3296 RIDING THE FIRE AND ICE SPACE UNICORN - Call In Show - May 18th, 2016
Question 1: [1:42] - “In your wide ranging interview with Peter Schiff, as in most of your opinions, I sensed an avoidance from meaningful discussion of taxation, and of the philosophy thereof. The Trump campaign has correctly identified taxation of imports as a necessary change from present practice, but without identifying its’ most meaningful justification, taxation unequal to that on national production. What is your opinion of importing goods and services at a cost excluding the same level of taxation included in the cost of those nationally produced? And secondly, can you justify a taxation base of income?”Question 2: [40:47] - “If you want to know if God is real, why don’t you simply meet Him since nothing, other than yourself seems to prevent the encounter?”Question 3: [1:33:20] - “Are humans naturally hierarchical?”Question 4: [2:31:45] - “Given Stefan has identified that atheists are more likely to adopt far-left political views, would he recommend one raising their children in a church-going, God-fearing Christian environment? The idea behind this is if your kids do not become the poster-children of free-thinking, rational individuals, then at least they can fall back on their beliefs that better promote what Western society stands for. And hey, if they are rational people and later come to the realization that God doesn’t exist, then they can just throw that concept away then. No harm, no foul.”Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hello everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing very well.
So we had four great callers tonight.
The first was a gentleman a bit closer to the end than the beginning of his life who just demanded really to know why I wasn't willing to do my duty, pay my taxes, and support a civilization and society that had given me so many good graces, education, and opportunities.
And let's just say we had a spirited back and forth about it.
The second was a fellow who wanted to know why I had not decided to meet God and how I should go about doing so.
Yeah, I know it sounds a little sinister, but we cleared that up right ahead.
And we had a really good debate about the nature of love and evidence and facts and it was very productive for you.
Maybe not for him, certainly for you.
Third caller, long chat.
Are humans naturally hierarchical?
Are we always going to self-sort into these pyramids of power?
And what happens if we don't?
And the fourth caller, interesting question.
If you had to marry a feminist or a Christian woman or man, would you choose the feminist woman or the Christian woman?
If you or a man had to choose to marry.
A fine question.
And we talked a lot about...
The reasons why we might lean, say, one way or the other.
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And feel free to reshare the tweets.
Alright, up first today we have Ed.
Ed wrote in and said, In your wide-ranging interview with Peter Schiff, as in most of your opinions, I sensed an avoidance from meaningful discussion of taxation and the philosophy thereof.
The Trump campaign has correctly identified taxation of imports as a necessary change from present practice, but without identifying its most meaningful justification, taxation unequal to that on national production.
What is your opinion of importing goods and services at cost, excluding the same level of taxation, included in the cost of those nationally produced?
And secondly, can you justify a taxation of base income?
That's from Ed.
Well, hello Ed, how are you doing?
There, can you hear me?
Yes, can you hear me?
Yes, I can, and I'm very happy to be on the line with you.
Well, thank you.
Very nice of you to call in.
It's a It's a great question, and I'm happy to start with sort of some of my thoughts on the issue as it stands, or if you like, you can expand on your question if you prefer.
It applies to both of my countries.
You talk about both the U.S. and Canada.
And Canada, as usual, has been just following like a little doggy behind the Americans.
And so we are in almost the same problems as the United States is in.
I happen to believe that Canada has the ability to get out of the economic problems before the U.S. does.
But anyway, on the importation, This came up in the Trump campaign and I said, he's not talking about the right stuff.
Sure, it's nice to keep our people working instead of importing the stuff, but that's not the most important part.
The most important part is that for everything we produce in Canada, we pay about one-third to support our society.
And those things that we bring in, import, have none of that tax on it.
So we're going to be paying that tax anyway, but that stuff that's built in other countries has no tax on it by one third.
So how can our producers compete with that?
Right.
Now, the question of tariffs, I'm going to do a more detailed presentation on it, but just sort of very briefly, the question of tariffs, as a good free market guy, it's always been, well, tariffs are bad.
And compared to, you know, a back rub from a water buffalo, tariffs are bad.
I have no doubt about that.
In other words, if you have a choice between no tariffs and tariffs, choose no tariffs.
On the other hand, though, if you have the choice between income tax and tariffs, I think there's a very strong case to be made.
You choose the tariffs.
Now, of course, the U.S. government, federal government, was initially...
I guess for the first, what, 80 or maybe even 100 years outside of the Civil War and other things, was funded through tariffs.
Now, the good thing, a couple of good things about tariffs relative to the income tax.
Number one, it's optional, right?
I mean, so in England, you have to import tea because it's too cold to grow it there.
It's too cold to grow much in England except resentment.
And And if you don't want to pay the tax, you don't drink the tea.
And so there is that aspect of things that it's an avoidable tax in a way that the income tax generally isn't.
So because it's avoidable, there's a cap on how far it can grow, right?
See, the challenge with the income tax, especially this, I think it was Friedman who came up with the godforsaken idea of deduction at source, The problem with the income tax is you can't avoid it.
And if the income tax goes up 2% or 3% or 5%, it's deducted from source, you can't avoid it.
On the other hand, and you know this as a fellow Canuck, they keep trying to raise taxes on cigarettes.
And then what happens is usually a knot of native Canadians with their packages of cigarettes in their hockey bags will go up and down Yonge Street, at least they used to back in the day, offering their cut rate smuggled across the border cigarettes to people for cash.
And so they keep trying to raise these syntaxes and what happens is people, you know, find a way around it or they simply stop consuming whatever has the too high tariff.
And so there's a ceiling, there's a downward pressure on the tax because it can be avoided or can be bypassed in some ways.
So I like it from that standpoint if you have to do it.
The other thing too, of course, is that I think it's fairly incontrovertible, at least from an economic standpoint, that if you raise taxes on competing products coming into a country, it does tend to create an incubation for domestic industries.
So Reagan famously put a huge tax tariff on Japanese motorcycles in order to protect the Harley-Davidson company, which of course is an American maker of motorcycles.
So there is some case to be made for tariffs.
The other thing, of course, is that if you have a tariff instead of an income tax, you tend to not have the trillions of unpaid, godforsaken hours put in by the people to complete all of their income taxes.
Like if you could take all of the income tax out of the equation and replace it with tariffs, Well, tariffs are much easier to institute and to collect than income taxes and it's built into the price of whatever you buy from overseas.
It's subject to that tariff.
You pay your tax that way and you don't have to fill out your income tax.
I have to go back and disagree with your first sentence.
You say where it's obvious that tariffs are not the good way to tax.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
What I meant was that if you have the choice between no tax at all, like a totally free society and tariffs, then choose a free society.
But if you have the choice between income tax and tariffs, I would choose tariffs.
Or any other tax and tariffs.
Because the thing about tariffs, even without the tax part of it, if you do not have Canadian amnesia or American amnesia, And you go back a hundred years and more.
That's what built our manufacturing sector.
And now what they've done, they not only did they stop tariffs, which originally were a tax and were not meant to offset taxes on Canadian goods, but now we have the bizarre part where if we build a tractor in Canada, And we can buy one overseas for $10,000.
By the time you add on that one third, you're up to $13,000.
Canadians can build a tractor for $13,000.
They're not competing fairly with the imports.
Yes, and I think there's a very good case to be made for that, insofar as when you have a sort of late-stage, hyper-socialist, redistributionist economy like Canada does, as you say, there's a third of the productivity is just sucked up in income redistribution and so on, right?
Right.
The problem that I see with the whole tax regime is that it doesn't It isn't based on rational thought.
For example, the taxation of income is the taxation of production.
And it's proven and people accept that it does cut down people's productivity because they just won't work sometimes if they have to pay the tax.
That is a good reason for taxing what people consume.
What they create, their income, means they have created wealth.
Either goods or services or whatever.
But that is wealth created.
Everybody's income is the creation of wealth.
And everybody's food and everything they spend is the consumption of wealth.
So we're taxing Right off the top to prevent production and we're not taxing at the end to discourage production, to discourage the consumption of our wealth.
Right.
And libertarians are like a bunch of jackals on an elephant with Donald Trump because they say, well, Donald Trump is going to spark a trade war and Donald Trump wants tariffs and tariffs are bad and so on.
And again, this is just, I don't know, knee-jerk reactionary libertarianism.
They don't know what they're talking about.
Well, no, because if it's true, I mean, this is, I think, what's going on.
If I had to hazard a guess and cross over to this place of libertarian thought, for want of a better word, I think what they think is that Donald Trump is saying everything's going to stay the same.
Corporate taxes stay the same.
Income taxes stay the same.
The complicated tax code stays the same.
Everything stays the same.
But I'm going to put massive tariffs on stuff coming into the country, too.
And that is certainly not the case.
I mean, Donald Trump is looking to reduce...
Corporate taxes enormously, looking to reduce and simplify income taxes enormously.
And to make up for some of that revenue he wants, and to protect American industries, he wants a tariff wall on particular goods.
The other thing too is that when Donald Trump, and this is, I don't know, I guess people have never been in business who studied the economy.
But when Donald Trump says, I'm going to put a 50% tariff on this and I'm going to put an 80% tariff on that, that is not what happens.
You know, that's like saying, wow, you lowballed your estimate on my house.
I guess I have to sell it to you.
It's like, no, that is your opening position.
That is your opening position and it gets people's attention.
Where it ends up is different.
Donald Trump might threaten a 50% tariff on something and in return for that might get more honest business practices from The other country.
You know, the degree to which China devalues its currency, the degree to which they're not subject to environmental protectionism and health and safety and all that kind of stuff is somewhat of an uneven playing field.
So it's not like he's just going to wave the magic presidential wand and put all these tariffs in place.
This is an opening negotiating position so that he can get what he thinks is best for the American economy.
But he's not the dictator of the world that just command everyone to do everything.
It's a negotiating position And you figure out where you're going to end up.
You know, with kids, the negotiating position is, I want chocolate cake for dinner.
That doesn't mean they get that.
That's just what they want.
And this is just a starting position.
But there is this...
I don't know how to put it.
I guess a confusion in people's thinking with regards to domestic versus overseas production.
Because people say, well, how can American workers or Canadian workers...
Compete with Chinese workers who are willing to work for $3 an hour or $2 an hour or whatever.
That is nonsense.
That is complete nonsense.
Let's say...
Let's take an extreme example.
That I sell my service to you as a COBOL programmer and I will do COBOL programming for $50 an hour.
Let's just say I have no sense of my net worth or economic worth.
$50 an hour.
Next to me...
Is Coco the chimpanzee, who is also willing to sell you his services as a COBOL programmer, but he'll work literally for peanuts and bananas, right?
And you've got a lot of peanuts and bananas.
Do you want to pay me $50?
Because this, Coco the monkey, Coco the COBOL programming, nut-eating monkey, Banana-licking monkey, he's willing to work for nothing, virtually.
Well, who are you going to hire?
Well, there's no point hiring the monkey because he's not going to be able to program in COBOL, certainly not past version 74.
