be pushed.
	You're going to have to have a certain blindness towards other people's feelings.
	Anybody who wants to create in particular moral advances...
	To humanity, you know, like I've got this big thing around not spanking and peaceful parenting and so on.
	That makes a lot of people feel really bad because they've already committed to the hitting your children and yelling at your children and abusing your children and so they feel really, really bad.
	You know, the people who ended slavery were ending an institution that was accepted as foundational to human society and morality and had been for ever since there was human societies.
	And so when they began to redefine slavery as an immoral thing, they made tens of millions of people around the world feel pretty bad.
	So I don't know that this being sensitive to other people's feelings is a good thing.
	In other words, EQ, being able to ignore other people's feelings and in fact act counter to the resistance of other people's upset and anger, It's pretty foundational.
	Like, what was the EQ of the suffragettes?
	I don't know.
	I mean, they certainly annoyed the living hell out of a lot of people and were willing to pursue what they thought was important, even while having things thrown at them and being thrown in jail.
	What was their EQ? I don't know what that means anymore.
	I know that they were smart.
	I assume their IQ was high.
	And I'd be shocked if it wasn't.
	But what is the EQ of people who go against the social grain and really upset people?
	I don't know.
	I don't even know how that question sits.
	And again, I'm no expert on EQ. I've never really seen that addressed.
	I was trying to look up before because you said something about Intelligence being associated with higher quality mental health.
	And I think part of the reason that I gave the emotional intelligence hypothesis, if you want to call it that, more credence, was that there was some claim floating around that people with high IQ actually experience more severe instances of mental health related issues than people lower, I guess.
	And I was just Googling that before, and it turns out that that's apparently also very dubious.
	So, yeah, it's an interesting conversation for sure.
	But I don't think that the data pans out in support of the emotional intelligence either.
	Yeah, I think I just had a conversation with one of the most famous IQ researchers in the world, Dr.
	Richard Lin.
	It's not out yet, but Dr.
	Lin pointed out that...
	Women and men, boys and girls, have the same IQ patterns up until about the age of 16 and then women begin to taper off and men continue to grow for quite a bit of time afterwards.
	And men end up with about a 4 point IQ difference, higher IQ on average than women do.
	That's not insignificant.
	That's pretty similar to the difference between East Asians and Caucasians.
	And if you look at the income between East Asians and Caucasians, it's Quite a bit, plus East Asians tend to have higher IQ in particularly productive areas, engineering, spatial reasoning, and so on.
	And so, when the IQ stuff came out, there were certain groups who didn't do as well.
	Blacks, Hispanics, Native Indians, Sub-Saharan Africans, and women.
	Again, the gap with women is much smaller than most of these other groups.
	And then, of course, with regards to IQ, The fact that the bell curve for men is flatter, right?
	There are fewer men around the average and more men at the extremes of very high and very low intelligence.
	Also explains, goes a long way towards explaining why there are so many fewer women at the highest levels of human achievement.
	And the lowest levels of human achievement have fewer women too.
	I don't know.
	It's a pretty good cluster to stick around in the middle.
	It's quite a gamble being a guy, right?
	It's either like Well, there's a lot more 12s and a lot more snake eyes going on when the guys roll the dice as far as brains go.
	Right.
	And so it just is interesting to me that within a year or so of IQ explaining a whole bunch of social phenomena that hitherto had been very puzzling to people.
	And if you think about it, of course, I mean the bell curve is over 20 years old now, so 22 years old.
	And the bell curve was entirely predictive.
	In other words, the bell curve said, we don't know how to budge IQ, so Head Start isn't going to work.
	A hundred billion dollars plus later, hasn't worked.
	The bell curve would say that if you want more blacks and Hispanics in colleges, then Either they're going to fail a lot more or the standards of those colleges are going to have to enormously decline in order to pass them.
	Right.
	And we can sort of go on and on with all this kind of stuff, right?
	But it has enormous predictive power.
	So when the power of IQ came out, it created, in my mind, a vacuum.
	Right.
	Wherein people needed something else to hold on to because they couldn't do that well in the IQ tests.
	And magically, here comes EQ. True.
	So that people don't have to feel bad.
	Right.
	And they don't worry, they've got a backup emergency alternative intelligence.
	But EQ to me is very aptly explained by IQ. It just doesn't have this subjectivist thing.
	And, of course, the promise, you know, the other thing that happened was, of course, that people used to make a lot of money selling as how to improve your IQ, right?
	The baby Mozart tapes and all that stuff.
	Yeah, all this stuff that, you know, they've had to give refunds is all a bunch of bullshit, right?
	You can't raise IQ. Can't raise IQ. Now, again, I think peaceful parenting will help because that's an untried experiment for the most part.
	And also, you know, more breastfeeding will certainly help.
	But in general, right, nothing the government's doing is going to raise IQ, right?
	Basically the opposite of everything we've been doing the last couple of decades.
	Right, right, right.
	And so there was a huge industry called, we're going to make your kids smarter, right?
	And...
	The IQ books came out in the early 90s and then they were validated by the American Psychological Association.
	You can't change IQ, you can't improve it.
	And next thing you know, look!
	There's a whole industry which has invented something new called EQ that you can improve for a price.
	That smells so bogus to me.
	It doesn't even pass the smell test.
	Oh, we can't sell IQ anymore because...
	Hey, we'll switch letters.
	Now we've got something called EQ. And that's really, really important.
	And we can totally help you raise that for money.
	Right.
	I have some...
	Again, pursue self-knowledge.
	And that's a great, wonderful, wonderful thing.
	But to me, the pursuit of self-knowledge is...
	I mean, it's therapy plus journaling plus an intense examination of your relationships with reference to objective values and so on.
	Again, what do I know about EQ and its promises and so on, but it doesn't seem to be involved in that.
	It seems to be one of these quick, easy fixies, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I got stuck into it a little bit because I always had a slight insecurity around my intelligence.
	So I guess I kind of got pulled into the lure of, oh, this shiny alternative.
	Yeah, I can feel smart without the challenges of objective testing.
	Right, right.
	Right.
	And intelligence is one of these things that, you know...
	I always somewhat feel it's like, if you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.
	Yes, yes.
	I agree.
	I mean, if you just assume that you're a genius, who knows how far you can go, right?
	But it's sort of like the moment you look down.
	So...
	Anyway, again, I don't know any sort of final answers or anything like that.
	But, you know, since you asked, those are my sort of concerns and criticisms of it.
	And look, if...
	If there's someone out there who's a real expert on EQ and, you know, I'm completely wrong about all of this.
	I know I'm not wrong about some of this data because it's pretty well validated.
	But, you know, if you want to call in and set me straight, you know, as people can tell, I'm not an expert on everything.
	So I'm more than happy to get feedback from people if they want to call in and set me straight on this.
	So if there's new data or data that I don't know about.
	Absolutely.
	I appreciate it.
	And if I can just say one other thing, not to blow too much smoke up your behind, but I've been listening to you for a few years and I only recently started donating.
	I felt a little guilty about not doing that before.
	And I just want to say And I've heard other callers say this a lot more recently in your show.
	I really appreciate what you do and I consider your show, I haven't read your writings, but I consider your show to have been pretty, you know, pivotal for me to help formulate some of my ideas and even work through personal issues.
	So just, you know, thanks for taking me.
	Thanks for answering my question and thank you for everything that you do.
	It was my great pleasure.
	Thank you for your support and your very kind words.
	I very much appreciate that.
	Take care, Steph.
	Take care, man.
	All right.
	Up next is Tariq.
	He wrote in and said, There was a public speech competition in my college a couple of weeks back, and before going up, they had to know exactly what I wanted to talk about.
	I introduced Peaceful Parenting and started explaining how to have a conversation with your child and not to spank.
	The judges mocked me and said I had no idea how parenting works and said, let's see how you will do when you have children of your own in a satirical manner.
	I knew it would be a difficult topic to discuss, but not that I would receive such extreme rejection.
	So how else can I introduce people to peaceful parenting and at least get them to listen to the other side?
	That's from Tariq, and the added caveat is that he lives in the Middle East.
	Yes, hello.
	Hello, how are you doing?
	Fine, thank you.
	How about yourself?
	I'm very well, thank you.
	So, Tariq, please tell me if I'm totally whiting up that name for you.
	How do you pronounce it?
	You can say Tariq.
	Tariq, okay.
	Tariq.
	Rhymes with Dalek.
	Okay, Tariq.
	So, how did you...
	I've got to ask, how did you come about the peaceful parenting stuff and what made you think of putting it forward as a speech?
	Well, I've been listening to your show for two years now.
	And I know that here in the Middle East we don't have the best representation.
	So I don't know what you think of me or the place over here.
	I try not to think of places in general.
	You know, I can tell you already, I like you and I'm really going to enjoy this conversation.
	So I'm very glad you're calling in.
	Okay, thank you.
	So I found out about your channel on YouTube.
	So I started listening to you.
	And I thought, you know, I still haven't lost hope here in the Middle East.
	And a lot of people do have intelligent conversations, but that's not the norm.
	So I thought, how is the best way to increase it?
	How can I help the community over here?
	So I thought of peaceful parenting.
	As well as other things that you've talked about.
	But I felt that peaceful parenting is one of the more important things, especially in this culture, where spanking is the norm.
	Well, and more than the sort of spot on the butt, That a lot of Western people think of in terms of spanking.
	I'm sorry.
	It's more like hitting, like out and out hitting, right?
	Well, more of hitting, but not really harming.
	Maybe shouting at, abusing, verbal abuse.
	Is it bare butt spanking?
	Well, we have different forms.
	Usually it's with the slippers on the feet.
	You know, they hold your feet up and hit you with your slippers.
