Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

April 28, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:13:23

3276 Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Mom - Call In Show - April 27th, 2016

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	You know, it's often struck me as incredibly unfortunate that you don't get the chance...
	To get the view of this conversation, of this philosophical show, in the way that I get to view this conversation, messages every day come pouring in about people who've changed their lives enormously for the better, people who've gotten into fantastic relationships, people who've gotten off drugs, people who have gotten rid of dysfunction in their lives, and people like this woman you're about to hear from in the first part of this call-in show.
	This woman who listened to a show I did years ago called Mommy Wars and then listened to a couple of other shows.
	She was pregnant.
	She sat down with her husband and said, I'm quitting my career.
	I'm going to be home with this baby.
	I'm going to be home with this child.
	I'm going to be there, committed.
	We're going to be peaceful parents.
	We're not going to hit.
	We're not going to punish.
	We're not going to yell.
	Everything's going to change from how we were raised.
	And they weren't raised terribly, but massive, massive improvements going on.
	This is the kind of thing that happens in this conversation.
	And you don't get to see it in the way that we get to see it here.
	But it's happening.
	And it's happening because of your support.
	It's happening because you're willing to go in your browser to freedomainradio.com slash donate, click on donate, and subscribe or donate to help us out.
	This kind of change is occurring.
	It is tangible.
	It is measurable.
	It is proactive.
	It is productive.
	It is a revolution from within that can truly change the world.
	And there's almost no limit to what we can achieve with what we're doing here collectively.
	And we can't do any of it without your help and without your support.
	So please, please, please help us to continue to do what we're doing in the world.
	Freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	That is what allows you and allows us to have the kind of effect on the world that we're having.
	And to have you have the privilege, as I did, of talking to and listening to a woman like the one at the beginning of this call-in show.
	Alright, well up for us today is Stephanie.
	Stephanie wrote in and said, I'm a 27-year-old, proud, stay-at-home mother, with the thanks of Stefan's shows on YouTube about the benefits.
	I was going to continue my career with a large company after my daughter's birth, but came across Stefan's shows on abandonment.
	I spoke to my husband, and we both agreed that we would change our lifestyle so that I could stay home.
	He found a better-paying job because he has a STEM degree, and we moved states, downsized our home, and live on a budget.
	One week after I gave birth, we moved.
	I never have regretted our decision, and am thankful for such a wonderful man who provides for me and our daughter.
	My question...
	Why do single mothers take zero responsibility for who they bring home around their children?
	Why do they blame the man and not themselves?
	To add on to that topic, why are stay-at-home mothers portrayed as having zero ambition and being uneducated?
	That's from Stephanie.
	Well, hello, Steph.
	How you doing?
	Good.
	How are you?
	It's good to speak with you.
	Nice to speak with you too.
	And it is one of these odd things.
	Way back, way back, I was watching, I guess I was in my early teens.
	There was an old show called WKRP in Cincinnati.
	And Howard Hessman played a pretty chaotic and confused and volcanically motivated DJ. And he was just talking about one day, he was talking about how...
	Oh, you know, there was a garbage strike on.
	I say, well, why don't you just take your garbage and drop it on the mayor's lawn?
	You know, because the mayor wasn't resolving the garbage strike.
	And what happened was a whole bunch of people went and dumped their garbage on the mayor's lawn.
	And then he freaked out because he's like, wow, people are actually listening.
	Like, I'm just in his room talking at a microphone.
	And he's like, people are actually listening.
	I can't go on again.
	He had this crisis of confidence.
	And when I, you know, I got to tell you, like, when I... When I get these messages, I mean, I'm thrilled and like so excited because it sort of reminds me that, you know, okay, I'm in this little white room and I'm doing my thing and I'm putting the words out there and, you know, a lot of feedback I get is from irrational atheists and people who say they were spanked.
	It turned out fine!
	Thank you very much.
	But seeing how, wow, you listen to the message, you kind of changed your life.
	I'm sure your husband is happy at the lower income.
	And that's Wow.
	I mean, thank you so much for letting me know.
	Well, no, really, thank you.
	And, you know, this is probably pretty blunt, but you really kicked me in the stomach, Stefan.
	Pre-pregnancy, let's hope, because that's a bad image for a pregnant woman to say.
	No, I was working a corporate job, and...
	One of our friends gave us your video on YouTube with George Zimmerman, and we both listened to it together, and we're like, what?
	This is amazing.
	So when I was at my job, actually, I found your mommy wars, and I'm, you know, sitting, typing away, and I'm pregnant, and it was just like, oh my goodness, okay, well...
	That's pretty life-changing.
	So I went home to my house.
	Sorry, what was it about the mommy wars?
	That was sort of about the stay-at-home versus the working mom.
	Just your brutal honesty about how specifically the abandonment of infants.
	And I just couldn't do that.
	I... It really struck with me.
	I went home, of course, and I talked to my husband.
	I told him, I said, I'm willing to do anything.
	If that means we downsize, fine.
	If we live out of a shoebox, fine.
	But let's do this right.
	And so we did.
	And I have zero regrets, but the main pushback that I'm getting specifically is from other women who say, well, that's great for you, but I have ambition.
	Oh, it's just like, you know, I mean, you want some cream with that wine?
	I mean, holy viciousness, eh?
	Right.
	And I do have ambition.
	I have goals.
	I'm educated.
	I have done a lot in my life.
	But I'm willing to put that aside for my daughter.
	Why don't you go down to where the working moms are?
	Well, I actually love my children.
	I had children spend time with them.
	I want to be a good mother.
	So off you go, ladies.
	Take off your sneakers.
	Put on your stilettos.
	Abandon your children.
	And then breast pump in a toilet.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	You wouldn't do that, right?
	Because, you know, although there may be valid reasons to do it, that'd be kind of catty.
	But yeah, I suppose it's fine for you, but you see, I have more than four and a half brain cells, so I'll be down answering customer service calls for quantum cooperation.
	That's the truth.
	Yeah, and I'm friends with a lot of stay-at-home mothers, and it's funny because when we get together, I mean, there's that awkward silence of, well, I'm planning on going back to school, or, oh, I'm planning on, you know, I'm looking for jobs, and I'm over here sitting, no, I'm not looking for a job.
	I'm not looking for further education.
	I'm just living in the present, and What I'm looking for from you is kind of advice, like how do I pep talk these stay-at-home mothers?
	All we're bombarded with is the glories of the single mother and the working mother and how they're faced for modern feminism, but that's not true.
	If anything, I'd say that what we do is the real feminism because we're raising children to understand the real world and how There's such a war on the stay-at-home mother and, you know, masculinity.
	So, yeah, I just, it's very frustrating.
	Well, yeah, I mean, I guess my question is, I mean, my response, and I don't get a lot of that.
	I certainly had a little bit of that, oh, you're a stay-at-home dad.
	I suppose that means you have an arts degree and no viable skills, and how nice for you.
	Yeah.
	I'm sorry, of course, that you can't join the mad male rat race to an early grave, but I suppose that's all right if you're willing to do some laundry.
	So there is a little bit of that for sure.
	But my question, I would just ask these people, well, why?
	Why is going back to work preferable to raising your children?
	I mean, now the answer would probably be something like, well, raising children is not very intellectually challenging.
	To which I would say, then you're doing it wrong.
	Because I'm a very smart guy, and I find parenting very intellectually challenging.
	Yes, very much so.
	You know, I was watching Donald Trump's speech today on foreign policy, pausing it and explaining it to my daughter.
	Now, anyone who thinks it's easy to go from Trump speak to seven-year-old speak in a way that's entertaining and engaging and illustrative and keeps their attention, well, that's a lot more challenging than any coding problem I ever worked on when I was in the business world.
	So if you're like, okay, if you're Not interacting with your kids and you're just kind of home or you're letting them have tablets or TVs or whatever.
	Like if you're not engaged with them and teaching them about the world and learning about them and helping them understand where their thoughts come from.
	You know, we play a game called chase the brain.
	Where did this thought come from?
	Oh, you were thinking of this truck.
	Well, what were you thinking of before that?
	And you go back until you can't remember.
	And whoever can go back the furthest, that teaches self-knowledge.
	Where do my thoughts come from?
	And so coming up with stuff that really engages and entertains and illustrates kids, that is not easy.
	This is not easy at all to do.
	And, you know, sometimes I'll just toss a book aside and I'll just make up a story on the fly.
	That's not easy to do, to keep it entertaining and engaging.
	So I don't know, like if somebody would say to me, well, don't you want to go and have a job to be intellectually stimulated again?
	It's like...
	I, you know, I can't really think of much.
	It may be this job and it's sort of like what I do with these conversations in its most fiery intensity.
	But there's a massive amount of intellectual stimulation engagement challenge that comes from being an engaged parent.
	So this dichotomy is like, well, you know, you could be designing code submodules for a DLL or, you know, you could be trying to explain a crazy world to a sane child.
	I'll take the latter challenge as something that's much more elevated.
	Right.
	Right.
	Well, and then, and to that, you know, there's that stereotype that stay-at-home mothers, you know, we just, we, we go and shop or, or that we, um, you know, just stay at home and watch TV. I mean, that's, that's further from the truth.
	So poppers and bonbons, right?
	Right.
	And it's, it's so further from the truth because, you know, I've got a nine month old and, and, uh, I mean, everything is grabbing and moving.
	And, you know, I rarely have the TV on.
	Have you ever been more alert?
	Like, you're like this radar, right?
	Like, danger, child, danger, child.
	What is their level of proximity?
	Because, you know, this...
	They're basically giant death magnets at that age, right?
	Right.
	And I've noticed, too, I'll go to the gym during the day, and I do send her in the daycare area.
	And you can tell.
	You can tell that the children who are not engaged or the ones that are just passed off, I mean, they're screaming, they're crying.
	And then there's my daughter who's going after the blocks and the knobs and the wheels and having a good time.
	And I think that that says a lot.
	But it just...
	I guess, Stefan, I'm just...
	I'm kind of pissed because it seems like the single mother and the working mother, they are in the spotlight.
	Like, yes, this is how you should be.
	And even when I was in college, I mean, I was like, oh, yeah, you know, I'll be that career woman and have...
	Kids and not really think about it.
	But now that I've gotten older and I've been exposed to information, it's not being put out there that it's okay to be a stay-at-home mother.
	It's okay.
	No, it's not that it's okay.
	Well, first of all, there's two things here that I don't want us to conflate.
	Maybe your experience has been different, Steph, but mine is that stay-at-home moms with a husband are They're generally portrayed as, you know, lazy losers who couldn't make it in the working world.
	Whereas single mothers are heroic.
	Right, right, yes.
	Right?
	So I don't want to sort of put the...
	Let's just talk about the stay-at-home moms or stay-at-home dads because single mothers is a whole different...
	I mean, I almost hear nothing negative about single mothers, you know, outside of some YouTube channels.
	This one included, I suppose.
	But, yeah, so it's the stay-at-home moms.
	And that is...
	You know, that comes straight out of the 60s.
	It comes straight out of feminism.
	And we can get into that in a sec, but I didn't want to interrupt you if you were still in mid-flow, so go ahead.
	No, that's quite all right.
	So there's a book by Daniel Crittenden, I think What Our Mothers Didn't Teach Us or whatever it is, that I read before I got married.
	And she was talking about how in the 60s there was this thing called a click moment.
	And what it was is the moms would be making lunches or doing laundry or driving their kids around someplace and there'd be a click moment and they'd say, I should be doing so much more than this.
	I should be more than a chauffeur and a maid and a cook.
	I have this brain, this ambition, this creativity.
	I want to do more.
	And it was a click moment.
	And from there, they began to view chores as unsatisfying and family life as confining, as...
	Hillary Clinton, in all her glorious femininity, said that traditional marriage is a prison.
	And I guess her husband is part of the rape room.
	But anyway, so there was this click moment where women suddenly said, I can do so much more than this.
	And, you know, frankly, if your job as a mother is to be a chauffeur and a maid and a cook...
	You suck at being a mom.
	That is terrible parenting.
	I mean, I drive my daughter places, and we go places, and I tell you, the car, I mean, you'll get this when your kid gets older, the car is a fantastic place for conversation.
	There's no distractions and all.
	You can have, like, the most amazing conversations in the car, because it's relaxed.
	You know there's not going to be any phone calls or interruptions or whatever.
	So, the idea that you're just a chauffeur, well, if you're just a chauffeur, then you are a disengaged parent who is not talking to his or her children.
	And if you're just a maid, well, get your kids involved and have conversations while you are engaged.
	Doing your chores.
	Get your kids involved in the laundry.
	I mean, stuff's got to get cleaned.
	Right, right.
	You know, so you can get your kids – like, you don't need a lot of brain power to empty a dishwasher, for God's sake.
	So get your kids in and have conversations with them.
	I mean, talk about the history of the fork.
	Talk about how funny the word spork is.
	I mean, there's so many things that you can do.
	But nobody enjoys chores.
	I mean, if I had to work out without headphones, I'd never do it again.
	I'd rather have an early death than do that boring, sweaty, dull, moving metal nonsense without either being on the phone or doing a show or listening to something or music.
	I mean, it's really, really boring.
	It's why I quit being a competitive swimmer when I was younger.
	It's like, here's my impression of what it's like to be a competitive swimmer.
	Gurgle, splash, gurgle, gurgle, splash, splash, gurgle, gurgle, turn, splash, gurgle.
	No headphones, no conversation.
	I am dying.
	I'm literally drowning in boredom.
	And so I went to other things where I could actually have conversations or at least listen to music while I was doing sort of the practice.
	The parents who were disengaged, who are dissociated, who aren't really enjoying being parents, who maybe shouldn't have been parents in the first place, well, they are not engaged with their children, and therefore they're functioning as utility robots around their children.
	And of course that's boring.
	Because if you have the capacity to do something really smart with your life, why on earth would you want to be a driver, a cook, or, I mean, a low-rent cook, or a maid?
	Of course not.
	I mean, if you had the chance to be a lawyer and you were a maid, yeah, you're kind of underutilizing yourself.
	But the idea that being a mom has something to do fundamentally with chores and not to do with engaging in challenging, exciting things Brain-molding conversations with the future of mankind means that you're completely missing what parenting is all about, and maybe you would be better off in an office.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, don't get me wrong.
	I mean, I do cook, I do clean, I do laundry, but I don't see it as a chore.
	I just see it as it's part of the deal.
	You know, my husband...
	He's an engineer and he works hard.
	He commutes.
	He gets up at sometimes 3 o'clock in the morning and I'm up too just because I'm a light sleeper.
	But then sometimes he doesn't come home until 5.
	I wouldn't expect him, oh hey honey, welcome home.
	How about that dinner?
	That's not part of the deal.
	But I definitely agree that if you see it as a chore then you're doing something wrong.
	And how is work not more of a chore?
	Right.
	I mean, you had reasonably high-level jobs.
	I mean, it's not like everything that your husband does is a rollercoaster.
	I mean, there are meetings.
	There is, like, memos.
	There's junk to read.
	There's procedures to go over.
	There's manuals to plow through.
	There's being stuck on customer support when you have a technical issue.
	I mean, it's not like everything in the working world is just so thrilling, you know?
	It's like...
	You know, you can be a Pulitzer Prize for being a writer, but if you just view it as typing, you're going to be discontented.
	And the sowing of the seed of discontent was foundational to sort of the slow detonation of the foundations of Western civilization.
	So, you know, what you're engaged in is a very, very important procedure and process and pushback.
	Because, I don't know, I don't know...
	You're a woman, and perhaps you could explain this to me, because, you know, naturally, you can speak for all women.
	But would you say, let me ask you this, would you say it is easier to talk a woman into being discontented, or is it easier to talk a man into being discontented?
	Oh, a woman, hands down.
	Take your time.
	I need you to think about this, because I don't know.
	You came back at me very quickly with that one.
	Tell me where that's coming from.
	Oh, well, before this, I'm in the military.
	I'm in the reserves.
	And I tell you, there's such a difference working with men and women.
	And it's excruciating that when you work with women, you have to be careful how you say it.
	Your tone has to be right.
	Make sure that, you know, you didn't put anything in there that could possibly be offensive or they could take the wrong way.
	But with a man, you know, you just...
	This is this.
	This is what needs to happen.
	And this is how we're going to do it.
	Cool.
	Let's do it.
	You know, but then...
	No, no.
	But have you ever heard the phrase, it's not what you said, it's how you said it.
	Yes, yes.
	And, you know, I'll admit I'm guilty sometimes.
	You know, my husband says that.
	Well, you are a woman, so that's okay.
	I mean, that you notice it is important.
	But go on with that.
	Because I was just reading the other day about how...
	Women are sort of being moved more into the front lines of the U.S. military.
	And what is it?
	The requirement for a man is 42 push-ups and the requirement for a woman rages between 13 and 19 push-ups.
	It's horrible.
	And, you know, love the ladies.
	But I'm telling you, if I'm on a battlefield and 195 pounds of me is lying there bleeding out, I want someone who can drag me back to a hospital.
	I don't want someone who's like...
	Oh, I can't lift you.
	It's like, how is this supposed to work?
	But, you know, I've only been in for four years and I don't regret any of my decisions.
	I don't regret it, but it's changed so much in four years that I'm just, I'm eager to get out.
	I am just...
	Oh, you mean the military has changed?
	Right.
	And it's just, you know, that's a perfect example is, you know, the women coming in Everybody's catering to the female that, oh, you know, diversity.
	And we get, you know, slideshow presentations of diversity training and, you know, equal opportunity.
	And I'm always, you know, pushing back at that because, you know, it...
	The military isn't meant to be like that, and things are changing so quickly to cater to that, that a lot of the stronger presence, especially the masculinity of the military, is leaving.
	And I was also going to bring up to the point, too, that a lot of the, you know, people that I've seen are single mothers.
	You know, they get the free child care from the government, from the military, free housing, and that's just like a big vacuum for single mothers to come into the military.
	And it's...
	What?
	Hang on, what?
	What?
	Sorry, I've not heard of this one.
	I mean, I know that America is not wildly combat ready.
	What is it?
	The Navy's gone down from 500 to 270.
	Yeah, watch the speech.
	Ships and the Air Force is down by a third and personnel are down from, what, 3 million to 2.2 or something.
	What, the Xena Princess Warrior Single Mom Fighter Battalion is being formed?
	Yeah, yeah.