So hang on, let me just finish up here.
So there's this idea, well, because they're willing to work for less, we can't possibly compete.
America became the number one manufacturing industrial power In the world, in the 19th century, when American workers were close to if not the most highly paid workers in the world.
And this idea that because other people are willing to work for less, they must They will always out-compete you.
Look, Brad Pitt charges, what, $15 million for a movie or something like that?
There are tons of actors, in fact, just about all of them, who'd be willing to work for much less than $15 million.
Why doesn't, I mean, the Chinese actress will be willing to work for $3 an hour.
Why don't they hire the Chinese actress?
Well, because Brad Pitt brings economic value with him that's worth much more than the $15 million Another point that you haven't made is that I'm not so sure that these imported goods have gone down in cost to the Canadians because what has happened is that the importer,
the corporations bringing it in, and the transportation and all of this extra cost We're probably paying just as much for these goods.
There's probably another 30 or 40 percent that we're paying for these foreign goods that we could be paying to build them in Canada.
So we may be getting those foreign goods for half what the price would come up to in Canada, but if you add on the extra profit to the distributors and the importers and all the rest of it, we're probably paying the same.
Yes, and the other problem with the welfare state and the unemployment insurance economies is I would rather have a Canadian working in a manufacturing plant even if I've got to pay twice for what he makes because otherwise he's sitting on welfare or sitting on unemployment and I've got to pay it through taxes anyway except he's losing job skills and there's no jobs and he's not contributing taxes.
So there's this weird situation where because there's this welfare state unemployment insurance and all that kind of stuff, tariffs make sense because I'd rather have a Canadian working than taking my tax revenues.
So I have on taxation that in our society or in our country we should be taxing those things that harm our society and not doing things that harm our society.
For example, we do not tax the trading in the secondary markets for securities.
And I have, remember, a quotation by the head of the Of the Vanguard Group, who said the job of finance is to provide capital to companies.
We do it to the tune of $250 billion a year in initial public and secondary offerings.
What else do we do?
We encourage investors to trade about $32 trillion a year.
So the way I calculated, 99% of what we do in this industry is people trading with one another, with a gain only to the middleman.
It's a waste of resources.
There is a source of taxation, two or three percent On that market, and that is harmful to our economy, that market, because what it does, it diverts capital that could be invested in productive assets and puts it in pieces of paper.
They're almost like lottery tickets.
And the government looks at a lottery ticket, and they take 48 percent of the money that's paid for that lottery ticket goes to government.
And yet those that are speculating in secondary Financial instruments and derivatives and all that garbage, they're not paying any tax.
Why is the guy who's speculating in the lottery paying 48% and these guys speculating elsewhere don't pay anything?
And that's where the money is.
That's what we should be taxing.
Money's there.
No, and I understand all of that, but to me, this is sort of like designing a dungeon in Dungeons& Dragons.
It probably doesn't mean that much to you, but...
This idea we should do this or the government should do that or this is a better way to tax or a worse way to tax.
The problem is what it does is it gives the government the right to tax and then special interests take it over.
And the governments like low tariffs because low tariffs tend to push down inflation, right?
Because if you can get a bunch of cheap goods in, then the government can print more money and the inflation doesn't go up because the cheap goods are being pumped into the country.
So the problem is it gets corrupted.
Like whenever you give government these powers, it will generally get corrupted over time.
So I try and stay away from the should.
I just sort of wanted to point out that it'd be nice if, but, you know, we give the government these powers and then neither you nor I end up being able to control how these powers get executed.
Yeah, you are against paying taxes, I would gather.
Is that true?
Well, taxes violate the non-aggression principle, so from that standpoint to my ideal society, generations down the road is a no-tax society where things are dealt with voluntarily.
John Madison quoted some long time ago, government is an institution to make people do their duty.
And I accept that.
You don't seem to accept that.
You don't think that people should do their duty.
I don't even know what the word duty means.
I don't like violence being threatened against me for following my conscience.
No, it's not violence.
It's just giving you the ability to participate in the society along with all the rest of the members that that society has within its borders.
Why would I need taxation to participate in my society?
I do it all the time.
I do it with public speaking.
I do it with podcasts.
I do it with conversations.
I do it by buying and selling.
We all do that.
We all do that.
We've behead corporations and built things and started new things up and all this.
We've all done that.
That's the part of living.
Part of living and part of being in society is bearing your fair load of being part of that society.
Here's a question for you.
Of the amount of income that anybody earns, how much of that is the result of them being in the society they're in and And having the advantages passed on to them from everybody else that passed through that society before.
Do you have any idea what percentage that might be?
Well, I can only say, you know, from my own intellectual standpoint, that I am like, I've inherited the English language
refined over countless centuries.
Are you going to pay your society something for all those things you've had bestowed upon you?
I don't understand what you mean.
What I mean is that...
I do.
Someone built a house, someone built a house, I pay them for it.
No, we're talking about supporting the society.
Now, without talking about whether your governments and your politicians are spending money wisely or not, the point is that it takes money to maintain a society.
And somebody has to pay for it.
And what do you find wrong with paying something back to the society that's given you all of these benefits?
What are the benefits that you feel society has given me?
Because, I mean, from my standpoint...
Listen to you talk!
That's what it's given to you.
It's given you this ability to talk.
It's given you education.
It's given you health.
It's given you a good diet.
You know, what do you mean?
What has it given you?
It's given you almost everything you have.
My education was terrible.
My education, the government-sponsored education, the government-enforced education, which I partook of in three countries, was terrible.
Why weren't you like me then and never bothered with the government education?
I didn't bother with the government education.
I didn't even graduate from high school for heaven's sake.
I'm sorry?
I didn't even graduate from...
Well, I finished high school, but very poorly.
And I have been an elected member, and I've been a consultant to all Canadian and international governments and so on.
I've been a substantial citizen.
Okay, so you spent 13 years in government education, and do you feel that it was...
Wonderfully great stuff that you'd be happy to pay for until you die?
Sure!
Absolutely!
Just the fact that I can quote poems that I studied in high school, you know, that is a pleasure for me that I wouldn't have had.
Why wouldn't you have had it?
There are libraries where this stuff is free.
I know, there is, but I wouldn't have run across it.
I got that start and so then I was able to follow and read Poet on my own later and read the books later and so on.
But I got the start through the education system.
Besides that, my father was able to feed me well.
We had a farm and so we ate.
Wait, hang on.
Your father grew your own food So why would he need to pay for society for the hard work of his own labor?
Because he's a member of society and he has a duty to society.
We all have a duty to the rest of the people that we share this society with.
And that duty means that you have to hand over your productive labor at the point of a gun, and this somehow you consider to be a good thing.
No, only a fair amount of it.
Only enough.
No, no, it doesn't matter how much you consider fair.
Why should violence be used in the interaction at all?
Because you wouldn't pay it.
Just as I told you.
Of course I would.
I told you what it said.
Do you not give to any charities?
It's an institution to make people do their duty, because without the society making you do your duty, you would say, F everybody else.
I'm going my own way.
Let them starve.
So you've never given any money to people voluntarily?
You've never donated any time or effort or energy to help people in the absence of being paid?
Yes, of course I have.
We all have.
We're members of society.
We do these things.
Good.
Then we don't need force.
Yes, we do, because we don't have those opportunities all the time.
And besides that, It doesn't work.
Charity doesn't do anything.
I believe that the government should pass half of the stuff it does off to non-public charities and then pay half of their costs, because part of the trouble is our administration and the bureaucracy.
I'm sorry, I'm a little confused.
You said charity doesn't do anything, but government should give its money to charity.
Charity does, I didn't say, I hope I didn't say that it doesn't do anything because charity to me is a very important thing and we should be doing more through charitable organizations than through bureaucracy.
I just today sent a bunch of money to the Fort McMurray Fire people to help them out and I'm looking into how I can help out the people in Venezuela other than doing a presentation on it.
And I sponsor kids around the world and I'm very happy.
And of course, I create a library of philosophy and interviews with experts and conversations such as this one.
Handed out for free, though I ask for donations at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
So I, you know, when you say to me, well, you owe a duty to society, I think I'm doing a massive amount of good for society.
200 million views and downloads of very important philosophical content for which I barely ask a penny.
And so, but if somebody put a gun to my head and said you have to do it, I wouldn't do it.
We're all doing those things because we enjoy doing them and we think that we're helping our country, but we also have to pay some of the bills.
Somebody has got to pay the bills.
Now, I'd like them to stop spending all the money they're spending, but if they're spending it, they've got to get it from us, the members of the society.
We have got to face to our duties.
Well, but you know the word duty is not a moral argument, right?
I can say to some woman, it's your duty to have sex with me, and therefore you should be—I mean, the word duty has no moral content.
All right.
So when you say you have to do a duty— Let's just call it morality, then.
Morality is begging the question because we're trying to establish what is moral, and if you say, well, my system is the definition of morality, that's called a tautology, right?
What is moral?
Well, what I'm saying, well, how do we know?
Because it's moral, right?
I mean, so you're just substituting moral and duty for an argument which remains absent.
Your system isn't a good example of morality if you don't want to pay some of the cost of the society that you live in.
Anyway, the whole tax thing It has to be changed.
I haven't heard you comment yet on the basic income.
That has to be tied into the property.
Oh, sorry, sorry to interrupt.
But you mean where some governments are considering the idea of just giving people a minimum of, say, $20,000 a year, and that's it.
You either get $20,000 a year, if you make another dollar, it doesn't get deducted the way it does in welfare, but you just get this basic income, which you can't float below, and if you float above it, everyone's happy, right?
You would get that base income, too, you know.
Oh, everyone gets $20,000 no matter how much money you have?
That's right!
You haven't studied it, apparently.
I thought it was sort of a minimum income, not everyone gets $20,000, because if everyone gets $20,000, who the heck pays for it?
The same people is just circulating money.
You're just talking about rolling cash over here.
We're paying the cash now.
We're not letting people starve on the streets.
We may not be feeding them very well, or we may be not looking after them very well, but if you took all the bureaucracy that's administering all these programs, if you took all of these programs, the The unemployment insurance and the child benefits and the welfare payments and all these things and just wrapped those up and paid everybody the money,
including everybody else, so you wouldn't be favoring anybody in the society, you would have a good working system and it wouldn't change the gross amount of money that has to be circulated through government, very little, if any.
Yeah, my understanding is that it's a universal basic income, which I understand is a universal minimum income.
I kind of like it.
You know, if I had to choose between that and the welfare state, I would definitely choose that.
Because the welfare state...
Sorry, go ahead.
Do you know who spoke of this 50 years ago?
Canadian Prime Minister, potential Prime Minister.
Bob Stanfield mentioned this guaranteed annual income.
His terminology was very poor when he said that, but he first came up with this idea and spoke it publicly and they almost tore his arms and legs off because everybody says, oh, you can't do that.
That's because they didn't think it through.
He thought it through.
He could see the advantages of it.