	It's a bit different, but the same outcome.
	And the goal, of course, is not to damage the child's body, but to sort of startle and frighten the child, right?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Just to discipline him.
	What people say is like...
	What are the sort of...
	Sorry to interrupt, but Tariq, what are the...
	What would cause these kinds of punishments in a family?
	Now, I've had these conversations with my friends and asked them how were they spanked or hit.
	Now, a lot of them only said we would be hit if we hit our siblings.
	So that's in my case as well.
	The only time I would be hit if I hit my brother or sister.
	Other than that, I wouldn't be hit.
	However, in other cases, or what the norm is, any disciplinary action, just to discipline the child, he would be hit.
	Right.
	And what about in terms of religious instruction?
	How is that enforced?
	Or how is the discipline applied there?
	There's this known saying in Arabic, which roughly translates as, teach your kid for seven years.
	and then discipline him for seven years and then befriend him for seven years so by the age of until he's seven you teach him then you discipline him for the next seven till he's 14 then after that you befriend him like he's an adult now right okay okay all right and um i mean i know when i was a kid going to church Was generally not one of my favorite things to do, to put it mildly.
	But with regards to mosques and attendance and prayers and so on, how is that enforced?
	Well, it depends.
	It varies quite a lot from country to country, obviously.
	But, like, I don't know how to say it.
	It's a lot less than it used to be back in the day, probably like 30 years back.
	It's a lot less nowadays.
	Okay, that's good to hear.
	So can you tell me a little bit about the circumstances of the speech and who you were giving it to?
	Well, I didn't actually have the chance before because as I said, to give the speech I had to introduce my topic and only certain topics were accepted and Furthermore, were taken.
	So what happens actually, before the speech happens, there was like a private sitting and the candidates who wanted to speak introduced their topics and only a selected couple were chosen to go on with it.
	So if you want to know what other topics that were introduced, like other topics that people talked about was global warming, pollution, Self-esteem and that other stuff.
	Right, right, okay.
	So what was the sequence that happened?
	So you said, I want to talk about not spanking and peaceful parenting.
	And then what happened?
	Yeah, so what happened is I sit in front of a couple of judges and then they give me a period of one to two minutes to speak and introduce my topic.
	So I introduced that.
	So some judges were like, yeah, that's quite an interesting point of view.
	While others were like, totally, you're talking nonsense, you're only 23 years old, you have no idea how parenting works, and we'll see how you do when you get your children.
	Right, right, okay.
	Well, your question is sort of what...
	What can you do to try and advance these ideas in your culture?
	Is that right?
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	Well, to me, there's sort of two prongs to the better treatment of children.
	And, you know, I mean, the question is, you know, if I'm so much into peaceful parenting, why don't I just only do peaceful parenting and not sort of the other philosophical stuff?
	Well, because to me, there's these two prongs.
	And the one prong is that the more irrational...
	Or anti-empirical, or anti-common sense, a society's beliefs are, the more aggressive it needs to be with its children.
	So it's pretty easy, sorry I won't use a myth from your culture, I'm sure there's an equivalent one, but it's pretty easy to convince a three-year-old that there's such a thing as Santa Claus, right?
	But it's pretty hard to convince a 13-year-old that there's such a thing as Santa Claus.
	Because the 13-year-old can think for themselves and reason through it and recognize that there's not a guy going all over the place with a red-nosed reindeer faster than what would cause something to burn up in the atmosphere and going down every chimney.
	And so the more irrational...
	If you really desperately need your 13-year-old to believe in Santa Claus, you have to get pretty aggressive because reality and common sense and thinking for yourself kind of disproves that there's a Santa Claus.
	So if you really desperately need your 13-year-old to believe in Santa Claus, you've got to threaten them, you've got to yell at them, you've got to call them bad if they don't, you've got to really escalate to get them to claim to believe in such stuff, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	And so, to me, if a society's beliefs...
	If society's beliefs are very anti-rational, then it is necessary...
	And moral, right?
	Anti-rational and moral, which tends to go hand in hand.
	Then...
	It has to be aggressive towards its children because the children don't really believe what's going on, like what is being discussed.
	And this is why irrational belief structures tend to have very aggressive consequences for failing to believe in them.
	Like, don't pay your taxes and you go to jail.
	Don't believe in a particular deity You go to hell or you're ostracized by your community or whatever it is, right?
	Yeah.
	And so when it comes to the Middle East, and look, I mean, I'm certainly not trying...
	I'm not going to try and create some false dichotomy here where...
	Western philosophy is super rational and Middle Eastern philosophy is just crazy.
	Trust me, you probably see a lot of craziness in your culture.
	I know I see a lot of craziness in my culture.
	The craziness in the West has to do with a lot of anti-white hatred and a lot of subjectivism, a lot of relativism, and a lot of the hysteria that comes out of people who've let go of any kind of rational and empirical common sense.
	So...
	In the West, I'm sort of fighting the bad ideas in the West.
	And as people in the West let go of bad ideas and embrace more sensible ideas, then they don't have to be as aggressive with their children.
	I don't need to be aggressive with my daughter because I'm not teaching her anything that's fundamentally not true or anything that's not true.
	And so the more that society embraces reason and evidence, the less aggressive it needs to be with its children.
	So promoting critical thinking is synonymous with promoting peaceful parenting.
	The more sensible things you believe, the less aggressive you have to be with your children because you have reality backing you up, so you don't need to be aggressive.
	Does that make any sense?
	Oh yeah, that makes sense.
	Now, so that's sort of the one prong, which is to try and convince people of more rational ideas.
	The second is, you know, as explosive, if not more explosive, which is to promote what I have called the voluntary family, which is do not spend time with your family of origin because of irrational obligations or duty or, you know, that...
	Spend time with your family of origin because you love them, because they listen, because they're good people.
	They don't have to be perfect people.
	Lord knows nobody is.
	But the promotion of volunteerism, or another way of putting it, is called the privatization of the family.
	Volunteerism is quality.
	Like, you know, if the government runs the post office and you don't have any choice about how you send your mail, then the post office isn't going to have a lot of quality because there's no volunteerism.
	There's no choice in it.
	You know, as I talked about in the last show, If you're in the Soviet Union and you run the local restaurant and everyone has to eat there or they pay for the food whether they go or not, then you're just not going to be that interested in having great service and great food because nobody has any choice.
	So where there is no choice, there can be no quality in relationships.
	And so the promotion of spend time with your family because they're good people and because you love them means that The people who are good to their children will do very well.
	And the people who are mean or vicious or abusive or neglectful of their children will not do as well.
	And so promoting spending time with people based upon virtue rather than based upon accidents of history is very important.
	And then, of course, you need the actual methodologies of here's what you do instead of.
	Like once you are telling mostly sensible things to your kids...
	And once, you know, they understand that they don't, you don't expect them to spend time with you when they grow up just because you're their parent, but you have to earn their love and respect and time with you, then there's the practical, you know, okay, so if I don't hit my kids, well, what do I do?
	You reason with them the way that you would reason with a friend.
	You know, if you have a disagreement about whether to go to the cinema or the theater with your friend, you don't hit their feet with a slipper until they agree to go with you to the theater, right?
	You try and find ways to compromise.
	You reason with them.
	And that prepares them for life in a rational society, which is why all of this stuff has to kind of work.
	Not everyone has to do every part of it, but it works best when it all works together.
	Because if you live in a truly insane society, I'm not saying you do, but if you did live in a truly insane society, training your children for sanity would be setting them up for failure, right?
	And so those would be the things that I would promote.
	You know, rational thinking, critical thinking, the voluntary family, and ways to reason with your children instead of hitting them.
	I think those are the fastest and best ways to spread the ideals.
	But it is, you know, it's a slow and difficult process, to put it mildly.
	So, I'll just speak from the other side point.
	When you hit your child, he's disciplined right away and he knows that what's wrong is wrong because he's being hit about it.
	But when you try to reason, they say, how can you reason with a five-year-old or a six-year-old who doesn't know right from wrong?
	It's like speaking with a low IQ person.
	So that's the point they go about.
	Alright, so what I would say to that is, first of all, when you hit a child, you're not teaching them right and wrong.
	All you're teaching them is that if they do something, they'll get hit, and so they shouldn't do it.
	All you're teaching them is fear and compliance.
	You're not teaching them right and wrong at all.
	I mean, otherwise, we could turn dogs into moral philosophers when we teach them not to take a crap on the rug by hitting them with a newspaper, right?
	I mean, aversion training is not...
	Philosophical education, right?
	You could hit someone on the foot with a slipper.
	You're not teaching them anything other than be afraid of being hit on the foot with a slipper.
	It's just fear and compliance.
	It's not moral instruction.
	The idea that six-year-olds can't be moral, all morality is, is universalization.
	That's all morality is, right?
	Which is why it's the first word in my book on ethics, universally preferable behavior, which people can get Freedomainradio.com slash free.
	It's just universalization.
	Now, children can start universalizing in their minds, in their concepts, at seven or eight months of age.
	Not years, months.
	The first time that a child recognizes a new chair as a chair, they're able to do morality because they've already universalized.
	The first stage towards morality is recognizing that other people have wants, just like you do, which is basic empathy, and it's also having a time preference that stretches beyond the moment.
	With my daughter, when it came to sharing, it was pretty easy to get her to share.
	Because I would ask her to share a little bite of whatever it was she was having, and she would say no.
	Right?
	Because she was a kid, right?
	She was a little kid.
	She'd say no.
	And I'd say, okay.
	She knew that I wanted it.
	She knew that she wanted it.
	She just wanted it for herself.
	And I said, okay.
	So is that the rule now?
	That whenever we have a treat, we don't share.
	Nobody has to share.
	And then her hand would freeze right in front of her mouth.