	And I'm in a combat support.
	And I would say out of the...
	20, maybe 10 to 20 females.
	I'd say a good 70% are single mothers.
	And it's...
	But how...
	So the army...
	The army is fine if you have no husband, you have a baby.
	Yes, you can come into the army.
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	Really?
	It's incentive, too, because, you know, oh, we'll take care of the childcare and, you know, housing and food and...
	Yeah, yeah.
	Wow, so when I talk about women being married to the state, sometimes the groom shows up in battle fatigues.
	Right, right.
	And I'm in the reserves, so I can't speak for active duty, but although I have been on active duty, I see that as well.
	And it makes it a very difficult working environment because even as a female, If you say, hey, I need this, this, and this done, completed by this time, it's, well, I've got to take my son to this doctor, or he's sick, or whatever.
	This is the military.
	I'm sorry, but I don't care.
	Oh, God.
	I'm sorry.
	I didn't know.
	Just when I think things have gotten so completely insane...
	Sorry, I can't deploy that day because it conflicts with my kid's orthodontics deployment.
	Can you just move the invasion of France a day, maybe day and a half later, assuming I get some good sleep and I'm not currently lactating into my uniform?
	And it's sad too because, you know...
	You talk to these female mothers, soldiers, whatever, and they all have, you know, multiple kids, or specifically one.
	And, you know, the family care plans, if, you know, if something happens, then contact my lawyer, and the kid gets bounced here, and then here, and then they get, you know, it's just a huge mess.
	And then all the while, the Army's pushing, you know, lactation, Information and, you know, areas where women can go, you know, breastfeed and that's being...
	Oh my God!
	Are you kidding me?
	No.
	I'm telling you, I don't mean to be too old-fashioned, but as far as I remember it, the liquid the military is supposed to be spilling is not breast milk!
	Oh, that's funny.
	No, that's definitely being pushed right now.
	And, yeah, I'm...
	I'm done.
	I'm ready to cut my losses.
	Even when I joined, it was different.
	You had all of the battle-hardened soldiers that were coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
	They were your platoon sergeants.
	I'm an officer, so they're teaching you things that are very valuable, especially with leadership.
	And then you see this new wave coming in of, you know, single mothers and changing the standards and letting women into combat.
	And it's just it's it's mind blowing how quickly things have changed.
	Yeah.
	And I mean, it's just become another government program and another giant welfare state just pretending to be armed.
	I mean, the research shows that female military veterans commit suicide at nearly six times the rate of other women.
	Right.
	Women, women in combat roles get depressed significantly more.
	Look, I used to be more sort of egalitarian and so on.
	But the research seems to be pretty clear that, you know, women are built to create life.
	They're not particularly well handled for the brutal disassembly of other human beings.
	Right, right.
	And, you know, again, I don't mean to be all kinds of, you know, old school about this, but this is what the data seems to show pretty clearly.
	Women are not well suited to combat.
	And, of course, it creates problems in the unit cohesion because men are vying for the attention of Of course, the men get resentful as well because the women literally cannot pull their weight.
	Right, absolutely.
	Especially for me, at my peak physical condition, I was 150 pounds and I could lift maybe 200 pounds.
	But with a full combat load, I mean, you're pushing, if a guy's 200 pounds, 300 pounds, there's no way.
	There's no way that I could carry that or drag it or move it, you know?
	And that's one of the big arguments against, you know, women in combat.
	Well, it's life and death.
	It's life and death.
	You know, it's like the female fireman, you know?
	Like, I want someone who can shoulder down a big door, not someone who's going to bounce back like a pinball.
	But everyone dances around that, and they say, well, you know, there's some excuse, but when it comes down to it, there's no excuse in combat.
	I mean, I haven't been deployed.
	I always got, like, right on the edge of it.
	But it just, it cannot happen.
	And it's difficult too because, you know, when I interact with, especially liberal females who are like, oh yeah, women in combat, I always engage them and say, well, what do you know about it?
	You don't even know what you're talking about.
	You don't know what it's like.
	And how, like Hillary Clinton, how do you have an opinion on this?
	If you've never even been in the military, you haven't even seen a combat unit It's just beyond frustrating.
	Like I said, I'm ready to cut my losses.
	Especially having a daughter now.
	My mind's completely changed.
	In college, I was kind of groomed for that career woman, military.
	But now that I'm a mother, it's like, no, stay at home.
	Raise her right.
	Support my husband.
	Be that support for him and her.
	And I'm happy with that, but that's not what's being told to females right now.
	What is it, do you think, Steph, that makes women so susceptible to being talked into being discontented?
	I just think it's not so much being discontented, it's just that allure of you can do it all.
	You can be whatever you want to be, you can do whatever you want to do, and you can do it just as great as a man.
	And When you live that, when you try to obtain that, it never pans out.
	Because we're different.
	We operate differently.
	And I think that has a lot to do with it.
	And all of that just propaganda that is seeped into our brains when we're younger, especially in my generation, that, you know...
	You know, just the media and that men are being portrayed as weak and so women need to step up to the plate but when you do step up to the plate it's kind of a hard plate to stand on, you know?
	Yeah, I mean I certainly like know when I was growing up and I think just in general, I mean, if you're doing one thing, you're not doing something else.
	Right.
	It's called the alibi principle.
	You can't just be in two places at the same time.
	And this idea that women can be both great moms and great career women, I mean, that's...
	You know, like if you're married, you shouldn't be out dating.
	And if you're out dating, it's because you're not married, right?
	I mean, you can't do, you can't get both at the same, you can't be in a monogamous relationship and a polygamous relationship at the same time.
	You can't be at work and at home at the same time.
	And this, because I get these messages all the time from the single mom saying, well, you know, I'm a single mom and I'm, you know, I'm supporting my family and I'm going to work and I'm going to school and so why would you have any problems with me?
	It's like, because if you're going to work and you're going to school, You're not being a good mom.
	Right.
	Because you're not there.
	You can't be in two places at the same time.
	In most places, you can't bring your kids.
	Yeah.
	That reminds me.
	That was the kick in the stomach.
	I remember you saying you're either a great mother or you're a great business person or worker, but you can't be both.
	I live that.
	I completely agree.
	I made the choice.
	I made the choice to be a great mother because...
	I can always find a job.
	Whatever that job may be, I can get a job.
	But I can't go back and redo the raising of our children.
	I grew up with a mother who worked And my father worked and they worked at the same time.
	And to this day, my mother works.
	And I say, you know what?
	I would rather spend time with you than you to work and send me baby clothes or whatever.
	That time is irreplaceable.
	Does your daughter need you?
	I can hear her a little bit.
	No, my husband.
	He got it.
	Okay.
	All right.
	He's getting the boobs with floss.
	All right.
	Got it.
	And that, you know, that is a funny thing, too, because, you know, if you have kids, it's not like people are saying, you can never work again.
	I mean, it's not like you're expelling yourself.
	It's a couple of years.
	Right.
	A couple of years.
	A couple of years per kid.
	You know, we take time off from the workforce to go to school or go to college, right?
	If people do that.
	So you take a couple of years or four years maybe more to go to college and you do that because it's an investment in your future and it's like why is college and you and your paycheck more important than the life that you have created that biologically and psychologically and emotionally and dare I say spiritually is completely and totally dependent and wedded upon your proximate existence.
	Why is college more important than the literal flesh and blood of your loins?
	It's so weird.
	I go to college, see, because it's going to help me make some more money during the course of your...
	Okay, well then take some time off so that you can have a high quality relationship with your child.
	Because parenting, man, I mean, this is what's so great about what you're doing.
	Parenting is totally and completely Pay me now or pay me later.
	Right.
	And you can choose to say, well, you know, two months after my kid was born, there I was back at work.
	Good wage slave!
	Good job!
	Good job!
	Because you really need to give that money to the government so it can use it as collateral to sell your kid off into slavery.
	Good job!
	Good wage slave!
	Because what's going to happen is you don't have the bond with your kid, which means there's a lot of conflict, a lot of fighting, a lot of lack of trust, and then Come the teenage years.
	And what were yours like?
	Well, at that time, my dad was in Iraq, and so that kind of falls into why I joined the military.
	And my mom worked at a hospital on base, and so she was dealing with, you know, all the soldiers getting life-flighted back to the States, you know, all the combat wounded.
	Honestly, I was lonely, and so I got a job.
	I was a waitress.
	I learned how to be an introvert, and I learned that when I do spend time with my parents, it's very...
	Get to the point and then it's valued.
	And when I have my daughter, I see it differently now because I don't want her to have to wait for my time and I don't want her to feel like time is so valuable and it's so precious.
	Yes it is, but I don't want that anxiety of getting my attention, if that makes sense.
	No, no, it totally makes sense.
	And as you know, the studies are all very clear.
	Like, my job as a parent, it's mostly done now.
	You know, my daughter is seven.
	My job as a parent was mostly done two years ago.
	Now there's, you know, a little course corrections and touch-ups here and there, but my job as a parent was way done.
	Now it's just, you know, food, housing, and fun.
	But...
	The idea that you don't bond with your kids, you don't develop that close relationship, that intimacy with your kids when they're young, when they're dependent, when they really are going to bond with you physically, biologically.
	If you don't do it, then what happens is people then try and course correct later on when they don't have the credibility of early intimacy.
	Your job as a mom, Steph, is going to be so much easier going forward because your daughter is bonded with you.
	She knows that you are her number one priority.
	That she is your, sorry, she is your number one priority.
	That you care for her just about more than anything.
	And you have all of that, right?
	So, you know, my daughter will shave against me.
	You know, yeah, we got her a bike.
	Sure, you gotta wear some elbow pads.
	I don't want her elbow pads.
	I say that, but you know my job is to keep you safe and that's what I've been doing for seven years.
	Yeah, okay, fine.
	There's not that level of conflict because you have the credibility of early intimacy and pouring your resources into your child so that she knows that you love and you care and you respect and you cherish and nurture her.
	As you go forward, you're just going to have that authority.
	It's not a bossy authority.
	It's a well-earned authority.
	It's always fascinating to me when I see people who are unable to give Legitimately earned authority to other people.
	They're just fighting against everything all the time.
	And it's sort of pointless.
	You have to give up legitimately earned authority.
	You know, my dentist tells me to do something.
	I'll do something.
	Okay, fine.
	I'll wear a night guard if I can.
	Right?
	And so all of these things, your job is going to be so much easier.
	But what happens is people end up butting heads with their kids literally for the rest of their lives.
	It's not just through the teenage years, but on and on and on because they don't have...
	Have that intimate, loved, connected foundation at the beginning.
	Man, it's tough to course-correct later on.
	It's like, hey, I've driven off a cliff.
	Now I'm going to start turning the wheel.
	Nope.
	The wheels are no longer on the ground.
	It's too late.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	That's very insightful.
	I hadn't really thought about that when she gets older.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And then what happens is everyone grows up with those kind of parents where they're constantly butting heads and don't realize that it is the absence of intimacy that is causing the problems.
	Because if you go and work when your kid is young, when your kid is a baby, when your kid is a toddler, the kid doesn't know anything about the outside world.
	You can't explain to the child why mommy is taking her food bags and heading out on the road.
	You can't explain.
	The kid doesn't understand that.
	All the kid knows.
	Is that something is either forcing mummy to be away, in which case the world is dangerous and scary.
	She's being kidnapped every day.
	Or she is choosing to be somewhere other than where he is.
	In which case, how can she love him?
	If you choose something...
	More than your child or all you are communicating to your child is that you love something more than your child.
	Right.
	And that's not a child's misinterpretation.
	That is an actual fact.
	We judge people.
	I'm an empiricist, just as everyone is and just as children are.
	We think that we can convince children with words.
	Mommy's going to work because she loves you.
	And mommy, you know, here's a dull scenario where the mommy is going to buy things for the child.
	Like, we think that we can somehow correct the empiricism of our actions through the sophistry of our language.
	It's nonsense.
	The children know for an absolute fact that you are choosing something at their expense over them.
	That you love something so much more that you're willing to harm your children by your absence to go and do that thing.
	Now, we have so evolved that it's less problematic for the dads to go because the dads were the hunter-gatherers and so on.
	And, you know, if the dads and moms switch roles, which a lot of times they did when women died in childbirth through the evolution of the species and so on, and fathers are equally as important, and I don't, you know, we just did this thing in the last show about that, so I won't repeat it here.
	But the people empirically say to their kids, mommy is willing to harm you to go and conform with the socialist lesbian expectations of radical feminism.
	Andrea Dworkin is my real partner in this at your expense or whatever it's going to be.
	And then what happens is the parents demand respect.
	What?
	You've just devalued and bathed in contempt your own child by choosing something at their expense that you want.
	And then you ever criticize your children for being selfish?
	Are you kidding me?
	Yeah.
	And then you say to your kids, well, you have to think about the feelings of other people.
	Really?
	So when you all skated off off to work leaving your kids in some daycare or with some person who was not as good as you and certainly wasn't their mom...
	Were you caring about your kids' feelings?
	And then we say, well, you've got to be sensitive to other people's feelings.
	Well, you've modeled the exact opposite.
	You've modeled compliant, conformist, empty-headed, Selfishness as a mom and then you get upset because your kids grow up and don't really care that much about your feelings and then you nag and lecture them which is even more demanding a respect that you haven't earned which is exactly the same as going to work.
	It's demanding something you haven't earned and it's demanding that they comply to you at their own expense of the the integrity of their own empirical history and evidence of your behavior and then people what happens is the kids then grow up and say man Parents and parenting suck!
	And then they don't want to have kids because, man, it was a lot of work, a lot of fights, it wasn't that much fun.
	Whereas parenting is the most fun.
	You know, you're never too old to have a happy childhood, right?
	Parenting is the most fun.
	And so what happens is the kids with refractuous distance, combating, no authority, no intimacy, no legitimacy, no respect, no honor, parenting, bang, bang, bang, headbutt, headbutt, headbutt, they grow up saying, my God, the last thing I'd ever want to be as a parent, all we did was fight.
	And then, well, you need third world migrants to end of civilization, but we've done that before, but go on.
	Yeah, well, and I've brought that up, too, to other women, and I always get the pushback, especially working mothers, of, well, it's not that black and white.
	And, you know, some people can't afford that, or I actually want my kid to go to good schools, and it's just, it's a constant digging to you, but then you know that, okay, well, I'm actually making sense here because you're defending your behavior.
	Without an argument.
	It's not that black and white?
	What the hell does that mean?
	I don't even know what that two and two is for.
	Well, it's more nuanced than that.
	What?
	Nuance is not an argument.
	It's more complex than that.
	A, that's an insult.
	And B, it's not an argument.
	Right.
	And I've, I mean, especially when I was working and I, I made this decision before I told anybody on my coworkers, I would get, um, these mothers coming up to me and saying, Oh, congratulations, but don't worry.
	In six weeks, you'll be wanting to give your baby to daycare and you'll just need a break.
	And then when I said, hey, you know, I'm quitting and I'm going to be a stay-at-home mother, then it was, wow, I really envy you.
	Okay, well, which one is it?
	Do you need that break or do you envy me?
	Because it seems like you're trying to convince yourself that what you're doing by working is the right thing to do.
	But in the back of your mind, you know that it's not the right thing to do.
	But yet, they try to come together and support each other and it's just a big life vest.
	Yeah.
	No, no, it's true.
	You know, I mean, six weeks after your birth of your child, of course, of course you'll want to drop your child off in a daycare or get a nanny or just put them somewhere else.
	You don't have to take care of them.
	You know, exactly the same way that you come back from your honeymoon and people say, oh, no, man, like in a couple of weeks, you'll be totally happy to go and buy your husband a prostitute because, I mean, you'll be so sick and tired of having sex with him.
	You're going to want to go out.
	You'll be willing to give up water buffaloes.
	You'll be buying people chickens.
	You'll be flying them out to Cambodia.
	Because, my God, why would you ever want to have sex with the guy again?
	You've already done that.
	Yeah.
	But, you know, honestly, at six weeks, I didn't feel that way.
	No!
	I didn't.
	And I wanted to be with her.
	I wanted, every day, like, I felt like, oh, there's something new.
	There's something new that I'm seeing.
	She's looking at something different, and she's responding to me differently.
	And, yeah, I think it's just a load of crap.
	Yeah, my daughter...
	I said two days ago, just sat down with me and said, Dad, gotta answer me something.
	Why do we use the word window for window rather than door?
	Why do things have the names that they have?
	And it was, I mean...
	Great question.
	You know, we could answer a little bit, and I mentioned this before, but, you know, the stuff that you talk about all the time tends to be single-syllable because it's more efficient.
	Like, you don't want to use the word Ahmed, Ahmed Ahmed Ahmedajad for your hand because it's going to take a little bit of time to get anything explained.
	And we could talk about, you know, people's occupations, farmer, baker, smith, and all that.
	But, you know, and we looked up some words, but all etymology does is tell you where the first instance of the word was.
	Nobody tells you why it was that way.
	And, yeah, so we don't know.
	And we looked at some of the words that we've made up in the family and why.
	But, man, that's cool, you know, because, I mean, I guess everyone's had that thought, but I haven't really thought about it in a while.
	But it's a really, really important thought.
	And I just, the fact that she's now generating her own thoughts, questions, and ideas, rather than me asking her questions and we sort of go from there.
	God, it's glorious.
	It's exciting.
	It's glorious.
	And it's, you know, it only continues from here.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And I'm like, useless intellectual curiosity.
	You can take over my show.
	No, especially in my case with my nine-month-old, you know, she's starting to respond or call me mama or, you know, she reaches out to me and it's just like, ah, this is the smartest baby in the world.
	You know, obviously, probably not.
	But in my eyes, it's just amazing.
	Why not?
	Why not?
	She's the smartest baby in your world and that's really all that matters, right?
	Right.
	But yeah, I can't imagine missing that.
	And for a career to develop into a career, I just, it's not worth it.
	You know, where's the Cats in the Cradle song from Alms?
	You know that Cats in the Cradle song, you know, he learned to walk while I was away.
	Where's the one from Alms?
	It's like, well, no, we can't push that wound because we might actually be able to do something about it.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And it's just...
	But again, you know, I kind of go back to my original question.
	It's like just being in a surrounding of stay-at-home mothers, just that feeling in the air that we're not enough or that we need to push for education or...
	Oh, you mean to get yourself back into school or something?
	Right, right.