Yeah, because right now, and I've got a whole presentation called The Truth About Welfare, right now, and that's more focused in America, although there's lots of similarities in Canada, but...
Welfare really traps people in poverty because you try and make money and it just gets deducted from your welfare.
And certain places in the US, like a single mom would have to start making more than $60,000 a year just to match the benefits she gets on welfare.
And she's not about to leap with two or three or four kids to that kind of income very easily.
And so people get stuck, you know, like flies in amber in this welfare state.
And I would much rather, you know, just take the money and hand it to the people so that they all have a minimum of $20,000 a year.
Get rid of the entire welfare state, get rid of the welfare cliff, get rid of all these deductions and get rid of all of these benefits and all of this nonsense and just give them the money and reduce the overhead.
Give it to them every week.
Now, back in the 30s and the 40s when I was growing up, we got a paycheck, a pay envelope with the cash in it every Saturday night.
Now they're paying these people by monthly checks and so on.
They cannot budget for a month or even two or three weeks or two weeks.
It's crazy that they don't just credit their card or something every week so they get this money.
They can budget a week, but they can't budget four weeks.
Okay, so it's called Guaranteed Minimum Income.
It's a system of social welfare provision that guarantees that all citizens or families have an income sufficient to live on, provided they meet certain conditions.
Right.
A citizenship, a means test, and so on.
It's not everyone gets $20,000, it's everyone has at least $20,000, and if they make, it's also called a negative income tax.
No, I'm sorry, everybody gets that.
Not according to what I'm reading.
I mean, if you've got another definition, that's fine.
Well, there's different writings on it, but that is one of the writings that I've read, is that everybody gets it.
Okay, 30 million people or 20 million people in Canada get $20,000, right?
Yep.
Let's say everyone gets $20,000.
Who pays for that?
Oh, you pay a lot, but you tax it back, of course.
If they spend money after that, you tax what they're spending, the wealth that they're dissipating, and so you collect back the money.
You are just circulating it.
You know, money is meant to be circulated, and it's not going to change very much in terms of the total cost.
Well, and Milton Friedman, just for those who were like, oh, this is horrible socialism and so on, Milton Friedman discussed it.
And it's called a negative income tax.
So basically, if you make less than $20,000 a year, the government pays you to bring you up to $20,000 a year.
If you make more than $20,000 a year, then you get taxed.
And the taxes, of course, is used to bring everyone up to $20,000.
I mean, there are a number of problems.
Hang on, let me finish.
Still in the middle of talking.
There are some problems with it, which is that basically, if you get $20,000 a year for not working, then if you get a job, For $30,000 a year, you're really only getting paid $10,000 a year because you're going to get $20,000 a year either way.
So it is a challenge in terms of the value of work.
I'm sorry, that would be a dumb way to run it.
If you get a job for $30,000 a year, you start to tax that so that maybe by the time of that $30,000, you'll probably keep half or three quarters of it.
If you're making $200,000, Yes, you'll be paying tax on what you consume.
It's just mathematics.
Okay, whatever that means.
But here's the problem.
Let's say that you tax someone at 50% of everything they make over $20,000.
So then they get a job for $30,000.
They're only taking home $25,000, which means that they're only being paid $5,000 I think?
I think a lot of people will just choose to stay home and there is of course that challenge.
So that's why you use some rational thoughts and you say we want these people to go out and earn on top of the 20,000 and if they've got their basic needs of life they will do it.
I've hired a lot of basic income people and they will go out and work over and above what they get for their welfare.
So, if they've got the needs of life, it gives them the capacity to go out and earn on top of that.
Then you start to talk that at a graduated rate so that you don't discourage anybody.
This is the whole thing.
We're discouraging people by taxing their income.
What I'm saying is you take the And I advocate a cash flow tax.
So you take all the cash that comes in, less what is not spent, what's saved and invested, and that's the base for taxation rather than income.
And that graduated rate supply based on the amount that you consume.
For example, small business.
If a guy's in a small business, He doesn't spend that money.
Right now he's paying tax on it and then he invests what's left over after the tax back in his business.
But better to tax him on what he spends.
It all started, I was a tax practitioner 50 years ago and I went to a cocktail party.
And the guy at the cocktail party found out who I was working for, and he said, those got to be the stupidest bunch of accountants ever.
I said, why is that?
He said, well, my next door neighbor, I know he takes home less money than I do, and I know he paid a lot more tax than I did.
And I said, well, maybe.
What's he do?
Well, he's got this machine shop.
I said, is he doing well?
Oh, yes, he's added new...
We had a new lathe yard last year and a couple of people.
And I said, do you know that that lathe had to be paid for out of money that he'd paid tax on?
And the inventory that he had to have of raw material and finished products and the account receivable, he's all paid for out of money that he has to have paid tax on.
So, it's ridiculous to tax income.
We should tax what the guy is spending.
Okay, but I just want to finish up with this point.
And Milton Friedman kind of went back and forth with this negative income tax, and you can look it up if you want.
But here's the challenge about what you're talking about.
You're saying that without government compulsion, people are just too selfish, too mean, too cold-hearted to do the right thing in society.
The problem is those same cold, mean-hearted, selfish people are going to be in charge of of the government.
There's not a magical different class of angels you put in charge of government that will, like a sheepdog, round up all the mean selfish impulses of the population and point them all towards a glorious utopian future.
If you think, like I think people are corrupted by power and I think in the absence of power a lot of people tend to do the right thing.
I think when they have power things get really really bad.
So I think that the creation of a sort of top-down, coercive state environment draws some of the darkest souls in the planet to the exercise of power, and because they have near universal power over their subjects, it becomes rather difficult for the good people in society.
I think in the absence of the state, people negotiate, people are generous, people of course will have two to three times their income Almost right away in the absence of the state and therefore we'll have much more money to help out those in need.
But you can't say, well, Steph, you've got to force people to do the right thing because they're so mean and selfish they won't help people otherwise.
Well, those mean and selfish people will be all the more prevalent in the government than in the general population, but they'll have way more power than anyone in the private sector.
And less common sense.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks for the call.
I appreciate it.
Very, very enjoyable.
One point.
I did some calculations.
Do you know that from 1970, if I applied the same tax rates, income tax rates, from 1970 to 2014, and the people making under $200,000 a year were paying 18% more than if we'd been using the rates of 1970, and the people making over $200,000 were paying 38% less.
Well, I'm not going to doubt your math, although I've known some pretty rich people in Canada who had a pretty tough time with their tax rates.
But there's another argument, and it's very well sourced, which says that in America, if the federal government had simply kept the regulations constant that were in place throughout the Second World, end of the Second World War period, so in the late 1940s, if the number of federal regulations had not increased,
They may have shifted around, you add some, you remove some, but if they stayed about the same, then the gross domestic product of America, instead of being about $15 trillion a year, would be over $50 trillion a year.
So that would be three to four times the amount of money that people are making right now.
So instead of making 30, you'd be making $120,000.
Instead of making 50, you'd be making $200,000 or more.
And that's everything else staying the same, just not piling on all of these crazy regulations.
Now I'm pretty much sure that if people were making $200,000, $250,000 a year, they'd They'd find it in their heart and they'd find it in their wallets to help the poor in a much more effective way than the government is doing.
But Ed, appreciate your call.
You're welcome back anytime.
And thanks for the chat.
Thanks a lot.
It was very good fun.
I enjoyed it.
Good.
Alright, up next is Mark.
Mark wrote in and said, If you want to know if God is real, why don't you simply meet him?
Since nothing, other than yourself, seems to prevent the encounter.
That's from Mark.
Hi Mark, that sounds vaguely threatening.
I'm going to help you meet your maker.
I don't see how that starts.
I'm just kidding.
I can arrange.
It's not up to me to find out if there is a God and you have to arrange the meeting.
Okay.
You've got to meet the big man.
Okay, how am I going to meet him?
Is there an at Twitter account I'm not aware of?
No, but it's like, you know, like when I was younger and various Sylvangelists would try to convert me and things like that I'd often say or other people would say hey look you know if God wants me to know all about him he knows where I live he's got my phone number that kind of a thing and you know that's pretty silly actually but um you know people have been encountering God obviously for tens of thousands of years just about every yes every culture sorry when you insert
the word obviously that is not a proof when people have been encountering God and what does that mean Well, they've been having theophanies.
Well, they have had remarkable experiences that they ascribe to a deity.
I certainly would agree with that, but that's not a proof that the deity exists, right?
Well, not to you, but it is to them.
No.
See, that's the funny thing about the word proof.
Proof is exactly what is not up to me or to them.
There's no such thing as proof for me or proof for them that doesn't somehow converge.
Proof is an objective standard for determining the existence or validity of an object or a statement.
So there's no my truth or your truth.
There's no, well, it's proof for them but not for me.
Proof is just one of these terms that is an objective Experience is subjective, but proof is objective.
Well, you're distorting it because if you're colorblind and you don't see a particular color, but everybody else does, you can deny that it exists.
But it's true for everybody who sees normally.
Well, no, you can deny that the color exists, but you're wrong.
Right?
Because they can point a spectrometer at the color, and they can show you the wavelength, and maybe the blue and the green.
Like I was saying, I was reading that...
Hey, dude, dude, I'm still talking.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
I was reading that one of the reasons why Facebook's symbol is blue, I think Mark Zuckerberg is sort of colorblind, and there was no point putting more colors in.
But...
You can point a spectrometer at the blue and the green, and you can show the colorblind person that the digital readout is different, right?
And so they're not the same color.
Now, they may not be able to experience it directly, but they can't say that blue and green don't exist just because they don't see it.
That's the equivalent of that little kid playing hide-and-go-seek who stands in the middle of the room And covers her eyes and says, you can't find me because my eyes are closed.
It's like, no, just because you don't experience something yourself doesn't mean that you can then objectively say it doesn't exist.
Like, I've never been to Thailand.
I'm pretty sure it's real, though.
Well, then how would you prove love exists?
How would I prove love exists?
Yeah.
Well, it depends what your definition of love is, right?
If you say love is a sort of biochemical attachment based upon romantic impulses, well, you can certainly measure the dopamine.
You can measure the neurotransmitters that are flowing through someone when they're in love.
You can show them a picture and you can measure their internal state.
So you can certainly measure a reaction.
You know, if it's lust, I guess you can...
Well, how would you prove...
A couple of pipe cleaners around someone's Johnson and see if they stretch.
Let's say your mother or father is dead.
How would you prove that they loved you?
So if your mother and father is dead, how would you prove that they loved you?
Well, not alive to say that they do, and they're not alive to show it, and you may not have any artifacts of it in one way or another.
Wait, wait, you don't have any artifacts?
You don't, like, maybe they sent you letters saying that they loved you?
Yes, whatever.
Okay, well, we would have standards of behavior that would accord to someone loving you.
So someone who loves you enjoys your company and wants the best for you.
They don't try and strangle you.
So if, for instance, your mother tried to strangle you, that would not be evidence of love.