	And she'd be like, you could see gears beginning to turn.
	Oh no.
	Wait a minute.
	Is this going to be good for me?
	Is this going to be good for me or bad for me?
	Which is fine.
	It's a good place to start.
	But is that the rule?
	Is that the rule?
	Because she knows that I'm going to have some treat in the near future.
	And if the rule is we don't share, then I'm not going to have to share my treat.
	So she's thinking about the future.
	Now, again, it's still self-advantaged, which again, it's not the end of the world, it's not a bad place to start.
	So the question then she has is that if she says, yes, we don't have to share anymore, she knows I'm going to hold her to it in the future.
	So she gets to not share her treat, but in the future, she knows I don't have to share my treats.
	And in general, she was like, fine, bake up a little piece of her treat and give it to me grudgingly.
	Like, fine, you know.
	That's fine, you know.
	I have no problem with that, you know.
	It's a process, right?
	I mean, and I still sometimes forget these things as well.
	So, it's just, all it is is universalization.
	Yeah.
	You know, I mean, if, I don't know, if some kid's snappy at me, I would say, okay, so is this Do we just get to be snappy with each other when we're upset?
	Is that the rule?
	What is the rule?
	This is standard.
	This is not even me.
	This is way before me.
	This is Kant's categorical imperative, which is you act.
	How would you act if your action created a general rule that everyone had to follow?
	So if you go around stealing stuff, what if everyone stole?
	Well, that would mean nothing for you to steal because nobody would ever produce anything.
	It couldn't be sustained, right?
	Right.
	And so children...
	I mean, I started doing this with my daughter...
	Around two?
	She was perfectly able to grasp it.
	And, you know, she's smarter than your average bear, so maybe some kids would have to wait until two and a half.
	I don't know, right?
	But the moment they can universalize, then they can start processing morality and all of that stuff.
	If I just hit her on the foot, what would I? I'm teaching her anything.
	Right.
	Yeah, that's a lot to take in.
	Yeah, and listen, do you know anyone in your neck of the woods who is interested in these ideas?
	Oh yeah, a couple of my friends.
	I tried to talk about a lot of these topics with my friends, and now some of them take it with a grain of salt, and some of them like...
	No, just rejection.
	So this is one of the topics, but I'm trying to think that you can't just go in full throttle with all of these topics.
	So what would you suggest, other topics that would be easier to be accepted over here?
	Ah, well, you know, you're asking for a lot of detail from a guy who's only been to the Middle East a couple of times.
	So, do you think that there are...
	Well, you know, well, I guess you could say, I mean, as far as I understand it, people in the Middle East, and I stand shoulder to shoulder with them on this, people in the Middle East, you know, not particularly happy with Western imperialism, right?
	Right.
	Oh yeah, this is one of the other problems I'm having.
	Whenever I bring such peaceful parenting ideas, they're like, yeah, you with your Western ideas that just don't work.
	It's really weird.
	One of the things is some of the same When you were talking, for instance, about the Crusades, when you talked about them and then you talked about the slave traders, the Arab slave traders, what we are taught here in books is the other way around.
	It's like the Arab Navy was actually protecting The villages, the European villages.
	Yes, that's right.
	All the Muslims went to Vienna as a preemptive way of preventing the Europeans from going into the Middle East.
	Look, and you and I, I'm sure, would be very much on the same page as far as this goes, that I don't like Western imperialism, and I don't like Middle Eastern imperialism, and I don't like African imperialism, and the whole damn thing is horrible.
	And, you know, right now, of course, it is the case that You know, there's a big topic and all, right?
	But, you know, the migrants, the Islamic, well, actually Islamic migrants coming into Europe, man, I mean, do Europeans not have any idea the degree to which Europe and America have completely screwed around with the Middle East for, what, going on at least 100 years now?
	Yeah.
	And it's easier to see the faults in our enemies than in ourselves.
	That's a pretty...
	And it's true for every...
	I think it's true for most people.
	And so you can say to people, well, what is it that you really dislike about Western imperialism?
	There's a lot to dislike about Western imperialism, right?
	The arrogance, the brutality, the cowardice.
	You know, it's all about dropping bombs from the air and all that, right?
	And...
	It's brutal.
	And those same principles of the initiation of force are also present in the Middle East within countries within the Middle East, right?
	And so if you can sort of say, well, what is it about Western imperialism that is so horrible?
	You can find some of those selfsame principles in Middle Eastern governments as well.
	And it can be a stepping stone.
	Again, it's easier to identify the evils.
	Of your enemies, but when you can, then, you know, my particular approach has been, well, I dislike these things in other cultures, but I can't do much about other cultures.
	But if I dislike these things in other cultures, and then I see echoes of them in my own culture, well, there's more I can do about my own culture than about other people's cultures, in language barriers and cultural barriers and so on.
	So those would be maybe helpful approaches.
	Right, right.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	And by the way, good job.
	Good job.
	I mean, good job.
	It's a really, you know, and I appreciate you calling in for so many reasons, but one of them in particular is that you're saying that in the Middle East there is some lessening of harshness towards kids.
	Oh, yeah.
	And that is fantastic.
	That is fantastic to hear.
	Yeah, I'm trying to advocate more of that.
	That's what I'm thinking about.
	If the next generation is being brought up in a more peaceful manner, hopefully the entire region becomes more peaceful.
	That's what I'm thinking in the long run.
	That's what I'm trying to achieve.
	No, because a lot of times what you hear on news and all of that, you start losing hope, especially in this region.
	But then again, I try my best to advocate these ideas of peaceful parenting.
	I think that hopefully the next generation will have a better life, you know, more peaceful.
	You may not know this, but I've had some curiosity.
	What is the perception in the Middle East of what is going on with ISIS or ISIL? What is the view of this group?
	Oh, yeah.
	They're like the worst people ever.
	We hate them more than the West does, especially in the media.
	Yeah, they're like the enemy number one.
	Right.
	Yeah, which is...
	Yeah.
	I mean, it's got to be pretty...
	People in America are scared of ISIS, and there's like a whole ocean.
	Between America and ISIS, I mean, man, in the Middle East, I'd be pretty jumpy about these lunatics.
	Oh yeah, oh yeah.
	Because if you actually look at the numbers, they kill more Muslims than Christians, maybe because of the location, but they're killing everyone.
	So it's not about their religion.
	It's just lunatics.
	Right.
	And the other thing too, of course, because they're calling themselves Muslims, it's not exactly great for PR, right?
	Oh yeah, which is a really interesting topic, which is a whole other thing.
	It's like how they call themselves Muslim.
	While in Islamic teachings, you shouldn't even cut down a tree.
	That's how peaceful you should try to be.
	There's some pretty war-like stuff.
	And listen, there is in the Old Testament and even some of the New Testament as well.
	So it's not like Judaism or Christianity is free of this stuff.
	But there's some pretty warlike stuff in the Hadiths and in the Quran.
	And certainly looking at the life of the Prophet, there's some pretty warlike stuff, right?
	Yeah, there is.
	So it's like how you interpret it, how you interpret whatever you read.
	So what ISIS and other terrorists go about is like war and jihad and whatever.
	And while most other people think about, no, that's not the way it's gonna work, especially these days.
	But they're going – like the ISIS guys are going to the original texts and not – like they're taking it pretty raw from the original texts.
	And of course they're not – they're ignoring a whole bunch of stuff and they're focusing on some particular texts.
	But I mean those texts do exist, right?
	I mean so it's not like – they're obviously not representative of the vast majority of Muslims.
	But they're also not way off book if you just look at particular texts.
	Is that – again, you know more about it than I do, but that's sort of my understanding.
	Yeah, they take a specific text just to get some audience.
	They can't just come up with some wacko ideas.
	Nobody would follow them.
	So they try to take whatever they find and then twist it into their own words.
	Not their own words, but their own interpretation.
	And then to get some audience to follow them.
	So that's how they work.
	And this is the insane thing.
	I don't know if you guys are watching, do you know people who, are they watching any of the US presidential debates?
	Yeah, yeah, especially like only what you find on mainstream, not the actual debates.
	Like they know who Trump is because his name, you know, echoes throughout the media.
	But I just, you know, this is the, to me, this is the astounding thing.
	And this is true of all of the, I don't know much about what the Democrats are talking about the Republicans.
	It's like, well, we bombed the living crap out of Iraq, and that produced a power vacuum, and now ISIS is rushed in, who is, you know, arguably a lot worse than Saddam Hussein ever was.
	But don't worry, once we bomb ISIS, everything's going to be better.
	And it's like, didn't we just do this exact same thing and got a worse outcome?
	How on earth is it going to be different the next time?
	Yeah, which is really interesting.
	It's a complete failure of pattern recognition.
	And that even fills even more hate to the West.
	A lot of people, when they hear what Trump says, banning all Muslims or killing the terrorists and their family, that just creates even more hate.
	How is that going to fix anything?
	Well, the problem is, of course, that The Muslims can't be vetted, right?
	Look, there is a lot of hatred for America in the Middle East.
	I'm not trying to say that's all irrational, but there is, right?
	And so, you know, when you're in a significant conflict with an entire region, which the West has been, tragically, horrifyingly, horribly, with the Middle East for decades and decades, you can't bring people in Especially young military-aged men who you cannot vet.
	You can't bring them into your country, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, the example which is a very Western example that I've given before is, you know, if England is at war with Germany, they can't let 300,000 young German-aged men into the country.
	Yeah.
	What I find really interesting as well is the love-hate relationship that a lot of people here have with the West.
	It's like if you're actually, your name is John and you're blue-eyed, you're going to find the job so easier than any dark-haired, dark-skinned A guy called Tariq, for instance.