	And I mean, I know I'm set in my situation right now.
	I'm not...
	Looking for anything like that.
	But how do I encourage the other mothers?
	You know, I guess that's kind of circling back to my question.
	Just ask them why was your input?
	Yeah.
	I guess I'd say why now?
	Like of all times.
	You know, like let's say you live for 80 years.
	You got five years now.
	Where you can be a stay-at-home mom.
	Like, why would you want to jam other stuff into those five years?
	You know, it's like, I want to be a ballerina and get an MBA. It's like, why do those two things have to happen at the same time?
	Right.
	And learn Japanese.
	And it's like, you know, because you know what it's like, especially with a nine-month-old.
	And, you know, it depends on the kid and so on.
	But, I mean, if you're not...
	Sleeping, you're wanting to sleep, right?
	Because, you know, they're up all night and you're wrecked, right?
	I mean, you go to school.
	I mean, it's insane, right?
	I mean, I was barely able to get any shows out during the first six months of my daughter's life in terms.
	It's just wrecked.
	And so, why now?
	Like, why now?
	Why?
	Of all the times, of all the times, to...
	Want to jam education into something?
	Why now?
	It's going to take you away from your child.
	And it's going to make your future job as a parent much harder.
	And there is this weird thing.
	And this goes, you know, I'm sure you had this in the army as well.
	People have this in every career situation.
	And they have it in other situations as well.
	And it goes something like this.
	And we used to say this when I was in the software field all the time.
	We'd say, look...
	You can fix a problem nine times easier in the planning phase than in the execution phase.
	Yes.
	Right?
	In the planning phase rather than the execution phase.
	And people would say, well, we've got to get the specs done.
	We've got to start building this thing.
	We've got to get moving.
	And my question was always, well, if we don't have the time to fix it now, when it's nine times easier to fix, how on earth are we going to have the time to fix it later when it's nine times harder to fix?
	If we don't have an hour now to hammer out this specification, how on earth are we going to have nine or more hours later on when we're actually doing it?
	Forget the blueprints.
	Let's just start building this house.
	We've got no time.
	It's like, okay, but when the walls don't meet, how are we going to fix it then?
	When the ceiling is two feet too low, how are we going to fix it?
	If we don't have time to fix it in the planning phase, how are we going to fix it in the execution phase?
	And All of early childhood is planning for the teenage years and beyond.
	And so if they don't have time to do proper parenting now, how are they going to have time to do reactive parenting with non-bonded children later?
	There's this magical belief that people say, well, I don't have to be around my kid when they're that younger because I'll just nag them later.
	Or I'll just be on them later, or it'll just somehow magically happen that I'll get authority without proximity, which is like wanting to get paid without showing up for work.
	You show up for work with your children and you get paid with the currency of authority.
	My daughter certainly has a mind of her own and is certainly willing to push back, and sometimes she's entirely right to do so, but she really listens to what I say because I have credibility and the authority of having been there and been invested, not just been around, but invested.
	And so I need little tiny conversations with her.
	I need little tiny course corrections because she really listens.
	So it's easy.
	It's easy.
	It's the difference between a wild grizzly and one that's well-trained, so to speak, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	And so, if people say, well, I've got to go back to school, first of all, that's just guilt, and it's just conformity.
	I don't think, like, do you ever wake up in the morning and say, wow, I really wish I was studying statistics right now?
	No, I'm thinking, I need to get a bottle, or I need to do...
	You're like, wow, you know, my first bath in three days would be fantastic.
	You know what I'm saying?
	Hope I didn't leak through my nightie again, right?
	I mean, that's where, you know, how's my daughter?
	I used to write two books a year back before my daughter was born.
	I haven't written a book since she was born.
	That's going to come back.
	But the reason I'm willing to give up seven years of writing books is because if I was writing all these books and not being as effective or involved a parent...
	writing any books when she becomes a teenager forever because I'd be redealing with all that nonsense, right?
	It's just investment.
	So no, no, women don't want to wake up and say, gosh, I'd really love to be studying hotel management, you know, after having slept for three hours over the past two days, you know, be excellent if I could create imaginary menus to the G8 summit or I mean, nobody wakes up.
	There's just this vague residual guilt that somehow by being a mother, by shaping and creating the minds and souls of the next generation of human beings, that you're just not doing enough.
	Well, all I did was create life and mold and shape and implant in it, in that life, the values that sustain civilization.
	But all the same time, I could have been managing a restaurant.
	That reminds me of my husband.
	Some days he'll come home and Like, oh, I didn't do anything today.
	You know, I'm kind of disheveled.
	And he's like, no, no, no, no.
	You were raising our daughter today.
	I'm like, yeah, but no, that's enough.
	Like, oh, okay.
	That's very good.
	Look, this is the thing, too.
	And sorry to interrupt.
	But that's a really important thing, which is probably hard for you to...
	I shouldn't say that.
	Of course, it's easy for you to see.
	You can do military stuff.
	You can see this stuff.
	But, you know, what you say here in your initial contact with us, you said...
	I've never regretted our decision and I'm thankful for such a wonderful man who provides for me and our daughter.
	Why do women want to go back to school when they have children?
	Because they're afraid their marriages won't work out and they'll need job skills.
	Oh, yeah.
	So the degree of dependence, you know, you are depending on your husband's integrity, almost to the same degree that your daughter's depending on your presence.
	Because you are completely handing over in some way, you know, I mean, you get divorced and taken for half he's worth, but you know, not that kind of person, your case selected, obviously.
	But you are depending on your husband.
	And if you did not love and trust your husband, Then you would feel, okay, well, what's my plan B? You know, I mean, maybe he'll find some young engineer hottie at work, and then he'll have an affair, and then he'll leave me, and then I'll be stuck here, and I'll have no job skills, and I'm going, ah, starvation, I'll have to eat my child!
	You know what I mean?
	So the fact that you trust your husband is one of the reasons why you can relax into being a mom.
	Right, right.
	Yeah, I doubt he'll find the engineer hottie, Stefan.
	I think that's a bit of a stretch, I'm just saying.
	Yeah.
	They have hardy pinups.
	You know, maybe he'll date a pinup.
	And I don't know if pinups even exist.
	Probably screensavers now.
	But the point is that you trust your husband to be there for the duration.
	Therefore, you can relax into being taken care of so that you can take care of Because the husband creates the biosphere of security which allows the mom to bond with the child.
	And you trust your husband enough and give him authority that he can, over time, begin to peel you away from your child and give the child a little bit of breathing room to experience risk, hurt themselves and grow that way.
	This hyper, you know, you've been one with your daughter, so your pain is her pain.
	And, you know, you need a little bit of distance from that to some degree so that your kid can grow up without the sort of bubble wrap of maternal fear of disaster all over the place all the time.
	And there's nothing wrong with that.
	That's natural.
	I'm like, yeah, go up one step and try another jump.
	My wife's like...
	Right.
	So she sees, you know, the top of one of those Aztec ruins jumping from that.
	But the fact is that the women who say, I have to go back to work, are saying, I don't trust my husband.
	Because he could divorce me or I could divorce him.
	I'm going to need job skills.
	I'm going to need a resume because otherwise I'm totally dependent.
	And it somehow has become unfeminine to depend on your husband.
	And all that tells me is that the women are choosing the wrong guys.
	Yes, that's so true.
	And you know, that's funny you say that too because some of the stay at home mothers I know, not all of them, but say, well, you know, if this doesn't work out, I'm like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no whole red flag.
	You have a child.
	You're going to make it work now.
	It just, it blows my mind that there's always that escape hatch in the back of their brains.
	Oh, you're like they're saying, well, you know, if my marriage doesn't work out?
	Right, right.
	Oh my god.
	You know, and I'm just like, ah, don't say those things.
	No, and what they're, you know, let me give you that translation, if you don't mind me saying so.
	When they say, if it doesn't work out, it's like, well, I don't really want to stop being a bitch.
	So if it turns out that me still being a bitch threatens my marriage, well, I'll never have to stop because I'll have some backup.
	It's like, because to me, the idea of, and, you know, I'm sure this is your experience too, There's no, I wonder if it's going to work out.
	That's so passive.
	Make it work out.
	Deal with your problems.
	Keep your communication lines open.
	Fight fair.
	Fight reasonably.
	Don't yell.
	Don't insult.
	Don't call names.
	Don't do stupid, immature tantrum stuff.
	It's not like, well, I cross my fingers and hope it works out.
	It's like, yeah, you can cross your fingers and hope you don't get sick.
	Or you can just eat well and exercise and that's going to raise your odds, right?
	I mean, so this idea like, I hope it works out, that's so passive and that means that they're not willing to commit to the kind of behavior that's going to give them a virtual certainty of it working out.
	Yes, that's so true.
	Yeah, I... I just want to like, I feel most protective, especially like my brain has completely changed from being a mother.
	It's just, I'm so protective, not only for my daughter, but other kids.
	And I just want to be like, ah, what are you doing?
	Stop it.
	Like, smack them.
	Like, no, this is a child.
	You can't think like that anymore.
	You know, I mean, our generation, you know, I'm 27 and a lot of us, you know.
	You mean you and your husbands, right?
	Because I'm not.
	Yeah.
	Well, yes, excuse me.
	It was nice of you to include me even potentially in that, but it's not going to happen.
	Go ahead.
	You know, we've come from broken homes.
	My parents have been married for almost 30 years, so I can't speak for that.
	But the damage has been done of this escapism for divorce, using it as an option.
	And it can't be when you have a child.
	And I've seen, at least our circle of friends, strong marriages, but our parents, that generation of just, you know, flippant divorce and remarriage is just, it's done its damage.
	And I think that's reflective in, you know, the modern day feminism of the, you know, the working mother.
	You know, I think that's kind of, there's a correlation there.
	Of just having divorce as an option.
	And it can't be an option.
	No, no, no, it can't be.
	And just think how much better choices people would make about their marriage partners if divorce was not an option.
	Yeah, yeah.
	There was a good wife that was on the other night where the woman's son came home with some guy.
	Some woman she wanted to marry.
	He wanted to marry.
	And...
	The woman was basically saying, well, you know, we'll go to France, we'll get married, and, you know, if it doesn't work out, we'll get divorced.
	You know, he said, my parents were together, and then they were divorced.
	They're still friends, you know.
	And the woman was like, well, why get married at all, then, if there's no commitment or whatever?
	The woman was like, taxes.
	Yeah.
	And that sense of, like, sexuality and marriage have basically become Selfish commodities for personal pleasure rather than what they're designed for, which is to create a productive and positive and healthy and helpful environment to raise children in.
	Sexuality is around children, right?
	I mean, you have a different relationship, I dare say, to your vagina now that life has come out of it because now you realize, okay, that's what it's for, you know?
	Yeah.
	That's what it's for.
	It's not just for fun and recreation, although there's part of it, but it really is for the creation of life.
	Marriage is around creating an enclosure, a moat, a biosphere, which is the best place for raising children and sexuality is what produces children and maintains the bond between the parents and that's all fantastic.
	But sexuality has just become this personal toy.
	You know, like morphine is supposed to be for an operation, not just for a fun Saturday night.
	Yeah.
	Yes.
	But, you know, going back to the taxes, that's interesting you say that too, because in the military, a lot of people get married just so they can get a higher, we call it a BH, but a higher allowance from the government to live in a larger house, or they get more money for, you know, if they have a family, you get more money.
	And that kind of goes along with that too, is, you know, why there's so much dysfunction in military, because military spouses, I mean, there's a...
	Let's say 60, maybe higher, maybe I'm low-balling it here, but there's a 60% chance of divorce, the divorce rate in the military.
	And I think that's what you were saying, is that people get married for money.
	Yeah, I mean, the military claims to bring stability to the Middle East, but you just bring stability to your own marriages, and then maybe we'll believe you've got something to say about the Middle East.
	Yes, yes.
	So...
	As far as trying to change other people's minds, you know, the challenge is, and there is something about female nature, not to be overly collectivist, but there is something about female nature that is somewhat conflict avoidant, particularly female to female.
	And like I was just reading the other day, About how genetic counselors, right, I mean, if there's risks of genetic problems, they do testing of the genes of the husband and the wife or the mother and the father, and then they give them all this information.
	Now, 95% of the time, if it turns out through genetic testing that the father is not actually the father of the child he thinks is the father of the child, 95% of the time the genetic counselor will not tell the father.
	Even though that genetic counselor clearly knows that the father is not actually the father of the child he thinks is his child.
	95% of the time, the genetic counselor will not tell the husband.
	Now, Steph, just to put on your guessing cap, what percentage of genetic counselors do you think are women?
	Oh, probably 85%.
	Actually, interestingly enough, it's 95%.
	It's the exact same number as the number of genetic counselors who will not tell the husband.
	Now, I don't know if they've done that study, but I'm guessing that the 5% who are men are probably a little bit more keen or at least willing to tell the supposed father that he's not actually the father of his child.
	Now, there are some times when doctors do have to tell the father, but mostly that's like if...
	This can sometimes happen in families where...
	They have a kid, they supposedly have a kid, and then they're really having trouble having a second child.
	So they both go in for their testing, right?
	And the woman's fine, but it turns out the man is completely sterile.
	At which point he says, well, I don't think I used to be because I have a child.
	And they're like, no, you're totally sterile.
	You got no tadpoles in the pool.
	Nothing's getting past the goalie because there's no puck on the ice.
	So go have a conversation with your wife.
	And then they find out that, oh, yeah, the aerobics instructor from Malibu three years ago, whatever, right?
	And so this sort of female in-group preference where the vast majority of genetic counselors are women and the vast majority exactly the same percentage of genetic counselors don't tell a man if he's not the father because that creates trouble for the wife, right?
	And it's female in-group preference.
	This female in-group preference is something that's a great challenge for you because how is it possible for you to assert the value of your choices without either explicitly or implicitly Kind of casting some aspersions on the choices of other women?
	Oh, and I have already, Stefan.
	I already have.
	And that's when I get the, well, it's not that black and white.
	And, well, I have ambition.
	And I just stand there like, okay, good.
	I think you got my point.
	I don't think I need to go any further because you're just trying to convince yourself now.
	So you let it go at that point, right?
	Yeah, I do.
	I do.
	And you have them call in to me?
	Because I don't have female preference and I'm happily married, so I don't want to have sex with any of them.
	And I'm also not a woman, so I could be pretty blunt.
	If you want to have them call into me, I'd be thrilled because I wouldn't let it go with that.
	And I certainly wouldn't let it go with the passive aggression of, well, I have ambition, you sloth of nothingness, right?
	I mean, that's just...
	That would be something that would get my gander going.
	My emotional side too kicks in and I think, oh, you know, I'm a woman.
	I get emotional and I think, well, am I not ambitious?
	And then I have to say, no, stop.
	You have done more in your life in 27 years than they'll probably ever do in their lifetime.
	So I just need to put the brakes on that and look at it in a different light.
	But, you know, it's hard.
	It's hard.
	I'm not going to lie.
	And it's hard to be criticized too.
	And maybe I just need to put my big girl pants on and be a little abrupt, but...
	It's very hard.
	You know, particularly, you know, if you have...
	I don't need to tell you this, I mean, you're in an army environment, so you're in a kind of a biosphere, and, you know, you want other kids around, you want other parents around, so it's pretty tricky, right?
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	So, no, I wouldn't say it's just like a big girl...
	I mean, it's a big deal.
	Trust me, I've had a little bit of experience criticizing parents.
	It can be a tad volatile at times.
	And so, no, I mean, it is a big deal.
	You can, of course, let, you know, just send them links to my stuff or whatever.
	Or, you know, we'll put this in the link below this video and in the notes for the podcast.
	But...
	No, I do.
	And I spread the word because, like I said, I mean, you've changed our lives and you have made a difference.
	And I would hope that if you're going to have a kid, you're going to make informed decisions.
	And so my husband and I both, you know, we share your videos and try to spread the word of peaceful parenting as well because that's something else entirely as well.
	Well, and so, yeah, you could just mention to them that kids who spend more than 20 hours a week away from their moms experience exactly the same symptoms as maternal abandonment.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	So, this is just a basic fact.
	So basically, if you put your kid into daycare or into other care for 20 or more hours a week, you might as well have just been gored by a bull and expired in a ditch as far as your kid goes.
	Like, I mean, you might as well just have been beamed up by space aliens and currently be going through some sort of proctology exam because that's what the baby experiences.
	40% of infants in the United States, quote, live in fear or distrust of their parents.
	And that translates into aggressiveness, defiance, and hyperactivity as they grow into adults.
	You are planting, like, the early years and your choices as a parent, that is where you are planting your seeds.
	Now, I don't know if you do any gardening, but, you know, not too much sunlight, and maybe a little bit of shade for half the day, and be sure to water this, and like, it's complex.
	You don't plant the stuff that needs sunlight in the shade and you don't plant the mushrooms in direct sunlight.
	I'd prefer if you use the analogy of cooking because I can't grow anything.
	You have a daughter, don't you?
	I do, I do, yes.
	So you can grow one thing.
	That's important.
	Okay, yeah, but the difference is, yeah, okay, so cooking, right?
	I mean, it all matters what you put in at the beginning.
	Right.
	You know, if you put a pound of cayenne pepper into your soup at the beginning, I don't care what you add afterwards, you can reveal that I'm pretty white and do not have that Arabic spice affinity.
	So...
	It matters where you plant.
	And there's no amount of nurturing that makes a plant flourish if it's planted in the wrong place.
	Right.
	And you can't do it after the fact.
	You can't just go back and do it later.
	And the other thing you can do is pull the D card.
	Pull the death card.
	Because the death card...
	Really gets people's attention.
	Like I was watching the story of your enslavement, my sort of biggest video, and it starts off with, hey, death!
	You know, and it's like, okay, now that you have my attention.
	The mortality thing.
	And it's confrontational, but it can be, it's not hostile confrontational.
	It's just like wet fish across the dissociated face of compliance confrontational.
	You just say to people, look, someday you're going to be on your deathbed.
	We're all going to be there.
	And that machine is going to be beeping and everyone's going to be gathering and they're going to have, they're going to be fighting back tears because they don't want to scare you, but you know.
	You know, you know that that guy with the hooded face and the gardening implement that cuts down human lives is on his rollerblades sliding down that linoleum hallway in the hospital and he's getting closer and they can close that door but he's gonna come right through and they can throw themselves in front of you and say no death don't take him don't take her and he's just gonna be like excuse me pardon me coming through and here he comes through And then he flops himself on top of you and plants
	that deep, smoky, worm-filled tongue kiss for eternity.