If, however, your mother, you know, cooked for you and read to you and taught you and hugged you and played with you and told you she loved you and wrote it in letters and recorded it in videos and visited you when you went to college and, like, if she did all of those things which we would put In the category of positive affection or evidence of positive affection,
then there would be an accumulation of evidence, some of it remembered and some of it objective, that would establish that your mother was acting in a way that we would objectively define as loving, right?
Yeah, except for B.B. King's song lyric where it goes, only my mother loves me, but she could be jiving me too.
It's funny, but I can't use song lyrics to proof.
You're insisting on a kind of reductionist and that's absurd.
Oh, come on, man.
I give you a good argument.
Don't come back at me with that crap.
No, you are being...
Oh, come on.
You ask...
No, come on.
Come on, man.
Be fair.
Be fair.
Hang on, Mark.
Be fair.
You asked me a question.
How would you establish that someone loved?
I gave you a good answer.
Now, you may disagree with it, you can come up, but don't just come back with something bullshit like, well, that's just reductionist.
That's not an argument.
If you want to respond to something I've said, but don't just give me stupid little snarky terms and think that you're having an argument with me.
me if you want to debate something fantastic but don't just give me snarky stuff and and and think that you're contributing something do you do you disagree with the way that i have discussed how you might show that someone has loved you your mother Yeah, yeah.
Okay, good.
Good, then tell me how you disagree.
What you have are examples.
For example, your mother read to you, she hugged you, she kissed you, she did this and the other thing.
Those are actions and not necessarily feelings.
And the idea that you just hook up an EET and then you can measure everything is in the realm of reductionism.
Life is a lot more than just simply, you know, Measuring your electrical impulses of your, you know, biochemistry.
Okay.
Did you want to continue?
Well, for example, how do you prove you've met somebody?
No, no, no.
We've got to stay on one topic at a time before we charge off somewhere else.
We've got to stay with the love thing, because we're still debating the love thing.
I don't want to go into the meeting thing.
We can go to the meeting thing after we do the love thing, but I don't like this bit where we start something, we disagree, we charge off somewhere else.
There are a lot of parents who've taken care of their children, and people can look at them and say, they're doing a really good job, and then you'll meet their children later on.
And their children say, well, yeah, they provided, and they did all these what appeared to be very nice things, but they were rather cold and distant.
I don't have a good relationship with my parents, even though they did all the things that you said, for the most part.
Well, okay, but hang on.
So the setup was, the question which we were debating was, if your parents have, if your mother has died, how would you show or know or prove that she loved you, right?
Okay.
Now, love must have some manifestation in the world if we are to establish in any objective way whether it is there or not.
Right?
Because if it never manifests in any way shape or form Like, let me give you an example.
What is the band you hate the most?
The music band.
Like, they come on the radio, you're like, you got to turn it off.
Oh, I can't think of anybody offhand.
Maybe a song.
Is there a song?
Everyone has that song where it's like, oh, God.
And usually it's the one that plays all summer long everywhere.
Stairway to heaven.
Stairway to heaven.
Okay.
Alright, the one that's currently in court.
Anyway, so Stairway to Heaven.
So you're starting up, right?
You're like, oh man.
Now, so let's say that we had a little drone following you around your whole life.
And maybe you liked it the first couple of times.
Like, it's okay first couple of times, right?
My problem with Stairway to Heaven is they used to play it a slow song in my dances in junior high school and high school.
And it's like fine to begin with, you know, you're cuddling up, you're getting all...
Kind of squiggly.
And then there's this fast bit in the middle and nobody knows what the hell to do.
And you've got to keep the woman at a safe distance because of the eternal teenage boner.
Anyway, so if every single time the song, like you heard it five times, every single time after that, you turned the song off, you told everyone you disliked it, and you wrote in your journal, man, I hate that song.
This world would be a better place without that song or whatever, right?
Now, that would be evidence you didn't like the song.
Now, is it possible that this was all some elaborate ruse, right?
Like the song, right?
Like you just loved the song, you just turned it off because you're a masochist, and you told everyone you hated it so they wouldn't...
Whatever, right?
And you can come up with stuff like that, for sure.
But we can only measure, objectively and empirically, we can only measure the actions.
I mean, maybe you can slap up to an EEG or whatever and figure out what the dopamine or endorphin levels are.
Maybe you hear that song, you just...
Your, I don't know, stress hormones or whatever negative experience goes on, and we could measure that, but we don't have those measurements for people.
So all we can do is we can say, well, the evidence suggests that Mark really dislikes Stairway to Heaven.
You know, really, really, this is the song he dislikes just about the most.
He'll put up with other songs, you know, he'll maybe put up with, uh, um, uh, hey, hey, mom, I got away with the other stuff, right?
Maybe he'll put up with a black dog or whatever it is.
Um, But he hates that song.
And we can say the evidence points to the fact that Mark dislikes Stairway to Heaven.
Now, is it possible?
First of all, who cares, right?
All we can do is measure the effects.
Now, when it comes to love, love is a relationship, right?
So if I say to you, Mark, I've made a mixtape.
I've known you for 20 years.
I know you hate this song.
I've made you a mixtape that you're going to love.
Mark and I are Not 20, so we can talk about mixtapes.
Atari, song for mixtape, great title.
And the whole mixtape I give you is Stay Away to Heaven over and over again.
And I remember a friend of mine...
Oh, he gave me a mixtape once and he said, oh, this is a great song.
I'm having trouble with the levels.
You're really going to need to turn it up.
And he gave me the opening to Beethoven's Fifth at like volume 9000, which, you know, basically took the hair off the top of my head.
But anyway, it's pretty funny.
But so love is a relationship.
So We can't judge whether someone is loving simply by looking at their actions, because to be truly loving, you must do the actions not just express your view of love, but express what the other person experiences as love.
Right?
So, if I take my wife to some place I love, but she hates, that's not a very loving behavior.
Right?
And so, in order to, you know, hey, honey, I bought you a NVIDIA 980 TI graphics card for Mother's Day!
What, she got an iPod?
Anyway, so she doesn't want that.
So, you know, I would love that, but giving it to her doesn't really matter.
So if people say, well, my parents kind of did outwardly the right things, but I never felt loved, that is evidence that the parents weren't loving.
Because if you want to be loving towards someone, then what you have to do is make sure that what you're doing is a positive experience to the other person.
As I say to my daughter every night, how was your day?
What did you like?
What did you not like?
What could I have done better?
How could it have been more fun for you?
Whatever, right?
Because I want to make sure that what I'm doing is enjoyable for her.
So if the parents say, well, I did everything loving, and the kids say, well, I never felt loved, the kids are right.
Because part of loving is to make sure that the experience of being loved translates into the experience of the other person.
Does that make sense?
Well, I understand what you're saying, but I don't agree.
I'm sorry, I didn't quite follow.
I don't agree.
Oh, okay, yeah, well then, that's why you tell me how you don't agree.
Well, you have the parent, and they're saying, well, if the child says, I didn't feel loved, then the parent failed because they didn't properly make the child feel loved.
And a lot of parents would disagree with that, that they would insist that they did everything possible, and perhaps they had a child that was difficult, that was...
No.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but no, no, the parents can't say that.
Because if the definition of love is that the object of your love feels loved, then the question is, did the parents ask the child, do you feel loved?
Did you feel loved today?
And if the child says no, then the parent has to adjust the behavior in order for the child to feel loved.
So if the parent said, hang on, hang on, hang on.
If the parent said, I did everything I could to make my child feel loved, then that would include asking the child if the child felt loved.
And if the child says, no, I didn't feel loved because of X, Y, and Z, which you need to change, either the parent would have changed that behavior...
So that the child feel loved, in which case the child would not complain about not feeling loved.
Or the parent would not change the behavior and therefore would not be doing everything they could to make the child feel loved.
Or the parent would not even ask the question, did you feel loved today?
In which case the parent is certainly not doing everything they can to make the child feel loved.
Like if I'm running a pizza place, I'm going to have the little comment cards out there and I'm going to be asking people, you know, you've eaten at restaurants, the manager comes over and says, You know, how's your meal?
Are you having a good time?
Is there anything you need?
Because he wants to make sure you're having a good time.
And so if I'm, you know, I mean, I'm responsible for people in my family and my friends feeling loved.
I've got to say to my wife, do you feel loved?
Is there anything I can do better?
Say to my daughter, do you feel loved?
Is there anything?
That's how you do.
That's how you do it.
So the parents can't say, well, I tried everything, but they just mysteriously didn't feel loved.
I never did that with my daughter.
She was certainly well-loved, and she would tell you today, I never asked her, do you feel well-loved?
And lots of parents can do things that are loving and in the spirit of love, and another child would accept and feel loved by it, but other children don't.
And so if you don't hit all the different buttons on a child all the time, then a lot of times they're not going to feel loved, even though the parent was very loving.
Well, would your daughter say that she experienced love from you?
Absolutely.
Great.
So then you don't have to ask if somebody's really enjoying.
You know, like if I'm a stand-up comedian and people are like literally wetting themselves and crying tears of laughter when I'm doing my routine, I don't have to stop and, are you guys enjoying this?
Do you find this funny?
Right?
Because you don't need to.
So with your daughter, if it worked really well for you, you expressed your love, she understood that you were expressing your love, she felt loved, then yeah, I can understand why you wouldn't need to Ask those questions, sure.
I mean, if it's working, right?
But what we're talking about is when there is a difference between the parent's expression of love and the child's experience of love.
If that wasn't the case in your family, that's fine, but we're talking about where there is.
People are so different.
People are very different.
People are very different.
Oh, and siblings are crazy different.
I mean, siblings, like, they can have, like, what, a 7 to 9 IQ point difference.
They can have different personalities.
I mean, it's really different.
I mean, I had a friend, I saw him quite a while ago, and he was telling me this story about he had these two little boys.
First little boy, fascinated by the vacuum, maybe rolling around the vacuum and vacuuming, and the kid was like, ooh, vacuum, you get so excited and want to come and play with it.
And it was a loud vacuum, one of these inbuilt ones, a loud vacuum, big lights.
And he said, you know, so, you know, my second kid, my second son gets born, bring out the vacuum.
And turn it on, he screams and like can't be consoled for two hours.
Terrified of the vacuum.
Same family, same gene pool, same mommy and dad, same and they even lived in the same place.
You get one kid, loves the vacuum, wants to hug the vacuum.
The other kid sees vacuum as some sort of end boss in doom when he's unarmed.
So yeah, kids are really different.
That's why you gotta, you know, adjust, right?
Some do, some don't.
You have families where, you know, you've got four kids, three of them say, whoa, our parents took great care of us, they were wonderful.
One kid turned out to be a drug addict, says, you know, his life was miserable, he never felt loved, and all the rest, and so forth, and so on.
Yet he wasn't treated any differently.
Now, I would say that...
Well, that's very...
That's very anecdotal, and I've had hundreds and hundreds of conversations with people about families at this show, and I've never heard of anything like that.
I mean, that may be anecdotal for you.
I've never heard of anything like that.