	It's like they have this fantasy idea about the states and how everybody is really smart and everything follows a correct system.
	However, then again, they hate it for the wars that are raged.
	So it's like anybody in my age would love to go to Europe or the States just to study over there because of the high standards of education you can get.
	So it's really a love-hate relationship.
	Well, you know, and my understanding, it's a bit of a cliche, but my understanding is that in the Middle East, it's not like you hate...
	Every American.
	It's the policies of the American government that have wreaked such havoc and destruction in the region.
	And there is, of course, you know, I mean, this is the odd thing where, you know, the West is supposed to be so racist and yet, you know, every race wants to come.
	It's like, what?
	Pick one.
	You know, pick one.
	Just stop confusing everyone.
	You know, if all the races want to come, then it has to be the least racist place on the planet.
	And, uh, therefore it can't be yelled at as being racist.
	Anyway, it's just one of these funny things.
	But with regards to the, uh, the families, I mean, this is kind of a funny thing and I don't mean funny, like obviously it's tragic as a whole, but you know, the family thing is, um, you know, I, I, I don't want to speak for Donald Trump, but my understanding of, of this perspective goes something like this, that these, um, The San Bernardino shooters, right?
	The people who shot up in California, the two Muslims, the married couple.
	If it turns out that their families were aiding and abetting them, like in other words, if these guys were amassing weapons and talking about their plans and the families let it happen or covered it up or whatever it was, then yeah, of course, then they're accomplices to mass murder, right?
	And so, of course, you would go after that.
	And when it came to targeting Bin Laden, you know, this is the funny thing, this comedian, I guess comedian, John Oliver, was shocked and appalled that Trump talked about going after people's families, but at the same time, that's, I mean, they went after Bin Laden and his family, and everybody seemed fine with that.
	And people say, ah, yes, but it might be a war crime.
	Well, that's not as clear, because the Geneva Convention, which defines war crimes, Generally only applies to state actors, to state military.
	And terrorists aren't really covered by...
	The moment you don't have a uniform and you're not on a government payroll, then the Geneva Convention doesn't really cover you.
	And so this idea that it would suddenly be a war crime, it's like, well, war is something that is defined by...
	The armies of two nations fighting each other, and terrorists are not state actors by definition in general.
	If they are state actors, then they are an army, not terrorists.
	And then they're covered by the Geneva Convention.
	So, you know, I don't think people are saying if, you know, someone, they're going to go after the, you know, third cousin twice removed to the San Bernardino shooters who's living in Alaska and has never even heard of them.
	It's just, if there are immediate family members who've aided and abetted in the Preparation of and commission of these crimes, then those people will be targeted.
	I think that's closer to what the perspective is.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And especially about all these terrorist attacks, and I hate it when it's like the terrorists, they go in the name of Islam, and so what the media covers, or the Western media says it's like these Muslim terrorists, and then you see the Middle Eastern,
	Middle Eastern media goes like these terrorists which are against Islam which do not represent Islam and you know like just try to ostracize them showing that they're the worst people and like just make them as part away from Islam as they can.
	Well and you know there's good ways to be able to do that which is they have to show that there's nothing in the Islamic teachings that could ever justify such an action but again I'm no expert on it but to my understanding there are things in Islamic teachings that can justify such actions and of course the vast majority of Muslims would never even conceive of doing such things but nonetheless people make this mistake all the time that when
	there's a particular group that holds an ideology I don't mean to reduce your religion to an ideology, but what I mean by that is it could be communism, it could be fascism, it could be democracy.
	There's a group of people who hold a particular ideology and people say the ideology is really bad.
	That doesn't mean that everyone who is normally part of that group is equally bad.
	It just means those are the teachings.
	I'm not trying to compare your belief systems to Nazism.
	It's more of an extreme example.
	But Nazism is a nasty belief system, to put it mildly.
	And yet, not everyone who was in the Nazi party was a dedicated Nazi.
	I mean, some of them did it because they had to.
	They were forced to.
	Like, everyone...
	There were lots of people in the Communist Party under Joseph Stalin who were in the Communist Party because they didn't want to get killed for not joining the Communist Party or for showing hesitation in joining the Communist Party or whatever.
	And so you can find very nice communists, but communism is a pernicious doctrine.
	And I see this happening all the time when people say, well, certain aspects of Islam are very violent.
	And then people say, well, that doesn't mean that all Muslims are violent.
	It's like, of course it doesn't, right?
	You can't possibly judge, you know, what is it, 1.5 billion?
	You can't judge everyone and just say, well, they're all like this because they self-identify as Muslims or Christians or Jews or whatever.
	But we can criticize the doctrines, right?
	And that doesn't mean that every person who self-identifies as part of that group Believes in every aspect of the doctrine, but we can still criticize the doctrine.
	Like, I can criticize Christianity without saying that every Christian fully accepts this aspect of Christianity that I'm criticizing.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, I kind of get your point with not completely.
	Well, so in Islam, In general, and certainly as far as I understand it under Sharia law, people who don't practice Islam are not the equal of those who do.
	Yeah, okay.
	Right?
	Okay, yeah, yeah.
	Right, so that's a problem, right?
	Now, in Christianity, atheists can be put to death.
	I criticize that aspect of Christianity.
	Now, I certainly don't believe that every Christian wants to put me to death.
	I understand that, right?
	So I'm not talking about every individual Christian.
	I'm talking about the belief system.
	Yeah, I get you.
	And so, yeah, so if in Islam, of course, you know, as you know, the punishment for apostasy or for leaving Islam is what?
	Yeah, that's a really, really deep topic.
	Is what?
	I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that there, my friend.
	What is it again?
	Uh...
	Well, the short answer is death, but not really.
	Yeah, well, see, I don't like death with an asterisk.
	You know what I mean?
	I have a problem with that.
	It says death, but don't worry, there's some fine print.
	I'd rather there was no death and no fine print rather than death and fine print.
	But please, go ahead, make your case.
	Yeah, just to make my case.
	Now, as you said, why is it death?
	Like, apostasy is death.
	But not, like, just say that you're not a Muslim anymore.
	It's like, yeah, off with his head.
	It doesn't go like that.
	And now if you go back to history and the times of Prophet Muhammad, what we taught is that, okay, there were some people who left Islam.
	And he wasn't killed.
	And what we're taught is that Prophet Muhammad said, I don't want to be known as the person who kills my friends.
	So in history, what actually happened was that only people who left Islam and started fighting the Muslims were the ones who were killed.
	So if you left Islam and you didn't fight it, Then you are left to live.
	That's what we're taught.
	Right.
	And is that how Sharia law is implemented these days, that if you decide not to become a Muslim, you're left alone?
	It always depends on which country you're living in.
	And there are particular religious taxes for non-Muslims, right?
	Particularly, of course, Christians and Jews.
	Yeah, but if you think about the Sharia law itself, even Muslims have to pay the zakat, which is a sort of a tax which goes to the poor.
	When you think about it, it's like small details, like if you're Muslim, you have to pay this.
	If you're non-Muslim, you have to pay that, which is a very historical How do you put it?
	When people talk about Sharia a lot, they only look at how they implement the punishment.
	It's supposed to be an entire way of life, not only implementing laws and punishing people.
	That's the problem when the fundamentalists only take one part Of it and try to implement it.
	But it doesn't work like that.
	You have to think of it as an entirety, if you get me.
	No, no, I understand that.
	This is the challenge of, to me, religious belief systems as a whole.
	Which is that it takes a certain amount of intelligence.
	To be able to sift through the complexities of sometimes contradictory belief systems, right?
	I mean, in Islam, as in other religions, there's a lot of contradictory stuff.
	And it takes a certain amount of intelligence to say, well, you know, that's big picture stuff.
	You've got to balance this with this.
	This is allegorical, but this is literal.
	And the problem is that, as you know, intelligence is not evenly distributed among the population, right?
	Yeah.
	And so there are going to be people of lesser intelligence, and lesser intelligence is often associated with greater ferocity, who are going to not really...
	Get into all of the big balancing complexity stuff, but are going to fixate on something that is probably closer to their emotional makeup, maybe their childhood trauma or whatever, and say, well, I'm full of rage and here's an angry passage.
	And you see, to me, the philosophy, right, versus...
	I'm doing research for an introduction to Aristotle, and I really want to, of course, get across...
	To the Western listeners, the degree to which we have Aristotle because of you lovely Arabs and Muslims and Middle Easterners who saved Western philosophy from the fall of Rome and so on.
	But philosophy can't have these contradictions in it.
	It can't be like, well, you can focus on this, which is very aggressive, or there's this part, which is very peaceful.
	It takes religion to have these kinds of contradictory statements or principles or commandments.
	Philosophy doesn't have the luxury of allowing for these kinds of contradictions.
	And what that means to me is that philosophy is more stable...
	When it falls into the hands of the less intelligent, because it has to be more consistent.
	That's the whole point.
	It's like a big scientific theory.
	The pieces all have to hang together and be consistent.
	For more intelligent people, there's lots of great stuff that they can get out of religious teachings.
	My concern is not with the more intelligent and sophisticated people of any religious persuasion.
	It's with the Less intelligent and often more aggressive.
	Lower intelligence often coincides with higher levels of aggression.
	And so you're obviously a very intelligent fellow and I can't imagine that you would gravitate towards the more aggressive aspects of a belief system and act that out.
	And so you would not be my particular concern.
	My concern is among all irrational or contradictory belief systems the degree to which It can appeal to some of the worst instincts of the less intelligent and because there isn't this demand for consistency it keeps sophisticated people naturally relatively peaceful because they're more intelligent but it doesn't do a lot to block the aggression of the less intelligent because there's a lot they can find to justify how they feel or what they want to do if
	that makes sense.