	And you are...
	Get out of there!
	You have left the building and you are no more and you fall into mere memories and oddly eerily accurate video that lasts for all time unlike all the photos from my youth and my parents' youth.
	You are gone.
	You are literally history.
	You are no more.
	You are nothing but a footprint.
	The boot is gone.
	The foot is gone.
	Everything is gone and you may be recorded but you ain't adding to any new recordings and you may be on videos but you'll never be in a new one.
	And you are gone fading and it's like a bright light.
	You close your eyes.
	You'll see that afterimage for a little bit and people will remember you for a tiny amount of time or maybe a long amount of time.
	But at some point they'll forget you and they'll go days without even thinking about you.
	And then the next generation who maybe only met you a couple of times and wondered why you gave them such minty tasting bad candy when you could have had a perfectly good kinder egg in the bowl.
	They won't even know you at all.
	They won't remember you at all.
	You are gone.
	You are like an echo four days ago in the Grand Canyon.
	You're not even moving.
	A single stone back and forth.
	You are gone, done, over, flipped.
	Now, when you are in that deathbed and you hear the rollerblades of death coming down that linoleum, And he skates around that little mop bucket that always seems to be going somewhere in a hospital.
	A lot of blood and mucus and vomit to mop up and all that kind of stuff.
	When you hear that rollerblade death come down and you look at your kids, if they're even there, are you going to sit there and say, well, death, you can take me now because I'm really, really glad I spent the infancy of my children getting that real estate done.
	Certification that I never really got around to using.
	Yeah.
	Yes.
	So true.
	I can't imagine...
	I can't imagine that.
	No, it is the connections that we make that takes the sting of death out of our hearts.
	It is the lives that we grow.
	It is the creations that we pass forward and there is no creation more than children.
	Because without human beings nothing gets created.
	And so it is the connections that we make.
	That make life worthwhile and death bearable.
	And there is going to be, I tell you this, oh man.
	You probably don't know quite as many, but I certainly know there is a huge glut of childless people on this planet, especially in the West.
	And those people, as they get older and as they get frailer, my God, my God, I mean, already huge proportions of American women over 40 are on antidepressants, and I bet you a lot of those are childless.
	You know, when the baby rabies hit, You know, it's been described as you got to pee all the time, you're hungry all the time, you want a baby so much.
	And if you miss that window, you miss that turnoff.
	For women, it's certainly true for men as well.
	You know, as they say, women age like milk, men age like wine.
	Well, not quite true because male sperm gets less healthy as you, you know, you can keep them on deck just a little bit too long.
	And, you know, if you miss that window for women in your early 40s, you still got another 40 years to go.
	You're only halfway through.
	And you get older and, you know, your friends are going to die.
	First of all, if you're the person without kids and your friends have kids, sorry, big fork in the road.
	I've been there.
	I've been there.
	You know what it's like.
	I mean, what the hell?
	Let's go clubbing.
	No!
	I'm sorry.
	I'm exhausted.
	I'm leaky.
	I'm tired.
	And my baby's going to need me in about eight minutes anyway, if not now.
	Yes.
	Right?
	So, you know, fork in the road.
	And it's a T. It's not even a fork.
	Like a fork just gradually you get T. You know?
	Like you either get involved in me being a parent or we're not going to have anything really to talk about.
	Right.
	Right.
	And so, if you don't have kids and your friends have kids, you won't have those friends much when you get older.
	Because your lives have just gone through...
	And you know, a kid takes over your whole brain.
	I can't remember what I could...
	Before, I could think about all these other things.
	You know, and it's what...
	I think Daniel Crittinson, the woman I met, she said this.
	If you have kids, it's like a dimmer switch that doesn't go off.
	Like, you can turn it down, but you can't turn it off.
	Like, there's never a time where I forget that I'm a parent.
	There's never a time when...
	I don't at some level wonder or think or, you know, if my daughter's not around.
	It's never.
	And so you just don't have as much to say to people who aren't going through that experience.
	And then, you know, you've got to get your kids into college.
	It's not like it ends when they're 18 and, you know, then you've got to help them with their careers and then maybe they have kids and you've got to help plan the wedding and you've got to grant.
	Like it's just your lives completely diverge when you have kids and when you don't.
	So all the people who don't have kids...
	Well, maybe they're all hanging around with each other.
	I don't know.
	A lot of the friends that I know got kind of lonely as I'm sort of pushing 50 this year.
	They get kind of lonely because they don't have, maybe they got a family, maybe they got a wife, but they certainly don't have any kids.
	And they're not that much in contact with the people who did have kids because your lives just get completely different.
	I'm going to Japan.
	I'm now only going to speak Japanese, but I'm sure our friendship will be fine.
	I mean, no, you're going to a different planet when you become a parent.
	And then they're going to get older and older.
	And what?
	They've got no renewal.
	They've got no people coming into their lives.
	The great thing about having a family is you've got to convey a belt of new people coming into your life all the time.
	And when you're 70, how many people go out and say, hey, I think I'm going to get me some new friends.
	It's like, I mean, that's just not what happens.
	It's like taking up smoking when you're 80.
	It doesn't happen.
	So I think there's going to be just a lot of people who have a long way to go on that conveyor belt.
	No new people coming into their lives.
	No renewal.
	And nobody cares about them anymore because their parents are dead.
	Their aunts and uncles are dead.
	Maybe they got some brothers and sisters, but we all know how those people tend to spread out over time.
	And what's going to happen?
	Well, they're going to be really bitter and really lonely and they're going to look back way too late to fix anything.
	And, uh, the only thing I can say is that, uh, invest in cat futures.
	Yeah.
	Yep.
	And that's, and they are bitter.
	And especially like, I have an older sister and she doesn't have children yet.
	And, you know, there is that little bit of that attention, that tension of, Oh, well, what do you like to do for fun?
	I like to sleep.
	What do you like to do for fun?
	A sponge bath.
	A sponge bath while I'm cooking.
	Yeah, that's absolutely true because there's that disconnect.
	We're not as close as what we used to be because I've got a baby and my release is...
	My one-hour day when I go to the gym and I work out.
	That's not fun, but it is fun because I have time.
	She likes to go golfing.
	It's difficult, but I think she's feeling that clock tick.
	Do you ever ask you this?
	I don't want to obviously tell you your experience.
	This is a completely open-ended question.
	My experience, Steph, has been that Yeah.
	And, you know, people are going to hate me for this, but, you know, hey, add it to the list.
	What do I care anymore, right?
	But when you have kids, you know, this has been one of the things that people have, you know, he's talking about being selfless.
	Bad objectivist.
	But, you know, there's a reason why there were no kids in Ayn Rand novels, right?
	And the reality is that when you have kids, you simply can't be selfish.
	Yes.
	You can't.
	I mean, you wouldn't be doing this thing if you had a plant that needed this kind of care and attention, right?
	So you simply have to find a way to get pleasure and satisfaction without pursuing your own immediate preferences in the moment.
	Yes.
	Right?
	I mean, you've got to get a big, long, interstellar view of your life.
	Because, you know, when I was single, before I got married, I'd wake up in the morning and say, hey, what's going to be fun for me today?
	Yeah.
	And, you know, it wasn't watching the Wiggles and playing Jenga for four hours straight.
	I mean, that wasn't my list of things to do, right?
	Hey, you know what would be excellent?
	If a midget came and crapped all over my carpet and I could clean it up, boy, that would be great.
	Who wants to go whitewater rafting?
	No!
	No, can I just have someone pee on my arm?
	That'd be excellent.
	You know, like, that's some kinky shit going right there, right?
	So, when you become a parent, it's like...
	Bye-bye immediate personal preferences for a long time.
	A long time.
	I mean, as I say to my daughter, you know, like when I ask her to do things that she doesn't necessarily want, hey, I gotta go to a computer store, I gotta pick up something for the show or whatever, right?
	Ah, do we have to?
	And I'm like, hey, remember the other day when we spent four hours at Playdium, you know?
	It's loud for daddy!
	Some of the games have very small fonts!
	So, you know, and it's like, you gotta bat things back and forth a bit, but...
	I will actually get to a question, I apologize, assuming you haven't nodded off.
	No, I'm still here.
	Don't you look at people who don't have kids?
	At least, look at your sister, right?
	The divide is not just the time and the experience, but it's a smaller, more selfish life.
	And that's what I find it harder to relate to.
	I can relate to people on an intellectual level, and that's all fine.
	But fundamentally, and maybe it doesn't even have to do with kids particularly, because if you're interested in serving a bigger cause, Like a bigger course than yourself.
	Now kids are the, you know, add sperm and egg.
	Ooh, look, you've just cooked yourself a giant cake called a 20-year bigger course than yourself.
	Woohoo!
	You know, I've been conscripted into the cult of parenthood and that's going to be my life for the next 20 years.
	So maybe it's people who have a bigger vision than themselves.
	Some of them willing to sacrifice immediate pleasures to achieve something bigger than themselves.
	But there is a small...
	Relatively inconsequential momentary selfishness of the day as it goes that occurs for people without kids or causes that just is not part of your life as a parent like you don't wake up and say what's going to make me the happiest today you have to find some way that caring for your child is what makes you happy Even though in the absence of the child, you would never have done those things, right?
	Really, right?
	And so with you and your sister, and this is the same with me and some of the people who I knew before I became a parent and afterwards, their concerns, their, you know, how was your little day at your little job?
	Like, just sorry.
	It's like, they still strike me as, I don't know.
	It just seems kind of small and selfish, if that makes any sense.
	Trivial.
	Trivial.
	Yeah, that's the better word.
	Yeah, conversations aren't You know, you have pleasantries, especially with my sister.
	There's pleasantries.
	How are you?
	Good weather.
	But then it's, you know, all I can talk about is my daughter.
	And I'm happy to talk about that.
	But to you, it seems as though that's all I have.
	But to me, it's my world.
	And vice versa.
	I don't, I mean, cool, you went golfing.
	Cool, you went on a horseback riding.
	I don't, that's great for you.
	But in my mind, What I'm doing is so much more and it's hard to communicate that back and forth.
	Yeah, you made par, I'm making a life.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	It's a little tough to...
	And the concerns, you know?
	Hey, yay, my daughter's still alive.
	You know, like, that's, you know, that's, like, still breathing.
	Woo!
	Strike one for good parenting.
	And other people are like, you know, I'm really bummed that, you know, my car is making a ticking sound.
	Whatever, you know, like, I mean, it's, I don't know.
	It sounds, it is annoying for other people who aren't parents, but the view from people who have courses or, you know, parenting being the easiest and most compelling, in a way, course that's bigger than yourself.
	Yeah.
	You know, maybe this is the disconnect I have with atheists.
	We've got an atheist coming in.
	Because the fact that atheists, a lot of them don't have kids, and agnostics in particular, maybe they just...
	It's just a different view.
	You just have a different view when you have a cause or a kid.
	Yeah.
	Yes, very true.
	So...
	Try and convince her to have a kid.
	Especially if you've got the peaceful parenting fire hose going that way.
	I am trying, yes.
	Tell her to stop pulling dick for entertainment.
	Sorry?
	I got her convinced.
	You know, we're redheads, so we need to repopulate, right?
	We're going down fast, so...
	That's right, redheads.
	Two commandments.
	Number one, breed.
	Number two, stay away from the sun.
	Yes, yes.
	That's so true.
	The only vampires that can actually reproduce.
	30 SPF isn't anything until you've got like 50 or 60, then you're in the game.
	I just use a suit of medieval armor at the moment, and I still get a sunburn.
	But anyway.
	All right, I'm going to move on to the next caller.
	First of all, a real, real joy and pleasure to chat.
	I hugely appreciate the call.
	I hope it was helpful and not too rambly on my part.
	Actually, I don't because there's no hope for that.
	But I really, really appreciate the call.
	Well, thank you.
	And I just wanted to say again, thank you for your information that you put out there.
	And it does work.
	It does work.
	And you do impact people.
	So thank you.
	So thank you so much.
	And hopefully you'll keep us posted about how things are going.
	Absolutely.
	All right.
	Hope we can talk again.
	Thanks, Emil.
	Thanks.
	Alright, up next is Nicole.
	Nicole wrote in and said, While encouraging individual responsibility is a good thing,
	is it also not important to understand the systemic context and the constraints which it imposes?
	That's from Nicole.
	Well, hi Nicole.
	How are you doing tonight?
	Fine, thanks.
	That's this morning for me.
	Whoa!
	What's the price of Apple stock?
	No, just kidding.
	Old joke.
	Still worthwhile.
	For new listeners, it's new.
	So that's a great question.
	I've been sort of thinking about it half the day.
	And I don't know that Margaret Thatcher meant...
	such thing as systemic obstacles.
	I think she was basically just saying that when people talk about for the good of society or the common good or the collective and so on, that there is no such thing as the collective.
	And the analogy that I use is a jungle.
	What is for the good of the jungle?
	Well, it's for the good of the jungle that the jaguar eat the mouse and that the mouse eat the grain.
	And those are win-lose.
	The good of the jungle is for every animal to have as much opportunity to hunt and grow and mate and so on.
	So you can't sort of say for the good of the jungle, because the jungle is a collection of competing interests.
	And the same thing with society.
	Society is a collection of competing interests.
	And is it for the good of the community that one woman go out with some particular guy?
	No, it should be her choice.
	And if she chooses to go out with some particular guy, That's a whole bunch of other guys who she's not going out with who may be upset about that.
	And, you know, in the same way that around the world for billions and billions of women, there was two and a half days of silence when I got married, where they simply, of course, hung their heads and rubbed ashes into their belly buttons and so on.
	So I think she's just saying that there's no particular collective identity that we can claim to serve because we're all individuals.
	But, you know, you may have heard more about what she meant about that than I did.
	Well, essentially, I would argue that society is simply operating at a different scale in the same way that you can look at a body as its component cells.
	But however much you know about a cell, it doesn't tell you a great deal about a body.
	However much you know about an individual, that doesn't tell you much about population dynamics or herding behavior, crowd behavior, for instance.
	So I would regard these higher levels of organization as emergent properties of scale.
	So I would say There is such a thing as a collective.
	There is such a thing as a society.
	And it's not good enough to understand the component parts of it.
	You have to look at what happens as an emergent property of scale.
	When you combine those components, you get emerging dynamics that you would never predict looking at an individual alone.
	Right.
	Now, this is interesting because that's an idea that has been – I'm not saying you're not being original, but there is an idea that's been floating around for a while that society – this is a Middle Ages idea.
	the society is like a body and the the workers are the hands and the the priests are the conscience and the head is the the um the aristocracy and so on but i think the difference between individual cells and entire people is that individual cells sort of bound together for the common good of the body and it's not like if i get something that's healthy for me my left hand loses and my right hand
	In particular, the ecosystem called me benefits in general with exercise and good eating and all of that sort of stuff, good mental health habits and all that.
	So there's not a win-lose when it comes to my individual body.
	It's not like my liver is trying to take over my heart.
	And expel it to Siberia.
	And if it does, I'm better off.
	Like we're all working together because we're a unified whole with a single goal of life and health.
	But in society, we don't aggregate in that way.
	I don't know if that helps in terms of at least a possible rebuttal to that analogy.
	Well, I would argue that any individual cell would not be working for the betterment of the whole either because it would not be in any sense aware of the whole of which it was a part.
	It's simply doing its thing at the level at which it operates.
	But the sum total of the activities of all the cells give you a functioning human being or functioning any other species.
	I think a better analogy is to look at different layers of organization In terms of different trophic levels in an ecosystem.
	So you've got the level of primary production, and you've got different layers of predation.
	And so you've got a system that's extractive of energy that sends energy upwards through the trophic levels.
	And so you've got a system that operates at different levels, and those different levels need to be Analyzed independently, I would argue, because there are properties that come at the larger scale that you would not predict from knowing the smaller scale of organization.
	And good governance is in general interest.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	What's a trophic level?
	Layers of predation.
	So you've got, for instance, plants get eaten by herbivores that get eaten by carnivores.
	So a trophic level is a level of eating in a hierarchy in an ecosystem.
	And I certainly do believe that the good of the collective good, so to speak, which is not the good of every individual, and certainly some cells die in a body and other cells are born and so on, but the good of everybody in the long run in the main is served by, you know, voluntarism, the non-aggression principle, and reason over bullying and all that kind of stuff, and in particular the free market.
	However, in any transition between sort of the current system and a free market, voluntary, stateless society, there are going to be winners and losers.
	And the losers will be immediate and the winners will be dispersed and long-term and over time.
	So the people, let's say, if there is a woman who's got, you know, six kids by eight different guys somehow, and there's a welfare state and so on, and if then you transition to a free society, it's going to be a challenge for her, at least in the short run, to not have that.
	So I think that in transition to a free society, which is not only, you know, morally valid, but also to the benefit of everyone in the long term, there are transitions that occur that are negative to people immediately, but are positive to society as a whole in the long run.
	Is that sort of the kind of thing that you're talking about?
	So would you argue that these larger levels, you can simply eliminate them, that everything can work on the basis of individual free will, that there's no need to look at anything that operates at a larger scale than that, be it provincial, be it national, be it international, that you could simply do away with those levels of governance?
	Well, that's a big question, and I sort of don't want to answer yes or no until I make sure we're on the same page.
	Governance and government?
	They're different.
	I use governance deliberately because I'm most certainly not a statist.
	I'm not suggesting for a moment that solutions come from the top down from government policy.
	I think if anything comes from government policy, it's more likely to be making a bad situation worse as expensively as possible.
	But government and governance are not the same thing.
	The requirement for governance at a particular scale really comes from operating at that particular scale.
	If you lack governance at a scale at which you operate, then complicated things end up happening.
	Right.
	Okay.
	And I'm going to do a tiny rant here.
	I'm going to squeeze this accordion like as short as possible, and then I'll give you the airtime.
	But it's funny how, and not to put you in this category, I know you say you're not a statist, but...
	The socialist critique, or the general left-wing critique of the free market, is that it's dog-eat-dog, that it is Darwinian, and so on, and it's cruel, and all that.
	But the reality is, it is actually the state that creates win-lose interactions, for the most part.
	In a free market, it's, by definition, all trade entered into voluntarily, is to the benefit of both parties, otherwise you wouldn't do it.