I'm not saying that it's impossible.
I'm just saying that that seems a little improbable.
But, you know, again, we're discussing anecdotes here.
This is not really what philosophy is about.
I used to work in a drug abuse company.
Well, okay, yeah, but I mean, that's, I mean, to the degree to which that may be biological, I mean, that's not Environmental, right?
Yeah, but even psychological.
I mean, you have children who just go off the rails and everybody else, and parents were fine.
We came out great.
Well, yeah, but you don't...
The term black...
Parents aren't the only influence on children's lives, right?
I mean, it could have been some creepy uncle.
It could have been someone who grabbed them in the woods somewhere and beat them.
It could be any number of things.
Who knows, right?
I mean, but let's not speculate about this stuff because we don't have any data.
Okay, well, you're talking about love.
Can you tell me what is love?
We're talking about love.
Well, I got a whole book about that, so I don't want to, you know, start off on page one.
It's called Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love, and people can get it for free.
PDF, HTML, audiobook at freedomainradio.com slash free, so I don't want to...
But the definition for me is love is our involuntary response to virtuous people if we're virtuous.
It's a form of admiration and respect and positive regard that we have for virtuous people.
So the price of love is to be virtuous yourself and surround yourself with virtuous people.
Good, noble, courageous, honest.
Decent, strong people who stand up for what they believe in, but not in a sort of suicidal way.
That is love.
It is the positive response that we get to virtuous people if we ourselves are virtuous.
So love is about just built into life, built into the universe, it automatically develops from non-life?
I didn't understand the question.
Where does it come from?
Love, where does it come from?
How did we get it?
I'm sorry, do you mean evolutionarily?
I'm not sure what you mean.
Well, it's a quality of life, in life, and where does this quality come from?
How did we acquire it?
Look, you can just keep repeating the question, but if I tell you I don't understand the question, that doesn't help.
You need to go north.
Which way is north?
I don't know.
What's not to understand?
That's what I'm missing out.
I don't know what you mean.
What do you mean?
Where does it come from?
Where does it come from in an individual?
Where does it come from biologically?
Where does it come from socially?
Is it evolutionary?
I don't know what you mean when you say, where does it come from?
I'm not trying to be obtuse.
I just, I don't know what you mean when you're asking the question.
It exists, right?
Love exists.
Again, that depends what you mean by exist.
I mean, I think it exists as an objectively measurable subjective experience, but it doesn't exist like a rock exists.
How did we get it?
How did human beings or animals, because it's part of animals too, ever acquire this quality that doesn't exist like a rock exists?
Oh, why do animals feel love and affection for their offsprings, let's say?
I think that's pretty easy to answer.
It's an evolutionary advantage.
So if you have, like, let's take the cheetah, right?
So cheetahs, the fastest land animal, right?
So cheetahs teach their young how to hunt.
Why?
Because cheetahs are really good runners, pretty good hunters, But half the time, they expend this massive amount of energy to try and bring down whatever they're chasing.
And they fail.
And so half the time, they burn 6 billion calories going 70 miles an hour across the African savannah, and they fail to get any food.
Now, it's pretty expensive.
And they are fast, and the speed has come at the expense of toughness, of strength.
So the problem is...
If a cheetah brings down an animal, a lot of times it will get chased away from that animal because it's killed it, but it can't protect it from lions or hyenas or whatever else might be around, especially if they're pack animals, right?
So cheetahs really, really need to teach their offspring how to hunt, how to get the food that they need.
Because only about 1 in 10 cheetah cubs actually makes it to adult animals.
Sorry, I'm going to wait for you to stop moving because I can't concentrate with all that noise.
Sorry, I had to get a glass of water.
You could just climb out of the washing machine.
That'd be great.
All right.
So cheetahs, if the cheetahs do not have an attachment and an investment in their offspring, Then that lack of attachment and investment in their offspring will translate into their offspring having vastly lower survival chances.
So in other words, in the random mutation of feelings, I'm sure just about every feeling has been experimented with at some time or another over the course of evolution, right?
In other words, there's a cheetah.
Let me finish.
So there's a cheetah that has been born that really wants to eat its cubs.
You know, it's just that's how it rolls, right?
And it eats its cubs.
The gene for, I want to eat my cubs, dies off because you eat your cubs.
And then randomly, there are other cheetahs who were born who were indifferent to their cubs.
And that was better for the parent because they didn't have to invest all that time in teaching their cubs how to hunt.
So it was good for the parent, but bad for the genes because the cubs would have a substantially lower chance of survival by not being taught how to hunt by the mom.
Now there are other cheetahs randomly born with big strong attachments, hormonal, biochemical attachments and a faction for They're cubs and they play with their cubs and they teach their cubs how to hunt and they protect their cubs and they bring their cubs food and you know like the mama gorillas will bring water in their mouths and squirt it into their cubs right and all that right and so those genes for the attachment of the mother to the cub are the ones that provide the greatest chance of survival for
the cubs and therefore they are positively selected from an evolutionary standpoint so that the animals will evolve as a whole To have a positive attachment to their cubs.
And you can see this with like big giant toads.
Well, you know, I saw this documentary where big giant toads are carving little channels to make sure the tadpoles can make it to a bigger pond from a smaller pond that's drying up.
And, you know, there's a lot of affection that they have for these, and that's built in.
On the other hand...
There are selections against that for other, particularly our selected species, right?
So a rabbit who will defend her babies to the death, who is so strongly attached to her rabbit babies, That she will defend them to the death, well, that will be selected out of the gene pool because she's probably not going to win.
Rabbit versus wolf is, I don't know, Sanders versus Trump.
It just may be entertaining to watch, but it's not going to be very long.
And so there are other species wherein overinvestment in the young is a negative adaptation, a maladaptive strategy.
And this is all just, you know, fine-tuned over millions and millions and millions of years.
So that is where human affection for offspring come from.
Insofar as human beings do have the capacity to defend their children against predators, and therefore strong attachment is not negatively selected.
And human infants, human children, require an absurd amount of time to reach maturity.
Like it's a quarter century for the human male brain to become physically mature, a little bit less than that for the female brain.
And, you know, babies are helpless for the first couple of years of their life and so on.
So for human mothers to be indifferent to their children would be insane because that would be selected out of the gene pool.
Now, I know it does happen with depression and Brooke Shields and Then the rain came down and postpartum depression and so on.
I mean, it happens.
But in general, that kind of lack of attachment would be selected out of the gene pool and a positive attachment, which you can see happening at a biochemical level with eye contact, with proximity, with skin-on-skin contact.
The bonding happens very, very strongly between mother and child.
That's because it's of benefit to the child.
Now, that's just parent-child.
I'll go very, very quickly over adult-adult, right?
So in a case-selected society, Pair bonding for life is the best adaptation.
In a society or an environment where there's stability and predictability and where you're more at the top of the food chain, you want that stable pair bonding investment because that's the best survival for your kids.
In an R-selected environment, and people can go to the Gene Wars presentations I've done on this for more, then less attachment to your pair bond, the single mother stuff, is...
Uh, is, um, better, right?
Uh, and, and less attachment to your offspring.
Why would you care that much about your 12 baby rabbits when you can just make another one, another 12 in six weeks?
It's not worth dying for.
If you just look at how your genes get passed along, fighting to the death to protect your baby rabbits makes no sense.
Just let them get eaten.
Doesn't really matter.
I mean, you can see rabbits that get snatched up by a wolf.
The others don't even look up for munching.
Ah, fine.
There'll be another one here in just a second.
It doesn't really matter.
Whereas the wolves have a lot more investment and time and really have to protect their young.
You know, the grizzly, right?
You get between a rabbit and its babies, it doesn't really care.
You get between a grizzly and its cub, well, you're going home a lot lighter in a bag than you were.
So if you're sort of asking where does it come from, it comes from evolutionary adaptation fundamentally.
Oh, you're saying life is purposeful.
I'm sorry?
You're saying life is purposeful.
Is that what you're getting out of what I said?
I don't know what purposeful has to do with evolution.
I'm saying that these creatures are acting with purpose and with will.
Well, I don't know about purpose, whether a rabbit or wolf.
I mean, what I'm saying is that the biochemical motivators for optimal survival will be the ones that will be selected positively in an evolutionary process.
So you're going to end up with the kind of attachments and love that occurs that is going to be beneficial for the survival of the genes.
And this just came out of nowhere.
I'm sorry?
All of this just came out of nowhere.
These qualities.
Again, I have no idea what you're saying.
I have no idea what you're saying.
I mean, rabbits come out of other rabbits.
I don't know if you've ever seen it, but it's kind of cute.
Well, we can go back to the beginning.
Life comes out of non-life.
Life comes out of non-life?
Well, where did it begin?
Well, sure.
Of course life came out of non-life, because life is more complex than non-life, and less complexity precedes greater complexity, particularly with evolution.
You can prove that.
I'm sorry?
You can prove that.
That life comes out of non-life.
Sure.
Because you've done an experiment to prove that.
No, it's logical.
You don't need proof of that.
Because life is more complex than non-life.
And so...
The simplest things begin, right?
The simplest things start and more complex things evolve out of that.
Like, a human being was not the beginning of evolution.
The beginning of evolution was some single-celled thing that occurred out of the primordial soup.
And things get more complex as you go along.
And you can't have life begin at the beginning of the universe because there are no planets.
There's no water.
There's no...
There's no air.
There's no sun.
You can't have life in a void.
Life has to come along a lot later.
But life is different than non-life.
You have to have billions of years of non-life in order to create the environment wherein life can evolve.
How do you know that?
I just proved it.
No, you didn't.
You made a statement.
Okay, let me ask you this.
Hang on.
Do you think that life requires...
There is life.
We have life.
And there is non-life.
And there's a difference between the two.
How do you get from one to the other?
What was the mechanism that caused life to come out of non-life?
Now, we know that non-life can do lots and lots of complex things.
It's not as complex as life, as you said.
But it can just keep spinning and spinning and spinning.
We've got planets, you know, going around in circles and suns generating and they, as far as we know, lots and lots of don't have any life whatsoever.
So what's the mechanism where you get from non-life to life?
I don't, I'm sorry, again, I'm sorry to be dense.
I still don't quite understand.
They certainly have created some basic proteins out of primordial soups, so it's not, I mean, that mechanism is somewhat known.
No, it's not.
That doesn't work at all.
But in fact, who's doing the work?
Somebody is doing that.
What do you mean?
They're using like a tiny AutoCAD to create the proteins?
No, they're putting together these chemicals, they're adding a little bit of electricity and so forth and so forth to create some very, very simple compounds.
What people are doing is not happening on its own.
I mean, you can't go to Mars and see it happening.
You can't go to Mercury.
You can't go somewhere else and see it occurring all on its own.
But nobody's been to Mars.
So I'm not sure when you say you can't go to Mars.
I mean, people haven't been to Mars.
I mean, maybe it is occurring.
I don't know.
There could be bacteria there.
I have no idea.
I think that they found some bacterial evidence in asteroids, if I remember rightly.