	Wow, that makes a lot of sense.
	I never thought of it in that way.
	Yeah, because these questions come up quite a lot.
	It's like, well, I wouldn't hurt anyone even if he disagrees with what I believe or any idea.
	I would never think of that.
	No, and you can find the justification in the statement in Islamic texts, which is that there shall be no compulsion in the realm of belief.
	Yeah, exactly, exactly.
	Then when you talk about the less intelligent people and how they pull whatever they believe in, and how they try to justify it by whatever text they pull out, which, yeah, yeah, it's like, kind of like makes sense now.
	Can I ask you one other question, if you don't mind?
	I appreciate this conversation.
	What do You can't speak for the Middle East.
	So let me ask you this.
	How do you view Western feminism?
	Western feminism?
	Yeah, well, it's kind of exaggerated.
	Actually, there is some sort of feminist movement here.
	But I'm pretty sure that it's not the same level as in the West.
	But yeah, it just doesn't make sense.
	I couldn't understand it.
	What doesn't make sense?
	Help me understand what doesn't make sense.
	I don't know what exactly feminist movements want or what their beliefs are.
	Women want their independence from men.
	And they want to lead.
	I'm not sure what the feminist movements exactly are provocating for.
	So if women want their independence, okay, if you look at some...
	Let me just think of a proper sentence just rambling on.
	It's like, okay, what I think is right is that women do have rights.
	They do have the right to learn.
	They should have the right to do whatever they want.
	But then again, they still need to be...
	I'm not sure how to put it.
	Okay, they should have their independence, but not like overruling.
	It's like they want more rights.
	They don't want equal rights, they want more rights.
	Yeah, it's kind of like female supremacy, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	It shouldn't be like that.
	Yeah.
	No, I mean, it's always sort of struck me like some 18-year-old or 19-year-old kid wants to be completely independent of his parents, you know?
	I've had it with you ruling over me, man.
	I'm going to be free, independent.
	But you'll still be paying my visa, right?
	It's like, wait, hang on.
	Hang on.
	I don't need you, mom and dad.
	Wait, can you co-sign my loan for this car?
	Because I don't really have the credit to it, right?
	And I need you to pay.
	And it's like, okay, well, which do you want, right?
	I mean...
	If women want to, you know, we don't need men, okay, well then stay out of my wallet.
	Don't stop taking my tax money, right?
	Stop taking all this stuff from me, right?
	If you want to be independent, great!
	You know, if there's a patriarchy, how about you boycott the money the patriarchy produces?
	And if you don't want to boycott the money that the patriarchy produces, then don't pretend that you want to be independent of men.
	It was just my particular perspective, but...
	Yeah, so one of the things about feminism or women in general is in Islam the hijab.
	So you actually can't force your daughter to wear the hijab.
	She has to choose it herself.
	Because if she doesn't choose it and she forces it, there are quite a lot of, not quite a lot, but there are some women who in front of their family they wear the hijab and then when they go out alone they take it off.
	So what use is that?
	So, like, you have to think of it intelligently.
	Like, they have to choose it themselves.
	So that's the point I wanted to make.
	And the purpose of the hijab is because...
	Is it because a woman's sexuality is private to her husband and her husband alone?
	Is that the idea?
	Yeah, the idea is modesty.
	You know, when you wear the hijab, you become more modest.
	And, yeah, exactly.
	Right, right, okay.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Sorry.
	Yeah, but the hijab, it might be foreign to what you're used to.
	But when you live in a society where everybody wears the hijab, then you see someone with all her hair out and whatever, you feel the difference.
	You feel the difference.
	Yeah, but whenever you go to the Western society, it's the other way around.
	It's really weird.
	It's like everybody's hair out, and then you see a woman with a hijab on, then everybody starts looking at her.
	Right, right.
	What do you think is going to happen in Europe with these, I guess to a large degree, North African migrants and so on, these people who are A lot of them, of course, are not fleeing war zones or anything, but what do you think is going to happen between these two cultures?
	Well, I'm pretty sure there will be some sort of clashing and not getting along.
	But here in the Middle East, every family probably knows someone who left to live somewhere in the States or Canada or even in Europe.
	So people going to live...
	Abroad is quite common.
	But what was really interesting is a lot of scholars were saying that you shouldn't actually go to the West or go to Europe because you can't practice the same way that you practice your religion here and over there.
	So a lot of scholars were against that.
	And what I think is like, why would you go over there While you can live happily and here in closer countries.
	And a lot say that they can't make a living.
	So that's why if you go to Germany and you live on social welfare and you live a better life.
	So the problem is, okay, if you go live there, but can you accumulate?
	Is that the word?
	With the Germans and the German culture, which is quite different from Arab or Islamic culture, I believe so.
	So can you get along with them?
	That's a question.
	And will it become like a subculture?
	Will there be a subculture that lives in Europe?
	I don't know how it's going to work.
	It's really interesting.
	Well, that's one way of putting it.
	I mean, I don't know.
	Is there any sense that, you know, the Germans, you know, the welfare state is paid for by the Germans and the people who are coming from the Islamic countries to Germany have never paid into this system.
	I mean, is there any sense of like, well, that's That's not how the system is supposed to work.
	The welfare state is supposed to be there as an emergency safety net for people who've paid into the system.
	And people who come into the country and go immediately squat on the welfare state, they're taking from the Germans and they've never contributed anything to the German welfare state.
	No, yeah, that's true.
	That's true.
	It's almost kind of like abusing the system.
	Yeah, that's true.
	Well, kind of like abusing the system?
	No, it's abusing the system.
	It's not kind of like, right?
	It's not very empathetic towards the Germans, right?
	Which is, you know, that if I go to Japan and immediately sit on their welfare system, I mean, that money is not exactly honorably obtained because it's supposed to be there for Emergencies for people who've paid into the system.
	Yeah, that's true.
	But what I find really weird is that I had a friend who wanted to go to Germany and he applied for the visa and he was rejected.
	And he's like actually an educated with a college degree and he was rejected.
	So people with a college degree and want to go through the legal way couldn't make it.
	However, these immigrants, I don't know, some people do have educations, while a lot of others don't have educations, and they're just going illegally and are getting there.
	So, it's like, how is that going to work?
	Badly.
	Yeah.
	Badly is the answer to that.
	And why, is there any conversation among immigrants The Muslims in the Middle East, among your friends, were basically saying, well, why Europe?
	I mean, why are Christians being nicer to our fellow Muslims?
	that why don't we bring them here?
	You know, like in Saudi Arabia, they have...
	You know, these giant tent cities, right, for the pilgrimages and so on, and they...
	Why...
	I mean, from the outside, right, I mean, this is one of the things that people in the West are not...
	Look at somewhat, like, what?
	Like, which is so, you know, Muslims, you know, generosity and charity and kindness are very big virtues in Islamic thinking.
	So why are the Christians taking all of these migrants?
	Why aren't they going, like, why aren't the Muslim countries opening the borders and saying, no, fellow Muslims who speak our language and have our culture, come to us.
	Why would you want to go to the Christians?
	Because we are your fellow Muslims.
	Yeah, that's mind boggling when you put it that way.
	Yeah, to be honest, I don't have an answer.
	It's like there's a bunch of Christian refugees right in the middle of Europe, and then they have to take these incredibly risky journeys to go and find refuge in Saudi Arabia.
	This is why a lot of people in the West are like, well, wait a minute.
	What do you guys know about these migrants that we don't know, right?
	I mean, why don't you want them?
	That's really...
	I can't judge the migrants in particular, but I can judge the Muslims around the migrants who don't want them, and I'm like, oh, I don't know.
	It's sort of like the guy whose family has kicked him out.
	It's like, I don't know much about him, but I know that his family doesn't want him.
	I don't know.
	I haven't...
	I don't think I have the answer for that.
	Sorry about that.
	No, no, it's okay.
	But what's interesting is you seem a little bit surprised by the question.
	Yeah.
	Well, because even before there were all these migrants going to Europe, everybody, as I said before, the Western society has higher education, so everybody wants to go study So it's always been that going to the West is always a good option, trying to improve your lifestyle.
	And the West, they live on a certain system which appeals to a lot of people here.
	For many years, a lot of people have been trying to go to the States or Europe because the standard of living is much higher.
	For long.
	Not for long.
	Yeah, so with all these, it's like, as I told you, like a lot of my, not a lot, but some friends have tried to go through the legal system and applying for visas and have been rejected.
	So, like, people who actually are trying to work for it are being rejected, while others are just, you know, I know they're risking their lives.
	I don't want to undermine that, but they're risking their lives and Going there and they're being accepted.
	Which is weird.
	Well, it certainly will probably do quite a bit to end Western imperialism when the welfare state collapses.
	Because it can't possibly sustain these migrants.
	I mean, there's no way.
	There's no way.
	It can't possibly do it.
	Oh, yeah.
	Because, you know, I mean, you can barely make a welfare state work if everyone's kind of being decent about it and is paying in and then only takes it in emergencies.
	It barely works even then.
	But when you get people coming in who don't speak the language, don't have any cultural acclimatization, don't have the educational standards, may not have the IQ basis to sustain themselves in a high IQ society, it can't work.
	I've been arguing against the welfare state for over 30 years, People have told me that I'm a bad person who hates the poor.
	It's like, okay, alright, let's just see how it works now.
	Because it can't possibly work.
	I mean, countries in debt are taking on massive multi-generational financial obligations with incompatible cultures.
	There's no conceivable way that it could work.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Yeah, you do have, yeah.
	That makes sense.
	I mean, imagine if, you know, I don't know what the equivalent population in Saudi Arabia would be, but, you know, imagine if five million secular leftist bikini-wearing men and women all surged into Saudi Arabia and then went on welfare.