	And you might have bias, remorse, and so on, but in the moment you make the decision, It's win-win.
	So why are human beings able to create cities and beavers are only able to create dams?
	Because human beings are able to negotiate in a voluntary way, trade, defer gratification, invest, upgrade, and do these win-win negotiations, which are fundamentally impossible in the animal kingdom outside of sort of bare parasitism.
	And these sort of symbiotic, no, almost done, symbiotic benevolent relationships and so on.
	But I would say that it is a false dichotomy to say that if we don't have a central coercive agency in society, that everything becomes atomistic.
	That's like saying, of course, that if the government doesn't force people to get married, nobody will get married.
	And the reality is that when you have a stateless, free, voluntary society, spontaneous self-organization will cause people to organize themselves into larger collective groups.
	But they're voluntary, like in the same way that you get a bunch of professionals together to make a movie.
	It doesn't mean you need a government to make that happen, but people want to make movies and you can't really make a good movie on your own, except this one with you.
	But it is something that people will get together to do.
	People will get together to build houses and put up barns in the Amish style to make movies, build shopping malls.
	And there will be large groups that will organize themselves, but they'll all be voluntary.
	So I think there'll be lots to talk about and examine from a sort of collective cooperation standpoint in the absence of a state.
	It's not atomistic because people are then free to associate with each other in productive ways rather than in predatory ways through the state.
	Well, yes, I would definitely agree that a lot of change comes from the bottom up and having the sum total of millions and millions of short-term self-interested decisions does end up giving you a system that operates at a larger scale.
	And it's not necessarily a question of coercion from the top down.
	I don't regard that top-down coercion.
	As a particularly effective way of achieving much of anything.
	However, there are certain times when a greater degree of centralization is called for.
	I think it depends on the circumstances, where you are in the cycle of expansion and contraction, for instance.
	Because when you're in the expansion phase of any cycle of boom and bust, almost no matter how you organize your society, things are going to work because people will get behind it and will follow a particular set of principles.
	But over time, That system becomes self-serving, bureaucratic, sclerotic, hostage to vested interest.
	And especially if it's operating at a large scale, what ends up happening is you achieve a state called functional stupidity, where the system isolates itself from the ability to learn from feedback, so you lose reflexivity.
	Once you're operating at a larger scale, you get something that becomes internally consistent, but that no longer serves the functions that it is to serve.
	And I would argue that that's exactly where we are with government at the moment.
	We have the appearance of something that we call democracy.
	It doesn't function that way whatsoever.
	We end up with a system that has reached its sell-by date, but fundamentally isn't reformable.
	So it ends up having to simply collapse and be reformed from the bottom up in the ways that you suggest.
	But in the meantime, during the period of contraction, there may be a need for some kind of means of managing that contraction in the interest of people rather than simply pricing people with very little in the way of resources out of the market entirely.
	I think it's simply more complex than that.
	And the, I'm just really enjoying hearing you talk, but also the question, I think at the core of what you wrote in, which is what I don't have a good answer to, because I don't know if there is one, maybe there is, I can't think of it, but it is to what degree should we encourage individual responsibility?
	And to what degree should we give people the reality that there are systemic barriers to getting where they want to go?
	So, you know, just take some poor kid in a bad neighborhood, you know, with bad government education, with the manufacturing jobs gone, with the ladder to the middle class worn away or frayed away or broken.
	And, you know, surrounded by, you know, people who aren't shooting for the stars while keeping their feet on the ground, as Dick Clark used to say.
	And, And maybe he's got a single mom and maybe there's alcoholism or drug dependency or mental illness or God knows what.
	And, of course, he may, you know, he may need a license to get done what he needs to get done.
	And there's no particular human capital that he can...
	I don't know because the degree to which we say you can achieve anything you set your mind to is the degree to which he's going to blame himself if he fails and that failure may not be Through any particular fault of his own, there may be something systemic in his way.
	And we don't want to set him up for self-flagellation based upon, you can do anything!
	But at the same time, if we say, well, there are all these systemic limitations, are we not concerned that it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy?
	Well, the world is full of self-fulfilling prophecies all the time.
	So this is really where we get our cycle of boom and bust.
	During the phase of expansion, we start to believe that we can succeed, we become more optimistic, We're less risk-averse.
	We take chances.
	We employ people.
	And our very belief in the fact that we can succeed leads us to succeed for a period of time.
	And so you get the swing of expansion, which unfortunately then tends to go too far and leads you into direction of speculative boom boom.
	We collectively take leave of our senses under circumstances like that.
	And then we create a self-fulfilling prophecy to the downside where we start to question our ability to succeed and in fact increasingly believe in failure and then we fail.
	So I completely agree that these self-fulfilling prophecies exist.
	And I think when it comes to the individual in difficult circumstances, I don't think people can necessarily Succeed no matter where they come from.
	So the institutional barriers faced by people at the bottom of the heap are absolutely huge.
	I mean, it doesn't mean they're insurmountable under all circumstances.
	Some people do manage to get out of situations like that.
	But there are going to be very significant constraints.
	And I remember, for instance, when I was living in the UK, one BBC reporter was basically simulating being homeless.
	And attempting to apply for the things that he was entitled to and follow all the steps that he needed to follow to get into the system that would provide him some kind of assistance.
	And he found that even as a young, healthy, entirely fit man with no internal sense of, I can't do this, he found it almost impossible to be able to do what people were expected to do to access The assistance the system was supposed to be providing them.
	And if someone was really homeless and, for instance, had internalized learned helplessness, as a lot of people who've had nothing but kicks in the head from life have done, then what on earth would you do?
	The obstacles are very, very significant.
	And I think we do ourselves a disservice if we discount the context in which circumstances exist.
	I think it's a question of both.
	Of course, all change comes from the bottom up in terms of the sum total of individual actions, but the existence of the system is very real as well.
	Yeah, and I sort of feel that there are people who, just in terms of the outcomes, I don't know about the source, but there are people at the bottom that no amount of encouragement is Will motivate.
	I don't know if you've ever, I've had friends in my life who have had enormous, enormous capabilities and basically half ghosted, half MGTOW'd, half whatever their lives.
	And I would spend a huge amount of time just trying to pour some of my excess fiery energy into them.
	And, you know, basically it's like, you know, it wasn't like dancing with someone.
	It was like dancing with a jacket, you know, while you're moving, they're moving.
	And then you stop moving and they stop moving and you sit down and they just fall off your lap.
	And so there are people at the sort of low end of the motivational or achievement spectrum that no amount of encouragement will help.
	And so saying you can do anything you want won't change a damn thing.
	I think there are other people at the very high end of the motivational and energy spectrum that no amount of the system will hold you down will stop them.
	They're going to be like an ICBM breaking through ice and they're just going to like I put myself in that category because I came from a single mom mentally ill broken down messed up broke household and all that and have achieved some significant success and and notoriety let's say.
	So I there's these people in the middle and I don't know where the sweet spot is and.
	And these are some concerns that I have around questions of IQ and potential as well because it's not like everyone with high IQ is massively successful and it's not like everyone with a low IQ is an instant failure.
	There is a sort of bell curve in the middle and I don't know where that sweet spot is.
	And so I guess in general my thoughts have sort of settled around let's try and create as free a society as possible.
	Let's have as benevolent and positive and peaceful a set of parenting standards out there and let's let opportunity be as open as possible and then let's just let people do their thing and I think encouragement is good but encouragement is dangerous because Encouragement can get people to spend themselves in ways that aren't particularly productive.
	You know, like you might be the best singer at the karaoke club.
	It doesn't mean you're going to open for the Stones anytime soon.
	And so there is a certain amount of let's just let the market decide and let's let the dollar and the managers and the hirers and the bookers and the agents and all that, let's let them manage everything.
	The motivations, because there are times when we should say to people, go for it, and there's other times where we should say to people, please stop going for it because you're wasting your time.
	To some extent, it's going to depend on whether you're in an expansion phase or a contraction phase, because the psychology of expansion and psychology of contraction are like night and day.
	The things you're trying to encourage will get traction if they happen to fit the zeitgeist.
	So if you're talking about individual responsibility and can-do, spirit, and You're going to get a lot of traction, especially in the early phases or middle phase of a period of expansion.
	Those things will do very well and it's easy to encourage them.
	During a period of contraction where people are becoming risk-averse and afraid and angry and judgmental, We're good to go.
	In some ways, what you need to do is be a contrarian.
	And when people, especially towards the end of moves, people are getting terribly excited to the point of irrational exuberance at the peak of an expansion.
	So you take away the punch bowl.
	People are irrationally pessimistic at the bottom.
	And I think it was said that invest when there's blood in the streets, for instance.
	So when things look darkest, then That's the time to be really optimistic and can do.
	A lot of this has to do with timing.
	So if you want to encourage certain behaviors, look at what kinds of things are going to get traction at that time.
	And it doesn't mean you can't encourage positive, constructive things to happen in a contraction, but you'll be facing a headwind as you do.
	So you have to bear in mind that the whole way society functions will be fundamentally less constructive, less optimistic, Less prepared to take risk.
	So it's harder to encourage people to follow their dreams, to develop their ambitions at times like that.
	At the moment, we're somewhat in between.
	So we're not in the psychology of expansion, but we're on the verge of morphing into the psychology of contraction.
	We're getting these mixed messages.
	So it's much harder to encourage people than it used to be.
	And you can see the way the psychology has shifted over time.
	For people at the bottom, it used to be that, for instance, if someone sees someone they used to know driving by in a posh car that they would never have been able to afford before, In the early years of the expansion, their reaction would probably have been, good on you, mate.
	I'm going to work hard and I'm going to get that too.
	Congratulations on your success.
	Now it's more likely to be, why do you get to do that?
	Why do you have a car and money when I don't?
	And so you get a completely different kind of perception of other people's success that really does act at that higher level of organization.
	And so I think it's absolutely critical to know where you are in the cycle of expansion and contraction in order to know what buttons to push if you're trying to encourage certain kinds of behavior or alternatively to discourage other kinds of behavior.
	Can you, and I appreciate that, Nicole, just because you've used the contraction and expansion quite a bit now, and I'm trying to understand I have my own thoughts about it, but I certainly don't want to try and describe your approach to things.
	Can you help me, and I guess the millions of listeners, to understand what it is that you mean by this expansion and contraction?
	Because I'm concerned it's a little bit like tied in, tied out, deterministic kind of stuff, but what is it you mean by that?
	Well, there is a tied in, tied out element of it, because cycles of boom and bust are a characteristic of existence at civilizational scale.
	But the way that I most commonly would describe this is primarily financial so that you've got an expanding economy.
	You've got a positive feedback loop with a greater money supply, allowing for greater purchasing power.
	So you've got this increased level of demand that then causes supply to increase.
	And then you're getting a feedback loop where you're expanding the money supply.
	And we went from very concrete definitions of money to more and more abstract definitions of money as we went through this 30-year period of expansion or even longer.
	So we went from gold to gold and silver.
	To promissory notes backed by gold, to promissory notes backed by faith, to promises to repay promissory notes backed by faith.
	And this whole progression of larger and larger supplies of money creating an artificial stimulation of demand that created then an artificial stimulation of supply over the entirety of the cycle Credit is demand neutral, but not within the cycle itself.
	So you have these huge expansions of credit.
	A lot of this comes from the shadow banking system.
	It's not under the control of central banks at all.
	The increased purchasing power front loads demand into the early part of the cycle.
	So you're having this expansion.
	Where you've got lots of demands, you've got lots of supply, you have an economic boom, but eventually you get to the point where all the income streams of the productive economy can no longer serve as the debt you've created in doing it.
	You've gone, as Hyman Minsky would have described, from self-liquidating debt where you borrow money to create a business that provides an income stream where you're paying back the interest and the principal, You move from there into borrowing for consumption, for instance, and then to borrowing for speculation.
	So you go from being able to repay the interest and the principal to only being able to cover the interest.
	And then at the far end of expansion, the rational exuberance phase, you're not even generating enough income to cover all the interest.
	You're dependent on capital appreciation.
	And being able to tap that, like people using their homes as ATMs during the housing bubble, for instance, And you're tapping that capital appreciation in order to cover the payments even of just the interest.
	But you reach a point where you've reached the greatest fool.
	No one will pay more for the asset you just bought with huge amounts of leverage than you would.
	So you reach the point where you can no longer expand.
	At that point, your Ponzi scheme is going to collapse.
	You're going to have an asset price collapse.
	You're going to have the collapse of the value of credit instruments.
	And that's really what leads into the formation of depressions.
	You have a huge collapse in the money supply, which is deflation by definition, because you eliminate the 99% of the money supply, or probably more, that's purely credit.
	So you have this enormous contraction of the money supply.
	Now you have no demand at all, effectively, because demand is not what you want, it's what you can pay for.
	If you can't pay for anything anymore because credit's collapsed and we don't have much in the way of actual money anymore, then demand has collapsed, then supply will go out of business, And you move into the bust phase.
	So during the expansion, you front-loaded demand.
	Now you have to pay back that demand with a dearth of demand, which is called an economic depression.
	So this is really the way you look at cycles in purely financial terms.
	You can also look at it more geopolitically.
	That's the rise and fall of empire.
	So all these things are grounded in cycles of positive feedback and the need to continue to expand.
	And when you no longer have the ability to expand, you're going to experience a crash.
	And because reality is fractal, you get crashes, boom and bust at different degrees of trend.
	So you have the business cycle of over a few years of small cycles of expansion and contraction.
	Then you have much larger cycles of expansion and contraction.
	And then you get the largest period of expansion in the history of the world, which is what we've experienced most recently.
	So the crash is going to be proportionate to the scale of the excesses that preceded it.
	So we're looking at a substantial period of economic depression on the collapse of credit.
	So this is basically a credit expansion.
	Hang on.
	Sorry, it doesn't necessarily follow that we're going to follow...
	If the government stays in place and tries to remediate the problem, then of course we will end up with a long depression.
	But there's no inevitability to that.
	If the government allows the economy to restructure along free market lines, it'll be short and sharp, as has been the case when the government was more free.
	You mentioned something about...
	Because for me, what you're talking about is central banking, right?
	And...
	The politicians buying votes with people by printing up a bunch of money, which causes a boom, and then that eventually causes inflation, drives up interest rates, and then the debt becomes a problem, which causes a bust, a standard sort of Austrian thing.
	But you talked about shadow banking, Nicole, and I don't really know what that means.
	You said shadow banking, which is outside or beyond the power and control of central banking.
	What was that?
	So anytime you are offered credit, this is increasing the money supply, the effective money supply.
	Sorry, not in a free market.
	Well, the things that are capable of offering credit are not necessarily all under the control of central banks.
	So we have this sense that central banks control the money supply.
	During a period of credit expansion, they really don't.
	You've got a huge amount of credit expansion that goes on completely outside of that official system.
	Well, hang on, sorry.
	Just saying it doesn't help me understand.
	So, as far as I understand it, the central banks are responsible for not just creating money out of nothing by selling bonds and typing whatever they want into their own bank accounts, but allowing banks to operate in crazy fractional reserve stratospheres where they can lend out like $30 for every dollar they have on hand, which didn't, of course, used to be the case in the free market.
	Free market was generally, it was around one-to-one and maybe a little bit more.
	What is outside?
	Given that central banking controls currency and interest rates, what is outside of that?
	I wouldn't even say that central banking controls interest rates.
	I would say that a central bank chooses what interest rate it's prepared to defend.
	And if that's radically different from what the market is asking for at any given time, that's a recipe for bankruptcy.
	I don't think that you actually have that level of central top-down control anyway.
	So if you look at the whole ZERP and now moving into NERP kind of context, I don't think that's a question of the Fed, for instance, saying that we have to have 0% interest rates.
	I think it's far more a case that The United States is seen as a relative safe haven.
	There's a flight to safety into the reserve currency during times of uncertainty.
	So you're getting people who are prepared to pay a premium for the relative safety of their money so that they're not looking for yield.
	They're not looking for the return on capital.
	They're trying to ensure the return of capital in a time when there are ever more risky investments, ever more tenuous connections with any kind of underlying value.
	Well, I certainly agree that money supply relative to underlying value has gone completely haywire.
	But with regards to poor people, it's certainly, you know, inflation and that does create barriers and certainly doesn't allow poor people to accumulate money in an accumulating way.
	So, you know, right now I would say to people who are ambitious and on the lower end of the economic opportunity scale that You know, as a door closes, lo, a window doth open.
	And, of course, you can say, well, there's been a loss of manufacturing jobs.
	But at the same time, there's been the rise of the capacity to be YouTube stars and to create very valuable companies where, you know, as they say about software companies, like 98% of the value of the company goes down the elevators every day and into the parking lot.
	Because you can start a software company, you know, with a $300 laptop and some code.
	And you don't even have to pay for an operating system if you want to go Red Hat or something.
	And so there are opportunities that have closed in many ways or at least have become restricted.
	But other opportunities have opened up.
	And I would really say to people that you want to focus on what you can achieve and try and apply your energies to that which has the lowest barrier to entry.
	It is in fact easier for a poor person now to start a software company than it was for a rich person to start a manufacturing plant 30 years ago.
	And so from that standpoint I would say that many many opportunities have opened up and of course the fact that we have a worldwide audience For this show, which would have been impossible even 10 or 15 years ago, the fact that we have a studio and cameras and decent microphones and so on is far cheaper than what was necessary to create a television studio in the past.
	So we really have...
	A lot of opportunities that have opened up.
	And I think that the opportunities that are there are servicing the need or the thirst for truth, for comprehensibility, for a way of looking at the world where the jigsaw pulses aren't just flying around like mad butterflies in a kaleidoscope, but actually come together to form a coherent picture.
	I've always been grateful.
	To the thinkers in the past who've helped me to assemble information into a picture that makes sense and flows and is comprehensible and has not only descriptive in the past but predictive in the future value.
	And there is a giant thirst in the world for comprehensibility and for people who are able to communicate to others things that help the world make sense.
	Those opportunities have opened up enormously and internet advertising has opened up enormously beforehand.
	To attract advertisers, you need to have a radio station, a magazine, a newspaper, a television station, all of which are a giant, enormous, crazy-to-imagine barriers to entry.
	But now you can, of course, start to grab advertisements on various social media platforms relatively easily from your home with a $30 mic and a $50 webcam.