Well, it's a hypothesis.
But they think they found some precursors of certain biochemicals.
Right.
So, let's see here.
Here are some theories, right?
And look, we don't have to know the exact answer.
We know for sure that life came out of non-life, because life requires certain elements and compounds and heat and stability.
We don't know that for sure.
Excuse me.
Let me finish my goddamn sentence, all right?
Go ahead.
I know you're excited.
I'm excited too, but I'll let you finish.
So let me finish, all right?
Because it really, it just gets me pissed off after a while, like halfway through the beginning of a sentence.
And I interrupt sometimes too.
I do apologize and say why, but don't stop talking just while I'm in the middle of responding, all right?
So we know for sure that life came out of non-life.
Non-life had to precede life because life requires stability in a non-life environment in order to begin, right?
So we know for sure that life came out of non-life.
I don't know if everybody knows.
Of course, we don't know exactly when it happened or how it happened, but that's not particularly important.
We do know that life came out of non-life.
But here are some theories.
All right.
Lightning may have provided the spark needed for life to begin.
Electric sparks can generate amino acids and sugars from an atmosphere loaded with water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen.
As was shown in the famous Miller-Urey experiment reported in 1953, suggesting that lightning may have helped create the key building blocks of life in its early days.
Over millions of years, larger and more complex molecules could form.
Although research since then has revealed the early atmosphere of Earth was actually hydrogen poor, scientists have suggested that volcanic clouds in the early atmosphere might have held methane, ammonia, and hydrogen and been filled with lightning as well.
Could it be simple clay?
The first molecules of life might have met on clay, according to an idea elaborated by organic chemist Alexander Graham Cairns Smith.
That is the worst rap name ever.
At the University of Glasgow in Scotland, these surfaces may not only have concentrated these organic compounds together, but also helped organize them into patterns much like our genes do now.
Or maybe life began At the bottom of the sea, the deep sea vent theory suggests that life may have begun at submarine hydrothermal vents spewing key hydrogen-rich molecules.
Their rocky nooks could then have concentrated these molecules together and provided mineral catalysts for critical reactions.
Even now, these vents rich in chemical and thermal energy sustain vibrant ecosystems.
Or, it's only a few more, or ice might have covered the oceans three billion years ago as the sun was about a third less luminous Than it is now.
This layer of ice, possibly hundreds of feet thick, might have protected fragile organic compounds in the water below from ultraviolet light and destruction from cosmic impacts.
The cold might have also helped these molecules to survive longer, allowing key reactions to happen.
Or, nowadays DNA needs proteins in order to form and proteins require DNA to form.
So how could these have formed without each other?
The answer may be RNA. I think that's some kind of nurse, which can store information like DNA service and enzyme like proteins and help create both DNA and proteins.
Later DNA and proteins succeeded this RNA world because they are more efficient.
Or instead of developing from complex molecules such as RNA, life might have begun with smaller molecules interacting with each other in cycles of reactions.
These might have been contained in simple capsules akin to cell membranes and over time more complex molecules that performed these reactions better than the smaller ones could have evolved.
Scenarios dubbed metabolism first models as opposed to gene first models of the RNA world hypothesis.
And the last one Perhaps life did not begin on Earth at all, but was brought here from elsewhere in space, a notion known as panspermia.
Ooh, that's hot.
For instance, rocks regularly get blasted off Mars by cosmic impacts, and a number of Martian meteorites have been found on Earth that some researchers have controversially suggested brought microbes over here, potentially making us all Martians originally.
Other scientists have even suggested that life might have hitchhiked on comets from other star systems.
However, even if this concept were true, the question of how life began on Earth would then only change to how life began elsewhere in space.
So, anyway, I mean, that's just reading from some various theories about how it may have happened.
I mean, we know that it did happen, and that's where science is, at least as of March 24th, 2016.
Are you getting an all-off of the teleprompter or the internet?
Oh yeah, that's off on the internet.
Yeah, I didn't memorize it.
I might have started with that then.
As if that says it all?
Meaning, you don't have a dozen other articles there that counter what you're reading?
Because if I had the same advantage, I mean, I could be looking up all sorts of people, and I'd be refuting that left and right, and I could cite a chapter and verse like you just did.
I'm not sure.
Is that an argument?
I don't know what you're saying.
Are you saying that you would like to read arguments against these?
Well, these aren't inclusive arguments.
These are just where people are exploring about the origins of life.
So you don't want to meet God because he doesn't exist.
Thank you.
Wait, do I want to meet God?
Do you?
Yeah.
By God, I'd love to meet God.
Well, why don't you?
Damn!
I just want it to be a private meeting, and I want him to...
I mean, God, wouldn't that be fantastic?
To meet omniscience?
To meet all-powerful, all-knowing?
I mean, impossible, yes, but an amazingly cool experience.
Why is it impossible?
Oh, I'm not getting into that.
I've gone into that argument so many times.
And I've gone, I've got a whole book called Against the Gods?
Which, you know, so I would love to meet.
I mean, look, if God came down tomorrow, first of all, damn, we'd get a lot of views on YouTube.
Seriously.
I mean, we'd put PewDiePie in the dust and that would be great for the show.
Also, if God chose to come down to me in any objective form and he chose me, I gotta think that'd give me some pretty good second coming cred.
You know, God chooses to come down to me on this show in my studio.
I mean, man, talk about an AMA. Ask me anything.
With God and me?
Well, yeah, it's fair that God would get the higher billing.
But now you're being like that guy who says, you know, he knows my phone number.
If he came into the studio, wouldn't that be great?
Yeah, man, you can't beat that.
Is that how you imagine it?
Whatever meeting God would be, it would have to be something that could be recorded objectively because clearly I could have just gone psychotic, right?
I mean, I could just be insane.
And so, you know, I got to think, I don't know, Megyn Kelly choosing between God and Donald Trump.
I don't know, maybe you should flip a coin, and if it's on the edge, it's gone.
But no, it'd be cool.
It would have to be something objectively verifiable and measurable, though, because plenty of people go insane.
And so the idea that I have just met God that no one else can see, or I have just, God told me the answers to a whole bunch of really tough questions, and I wrote them down, and it just looks like doodles from my two-year-old child.
Well, I would need something.
Now, I mean, there are lots of texts, right?
You're not being serious.
If God told me something I didn't know, or let's say, sorry to interrupt, but let's say this question.
Let's say, tonight God comes to me, and he gives me the answer as to the origins of life.
And I write it down.
It's a whole bunch of symbols.
I don't even know what they are.
And I take it to a biologist, and the biologist is like, holy shit, dude.
That really could be the answer.
And then the biologist tests it and figures it out.
And he's like, dude, Dr.
Frankensteff, we just made life!
It's alive!
I mean, that would be so cool.
That would be pretty much evidence that I had encountered an intelligence vastly superior to mine.
And, um...
That it gave me information I could not possibly have either myself, because I don't study biology much, or anyone had because nobody had this particular answer.
Yeah.
Damn.
I mean, that would be...
Man, count me in.
I mean, I don't know where it would go from there, but...
No, you're not being serious.
This is ridiculous.
I'm being totally serious.
I'm being absolutely serious.
Do you think Shakespeare was a fool?
Do you think St.
Thomas Aquinas was a fool?
Do you think Jesus Christ was a fool?
You're back to the snarky thing, right?
I mean, in which case I'm probably going to move on to the next caller.
I mean, those people, you know, St.
Thomas Aquinas, what did he think?
That the Sun ran around the Earth.
I mean, A, they were brilliant, but they lack knowledge, and also they were in a situation where if they told the truth, they might get burned up.
So that makes them wrong about everything?
Because they had something wrong about the physics of the universe that's wrong about other insights they might have had?
Come on!
Well, no, it just means that intelligence absent knowledge is limited.
But they had knowledge you don't have.
Of course they did.
Absolutely they did.
And some of that knowledge may be the experience of God.
I have no question that theologians have experienced something they ascribe to a deity.
And they can reproduce that experience in a lab.
There's a certain particular part of the brain, I think it's associated with epilepsy, though you don't have to be epileptic, and if they stimulate, electrically, that part of the brain, you see angels, and you see people floating on clouds, and there is a part of the brain that if you have this particular stimulation, you have religious visions.
It's not the same thing.
It's not complicated.
It's not the same thing.
We used to ascribe epilepsy to demonic possession, and now we know it's an electrical storm in particular areas of the brain.
And in the same way, people ascribe theological experiences to a deity when the evidence seems to be that it's electrical stimulation in a certain area of the brain.
I mean, this is what science does.
It explains things that people think are subjective and mystical.
Yeah, it's not the same thing.
How do you know?
It explains a few phenomena.
I'm very familiar with all the literature regarding, you know, the spiritual varieties of religious experience.
It's something I've studied.
No, but you haven't had this part of your brain stimulated.
You don't know what it's like.
Yeah, I do.
It could be exactly the same as what you experience as a deity.
I have in one way or another.
I'm sorry?
I have in one way or another.
No, no, I mean the experiment where they put the electrodes...
Well, there's an experiment where they put electrodes to nuns and they pray, and they experience the presence of God, and so you can measure that too.
But it doesn't deny the fact that they are actually experiencing God, in the sense of the presence of God, which is different than a theophany.
And what you're describing, as far as electrodes and angels and things like that, that's not a theophany in the sense of the way it's defined.
Well, you seem very confident about what is and isn't a theophany, though you've never been.
It's something I've studied.
Okay, you get one more interruption, and then I'm moving on, all right?
If you can't control yourself, then we can't have a civilized discussion, all right?
I'm trying.
Try harder.
I will, I will try harder.
So, you seem very confident about what is or isn't a religious experience, despite the fact you've not had the stimulation happen to you.
I mean, you don't know.
I haven't either, but...
One kind of stimulation.
I haven't had electrodes.
Well, one that produces those experiences.
Yeah, I haven't had those electrodes attached, but I've done other kinds of stimulations that were artificial.
Like what?
You mean drugs?
When I was young, yeah.
And what was your experience with those?
Well, the first time I took LSD, it would, and other people have, you know, confirmed that in terms of measuring things of that nature.
It stimulates certain parts of the brain.
It gives you an expansive, almost, they call it a peak experience, high oceanic feelings, things like that.
And would you consider those similar to what people describe as religious experiences?
To some extent, but much less.
There's a difference, for example, if you meet somebody, let's say you met somebody who was very charismatic, made a big impression on you, more than somebody you just, you know, encountered at the store as a clerk or something or other than that, but somebody who left a big impression on you.
And later on, and nobody saw that happening.
Later on, you tell somebody, you know, I met so-and-so.
Incredible person.
I mean, it just has a great effect on you and so forth and so on.
And I say, really?
What's your proof?
Well, I didn't take a picture.
You could ask him, but, well, yeah, he did die a while ago.
I don't have any proof that I met him.
Are you done?
Yeah.
Okay, but that's completely different.
No.
Completely different.
No.
Okay.
You can either just tell me that it's not or you can listen to my argument.