	I don't know if there is welfare in Saudi Arabia.
	Qatar, maybe.
	But, I mean, good lord.
	Well, the funny thing is that the Saudis would just kick them out, right?
	I mean, there wouldn't even be any doubt.
	That's the thing that I actually have some admiration for in the Islamic culture.
	It's like, no, this is our culture.
	If you come here, we expect you to adapt or you ain't even close to sticking around.
	And that level of self-confidence in the culture is something that the West could use In my opinion.
	Yeah, that's true.
	I'm sure, yeah, as a Westerner coming to any Arab country, they should adapt to the culture.
	That's expected of them.
	Of course it is.
	Of course it is.
	I mean, naturally, it's an Islamic culture.
	It's an Islamic country.
	And of course, you know, it's almost impossible for non- Muslims to move to Islamic countries.
	But anyway, it's just weird what's happened to the West.
	Someday the West will find a middle ground between wanting to rule the entire planet and then just letting anyone swarm into the country.
	I mean, somewhere in the middle there's got to be some kind of balance.
	I hope philosophy can lead us there because, yeah, this is, I think it's just going to be a complete disaster.
	Yeah, I know.
	But personally, if I would go to live anywhere in Europe, I would respect the European culture.
	As you always say, treat people how they treat you, then work off of that.
	So Europeans are very welcoming, so I would expect whoever goes over there should respect their culture and should accumulate to an extent.
	Right.
	But what will happen?
	I have no idea.
	I have no idea what's going to happen.
	Well, it's a movie I don't want to see, but it looks like I'm not going to have much choice but to watch it.
	All right, listen, I really, really appreciate the call.
	Thank you a lot for opening your heart and your mind.
	And a hugely, you know, massive, massive respect for what you're doing with regards to spreading peaceful parenting, Tarak.
	I mean, it's a beautiful thing to hear about.
	Well, thank you.
	Thank you.
	And, well, if it wasn't for your show, I don't think I would have been spreading peaceful parenting.
	All right.
	Thank you.
	Middle Eastern Outpost!
	Woo!
	That was part of the business plan for this year.
	We can all go to bed now.
	All right.
	Thanks, man.
	What time is it where you are?
	I can't even imagine.
	Is it morning?
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's 6 o'clock, 6.25 in the morning.
	Yikes.
	Okay.
	All right.
	I appreciate you staying up or getting up early.
	That was a really great chat.
	Thanks so much.
	Okay.
	Thanks a lot.
	Thanks a lot.
	Take care.
	Okay.
	Bye-bye.
	All right.
	Well, up next is Malcolm.
	Malcolm wrote in and said, With the high costs of university, Marxist professors, and devalued degrees, I'm wondering if there is still value in the university experience.
	With the world obsessed with credentials, I have a fear of being shut out of potential opportunities.
	What am I missing if I skip university?
	That's from Malcolm.
	Hello, Malcolm.
	What do you think you're taking?
	Hi, Steph.
	It's really cool to talk to you.
	Well, I didn't really have a specific, like, I don't have a specific profession that I would take.
	I was more interested in kind of, I guess, the classical education.
	I'm embarrassed to say liberal arts.
	I got a liberal arts degree.
	I got no problem with that.
	But, yeah, it's something that I started thinking about a lot lately.
	I'm working as an electrical apprentice right now.
	And, you know, I have a lot of people around me telling me, you know, it's a good job, I'm in a union, you know, there's benefits, but it's monotonous, and it's, you know, I'm dealing with bitter union guys, and, you know, concrete does asbestos, and I'm trying to think about, you know, kind of try to craft something better with my life.
	Right.
	Now, do you have, like, an ideal sort of occupation, or Geek that you might want to get to in the future?
	Well, I'm really interested in business and economics, I think.
	I like reading Milton Friedman for fun, so that should give me a bit of a chick magnet.
	Oh yeah, it's great for picking up chicks.
	Also, I'm really invested, I guess, in the culture war that's happening.
	Um, you know, so I'm interested in journalism as far as just like the media is so useless.
	We need people like you that are just, you know, opening people's minds up.
	So that's also something I would think, uh, of doing.
	Right.
	You mean like sort of some sort of, um, alternative media?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	No, I'm like, uh, the reason I found your show was Bill Whittle is one of my favorites.
	Ah, we love the bill.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And it's funny, you know, because I was just thinking when you talk about a liberal arts degree, and every time we do a show with Peter Schiff, he says something about liberal arts degrees being useless, and it's like, still have more subscribers than you, my friend.
	Yeah, yeah, that's the thing.
	Yeah, although, you know, I think his house is quite a bit bigger than mine, but anyway.
	So...
	Would you take literature or history?
	What would you think of if you had to choose?
	To be perfectly honest with you, Steph, I have a limited understanding of the whole university experience.
	It's something that I rejected when I was in high school.
	The public education system is just so useless.
	I had no idea that I was interested in You know, history and philosophy and stuff until I got out in the working world and started finding myself reading and finding I'm a lot...
	I hate saying it, but I'm smarter than a lot of the people that are in my social sphere.
	Mm-hmm.
	Right.
	No, false modesty is just a kind of hypocrisy, so...
	Yeah, that's why Trump's doing so good.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's just so funny.
	The number of people, when he says, I'm really successful, I'm like, yep.
	Yeah.
	I don't want you to lie to me.
	People just get, oh my goodness, this guy has an accurate assessment of his own abilities.
	That's terrible.
	It's like, what?
	Would you want someone who didn't?
	I don't know.
	The false modesty of, this is one thing that drives me nuts about Kasich.
	He's like, I can't believe my wife has stayed married to me.
	She's got so much pace.
	He's like, dude, come on.
	Come on.
	I mean, please don't tell me that your wife is some long-suffering person, because then why on earth would I want to have anything to do with you?
	She knows you a lot better than I do.
	Yeah, that's just it.
	Yeah, that's just...
	Alright, so do you feel that a degree is going to give you credibility in the alternative media?
	In other words, if I've got a master's degree in history, Do you think that you would not listen to me if I didn't?
	Did you even know?
	The people I listen to have no idea what their education is, for the most part.
	I don't know.
	I don't, like, oh wait, I gotta see a resume, right?
	Are you interested?
	Do you have good arguments?
	Do you think for yourself?
	Do you encourage thinking in others?
	It's what matters to me.
	Yeah.
	Well, yeah, that's a good point.
	I think it It still matters to a lot of people.
	For example, my dad, he's a total autodidact.
	He's taught himself a lot.
	He's a very intelligent person.
	He can't get hired by big companies because he doesn't have a degree.
	He's into computers.
	He can do anything, but they won't take a look at someone like him because he doesn't even have a degree.
	To save time, I guess.
	Yeah, no, they probably have a standard, right?
	Which is that, you know, requires bachelor's degree.
	But would he even want to...
	I mean, trust me, if he got through that and started work for these people, he'd go insane.
	Yeah, that's probably true.
	They're doing him a service, right?
	What do you mean the crazy woman won't date me?
	Thank God, right?
	If there was a God, I'd get on my knees and thank Him every single morning for all the women I wanted to date who said no to me because I've had enough of life experience now to have seen where some of them have ended up.
	I'm like, oh, Jesus, God, thank you.
	So I should be very thankful.
	You're very, very thankful.
	Yeah.
	Seriously.
	Every woman who said no to me who didn't become my wife is like my blessed angel of rejection.
	Thank God for them.
	Oh, good.
	So, okay.
	So if you want to go into alternative media, I don't know that your education is going...
	Like formal whatever it is, right?
	I don't think that's going to make any difference.
	Okay.
	The other aspect...
	If you want to become an entrepreneur...
	If you can provide value to your customers, they don't care.
	I don't think anyone ever said, I'm not buying Apple stock because Steve Jobs doesn't have a degree in computer science.
	Yeah, fair enough.
	The other aspect I was also looking at was the actual experience of going to university itself.
	It's kind of a rite of passage in Western culture, at least it appears to be.
	Rite of passage for your liver, yeah.
	But there is a feeling I have, I don't know if it's rational or not, that a lot of people in my social circle, they're not interested in pretty much anything I'm interested in.
	Philosophy or history or anything that you talk about in this show, but it's possible that at university it would be more of an intellectually enlightening experience, I guess, despite what we see happening there today.
	Well, look, I can't.
	The real political correctness arrived after I left, right?
	Like I was out of college over 20 years ago, right?
	So I still had a lot of old school.
	Like I was taught.
	I did 19th century poetry.
	I was taught by a guy who was so old.
	He was a professor and he only had a BA. Oh, okay.
	Right?
	Because now you've got to have a post-graduate PhD sometimes.
	This guy was so old that he could be a professor with only a bachelor's degree.
	Wow.
	And he was pretty old, let me tell you that.
	And so I had, like, most of my professors were pretty old, so they all came, and, you know, it was a little bit different.
	There wasn't quite as much of the hippy-dippy stuff in Canada in the 60s, right?
	There was more out in Vancouver, but there was a lot of...
	Old-school empiricists who I was...
	I've mentioned this before.
	One of the greatest professors I ever had was this woman who taught me the full-year course on Aristotle.
	She was great.
	She wasn't old, but she was old-school.
	I remember some hippy-dippy guy started bringing up radical relativism.
	She just shot him down like a Messerschmitt on a boatload of refugees.
	It was just...
	I mean, she was just great.
	It was like watching Trump make fun of Marco Rubio's water drinking and then tossing the bottle with ultimate contempt.
	And I was just like, I love you.
	I will have your children, Miss Aristotle.
	I will bear your children.
	I started writing essays.
	Just to go to her office.
	Like, I just write extra essays.
	You know, we'd get into some thorny problem with regards to forms, and I would just start writing essays, and she'd be like, why did you write this?