	And so there are lots of opportunities that have opened up, and I think it's important to remind people of that.
	But one thing I would say...
	It's that I was thinking about while you were talking about the The sort of cycles.
	And I think there is an economic one.
	I think there is also obvious psychological one that's not always exactly the same as the economic one.
	One of the things that seems kind of crazy to me about Western civilization is the manic depressive element in Western civilization.
	You know, we're either on top of the world or we're beating ourselves senseless for being evil, racist, sexist bigots and all that.
	I can think of the 19th century when there was this terrifying, glorious, mad...
	Almost psychotic ambition to spread Western civilization to the whole world, which was one of the goals of the British Empire.
	And then followed by, you know, two civilization crushing world wars, and then followed by a battle against communism, and then followed by the self-flagellation of political correctness and so on.
	Hopefully we're reaching the bottom of that now.
	Yes, I'm certainly no fan of political correctness in any way, shape, or form.
	I think what we saw was an imperial expansion.
	So you can look at expansion and contraction geopolitically as well as the rise and fall of empire.
	They're all grounded in these positive feedback loops that basically make them based on Ponzi dynamics.
	So empires need to expand.
	They bring in more territories.
	They bring in the surpluses from the periphery.
	Concentrate those at the center.
	That concentration of capital resources and capacity allows societies to reach out and protect power at a distance, to act on a much larger stage than they would once have done, but they overreach themselves or they find there's nowhere else to expand to, and then you move into contraction.
	And what typically ends up happening is the center of hegemonic power Shifts from place to place to place depending on who was whose sweatshop during the previous era.
	So I think they're just very complicated systemic dynamics.
	You can trace the center of hegemonic power from, say, Spain to the Netherlands and Britain to America, now to China.
	And it depends on who was doing all the work at any given time.
	So a center rises, becomes complex, it becomes very controlling.
	But then it becomes decadent and it decides we're the ones with all the money.
	Someone else can do the work.
	So the near periphery ends up with the technology transfer, the work ethic, the money flowing in its direction.
	So when the old center falls, a new center rises in the near periphery.
	The far periphery is always for resource extraction.
	But you can look at so many things in terms of The center and the periphery, and it's fractal, so it's different degrees of trend at the same time.
	It's not just financial, it's not just economic, it's absolutely geopolitical as well.
	But these cycles of expansion and contraction that are vastly larger than any individual, any institution, are not something that's under any kind of central control.
	They're endogenous moves.
	And I think that's really the part of the system that I would argue we'd need to look at in terms of the context in which individual decisions are made.
	Right, and I think that you've made a case for the complexity, and it is this very complexity that, to me, is one of the major arguments for getting rid of this sort of centralized coercive power and allowing the free market to resolve these complexities.
	And, you know, in a free market, you will have booms and busts within various industries, but it does tend to smooth out with the economy as a whole.
	It takes one big giant lever controlling money and interest rates to make the entire economy go up and go down.
	So I sort of view it as you sort of think of a bathtub, right?
	You can sort of splash around in a bathtub and the water is going to go up and down in various areas.
	But the level of the bathtub is kind of even.
	On the other hand, if you tip the bathtub up at 45 degrees, well, you just have a big outpouring.
	And then if you tip it the other way at 45 degrees, it all pours out the other way.
	You've got to tilt the bathtub rather than splash around.
	The free market allows – well, it encourages the creative destruction of growth and decay in particular industries.
	But it evens out in the economy as a whole.
	But once you get centralized control of currency and interest, then you're tipping the bathtub and you just end up with nothing.
	So thanks a lot for your call.
	I'm going to move on to the next caller.
	But I appreciate you explicating some of these challenges for people.
	And I will strongly still encourage people to set your sights as high as you can because it's hard to know ahead of time how far you can go.
	But be sensitive to when you've reached your limits.
	So thanks a lot, Nicole.
	It was a real pleasure chatting.
	You're welcome.
	Take care.
	Okay, up next is Nate.
	Nate wrote in concerning the Why I Was Wrong About Atheism video.
	He wrote an email saying, Why the atheist attack and claiming that we are worshippers of the state?
	I am an atheist, but am also an ANCAP. That 20 or so minute video is what brought me to contacting, as it made no logical sense to me.
	The other part of this is pretty much every atheist I personally know happens to also be an ANCAP. Perhaps I just run in different circles, or maybe many claim to be atheists and lean that way without understanding both of these belief systems.
	That is from Nate.
	Well, hello Nate, how you doing?
	Well, nerd up, Stephan.
	Okay, I'm not sure what that means, but I'm willing to let you take the lead.
	Alright, well...
	I'm an off-grid person, just to throw that out there.
	Perhaps I run in weird circles.
	As I know many atheists and agnostics, some happen to be leftists and statists, though the vast majority happen to lean towards the right or are anarchists, in all honesty.
	The atheists and agnostics that I've known, for the most part, head towards the left, eventually become religious because of their marriage or that they have children and their families.
	I'd like to state that just because someone has decided because of genetic bone cancer to not have children that adoption or being with a single mother is also a good way to start a family.
	The only person that I really know that loves, and I do say it this way, Obesecare is my father.
	He found religion.
	Obesecare?
	What is that?
	Obamacare.
	Okay, okay.
	I call Obama OBZ because, well, it's hilarious.
	Alright, keep going.
	And also my notes for the video were written with Vim since you mentioned Red Hat and well, I'm not a big fan of Red Hat.
	Alright, alright.
	So, you obviously understand that when I talk about a tendency, I'm not talking in absolutes, right?
	It just seemed like you were talking about it.
	No, no, no.
	Come on.
	Come on.
	You can't just use the word seems like and then insert whatever you want rather than listen to me, right?
	That's unfair, right?
	You have to go with what I, if you're going to criticize me, you have to go with what I said, not what it seems like to you, because seems like is when you don't have full information, and you do have full information, which is what I said.
	I said that there is a tendency for atheists to lean to the left.
	Now, I said it was 70% according to that study.
	I looked up another study, and I'll give you some brief information, and you can then tell me more about that.
	I'll give you the link.
	Don't worry, I'll give you the link.
	Foundation for Freedom from Religion.
	This was June through December of last year, 2015.
	They conducted a survey Of its 23,500 members with nearly 8,000 respondents participating across America, 96% of these people are registered to vote, which is more than 20% higher than the population at large.
	72% reported having a college degree or higher.
	And 70%, sorry, so in the recent, in this poll of 8,000, about 8,000 atheists, 1% said that they were Republicans.
	There were lots of socialists, lots of Marxists, lots of progressives, lots of liberals, lots of Democrats, and a few libertarians.
	Libertarians are just a couple of percentage points.
	So 1% said they were Republicans.
	Now, if you compare that with white evangelical Protestant voters, It's 70%.
	So 1% of this group of atheists said they were Republicans and 70% of white evangelical Protestant voters identified as Republicans.
	So that's 70 times the number of Republicans in one religious group as opposed to this group of atheists.
	Now, is this a perfect survey?
	Well, no, of course not.
	There's no perfect survey, but that's a pretty significant gap.
	Even if it's only half of that, even if it's only a quarter of that, it's still a huge disproportion of people self-identifying as being on the left rather than on the right or libertarians.
	Alright, and like I also said, maybe I just run in a different circle.
	Well, of course you do.
	Of course you do.
	We tend to choose, as you know, we tend to choose people whose values are similar to our own.
	You know, it's like somebody who's an anti-racist saying, well, I don't know anyone in the KKK, therefore the KKK doesn't exist.
	It's like, well, no, you wouldn't be friends with someone who's in the KKK if you're anti-racist, right?
	That's true.
	True, but also across the road from me.
	My neighbor, highly Catholic.
	And we work together all the time on our properties.
	And most atheists I know believe in that.
	And we also believe in, I guess, the easiest way to put it is horse trading.
	On like, you know, I need to buy something from you.
	I'm going to buy something from you later.
	So kind of a capitalistic way of thinking.
	But you know, I don't know how to say this nicely, but you know that the plural of anecdote is not data, right?
	The fact that you know people or there's someone across the street, you understand that that doesn't actually mean anything as far as what I'm talking about, right?
	Right.
	I mean, everybody knows exceptions to it.
	Everyone knows exceptions to a tendency, but that's, you know, it's the exception that proves the rule.
	The other thing is, I moved into small-town southern Texas, and I've lived in many other small towns across the United States, and I've lived in Asia, and that's generally been my experience.
	Yes, it's filtered through your values.
	My experience is that people like to engage in philosophical discussions.
	Why?
	Because I bring philosophical topics up with the people I'm chatting with.
	But if I'm not there, I don't assume that it's exactly the same as if I am there because my presence is influencing the discussion.
	Alright, I'm cool with that.
	I just wanted to bring it up because, well, yes, I missed a word that you said in there.
	Now I understand.
	What do you mean, missed a word?
	I said repeatedly.
	It's just a tendency.
	I gave the numbers a 70%.
	I put the sources in below.
	That's tough to miss, right?
	At times, it does happen.
	Right.
	And this idea, too, because, you know, a lot of people, this is not necessarily your case, but a lot of people were saying that atheism is merely the rejection of a particular supernatural deity and so on.
	It has absolutely nothing to do with political affiliation.
	It has absolutely nothing to do with politics.
	Is that something that you would make a case for?
	In my opinion, I... This is just an opinion.
	I believe atheists should believe in less statism.
	Because, well, if you're going with, hey, I don't believe in some higher power, why am I going to believe in a higher power that can actually harm me?
	Yeah, yeah, I think that's reasonable.
	Yeah.
	And this obviously isn't necessarily relative to your friends, right, who seem to be, I guess, more on the libertarian side, Nate, but if there was a religion, and that religion forced children into its educational schools about that religion for,
	you know, six, seven hours a day, five days a week, For the vast majority of the year.
	For 12 years.
	And forced atheists to pay for that religious indoctrination.
	Atheists would go mental, right?
	Well, I actually do go mental about that because that's how our education system is.
	Right.
	So this is exactly what happens with the educational system, as you know, right?
	Which is that the state...
	Forces children to attend its institutions and, okay, you say, well, you can go to a private school, but they still have to follow the government curriculum, so it doesn't really matter.
	So the government forces children into its educational propaganda mills and forces people against the state or anti-statists or non-statists or anarchists, forces them to pay.
	And fails to teach critical thinking and teaches these children about the mythology of the state as if it's true and teaches children that the solution to all problems is running to the state and refuses to teach children about alternative theories of social organization other than statism.
	It's pure state propaganda mills from beginning to end, top to bottom, with virtually no exceptions, and that includes Jim.
	So the fact that atheists get very upset if there's the Ten Commandments hanging passively behind some desk in a courtroom, but don't sit there and say, well, if we want critical thinking, if we want rationality, if we want non-propaganda, we've got to tackle these government schools because, by God, they're far more dangerous than a voluntary Sunday school.
	At least I don't have to pay for that.
	But they don't mention anything.
	As a movement, they don't seem to...
	Atheism as a movement, and there is an atheist movement.
	I've not read one prominent atheist, you know, outside of people like Penn Jillette and so on.
	The prominent atheists who are there because they're atheists, not because they've done something else and are also atheists.
	They don't take on government schools.
	And also race and IQ, right?
	I mean, if atheists are very much into evolution, well, evolution has produced disparate outcomes among ethnic populations that have developed in tens of thousands of years in wildly disparate climates.
	So atheists could be putting that forward and saying, ah, well...
	You know, there is race and IQ differences and that's going to do something to explain why there could be bio-incompatibilities between various ethnic groups and this could explain why certain ethnic groups do better and worse in certain cultural and economic environments and so on.
	Boy, what a fantastic service that would be, but atheists won't touch that stuff with a 10-foot pole.
	Why?
	They could actually do a fantastic service.
	Why?
	Because they're not actually committed to science.
	They're not committed to science because if they were committed to science, they would say, look, the clear evidence of evolution is this and therefore, but because they tend to be on the left and the left is about radical egalitarianism, when the truths about evolution come crashing into the belief systems of leftist atheists, They completely ignore science and then they get angry and speak down and contemptuously towards Christians who reject evolution.
	But they're rejecting a much more important aspect of evolution, which is biocompatibility in the here and now, rather than what happened in the Big Bang and what happened with intermediate species hundreds of millions of years ago.
	It's a little bit more important what's happening right now in society.
	So I don't, you know, I'm not wildly impressed with the consistency of the atheist movement.
	That doesn't mean that there aren't consistent atheists.
	I'm an atheist and I really strive towards consistency.
	I just don't see it in the movement as a whole and I don't see a lot of challenges to the leftism.
	And if atheism is completely unrelated to any political preferences, then why in some surveys are there 70 times more Republicans among Christian groups than among atheist groups?
	If it's completely unrelated, why is there a correlation?
	Now, I put forward a theory as to why there might be a correlation, but people just kept typing back in all caps, well, correlation is not causation, correlation.
	I get that.
	But there is a disparity.
	I put forward a theory as to why people can then take on that theory, but they can't just say correlation is not causation, because if you put forward a falling domino theory as to why correlation is causation, Or causation is caused by something.
	You can address that, but just ignoring it is not rational.
	True enough.
	And well, you mentioned science and atheists.
	While I do believe in the non-aggression principle, if I ever met Richard Dawkins, I might slap him because I really don't agree with how he pushes atheism.
	And the other thing that you talked about with public education, I do have severe dyslexia.
	And if it wasn't for my mother buying comic books and reading them to me to teach me how to get past my inability to understand language, I would not be able to read and I would not be able to have the life that I do.
	Public education really wasn't good for me.
	I actually had to blackmail my way out of high school.
	Wait, what do you mean?
	Tell me what you mean, Nate.
	That's a fascinating...
	What do you mean you blackmailed your way out of high school?
	What does that mean?
	Alright, well, you're a computer guy, right?
	Yeah.
	So you remember when the Pentium 75 came out?
	Oh, I drooled over that one.
	That was right out.
	The P60 was the first one.
	And then they overclocked it.
	It was smokin'.
	Yeah, well, my school district ended up getting a whole crap load of Pentium 75s, and I knew somebody, so I was buying P60s and swapping them out for the P75s and making money.
	And I got almost expelled for that, but I had to blackmail my way out.
	Okay, so a little fraudulent there, right?
	A little fraudulent, but well, when you grow up poor, you got to do what you got to do.
	Well, I don't know that that's the message we want to get out to poor people, but you did what you felt you had to do.
	Let's put it that way.
	My mother made six grand a year, never took anything from the state, and she had to support me, my sister, and herself.
	What do you mean she never took anything from the state?
	You went to government schools, right?
	Sorry, she went to a government school.
	She never took welfare.
	She never took those programs.
	What happened to your dad?
	He's an asshole.
	Was he not around when you were growing up?
	Divorced, and he beat me really bad.
	I'm so sorry.
	That's terrible.
	Shit happens.
	No, that's not like...
	If your house fell in out of nowhere, that's people making choices, right?
	That is people making choices, but it still happens.
	I'm a better person.
	I believe in not causing aggression.
	When aggression is caused towards me, then I will defend myself.
	That's it.
	How old were you when you were getting beaten by your dad?
	Oh...
	Five to whenever, uh, that was 12?
	Is that when your parents got divorced?
	Yes.
	And why did your mother know you were being beaten when you were younger?
	Uh, at times, yes.
	Did she leave your dad?
	She divorced him and we lived with her.
	Why did she wait until you were 12 to divorce your father if she knew you were being beaten by him?
	In all honesty, I have no idea.
	Can't ask her.
	She's dead.
	Right.
	But I'm sorry that she's dead, but was not, you know, not the very best job of protecting you, right?
	She raised me and my sister to be responsible.
	Proper persons within society and not rely on handouts.
	Both me and my sister have never required handouts.
	Yeah, I mean, but you were defrauding at the age of 17 or 16 or 18 or whatever it was, right?
	I was what?
	Well, with the Pentium chips, right?
	You were defrauding a little bit at that age.
	Well, in my opinion, laws can be a little bit fluid.
	Okay, so not exactly the same as, you know, the non-aggression principle.
	I needed money in order to live on my own.
	Because I moved out when I was before graduation age.
	I needed money.
	Found a way to get money, therefore I did it.
	No, I know.
	I mean, I was on my own since I was 15, too, and I had three jobs, right?
	I also had jobs, but I was making a little bit on the side.
	It happens.
	I mean...
	Well, no, again, that's a specific choice.
	That's not dominoes, right?
	Well, I also don't have a problem with...
	People who happen to be criminals.
	If it's not truly harming anything, I mean, I was putting it in the 60s.
	They were overclocked to 75.
	Weren't the exact same.
	No harm, in my opinion.
	Right.
	So for those who don't know, and this may have changed since, but my understanding at the time was that they built them all the same way.
	And what they would do is they would test various processors.
	This was the difference between like the DX25s and the DX50s and so on.
	They would build all of these processors and then they would test them to see how fast they could run.
	And if they could reliably run Unless they had the divide by zero bug.
	Yes, yes.
	Unless they had, you can read, there's actually a book I read by Andy Grove, who was the CEO of Intel at the time, called Strategic Inflection Points, I think it was.
	And they had that divide by zero bug.
	I think, was that the same?
	Was that the bug that showed up, somebody showed it in a spreadsheet?
	Yes.
	Right.
	I mean, you could do a divide by zero in something, and the computer would just shut off.
	Right.
	Right.
	Sorry, there's my nerd cred.
	Yeah, no, I get that.
	So when you overclocked the 60s and sold them at 75s, of course, Intel wanted to sell them at 75s, but found that they couldn't reliably run at 75.
	So when you overclocked them from 60s to 75s and sold them at 75s, you were handing over Chips that would be much more likely to freeze and, you know, people could be working on an essay, it might freeze, they might lose all the work that they've done, and so on.
	So, you know, it was some negative consequences potentially to what you were doing, right?
	It was nefarious.
	But that's, you know, you don't have that.
	No, we needed the money, there's other ways to do it, right?
	Well, the other way that I could have made money was selling drugs, and I did not want to do that.
	That's the only other way you could have made money?
	I had two jobs, they weren't paying much, and it was expensive to live.
	The only other ways to make the money that I needed in order to do that at that age?
	Yes.
	Well, I took in roommates to lower the cost of living.
	I did not have that option.
	I was a roommate.
	Right.
	So, I mean...