Go ahead.
Thank you.
There is nothing impossible about you meeting a person.
A person is not a self-contradictory entity.
So if I say I met a person, I may not be able to prove it objectively to your satisfaction, but it's not impossible that I met a person.
So it remains in the realm of probability.
If I said I rode a unicorn made of fire and ice to Venus and back, is that in the realm of possibility?
Not to my knowledge.
Is there any knowledge by which you think I could ride a unicorn made of fire and ice through the interplanetary space between Earth and Jupiter and return and live?
Not at this time.
Do you think there is any time in the future where fire and ice, fire of course requiring oxygen to survive, that fire could travel through the interstellar or interplanetary space between Earth and Jupiter?
Continue to burn and be co-joined with ice at the same time.
Have me ride it without a space suit and return.
Under the present circumstances, no.
Which circumstances would change in order for that to become something which you would consider to be possible?
Supernatural ones.
You mean if it was like a ghost unicorn?
No, no.
I mean, if, uh, uh, Supernatural.
I mean, if a god who's all-powerful can do anything, then he could do that.
He could suspend the laws of physics, right?
Okay, so if you meet someone on a street corner, he's dirty, and he's unshaven, and he's crazy, and he says, last night I rode a fire ice unicorn to Venus and came back, you would say, yeah, could be.
Not likely.
I wouldn't necessarily trust his testimony.
So you would not believe him?
Probably not, no.
Probably not.
Okay, on a scale of 1 to 100, what would be your...
What believability rating of riding a fire and ice unicorn to Venus and back without a spacesuit and surviving and being fine, just from 1 to 100, where would you rate that in terms of believability?
Well, it's unbelievable.
I know, I get that.
That's why I gave you a scale and not a binary.
On 1 to 100, what would you, oh, 0 to 100, what would you rate it?
Well, which is the positive, which is the negative?
Okay, 100 is, it's 100% believable, and 0 is, I don't believe it for a second.
Oh, zero!
Okay, God, we've made it!
Hallelujah!
I feel like we just went to Venus and back on a fire and ice unicorn.
Okay, so you'd not believe this guy at all because it's impossible.
Good, okay.
So when he says, I met a guy yesterday, well, you may not put it at 100, but you wouldn't put it at zero because it's technically possible that he met a guy last night, this crazy guy on the street corner.
However, the fire and ice unicorn of Venus and back, zero.
Big fat goose egg.
It's a bagel of believability.
And so that's zero, right?
So when you say, well, I met a guy, but I can't prove it, that's not the same as God.
How do you know that?
Well, again, I've written a whole book on this.
God is a self-contradictory concept.
It's consciousness without matter.
It's all-knowing, all-powerful, which contradict each other.
It's life before the universe.
There's no logic to any of it at all.
It's a square circle.
And so if I say, I drew a square circle yesterday, that's a zero.
Big fat goose egg.
Still love Christians.
Love the ethics.
Love it when you guys call in.
Appreciate your support.
You are largely wonderful people, and I'm sorry for everything that came before.
But when it comes to philosophy, I'm afraid we still come up with a goose egg.
No, I don't think so.
All right.
Well, I got to move on to the next caller, but I really appreciate your conversation.
It was very enjoyable.
And thanks a lot for calling in.
All right.
Alright, up next is Alex.
Alex wrote in and said, Are humans naturally hierarchical?
Isn't our modern day, and hopefully greater future, independence only due to technology?
That's from Alex.
Hey, what's up, Stefan?
Big fan, by the way.
How you doing, Alex?
I'm doing well.
Sorry, you were about to praise me and I interrupted you.
How foolish of me.
Go ahead.
Oh, my bad.
No, I just say big fangers, by the way, man.
Well, thank you very much.
Okay, it wasn't a huge amount of praise, but I'll take it.
I learned to live on table scraps.
I'm on the internet.
Okay.
Well...
Do you want to expand on the question at all?
Yeah, so it kind of seems like, and you've probably already seen this recently also, with the Democratic National Convention that was happening out in Arizona where Sanders supporters were attacking Hillary supporters and vice versa, that a lot of people have taken to the- Sadly, unarmed, I will add.
Just kidding.
Go on.
Well, yeah, exactly.
I mean, self-defense all for it.
But the sad part is that in our day and age it seems as though people have a very binary view.
Either you're with us or you have to die!
You know what I mean?
Like there's no, hey, I'm not bothering you.
Just leave me alone.
I'm over here.
There's no reason for you to put your hands on me or attack me or anything like that.
And it's kind of looking like there's been more black block protests over the last several years or so.
And I'm just afraid that...
What's happening in Europe is going to happen in America if, like, Trump doesn't...
I'm sorry, you said more black something protests, but I wasn't sure what you said.
Black block, where people basically, you know, dress in all black garb and, you know, throw more loves and rocks and, you know, try and start...
It's called a black lock?
Black block.
Yeah, black block.
Black block.
Okay, that's cool.
I feel younger already.
Black luck.
So that's people dressed head to toe in black, like they're in mourning for a lack of socialism, or what does that mean?
Yeah, kind of like that.
So when I was in Germany, for the most part, after you get done with a lot of football matches, usually drunk people will start fighting or whatever.
But then you see a lot of these punks that are just on the sidewalk, always mean-mugging people, always looking at people and just walk up and go, hey man, you know what?
I need some money.
Give me some money.
And you ask them, why?
Why are you on the sidewalk, man?
Why aren't you at work?
You know what I mean?
It's a Monday.
I took the day off.
What's up with you, man?
And they'll go like, yeah, well, you know, fuck capitalism, while they're, you know, finger-banging their iPhone and all that other fun stuff.
And it seems as though people in Europe, but then also in America, as far as I've personally seen, whenever they do protests nowadays, they tend to attack both sides.
They're like, perfect example.
So I had a Trump sign in my yard, and, you know, live in the house, you know, have a yard, everything like that.
It had a Trump sign in it, and it was taken down.
So then got another Trump sign, even bigger, got taken down.
So I'm like, fuck, well, why is it okay?
You can steal my stuff, but then you're upset when you believe the rich steal from the poor, shouldn't you live by your own principles?
Wait, wait, hang on, hang on.
I'm bookmarking hypocritical socialists just because every now and then I like to really shock myself with new information.
Sorry, Alex, go ahead.
Plus, thank you for finger-banging their iPhone.
I just...
Then that's a touch screen, man.
Yeah, gotta do the dirty G.J. on that screen, but anyway, go on.
But yeah, but it just seems as though, for the most part, I mean, as humans, obviously, we're hierarchical, but as long as you can, like, walk away at the end of the day, you know, if, like, you're out with a bunch of friends, you know, draken or bullshitting or whatever, like, at the end of the night, you know, you could just do an Irish goodbye or walk away or what have you, or if a bunch of people want to go kayaking, you're like, ah, not into that.
You can walk away, whereas it seems like a lot of, um...
I don't want to necessarily characterize them as leftists, but from what I've seen, a bunch of leftist protesters basically are attacking other people who are protesting alongside of them Or even then, of like the same party, if they don't agree to their, what I believe are draconian, you know, policies.
So hang on, just before, I'm sorry to interrupt you, man, but just because this is like Trainspotting, you need subtitles.
What is an Irish goodbye?
Is that what you said?
Yeah, it's like whenever you just walk away, like you're hanging out with people and then you just disappear, you know?
An Irish goodbye?
Yeah.
I'm Irish.
What the hell does that mean?
Hey, I'm part Irish.
It's just a saying.
I'm not taking it offensively.
What does it mean?
Does Irish mean teleporting?
What does it mean?
No, man.
It's like if you go out with a bunch of friends and you're drinking.
For me, my tap out points at 2 a.m., I'll just go home.
You don't say goodbye?
Yeah.
If you're to the point where you don't really...
You're not in the mood to say goodbye or just drank too much and you really need to go to sleep and then you know you're gonna pass out, you know.
Irish goodbye.
All right.
I don't know if anyone ever knows.
Let's see here.
Hang on.
Oh, Mike's looked it up.
Mike, do you want to inform us?
Ghosting, a.k.a.
the Irish goodbye, the French exit, and any number of other vaguely ethnophobic terms refers to leaving a social gathering without saying your farewells.
One moment you're at the bar or the house party or the Sunday morning wedding brunch.
The next moment you're gone in the manner of a ghost.
But why is it Irish?
French exit?
I thought that was just rich millionaires leaving Paris because they're terrified, but I don't know what the Irish goodbye is.
When have the Irish done anything quietly, let alone goodbye?
Isn't the French exit their military strategy?
Never mind.
Oh!
That's crazy for it, man.
Like, a hundred millionaires left France since, like, 2015.
It's kind of sad.
Yeah, well, you don't get to be a millionaire usually by being an idiot, and they can wet finger the wind and know which way things are going.
Exactly.
Alright.
But it seems as though...
And also, if you...
You know, Huffington Post, everything like that.
I really don't like Huffington Post, but I do read their articles.
And they had a recent article stating that they basically...
Several political figures have came out and said, okay, well, Bernie Sanders supporters, if Bernie Sanders loses, don't do anything crazy.
Don't, you know, start lighting cars on fire like in the LA riots or anything like that.
Or, you know...
Anything stupid, you know, if he loses, just take it with grace.
Don't attack anybody.
And it's kind of sad when we've gotten to this point of our political discourse in America that you can't even have a rational conversation without somebody saying, okay, you know what, I'm going to hurt you if, you know, I don't get my way, basically.
No, and look, I get that.
And I think America is waking up to the fact that the violence seems to be coming a little bit more from the left than from the right.
But man, I can understand why Bernie Sanders supporters are pissed.
I get it.
Like, I really, and I condone violence of any kind or anything like that, but holy crap.
He keeps winning and he keeps losing.
And man, I mean, it's like he's got to climb the stairs and she's got the witch's jetpack broomstick can just go to the very top.
I know.
So I get why they'd be a little annoyed.
Well, the other thing, too, is Hillary Clinton, you know, I think you already said this in one of your other videos, that basically she's fighting for more than the presidency.
She's fighting for amnesty also, because if Trump gets in, she's definitely going to get prosecuted.
Oh, yeah.
I think that's pretty known.
I don't care if you're at my wedding.
You're going to have another...
Oh, and listen, I just want to put a recommendation out there.
And, you know, Roger Stone, who was on this show, is a great guy.
And...
He has written a book.
I first heard it like I was getting ready for my interview.
I was listening to some of his interviews.
And holy crap, he has written a book about LBJ. Now, I knew LBJ was a bit of a nutcase.
Lyndon Baines Johnson, right?
The president who got in.
You know, what's that Sting song, a pretty song?
My mother cried when President Kennedy died.
She said, I was a communist, but I knew better.
So he wrote a book called The Man Who Killed Kennedy, The Case Against LBJ. Now, I had...
A history teacher once.
I took some history math classes one summer so I could get out of school a semester early.
Oh, God, it was great.