	I'm like, actually, I do find, you know, A, I want to be near you, and B, I want to...
	It was a really interesting challenge, and she taught me a lot.
	Like, I'd write all these extra essays, and I'd go in, and she taught me a lot about cutting down arguments.
	Believe it or not, this is me heavily redacted, but...
	That was rare.
	I had one good professor who did actually an excellent Churchill who taught...
	I did a course on the Second World War and he was pretty good.
	But, you know, a lot of them were terrible.
	We're pretty terrible.
	And occasionally you'd get the sadistic firehose of facts guy.
	I took a course on ancient Rome and this is the guy you had to know the sequence of the emperors and you had to know the dates of their reign and you had to know when the laws went through major changes.
	It was all just Like, if I could turn you into the internet, I've considered myself a great educator.
	And the sort of stuff-yourself-with-facts guys were just terrible.
	And it was pretty brutal.
	And as far as quality conversations with my fellow students went, no.
	Not a lot.
	And I wasn't around during the hysterical political correctness stuff.
	But I will say that it was very lefty.
	Yeah.
	It was very lefty.
	It was very lefty.
	And what would happen is, you know, there's this funny thing that happens when you speak outside of the matrix.
	Like I remember doing a speech.
	It was not a speech.
	There was a question about the fall of Rome, and I gave a pretty good explanation.
	And there was this long pause, and then everybody just started laughing and saying, wow, you should really be on the floor of the House of Commons.
	I remember that comment, like you should really be on the floor of the Parliament, like House of Commons.
	But like you should be a politician, you know, the way you can synthesize and say this stuff from beginning to end.
	And so basically there was no comment on the content.
	There was only an appreciation of the form of what I was saying.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, total...
	And so I would not say that I had a lot of quality conversations.
	A lot of people in college, particularly when it got to the graduate level, were lost people.
	They were hiding out.
	They didn't know what they wanted to do with their lives, but they were relatively good at academics.
	And so they just, they kept doing academics because, and a lot of them were actually quite fragile.
	I actually was quite surprised to find.
	A lot of them were quite fragile people.
	I definitely see that now.
	Yeah, they wanted to stay in this giant government-fed amniotic sack of higher education because the alternative was kind of stressful for them, going out into the business world and being in a voluntary situation and testing their market value with productivity and all that kind of stuff.
	It is – it was not massively high-quality conversations that I can recall.
	And there was also, of course, a lot of odd hyper-competitiveness.
	Because, you know, everybody knew that if they were going to keep going in academia, they would have to make do with...
	You know, there were too many people in too few positions, right?
	You become professors or whatever.
	And so, if you're looking for quality conversations, well, I'm still, you know, other than this show and the people that we talk to, I don't know where to suggest you go, but I wouldn't necessarily say that going to college.
	Now, what's happened, of course, since all of this, like since my day, is...
	Affirmative action for women and minorities has kicked in big time in a lot of places.
	And that has fundamentally changed university.
	And I think that has really changed a lot of the standards, really lowered a lot of the standards, naturally, right?
	Like in the past, in Canada, you used to be able to skip grades.
	And now you're not allowed to skip grades.
	I don't know the formal reason, but I guarantee you I know the reason for real, which is that there'd be a whole bunch of white and oriental kids who'd be skipping grades and a whole bunch of black and Hispanic kids who wouldn't be.
	Yeah.
	And so, because otherwise everybody would be accused of racism, now no one can skip a grade.
	How terrible.
	Mm-hmm.
	How terrible.
	And, of course, college has become exceedingly risky for sexual activity.
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, I don't have to tell you.
	Like, everybody can feel their ballsack going up somewhere around their lungs when they read these stories of, you know, some woman who claims some guy raped her when, you know, even though it's obviously patently false, the guy's life's still completely destroyed, right?
	Yeah, because he catcalled and said hi.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, or, you know, she regretted it and then she, you know, she then ended up hanging out with the wrong crowd who convinced her it was rape and started using her to bludgeon men as a whole because of their own pathological hatreds.
	And, you know, of course, rape does happen on campus.
	It's rarer on campus than in the general population.
	And by any historical feminist definition of rapes, it happens as often to men as to women.
	But...
	This unraveling of the compatibility between the genders.
	I mean, that is really striking at the root of civilization as a whole.
	Yeah.
	And so, you know, it's not a fun-free bang-a-thon as it used to be.
	It's pretty risky.
	It's like Russian roulette with your balls, right?
	I mean, it's...
	You know, it might go off, but it also might go off and take your head off as well, right?
	So that's become a lot more risky.
	The political correctness stuff, I think, has become – I think there's a lot more – I had to bite my tongue a lot, of course, in college because it was so relentlessly lefty.
	But I think now with the political correctness stuff too – I bit my tongue because I really, and I would fight sometimes, and sometimes I took a whole course called The Rise of Capitalism and the Socialist Response, and I'd fight sometimes and I'd bite my tongue sometimes, but it was never personal.
	In so far as the Ewok-style Marxist professor would get upset with me and we'd have these conflicts and these clashes, But it was never like, I'm an evil stooge of the capitalist class.
	But with this political correctness stuff now too, I mean, you are a racist, you are a misogynist, like it's boom, straight to your heart, right?
	And that is pretty rough.
	Do you have any money saved up for this potential endeavor?
	Yeah, I'm a saver, so I've got about Well, I'm rash.
	Don't tell me.
	You've got some decent coin, right?
	Yeah.
	Now, I would say that if you've got something very specific that needs a particular degree, or if there's some place you want to go where you know you can't go without a particular degree, I mean, petroleum engineering, like whatever it is, right?
	Then that, you know, that's a pretty good case to make.
	If you're dying to be a lawyer, right?
	Then, although there's a bunch of law school grads now suing their law school because they can't find work.
	But anyway.
	If you want to be an engineer, you just got to get the piece of paper to do it, or a doctor, or whatever it is, right?
	If you really want to be one of those things, then that's the hoop you got to jump through.
	And on the other hand, if you just want to acquire general knowledge and share it, you do not need to go to college.
	In hindsight, if I'd have known the way my crazy life was going to go, which is sort of an impossible requirement, but if you've got enough money to go to college, well, college is going to cost you a lot of money.
	Why not just take time off from work and study the stuff you want to study?
	Oh yeah.
	And that doesn't mean you have to do it alone.
	There could be online groups, there could be people that you could meet up with and all that.
	But I don't know that you, you know, it's going to save you a lot of money.
	Because in order to be taught by a professor, the professor has to have knowledge that you really want and you can only get by paying him.
	You know, like if I got a toothache, the dentist has particular skills that I got to pay for, I can't do it on my own, right?
	Yeah.
	And so, you know, at the very least, you definitely want to find a college that's right up your alley in terms of what they're teaching.
	Right?
	Like, I mean, if you want to do something in economics, then, you know, there are particular schools that are more focused on free market economics, like George Mason or some of the University of Chicago has some more free market bend to it.
	And so...
	I think, and you definitely want to go, in my opinion, to a college where there's no affirmative action.
	And that's really important.
	To me, that's really important for a number of reasons.
	Number one, of course, affirmative action is going to lower the quality of the education you receive, just by definition.
	Unqualified people are getting in.
	And number two, You know, you don't, like, if there are a bunch of minorities or women or whoever around who are there because of affirmative action, it's going to be hard to avoid having a negative view of those groups.
	Yeah.
	You know, whereas, of course, if everyone's there on merit, then everyone's there on merit, and you're not going to end up with any particular negative view of any group, right?
	Yeah.
	Let's, uh...
	Yeah, you made some really good points.
	Yeah, I think it's just something that I can't help have it in my mind.
	It's so driven into your head.
	As soon as you go to school and you have to go to university, I'm just surrounded by it.
	So I definitely wanted to...
	I was just trying to figure out if there was pros that I wasn't seeing, because I'm very aware of the cons of Well, look, here's the thing, too.
	Let's say I had a PhD in Harvard in philosophy, right?
	And post-doctorate work and whatever, right?
	I studied under the reincarnated spirit of Bertrand Russell or something.
	Let's say that I had that intimidating paperwork back up.
	I can tell you one thing for sure that would happen is that my arguments would be less good.
	Oh yeah.
	Because I have to convince people that I have something of value to offer in the realm of philosophy without a PhD in philosophy from Harvard.
	So I have to work Hotter.
	I'm like the fat girl on a date with a hot guy.
	Oh, I'll work harder.
	Sorry.
	You know what I'm saying.
	I think you do.
	I think you do.
	I'm put out.
	That's what I'm saying.
	Am I being too blunt?
	No, that totally makes sense.
	But you know what I'm saying, right?
	I gotta work harder.
	I gotta work harder.
	And, you know, if I have a degree in history, and I focus on the history of philosophy, pretty big themes in the history of philosophy, my master's thesis, but I never say to people, well, listen, I have this degree, so you should listen.
	I mean, I have to work harder.
	I have to work harder.
	And I'll tell you this, almost nothing...
	That I know of value came from college.
	Almost nothing.
	Really?
	That I know of value.
	The principles that I use, almost all of them existed before I set foot in one college classroom.
	Wow.
	Like the objectivism, which was the foundation for a lot of my thinking, years before I went to college.
	When I... I was working up north.
	I grabbed armfuls of books because, you know, you work for eight hours and then you sit in a tent for eight hours, right?
	You got some time before tablets and no internet.
	And I just, I would grab, I grabbed armfuls of books and I just read voraciously.
	That's when I read the Bible and I read a lot of the Grange and Greek texts.
	I went through a lot of Socrates and, well, Plato.
	Socrates didn't write anything.
	But I went through, you know, just went through a lot of stuff.