	Yeah, I don't like to think that fraud and harming the interests of others is the only way to survive, but obviously you were in a tight place and a tough situation.
	And I am sorry that this was a decision that you made, but I'd be wary of saying that it was the only thing that you could have done, because that may not always be the case.
	Well, I also lived in the Smoky Mountains for six months, camping and scavenging food.
	Like I said, I know what it's like to be poor, and I also know what it's like to be homeless.
	Sometimes, when something comes up and you know how to do it, why not?
	What do you mean, why not?
	Because what you did with the computer chips probably did really harm other people, right?
	No, because all those computers got sent away about a year after they were bought.
	Well, but people tried to use them for a year with unstable processors that would regularly freeze, right?
	Because if they didn't freeze at 75, then Intel would have sold them at 75.
	No, they were completely unused computers.
	You sold them and nobody ever used them?
	Yes.
	And did you know that ahead of time?
	No, I didn't.
	Okay, so I mean, there was some fortunate circumstance, you know, that resulted in people not being harmed, I guess, other than economically, in that they paid more than they would have otherwise.
	Because, you know, I can't remember the price difference between the 75s and the 60s, but they paid more.
	So it turned out to be kind of fortunate that people didn't suffer negative effects of what you did, other than, you know, the school overpaying, you know.
	I'm not going to sit here and shed massive amounts of moral tears for the government overpaying for something, so that's not my major issue.
	It seems that there's a certain amount of consequentialist-based moral nihilism somewhere in your personality.
	I would say it's more about survival because of how many times I've ended up being homeless.
	Right.
	Is your life a little bit more stable now?
	Oh, yeah.
	My life is completely stable.
	I own a farm.
	Oh, good.
	Good.
	All right.
	All right.
	Okay.
	Well, I hope that I've helped.
	I'm sorry.
	Go ahead.
	I built a power plant.
	I drilled my own well.
	And the reason why, being the way that I've lived my life, I've been able to learn weird and random skills from Which allows me to do these things.
	And can you tell me, in all honesty, you've never done anything nefarious in your life?
	No, I would never say that I've never made moral mistakes in my life, but I try not to justify them after the fact.
	Yeah.
	Do I feel shitty that I fucked over my school system?
	Yes.
	But, eh, it's part of life.
	Live and learn.
	Can I change the past?
	No, I cannot.
	Can I learn from it?
	Yes, I have.
	Okay, good.
	Well, I hope that I've given you some reasonable responses to the criticisms.
	And I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I really do appreciate the call-in, and I certainly wish you the best with your crops.
	Alright, well, I hope you have a good evening, sir.
	Thanks, Nate.
	Pleasure to chat.
	Alright, well, up next is Matthew.
	Matthew wrote into the show and said, Should we hold stupid people to the same moral standard as people of high intelligence?
	I want to say that everyone has equal moral agency, but at the same time, I don't want to mistake the world for myself.
	That's from Matthew.
	Don't you wish there was a better word than stupid, than dumb, than, you know, because if somebody's short, we don't consider that a failing.
	You know, like, I mean, you could say stunted, you know, if their growth was supposed to be more, but they didn't get, then somebody's failing or some societal or food failing.
	But I just, I wish there was a word for less intelligent people that just didn't sound like a mean word, you know?
	That's a good point, yeah.
	And low IQ takes too long to say, so...
	Well, and low IQ, most people don't understand that we're just saying short.
	You know, we're not saying, you know...
	So, I just...
	I don't know.
	Maybe we'll work on this in this sort of eternal attempt to reshape language to something more philosophically accurate.
	But I just...
	I wish there was a better word than...
	Dumb, stupid.
	You know, like, I just, I wish there was.
	And, you know, maybe we'll come up with, it doesn't sound like, you know, abstractly challenged.
	Time preference shortened, durden, durden.
	Wait, what have we got here?
	Hang on, Mike.
	Go ahead, Mike.
	You want to chime in?
	Dull, dumb, foolish, futile, ill-advised, irrelevant, laughable, ludicrous, naive, senseless, short-sighted, simple, trivial, dummy, loser, rash, thick, unintelligent, brainless, dazed, deficient, dense, dim, doltish, dopey, gullible, half-baked, half-witted, idiotic, imbecilic, inane, indiscreet, insensinate, meaningless, mindless, moronic, nonsensical, obtuse, out-to-lunch, pointless, puerile, never heard that one before, simple-minded, slow, sluggish, stolid, stupefied, thick-headed, unthinking, witless.
	So whenever we need to refer it, we're just going to play that mic reading that list.
	Like, we're not going to pick one.
	We're just going to lose them all.
	So, wow.
	Okay, let's just go through here.
	Dull?
	Yeah, but dull is, you know, there are lots of intelligent people who are really, really dull in terms of that sounds like boring.
	Let's see.
	Short-sighted?
	It has a visual element to it as well.
	Simple?
	It's a bit...
	Brainless?
	No, that's a bit...
	And post-zombied.
	Dazed?
	No, that could...
	I called it recently.
	It had a characteristic but wasn't dumb.
	Dim.
	Daltish?
	No.
	Dopey?
	No, that's not right.
	Half-baked, half-witted.
	Imbecilic?
	No, that's not it.
	Let me just go through.
	Obtuse?
	By now, because really smart people can be defensive and obtuse for sure.
	Mm-hmm.
	Purile I like just because...
	Oh, yeah.
	Purile is great just because it's used in a Monty Python sketch.
	Simple-minded?
	I like the band Simple Minds.
	Let's see.
	Stolid.
	Stolid.
	Witless.
	I mean, I like Witless just as a whole, but that sounds also like you don't get a joke, and that can be smart people as well.
	Let's go with Stolid, if you don't mind.
	Mike, can you, I think, I mean, I've used, it's a bit of an older word, and I think it means kind of concrete and not particularly abstract enabled.
	I don't know if, let me just have a look here and see what it means.
	You know, let's get, I need a term for this.
	Not easily stirred or moved mentally, unemotional, impassive.
	Not easily moved mentally.
	Well, the problem is that a lot of unintelligent people are very easily moved mentally.
	Are very emotional and easily moved.
	So, unemotional.
	Damn it.
	That would have been great.
	Lumpish.
	Bovine!
	No, that's not, that's, no.
	Because then, no, bovine will have people being part of market transactions in Cambodia.
	So, let's see here.
	Dozy.
	I don't know.
	What are we going to do?
	I'm just having a look through any of the others that might be...
	These would be the worst dwarfs ever.
	That's right.
	Hi-ho, hi-ho.
	It's off to pillage we go.
	All right.
	It's off to vote we go.
	I don't know.
	Let me try it.
	Doesn't Trump say the educated and the not so educated?
	Yeah, not so educated.
	The other thing, too, there's lots of educated people who are completely retarded.
	Okay, synonyms.
	Let's just see here.
	Dense.
	How's dense for everyone?
	It still rings as an insult.
	Oh, black holes are dense.
	Yeah, no one likes black holes.
	Dull.
	Dull?
	No.
	We could just create a word.
	Start a trap.
	Let's just go with low-Q. Low-Q? Low-Q. We got high-Q and low-Q. That's our shorthand.
	We'll just go with low-Q for now.
	I'll take it.
	Maybe we just call them low-keys.
	Not only are they low-IQ, but they're also guards of mischief.
	We're going to call them low-keys.
	Just for this conversation, maybe we'll improve on it over time, but low-keys.
	And, you know, low-key.
	Anyway, so we'll go with that.
	All right, so now that I have completely distracted you from your question, I'm right.
	Did I win the debate?
	Did I win yet?
	That's from that great movie, Parenthood, a young Keanu Reeves.
	Drives a car in a race, crashes it like three feet out, comes out, completely dazed.
	Did I win?
	Anyway, so...
	All right, so Matt, we've talked before, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Okay, good.
	Just because people will recognize it as well.
	Should we hold Lokis to the same moral standard as people of high intelligence?
	High intelligence.
	I would say for...
	The immediate virtues?
	Yes.
	In other words, I would expect the Lokis to recognize, accept, and adhere to the non-aggression principle.
	And also to keep their word.
	Assuming they understood the terms of the contracts they were entering into.
	And I sort of use, for me, it's like the five-year-old test.
	Would we have a moral standard called don't slug people?
	for a five-year-old.
	And I think we would, right?
	Hello, man.
	Yeah, I...
	Oh, yeah.
	Were you pondering that one, or were you muted?
	I was thinking about it.
	Yeah, listen, and, you know, I worked in a daycare, and we had like 30 kids aged 5 to 12 rampaging around the room.
	And, you know, if the five-year-old, I mean, just go to a park and, you know, if you see a five-year-old slug another five-year-old, do they say, oh, you know, that's just what they do, you know?
	Yeah.
	Are we talking about a low-key?
	No, no.
	The five-year-old test first and foremost, right?
	So let me give you another example.
	No sane person gets angry at a baby for peeing on them, right?
	Right.
	Absolutely.
	But if a five-year-old walks over, unzips, and pees on you while you're napping, you might have a problem, right?
	Yeah.
	So there's an example of zero moral agency, the baby pees on you, and, you know, some potential moral agency that the five-year-old decides to take a life leak on your head, right?
	Similarly, if a baby drools on you, nobody gets upset, right?
	Yeah.
	But if a five-year-old spits on another child, what do you think teachers and parents say?
	That was bad.
	Yeah, so we got rules, and I think you can push it back from five to four to three, but let's just take five as reasonable.
	So we expect a five-year-old to not steal, to not hit, To not assault, right?
	And so, if a five-year-old is expected to adhere to the basic non-aggression principle, then low-keys can, right?
	And should.
	But are we comparing apples to oranges here?
	That's why I was asking, is the five-year-old of a high or low IQ? No, no, no.
	But there's no five-year-old...
	I mean, look, we're not talking about people who have significant brain dysfunction, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, we have to take those people out of the equation.
	So we're talking about people who have a high enough IQ to be part of a social contract, to be able to live independent.
	And we're not talking about people who've got either some genetic or disease-based destruction or failure of the brain to develop so that the point that they can't live alone.
	We're not talking about those people, right?
	We're talking about people who are intelligent enough to be part of society as a whole.
	And my argument is that I would expect them to conform to the thou shalt not.
	But I would not necessarily expect them to conform to the thou shalt virtues.
	And I'll get into that in a second.
	But I think we can agree that if a five-year-old is expected to not hit and kick and all steal, then we can expect adults, even the Lokis, to also not do that.
	Yeah, I think I can agree with that.
	Obviously, if there's some kind of abuse, they might be more at risk as they get older to certain kinds of...
	No, no, but sorry.
	So if you have a kid who goes up and punches another kid, we would say that kid is doing wrong, but because we have that standard, we would know that something is going wrong in the household, right?
	Like a baby drools on you, We don't say, well, that baby must be being abused, right?
	But if a five-year-old comes up and spits on you, there's probably something going wrong in the household, right?
	So it's because we have these...
	We wouldn't necessarily say that the five-year-old is completely morally responsible, but we do have a standard by which we know there's probably some dysfunction going on in the household if that's the way they're acting out.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	I guess another way to say it would be if you can find...
	Someone of the same low IQ who doesn't do those behaviors, then it's a reasonable expectation.
	Well, and it is almost a tautology as well, because if we say, if you're not capable of, like, people who are not capable of conforming to the non-aggression principle can't be in society anyway.
	Like, how do you know somebody's not fit to live in society?
	Well, they can't.
	They'll go out and just punch people.
	Or they'll just go out and if they see a piece of pizza, they'll just go steal it.
	Right?
	They'll just take whatever they want, hit whoever they want, you know, have tantrums, spit on people.
	That's how you know they can't live in society, right?
	So if you're not confined in some way for your own good...
	Then, by definition, you're a Loki who is expected to conform to the non-aggression principle as a bare minimum, right?
	Now, we wouldn't necessarily say that somebody who can conform to the non-aggression principle will also be capable of signing a complex lease arrangement for their business, right?
	In the same way that we expect a five-year-old to not, you know, cold clock another five-year-old with a chair, we also would not say that that five-year-old can also enter into compound interest loans at the age of five, right?
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	So there may be limitations, you know, the two basic premises of common law.
	Number one, don't initiate force.
	You know, we expect people in society to be able to do that.
	Number two, don't, like you have to keep your word, Well, we would expect that to some degree, although there's more flexibility with that with kids.
	But we also would not necessarily expect somebody, a low-key, to get into...
	We're talking about the housing crisis here, basically, right?
	Where a lot of people who had less money and perhaps...
	That's an indication of lower IQ. And this is what I've heard, is that people got into these, well, it's really cheap to buy your house now, and we've got you on a low introductory rate, but in six months or a year or two years when we renegotiate, we're then going to go with the current rates.
	And what happened was the current rates had gone up enormously in the intervening time period.
	And the house that used to cost them $1,200 now costs them $2,000 or $2,500.
	And those people just, they didn't really plan for that.
	They didn't really understand it.
	Like, woohoo!
	House for $1,200 for 20 years because it's a 20-year mortgage.
	But they didn't get the risk they were exposing themselves to at the current rate renegotiation that occurred at the expiration of the current contract that they were signing, right?
	It's a 20-year mortgage, but it's renegotiated after a year or two or whatever, right?
	And so those are low IQ people, possibly low IQ people, or low information people, who got involved in contracts and they weren't exactly equipped to fully understand the cost of benefits.
	And certainly the bank wasn't particularly interested in explaining it to them in some cases.
	Does that make sense?
	It does.
	But the banks didn't want to lend to them.
	And the way that you take care of that is through your credit rating, right?
	So the low-keys will get a credit card, right?
	And if they don't really get the compound interest thing or they just pay off the bare minimum or they end up not really being able to handle the credit card, well, what happens?
	Well, their credit card gets pulled and their credit rating goes into the toilet, right?
	Or let's say they go and buy their first car And maybe it's some used car and, you know, they get a $5,000 loan or whatever.
	We had a caller in last year or a year and a half ago, I was talking about this.
	And maybe they get a loan and they can't pay it off.
	And so the car has to be repoed and then they're...
	So everybody gets a shot, right?
	And of course, you have to pay usually more if you don't have a credit rating to take account of the risk.
	And so...
	They go and they try and get their first loan or their first contract, and if they can't fulfill it, then the credit rating goes negative or goes low or whatever, and then people aren't going to want to lend to them because they're not able to responsibly manage that kind of contract.
	And so then they have to kind of live paycheck to paycheck or hand to mouth or without credit or whatever, which, you know, it's certainly possible to do in a rather decent way if you have any kind of decent income.
	And so the capacity of people to enter into complex contracts, I think, would be best managed by a credit rating.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Well, I just thought of one thing that I probably should have brought up when we were talking about the non-aggression principle, which is how, you know, it's reasonable to expect that they will be able to adhere to them, but to understand why something is moral.
	Do you think that Oh, I don't care.
	Okay.
	Yeah, I mean, why somebody does it.
	You know, like, I talk to all these people in the show, and they say, this is not just callers, but, you know, other people too.
	Ah, you know, well, people are doing things with the best of intentions, and who cares?
	Who cares what people's like, whether they fully understand it and get the non-aggressive...
	I mean, first of all, five-year-olds can understand UPB. I can guarantee...
	Four-year-olds can understand UPB because I... I've tried.
	It's actually pretty easy to explain.
	I've got a podcast called The ABCs of UPB, which I did even before becoming a parent and explaining it to kids.
	But yeah, it's very easy to understand.
	But whether they do it because they're afraid of negative consequences or whether they do it because they fully understand the moral implications or whatever, doesn't...
	Or because there's a God who's looking at them.
	Yeah, who cares?
	I mean, just obey the damn rules.
	What your personal motivations are, I don't know.
	Do you pay me back?
	Because you think you're going to hell if you don't?
	I don't know.
	Just give me my money.
	So as far as one's capacity to keep one's word, well, it will very quickly become evident the degree to which people can handle long-term complicated contracts, and that will be decided on by that.
	So those are the thou shalt not, or the negative virtues, which is don't do stuff, don't initiate force, right?
	And I would say that the Lokis...
	By definition, must be able to handle that, otherwise they're in some sort of managed facility, right?
	Yeah, I think they're able to handle it, but obviously the deferral of gratification is a big thing.
	Well, okay, and that deferral of gratification will be dealt with by credit ratings or whatever, right?
	But here's the more challenging question, which I don't have an answer to, which is what about the positive virtues?
	So we expect a five-year-old to not go up and push other kids into a ditch, right?
	However, do we say to the five-year-old, you should show moral courage in the face of social disapproval and peer pressure?
	Uh...
	Thank you.
	Well, we say courage is a good thing.
	I'm not sure what you're asking.
	Well, I think in general, when I was a kid, right, I mean, the standard line was, you know, some kids would end up doing, be doing something bad or wrong or against the rules or whatever.
	And what do kids always say?
	Well, they were all doing it.
	And what do the parents say or the adults say?
	Oh, if your friends were jumping off a bridge, would you do it?
	If you were at London Bridge or when I came to the colonies, the CN Tower, if your friends were all doing this, if they were all eating poo cakes, would you eat a poo?
	So what you're basically saying is don't blame other people and social momentum for you making a bad choice.
	We understand that that is a skill to be developed over time.
	Nobody is born immune from peer pressure except sociopaths, I would imagine, or psychotics or whatever, right?
	So we're all susceptible to peer pressure because we are a tribal species, we are social animals, and we can only survive with at least some cooperation from those around us.
	So the positive moral virtues, like, it's not immoral to go along with peer pressure.
	You know, if you're an adult and your friends say, Have a drink and you don't want a drink and you have a drink.
	Okay.
	It's not immoral.
	They're not initiating force.
	They're just cajoling you, right?
	And so the positive virtue of stand for what you believe in and don't succumb to peer pressure against your values.
	Well, that is a positive virtue, which we all struggle with and we all have that challenge, right?
	I mean, I'll conform to peer pressure insofar as I don't invent my own clicking armpit fart with your hand language, because I'm going to conform to peer pressure like, okay, I'll use TCPIP and Skype, even though a lot of other people use it.
	And so, you know, I'll use collective stuff and all that.
	And the positive values of courage and integrity and making...
	Positive choices to do good in the world despite negative repercussions or reactions at some times.
	These are not virtues that we would anticipate being magnificently displayed by a five-year-old.
	In fact, it'd be kind of creepy if they did do that, right?
	Because those are sort of skills that you must develop over time.
	It's not good if you saw your own healthy handoff, right?
	And so we wouldn't want people doing that.
	On the other hand, that's sort of like a don't harm yourself kind of thing.
	But on the other hand, you know, how much time should you spend eating well and exercising and so on?
	That's more of a positive thing.
	A virtue that is more difficult to achieve and maintain.
	So I think for the Lokis, I would expect them to conform to the non-aggression principle and keep their word to the degree that they're capable of it and shielding them from areas where it's too complex for them because that's exploitation.
	but I'm not sure that I would hold the same high standards for positive virtues, you know, courage, integrity, honor, decency, love, like all of those things I would expect would be more clustered around the high IQ people.
	So if you were to...
	I'm still stuck on this...
	Would they be able to understand what they're doing is right?
	Because if they're in a group and the group is doing something that's good, then peer pressure is a good thing.
	If they're doing something that's bad, then it's a bad thing.
	Oh, you know, I don't know.
	But then you're going to...
	So if they're doing the right thing for the wrong reason, right?
	That's the great temptation, right?
	It's the greatest reason to do the right thing for the wrong reason, according to an old play.
	So, give me an example where peer pressure has someone doing something virtuous, right?
	Not just like, you know, that sort of thing that happens in Jersey Shore, you know, well, we all want these banging bods to attract the chicks, so we're all going to go to the gym.
	Like, I guess going to the gym is pretty healthy, but, you know, I guess what that does is means you've got great abs from which girls can lick off your STDs.
	But, So it turns you into sort of patient zero for the spread of God knows what.
	But can you give me an example of peer pressure that results in a positive moral virtue?
	Yeah, well, let's look at, you know, disasters like Katrina.
	Well, everyone else is sending money, and so it's the good thing to do, whereas if your neighbor wasn't doing it, you might not.
	Certain people might not decide to send money to help.
	Okay, all right.
	I can see that being a mechanism by which someone is going to be generous because someone else is doing it.
	And okay, that's fine.
	Would you expect, I would expect low IQ people, I would expect the low keys to be more susceptible to Doing the right thing because of peer pressure than because of their own internal moral compass.
	Yes, I think so.
	And...
	And that's what we have for children, right?
	The parents are supposed to model virtuous behavior, which is then copied by the children, and then they internalize the same values and then become self-sustaining moral agents over time.
	But it starts with imitation, right?
	I mean, you don't teach the definition of the word cat to a child before you point at something and call it a cat, right?
	They learn the word for no particular reason, and then they, you know, there's my daughter's interest in etymology now.
	They then wonder why there are these particular words and where they come from and so on.
	But you teach the word and then long afterwards you can teach the definition or the morphemes or the syllables or whatever.
	And so, yeah, you would expect, I guess, the low-keys to go more along with the crowd.
	And I would have lower expectations of a low-key being susceptible to peer pressure.
	That would be much more forgivable for me than a high IQ person would.
	Being susceptible to peer pressure.
	That's one of the reasons why I nag academics who are pro-free market for staying so far away from the free market than I do some government janitor.
	Am I keeping you awake?
	I feel like we're not quite getting a tennis game going here.
	Look, this means there's something else that's on your mind that you want to talk about that we're not getting to, so why don't we just ditch this abstract stuff and get to what's on your mind?
	Well...
	There's some motivation for this question that...
	Let me think about that.
	No, I mean, I am interested in the abstract.
	Um...
	Is there someone in your life that this may apply to?
	Yeah, I mean, friends, certain friends and roommates that I've had.
	So past tense.
	Not that compelling in your life right now?
	Currently have, yeah.
	Oh, currently, friends you currently have.
	Okay.
	And what is this specific area that...
	You think they may get the low-key exemption?
	Hmm.
	Okay, so...
	Shoplifting.
	The person didn't go through with it, but said, I could see myself doing that if I wouldn't get caught in it.
	Right, so they are not doing the wrong thing because they fear the consequences rather than any particular empathy for the shopkeeper who would then have to cover the costs of whatever they stole, right?
	Right, right.
	You could also argue that it's because there are people in their life who have done it and kind of rubs off on them.
	So it's sort of like the peer pressure thing too.
	Yeah, and they also may have a feeling that the society they live in has not provided them enough values and virtues that they feel obligated to uphold any social contract.
	Like, so for instance, one of the things that may be occurring, whether at a conscious or unconscious level, is they may say, well, wait a second, I'm $175,000 in debt Because the government didn't want to pay its bills.
	And now they expect me to never steal anything?
	They just stole $175,000 in terms of the national debt, not even counted.
	The unfunded liabilities That American government, it's like a million dollars per person or something.
	They're going to be even higher by the time these people become adults, if they're younger or whatever.
	So they may say, well, wait a second.
	I've been used as enslavement collateral by the society that I live in.
	And nobody seems to have a big problem with that.
	Nobody's saying, well, you know, we've got to deal with this debt.
	And so they have violated, not only stolen from the young, but they've put the young into absolutely unsustainable levels of debt.
	With no particular intention of paying it off.
	In fact, they're just accelerating, piling on more debt.
	You know, it took until eight years ago to accumulate the first $10 trillion of US debt from 1776 to, you know, eight years ago, 2008.
	And now it is...
	Taken only eight years to double the debt that it took a couple of hundred years to first accumulate.
	So people might say, well, society views me as collateral and has borrowed against me and put me into horrendous unsustainable debt.
	So why the hell should I respect property rights since I've been used as indebted, indentured, slave collateral and put into absolutely unpayable debt?
	Why the hell should I care about property rights?
	I'd say that's spot on if you replace government with corporation with that word.
	Oh, you mean they've mistaken who's able to put them in debt?
	Right.
	Right, because it's not like Apple can enter into a contract that I have to pay off, right?
	The government can, Apple legally can't.
	Yeah, I guess the bigger question is how do you get through to those types of People who are more on the left, but aren't, you know, it's going to be hard to reach them with syllogisms and stuff like that.
	Oh, how do you get through to leftists?
	I don't know.
	I mean, I don't know.
	I mean, you can, you know, you can point out the obvious hypocrisies and you can just bring up the basic thing that it's the government that's taught them to hate corporations.
	Right?
	Look, every religion needs a devil.
	Every religion needs a devil because religion fundamentally cannot solve the practical problems of life because, you know, it's superstition.
	It's fantasy.
	It's false, right?
	So when religion was in control of the West, there was no particular progress for over a thousand years.
	It was after the separation of church and state and after the fragmentation of Christendom that the cracks in the sidewalk of religion allowed for the shoots of the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, all of that.
	Religion says it's fantastic if the priests are in charge, but when the priests are in charge, society stagnates horribly.
	I give you the Middle East.
	What happens is every religion fails to satisfy and solve the basic problems of production, consumption, distribution, the economy as a whole.
	I mean, good Lord, it was one of the reasons why Jews ended up so prominent in the finances was that it was illegal for Catholics to lend money at interest.
	And it's still illegal in a lot of the Muslim world to lend money at interest, and that's one of the reasons why the economy stagnates.
	And so, every religion needs a devil.
	And just as the priests who keep people in poverty need a devil to explain their failures, The government who keeps everyone in poverty needs corporations to explain their failures.
	Corporations are just the devils of the modern religion of the state.
	Now, getting them to understand that, well, That's my whole show for 10 years and so on, right?
	So I can't sort of encapsulate it.
	But, you know, you can point out some basic contradictions.
	You can point out which agency has the power to initiate force against them and which agency doesn't and just see if they're open to any rational evidence or whether they're just fundamentalists, right?
	The leftists who are fundamentalists, you can't reach, you know, any more than you can jump into Jesus camp and explain evolution in a way that they'll accept.
	Yeah, and it seems like It's actually easier to reach low-key Ks on the right than it is to reach high-key...
	High-Q. We've got low-keys and high-Qs, if that helps.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, sure.
	Yeah, because K-selected people have a longer time frame.
	You can be lower IQ and have a longer time frame if you're K-selected, a longer time frame of the deferral of gratification.
	And, you know, these are the solid, stolid, lower-middle-class people who get married, who don't screw around, who tend their gardens, who maintain their houses, who are solid and reliable people who never overcook their barbecue meat and all that.
	Fine, fine, good, salt-of-the-earth people.
	And they're low IQ, but they're case-selected, and they're stable, and they're, you know, great people.
	And then there's our selected people who are very highly intelligent, And who have no particular, you know, this is, you know, nobody would say that John Maynard Keynes was low IQ, but his whole thing was, well, people would say, well, what about the long run?
	He'd say, well, in the long run, we're all dead.
	That's the basic K, sorry, this is basic R response.
	Who cares about the long run?
	We're all dead.
	Whereas that's not the K-selected response.
	And these are the people who, they've got low IQs, but they steadfastly and steadily put away money for their kids' education and teach them the value of education and teach them the value of deferring gratification.
	And they don't do it because they're just geniuses who figured all this stuff out from first principles, but because that's their nature, that's how they were raised, and that's what they're reproducing.
	Well, and they have tradition, which...
	It's kind of compounding all the collective intelligence from centuries.
	And then, you know, modernity comes along and we want to wipe all that out because we're so progressive.
	You know, the smart people think that they're smarter than centuries of hard learned lessons.
	Yeah, they think they can get rid of a god and somehow they don't uproot all of the moral lessons that depend upon the existence of a god.
	All of the traditions, all of the deferral of gratifications, no sex before marriage, commit until death do you die, be there to raise your children.
	They think they can get rid of god like they can just pull the keystone of an arch out and somehow the arch is going to stay up without anything there.
	This is what really pisses me off about atheists who ripped god away without providing a substitute for Objective ethics, which is why I started working on UPB so early and why at least I've got that one off my bucket list and can nag atheists with a fully conflict-free conscience.
	Right, right.
	So, I think that the solution to people who have Legitimate complaints about society's respect for property rights.
	Look, you can't treat the unborn as disposable tax cattle and then expect them to have respect for you as they age.
	I mean, this is just not...
	The nihilism and frustration and rage that erupts in some misguided but entirely understandable movements like, you know, Occupy Wall Street and so on and is now erupting on the K side in terms of Trump and on the R side in terms of Bernie Sanders.
	This is...
	It's all understandable stuff and all you have to do is help people to understand that they've got Good damn reasons to be pissed off and focus that anger in something that is productive.
	You know, stealing a candy bar, shoplifting a pair of Nike's kicks is not going to deal with statism.
	And you need to find a way to get people's anger, to help them understand it is perfectly legitimate, and to channel it into something that's actually going to solve the problem rather than a tit-for-tat escalation that can completely undo civilization.
	Yeah, and just when I look at your show, it's becoming more and more popular.
	Well, look, it has to be comprehensible to the majority.
	Philosophy has to be comprehensible to the majority.
	This is why, you know, I read through things like Kantian ethics and so on.
	It's like, yeah, nice framework, guys.
	How the hell is that going to solve anything in a playground?
	Making things so ridiculously abstract.
	It's like if the only computer was a 10-ton Bessie of vacuum tubes that you needed an entire fleet of cooling trucks to keep running, okay, it's great that someone has a computer, but it's not going to do much good to anyone else.
	We've got to GUI this thing up.
	We've got to make it user-friendly.
	And so it's not necessarily that it's low IQ people that I'm appealing to, but I'm providing...
	A valuable synthesis of philosophy to people who don't have the time, energy, or maybe even intellectual capacity to do all the stupid shit that has passed through moral philosophy for the past couple of hundred years, at least since moral philosophy began elbowing aside Christianity, at least Christianity is going to give you a vivid and clear and emotionally compelling portrait as to why be good.
	And until philosophers can do that, man...
	You cannot take out a central tunnel support unless you've got another one that you can slap right in its place.
	Or ideally, have one in its place and then take out the central tunnel support.
	Otherwise, the whole damn thing comes down.
	And I think culture is an important part of that.
	Because the left, they've got the down.
	They've got all these...
	Rappers and celebrities and everyone in Hollywood, all the writers, the art world.
	I'm actually an artist myself.
	I have a channel.
	I've seen your drawings on YouTube.
	They're lovely.
	Thank you.
	Yeah.
	And so I'm trying to I synthesize a lot of the stuff that I get from this show and other places involving philosophy into something that's imaginative and inspiring for just the everyday person.
	And I think we need more.
	Yes, it is.
	No, it is narrative that runs the world.
	And I don't know that that's ever not going to be the case.
	It is narrative and stories.
	That run the world.
	You know, my daughter wants to hear a story.
	And now I can put morals in the stories, but she's never said, Dad, can we rattle through some syllogisms?
	I mean, it's just stories that run the world.
	And maybe that will be not the case in some point in the future.
	But the fact that it is the case right now is not a problem.
	It's just what is.
	And the problem with the secular approach to life, there's no devil.
	There's no devil.
	And without a devil, you cannot get people excited about ethics.
	The devil is like the sexy hooker that gets you into the gambling house.
	Right?
	She is the chesty hooters waitress that has you put up with subpar wings.
	Right?
	And so you have to have a devil in order to get people interested in morality.
	And the left has a devil.
	It has a few devils.
	And it has...
	A place for people to vent their frustration, anger, and hatred.
	The patriarchy, racists, corporations, homophobes, like they have a whole pantheon, as is the case with Christianity, right?
	There's the devil, and then there's a whole bunch of other devils, because one is never enough.
	A lot of people have a lot of hatred.
	You can't just expect that to be contained in one satanic figure.
	You've got to have a whole pantheon.
	Your Beelzebub, your Asmodeus, you know, the whole thing.
	And your ball.
	And the problem with the secular worldview is because they don't believe in evil, they only believe in dysfunction, or unproductive approaches to life, or tragically misguided notions, or people who act out in unproductive, like they just don't believe in evil.
	And you cannot get people interested in morality unless you have a devil.
	The devil is the introduction to religion, not God, fundamentally.
	Or it has to be the love followed by the devil.
	But if you only have the love of God without the temptations of the devil, you have a vastly incomplete picture of what motivates human beings with regards to good and evil.
	I do good because I want to do good, and I also avoid doing evil because I'm afraid of what it will do to me and what it will do to others.
	Like the number of people who said, Steph, great speeches, you should go into politics.
	It's like, nope.
	Not only do I think it would be The wrong thing to do, but I'm genuinely afraid of what it would do to my personality.
	There's the devil too.
	The devil has his temptations.
	And if you don't have a devil with temptations in your pantheon, you can't get people that interested in ethics.
	Now, Islam has its devil and it has its angels.
	And Judaism has its devil and it has its angels.
	And socialism and Marxism.
	Why did they replace religion?
	Because they have their devils and they have their angels.
	If you don't have an object of hatred in your moral philosophy, you simply can't get people motivated to be good.
	Whether that'll change in the future, I don't know, but that's the way it is right now.
	Now, why is what I'm talking about growing?
	Because we have a devil.
	Because we have a devil.
	Unfortunately, it's a devil that very much conflicts with the devil of other ideologies.
	It's more in common with the christian devil than it is with the socialist devil or the atheist devil or which doesn't really exist that much except maybe religion and anyone who criticizes atheism but um or atheist outcomes but if you don't have a devil then Why does it matter?
	I mean, it's like trying to have a superhero movie without a villain.
	Who's going to go and watch it?
	Here's a superhero being good and helping people and no one's fighting him and no one's opposing him and there's no, you know, it's like it's all Bond, no villain.
	And actually, after I did the allegory of the cave, Plato's allegory of the cave, it was actually embedded in my presentation, Aristotle, but I wanted to pull it out and put it separate because I thought it was worth getting people excited and introduced to that perspective.
	Somebody was like, after I did that allegory, people were like, Steph would be an excellent Bond villain.
	That's a nice thing to hear.
	But without villains, there's no story.
	There's no, right?
	The left spreads because it's openly willing to target people as villains and to have you hate them.
	Now, I'm not trying to promote or preach or hate or anything like that, but when you get kids born into a million dollars in debt, yeah, yeah, there's something to hate there.
	And now, hate can be a very helpful and productive emotion if it's put to its right use and it's not violent but rather seeks you to pursue knowledge and strength and engage in necessary philosophical conversations.
	But in the absence of having any channel or container for negative or hostile emotions, there is no compelling place for people to put their legitimate angers and hatreds.
	And angers and hatreds are an essential part of human personality structures.
	They are energetic and positive aspects of...
	Our progress towards virtue.
	They are part of how we navigate as a species towards the good.
	Love of the good is hatred of evil.
	You can't have one without the other.
	It's like saying, I love my wife, but I'm completely indifferent as to whether she's alive or dead.
	No.
	If you love your wife, you will hate her absence.
	If you love something, you will hate its absence.
	If you are committed to something good, you will hate that which opposes and undermines and obstructs and destroys it or attempts to destroy it.
	Hatred and love are two sides of the same coin.
	They neither should run to extremes, maybe love, but right now the world strikes out so viciously at love that love is conjoined with hatred inevitably at the moment.
	And so that's what, you know, if you want to appeal to people on the left, you've got to give them a substitute devil.
	And I think that what we talk about in terms of coercive, centralized, oligarchical, hierarchical power, and the self-delusion, and this is why all the people who say, well, you know, the leftists, they put these government programs in with the best of intentions, and so on.
	It's like, okay, well, you've just scrubbed the devil from your pantheon, and you'll get no converts.
	So, I hope that helps.
	And, you know, we're going to listen to this a couple of times and mull it over.
	I just thought of this during the show, so it's actually, I'll have to mull it over sometime as well, the degree to which all moral narratives advance on the heels of a devil.
	That's something I'm going to have to mull over as well.
	I'm going to close off the show, but thanks very much for calling in.
	It was a very, very thought-provoking question.
	I'm glad we got a chance to discuss it.
	Thank you to...
	All of the callers for calling in.
	It is always a distinct and direct and deep, deep, deep pleasure to be able to chat with you about all these very important issues.
	Freedomainradio.com slash with a scimitar donate.
	To help out the show, just sign up for a subscription.
	It can be a couple of bucks a month.
	All of it helps us out and helps us to build and helps us to plan for what we're going to do next.
	We're always bicycling, churning new ideas about how to spread things.
	And we've got a couple cooking in the can right now.
	But we needed the money to do it.
	So freedommainradio.com slash donate, fdrurl.com slash Amazon to help us out with an affiliate link, and fdrpodcast.com, like, subscribe, and share.
	As usual, thank you so much for listening and watching.

▲