	And This is all before I went to college.
	Now, I did, you know, literature, I learned, because I took two years of an English degree, so I learned a lot of literature, but I had already read, I mean, I was like 14 when I first read Crime and Punishment, so a lot of the, like, there's not, like, I don't fall back on my college education when I run into difficulties, you know, in terms of trying to figure something out.
	Okay.
	And if you want to be original, being over-educated can squelch that.
	Yeah.
	You know, is it easier to write a song if you know 100,000 songs, or is it easier to write a song if you only know 100 songs?
	Mm-hmm.
	I don't know.
	Arguments to be made for the less, right?
	So I think if...
	I mean, certainly if you want to do alternative media, you should use that money to get the equipment and just go and start doing it.
	Okay.
	And recognize that you are going to have to work harder than somebody who's got some piece of paper behind them, which is good.
	Isn't that nice?
	Yeah.
	That means that you...
	That means that you have the chance to achieve something greater.
	Yeah.
	Let me tell you one other story.
	Yeah, go for it.
	It's not mine.
	But this is a story I read when I was in my mid-teens.
	A huge impact on me.
	And it was about a guy who was a butler.
	And one day, his master calls him into his room and says...
	He used to call the guy Jeeves.
	I don't remember the guy's name.
	Jeeves!
	It has just come to my attention that you don't even know how to read.
	Is that true?
	Yes, I don't know how to read.
	Never did learn, sir.
	Never found it necessary for my service.
	Well, I can't have a butler who doesn't even know how to read.
	I'd be a laughingstock.
	You're fired.
	Well, all right, sir, if that's where you want it.
	And the guy wanders out of the house, Jeeves the butler, And he wants to smoke his pipe.
	He's walking down the street.
	But there's no store that sells tobacco anywhere on this whole long street.
	He goes home to his wife.
	He says, I just got fired.
	Why?
	I don't know how to read, as you know.
	And I was walking home.
	I couldn't even find tobacco for my pipe.
	And his wife says, well, isn't that a good idea?
	Why don't you open a tobacconist store on the street where you couldn't find tobacco?
	So he does.
	And it's very successful.
	And he opens another store and he opens another store.
	Soon he has a whole chain of stores.
	And he's a multimillionaire.
	He goes into the bank.
	And he's gonna buy a million pound house.
	And the bank manager is drawing up the papers for his loan and the man says, well, you'll have to read them to me.
	Because I can't read.
	The bank manager says, wait, you have millions and millions of pounds, you're an incredibly successful entrepreneur, and you can't even read?
	He says, I can't even imagine what kind of success you'd be if you could read.
	And the man says, I can tell you exactly what kind of success I would be if I could read.
	I'd still be a butler.
	That's great.
	That is awesome.
	I probably got half that story wrong, but that's the point.
	That is the point.
	That is the point of the story.
	That you don't know.
	You don't know.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Wow.
	Thank you for that.
	That's something on my mind.
	I just wanted to try to work through that.
	That was really helpful stuff.
	If you want to be surrounded by people who need your credentials, then you're going to be limited by their lack of judgment.
	I ask people to judge me based upon my ideas, not upon my paperwork.
	Which is 20 plus years old now anyway, and who cares, right?
	And so do you want the kind of listeners who are going to say, well, he doesn't have a PhD in this chosen discipline from Harvard, so I'm just not going to listen?
	Why would you want those people anyway?
	They're boring old farts who don't have a shred of originality and can't think for themselves, and so they need paperwork because they can't think for themselves.
	Yeah.
	You don't want those people to be your listeners.
	You want people who can think for themselves.
	And the people who can think for themselves will evaluate your argument based upon its merits.
	They will not surrender to the argument from authority called, I have X, Y, or Z piece of paper.
	And this stuff doesn't mean what it used to mean.
	It doesn't like it.
	I think you could argue 50 years ago, you know, when it was...
	Really tough to get into these educational institutions and so on that, you know, it meant a lot more.
	Now the whole thing's been democratized and the scale of values has gone through the toilet.
	I mean, it doesn't mean what it used to mean.
	And the problem is, too, is it gets worse and worse.
	So, my degree, when there was not that much political correctness and very little affirmative action, is now cluttered in with all this bullshit that's come out of stuff now where there's much more political correctness.
	Like, some guy who got his degree 20 years ago from the University of Missouri now has his whole degree tainted by the idiots currently doing things at the University of Missouri.
	Yeah.
	So, you've got to think in the long run in terms of Degrees are getting worse now.
	I don't think they're so bad in the harder sciences, but in the arts, it's just become a bunch of politically correct garbage, in my opinion.
	And how is it going to be 10 years from now or 20 years from now?
	So, if there's something that you're passionate about intellectually, just go start doing it.
	If you want to learn...
	How about you go start up a channel on whatever you're passionate about intellectually and spend time and buy the equipment and spend the time and spend the time researching and spend the time coming up with the stuff you want to talk about and after four years you'll have an income not debt and trust me you will have learned a lot more By doing
	thinking rather than studying thinking, you will learn a lot more about any particular subject you're fascinated about by going out and trying to sell it than by going and paying people who don't make any more money if you succeed than if you fail.
	I mean, you're a market guy, right?
	You said you like reading Milton Friedman for fun, right?
	Well, is the university a market situation?
	Well, not really.
	No, it's not.
	It's not.
	It's not at all.
	At one point it was.
	And so if you value the market, then go into the market, which is try and sell your ideas in the marketplace for money.
	It's what I do.
	And find out the value and have all the challenges of that.
	People who need a degree are looking for excuses to not find what you're doing meaningful enough to act upon it.
	You want to get people so excited by what it is that you're talking about that they're willing to change their lives for the better, no matter what the cost.
	A degree will not help you with that.
	All it will do is put you under the tutelage of politically correct morons for a couple of years and have you spit out, instead of with the businesses making money and four years of experience under your belt, talking about things that matter to a hungry world, you'll be spat out, propagandized, exhausted, With four STDs, hopefully no rape charges, and in debt.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I think you're right.
	And just do a cost...
	You know, there's ways you can do a cost-to-benefit ratio for arts degrees.
	You'll see.
	They don't pay.
	No.
	No, and that's part of...
	Why I called you is really a cost-benefit analysis of the value of the experience itself and what I get out of it.
	That was very enlightening.
	Thank you.
	You're welcome.
	And if you do decide to do something, will you let us know so we can send a few people your way?
	If you do something in the alternative media?
	You can spend four years writing four books if you want.
	You can learn a lot more About things that way, then do something active.
	You know, school is fundamentally passive.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	I did just buy a microphone and, you know, media set for my computer, so I think that's something I will end up doing.
	Yeah, but, you know, who's your favorite band?
	Oh, The Who.
	The Who, all right.
	The Who, did they go to music college?
	Um...
	I don't believe...
	No, I don't think any of them did.
	No, they did not.
	They went out and wrote music and played clubs and beat up on each other.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	You know, the Beatles went to Hamburg, not to the Royal Academy of Music.
	They went and played music.
	You know, the band members for Queen were all in college.
	They all quit to go do music.
	Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, these guys all dropped out of college to do their thing.
	I didn't go do a PhD.
	I went into the business world which gave me the entrepreneurial skills to make a go of this business and also gave me some real credibility when it comes to talking about free market stuff because You know, people can say, well, do you have a PhD in economics?
	I certainly don't.
	But I was an entrepreneur and a successful one for a decade and a half, I guess now going on 20 years, which means that I might know some things that even the PhD in economics don't know.
	Because I've actually done it.
	Yeah.
	Not just done the math, done the thing itself.
	Yeah.
	Well, I think...
	I think that helps clear that up.
	That was on my mind.
	Good.
	Well, I hope that helps.
	And, you know, if there's some college course you're dying for, I mean, most of them are online for free anyway.
	I mean, most of the professors have recorded their courses, and you can go and find them anyway, so...
	Mm-hmm.
	So that would be my suggestions.
	Okay.
	Um...
	Can I shower you with praises now?
	I'm going to assume my relaxed position of absorbing praise and I am ready.
	I've been listening to the show since you had Bill on and it's my new favorite thing on the internet.
	I really thank you for it.
	You've challenged a lot of opinions I've had before and I thank you for it.
	I've been able to share the show It's all my immediate family and a couple friends, and they're really enjoying it too.
	So, they all thank you as well.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	Favorite thing on the internet?
	So, we beat porn?
	Uh, second favorite.
	Okay, maybe working at home might not be the thing for you.
	Wow, tired.
	Hand cramped.
	I'll do some work.
	Well, no, I appreciate that.
	Hey, second favorite thing on the internet.
	I'll take that.
	That's pretty good.
	Yeah, I think, you know, we all know, right?
	But that's, you know, I appreciate it's very high praise.
	So I appreciate that.
	And, you know, hopefully, you know, first favorite thing on the internet didn't actually show up during the conversation, but we'll see.
	We'll see.
	But I appreciate that.
	Thanks for your very kind words.
	And you'll keep us posted about what you decide?
	I will, Steph.
	I'll be happy to.
	All right.
	All right.
	Well, thank you.
	And thanks, everyone, so much for these great conversations.
	It's a privilege and honor, which I still expect to get paid for.
	I know.
	I know.
	It's just how it works for me and for reality.
	So freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	To help us out, it's essential that you do.
	The right thing to do is something you have to do.
	Free ride on other people's good decisions.
	So, freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
	FDRURL.com slash Amazon.
	If you've got some shopping to do, why not?
	Use our affiliate link.
	It costs you nothing.
	Nothing, I tell you.
	So, thanks everyone so much for the calls tonight.
	And have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week.
	Look for the untruths about Donald Trump Part II, which will be out soon.
	And have a great, great weekend.

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