I went to the wasteland of the North as a gold prospector, which was infinitely more intellectually stimulating than going to school with a thousand other people.
But anyway, I had this summer school teacher.
We did not get along.
I've never been much of a morning person and I would go in and he was really not a very scintillating teacher, to put it mildly.
And he also had a really bad hairpiece, which I looked at and I was like, whatever happens, don't do that.
Whatever happens, don't put what appears to be the equivalent of a duck on your head and think you're fooling anyone.
And I would occasionally just sort of put my head down, you know, while he was lecturing.
And I'd try and do it sort of like pretending I was reading.
And anyway, so I went up to give a presentation, and he screamed at the entire class, put your faces down on your desk and pretend to be asleep.
How do you like that, Mr.
Molyneux?
You try giving a presentation with everyone pretending to be asleep.
And he was in a nut bag.
Anyway, but one thing he did that was interesting was he brought in a guy to give us a full, I think, two-hour presentation on JFK, on the killing of JFK. And it was interesting.
And he was like, yeah, do you find that interesting?
Is that more interesting than me?
This guy, I was like, he was some maintenance and a half, let me tell you that.
But anyway, so Roger Stone has written a book called The Man Who Killed Kennedy, The Case Against LBJ. LBJ was facing corruption charges and facing jail time and so on.
And there seems to be quite a bit of evidence that crossing LBJ was not particularly good for your health.
And, um, he makes a very strong case that LBJ had Kennedy killed.
And I just really wanted to point out, it's like, it takes a lot for me to get there, but, I mean, Stone works his prosecutorial textual magic and makes a...
I haven't finished the book quite yet.
I'm pretty close to the end, but, uh, it's some chilling stuff.
And, um...
I just really wanted to point out that, I don't know, it's risky going against some people in politics, to put it mildly.
Sorry, I just wanted to put that out.
You can get this on audible.com.
You can get this fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
Read it.
I mean, he's a good writer.
It's a great story.
I think it may be, in fact, a lot more than a story.
And just hearing about LBJ and what he was like is...
I mean, this is the guy who put in the welfare state.
And he may well have assassinated or been responsible for the assassination of a U.S. president.
And he put in the welfare state.
Fuck.
I'm telling you.
I mean, LBJ, was he also known for the quote, I'll have those blacks voting Democrat for the next 200 years or something?
I don't think he used the word blacks.
He used the word blacks.
I'm black.
I don't really like saying the N-word just because...
No, I get it.
Let's just say it's a word that rhymes with trigger.
Yeah.
Nigglypuff.
Anyway, so...
No, I... Yeah, he basically...
Yeah, I mean, he as Diamond and Silk talked about on this show, you know, he was a...
He was very big on trying to rope blacks into the...
The Democrat plantation, as they called it, right?
And it's a brutal term, and I recognize its historical sensitivity, but he was a bastard and a half.
Holy crap.
And of course, you know, he's a civil rights hero and so on, but when you go beyond the rhetoric and you go beyond the sentimentality and you go beyond the sort of empty-headed patriotism and you start kicking over some rocks in LBJ's history, there's some dark places there, to put it mildly.
Anyway.
Sorry, we just went off topic, but it's a great book.
And I have, you know, hopefully this has some weight with people because I don't make a lot of book recommendations, except for mine, available at freedomainradio.com slash free.
And I'd like to thank everyone who writes to me and says I should really write a book or two.
It's not your fault.
It's my fault for being bad at marketing.
But anyway, I just wanted to mention that.
And Alex, I'm completely sorry for derailing.
Whatever the hell you were saying, I apologize for that.
But it is sad.
It is sad that we have to remind people not to throw garbage cans through windows because they don't get what they want, right?
Exactly.
And that's kind of like the type of stuff that Albert Camus was talking about in his seminal book, The Rebel, where he basically said for any theorem to be praised for an indefinite period of time, faith alone is not enough, but police force is required.
Well, okay.
I mean, that's arguable.
That's definitely something that's debatable.
But when it's just...
People who don't get their way and they're not about the rule of law and they're not about principle.
That's where it starts to get kind of Orwellian.
I mean, George Orwell, he even saw that with the Spanish Civil War, right?
Whenever he's fighting alongside the...
I don't know how you have, you know, anarchist, communist, but whatever.
Whenever he's fighting aside them and then after that, you know...
They ended up having a military dictatorship for a while that came in.
I mean, that's what made him passionately anti-communist.
I mean, you know, in my younger years, I was definitely very, very left.
But then, you know, growing up and going out in the free market and learning the work of merit and then just going to school was hell.
It was really hell.
And I saw how irrational people get whenever they can't It's almost like that's happened in this show, not with you.
Now, do you mean your school in particular was hell or just school in general, like based on the curriculum was hell?
School in general.
I mean, so I was a computer science major in my junior year and I had to take electives because I did four years in active duty military in the Air Force and, you know, got out, went back to school And my housemate at the time already had his bachelor's in CS. And, you know, so my job offers were for more, so I'm like, fuck it, why stay?
And in school, I had to take intro to film, Russian literary adultery, and Russian fairy tales.
And it put a really sour taste in my mouth that a bunch of my tuition...
Goes towards classes that essentially have nothing to do with my major, you know?
Oh, well, we teach those, you know, to be more well-rounded.
Well, fuck, dude.
I've already been to, like, 13 different countries, you know what I mean?
Like, before even, you know, being, like, 24, 25, so...
Oh, is it fair to...
Sorry to interrupt, Matt.
Is it fair to say that it's a pretty bad scene to do something like be in the military for a couple of years and then hang around with a bunch of, you know, relatively privileged and sheltered kids who've barely been beyond their own town but think they know it all?
So no, yeah, it's kind of annoying because you see these people where like, oh, I have to work at like, you know, this little coffee shop.
I think it's only in my city.
And yeah, I work at this little shitty coffee shop and my parents only gave me this one shitty car.
And it's like, dude, your parents gave you something for free.
You don't have to pay your tuition.
You don't have to work.
You don't have to go through your savings.
Like, dude, just suck it up.
It's going to be okay, man.
Just suck it up.
It was kind of a...
Yeah, Alex, my coffee shop, it's like a war zone, man.
Sometimes the customers are like four deep.
It's so tough.
God.
Thankfully, I've never been deployed or anything like that.
I've only been on TDY. It's like a business trip.
So, yeah.
TDY? What does that mean?
TDY. It's basically like a business trip.
So, I mainly went for training other units and then also being trained.
Yeah.
So, for me, it was like I just spent like 16 months in the woods.
So, I was so happy to be in a library.
Like, you couldn't pry me out of that.
And people are like, want to come out drinking?
Nope.
Nope.
I just want to go to the library.
Thank you very much.
Well, and see, that's the part that kind of scares me, is that I see a slowly but surely marching down that path of communism, of, like, death-grip socialism onto your life where you have no way of avoiding it.
And even when you bring up the people, oh yeah, you know, fascism, communism, they both force people to do what they want, and you can either agree and go along with it, you can leave, or you can get killed.
Oh, well, you know, communism is different in fashion because...
No, dude, it's centrally planned economies.
They're practically the same thing, right?
That's why when George Orwell, you know, he was in Spain during the Civil War, where the communists caught fascists and vice versa, they usually flip like that.
If you look at Germany, like Nazi Germany, the brown shirts, they estimated over, like, 70% of them were previous communists, you know?
Like, it's very...
Yeah, they called the Nazis beefsteaks.
Right, because they're brown on the outside, but red on the inside.
So, yeah, no, it's a very common thing.
And book recommendations, I've mentioned it before.
Homage to Catalonia is a great book to read about his experiences in the war.
Again, you can get it on audible.com.
But...
Tell me what you think of this.
And I'm sorry to interject myself in what you're saying, Alex, but I've been sort of trying to really sink down into the lizard brain reaction to a free market.
I spent a couple of days on this horrifying exploration of the...
Florida sinkhole cesspit of socialism that is swallowing Venezuela whole at the moment.
Like, it's a god-awful mess.
You've got people in the middle class, middle suburban section of Caracas hunting pigeons and dogs and cat for food.
I mean, it's insane down there at the moment.
They've got less than 15 days of food left in the country.
And I was comparing and contrasting this to Chile, which is doing very well.
Doing very well.
And I was sort of thinking, I mean, you talk to people in school, and I'm sure a bunch of lefties there, particularly in the arts.
Now, if the government were to say to me tomorrow, free market, I would feel like a weight lifted from my shoulder.
I would feel relief.
I would feel enthusiasm.
I would feel optimism.
I would feel excitement.
And I would be charged up.
I'd be bounding out of bed.
I mean, get out of bed positively, but that's for combat.
This would be for opportunity, right?
But the experience that I get...
The British used to say, suss out.
I don't know if that makes any sense here, but I would sort of intuit that when people would say, free market tomorrow, like the government would say that, a lot of people would feel abject terror at that.
Does that make any sense to you?
It makes sense.
I dropped out of college and now I work public sector for my county government and I'm trying to break it back into the private market.
It makes a lot of sense because a lot of people will equate The free market with, essentially put, you know, robber barons stealing all the wealth and then also massive amounts of wealth disparity, as you pointed out multiple times, for the most part it couldn't be achieved unless government was also passing legislation to cut out the little guys.
Like, perfect example, Ted Cruz, right?
And they were talking about how Ted Cruz, for the most part, was trying to lock up smaller ISPs.
That way then, you know, he could protect Verizon's business, essentially put.
Whenever you have large governments...
Their regulatory controls are usually used as weapons against smaller companies.
Because for the most part, I mean, you know, most businesses in America, most jobs in America are done through small business.
So for them to succeed in a bull market is kind of hard to achieve.
But in a bear market, I mean, small businesses usually do better, especially if you're talking about like small cap companies.
I'm sorry, I want to make sure I follow that.
Can you just step me through that a little bit more?
So when the economy is doing really well, whenever you have a bull market, whenever it's shooting up, for the most part, smaller companies do well.
I apologize, I probably got backwards the first time.
Is that because they're sort of more nimble and can respond and adapt to new opportunities without that sort of bulky, let's turn around the Star Destroyer?
Kind of bulk?
Exactly.
Okay, okay.
You've got great concepts moving faster.
I just want to make sure I'm hanging on.
And sometimes it's like fingers slipping from Paul of Alex's rhetoric.
So, okay, good.
I'm with you.
Keep going.
I might be backwards.
But the point is that whenever your economy is doing well, it's very hard for larger companies to overtake smaller companies.
Or if they first get on the ground, they first have their ideas.
And whenever your economy starts slipping, smaller companies, they just can't afford it.
So they have to lay off a bunch of people.
And larger companies, they have all that disposal income.
Sure, percentage points will be lost.
But for the most part, they'll do well.
It's the small businesses that are hurt.
And small businesses just work harder.
Exactly.
I mean, I've worked in IBM.
I've worked in a bunch of other big companies.
And then I was an entrepreneur, starting with two people and growing it to a couple of dozen.
And man, you just work like insane.
I mean, you work like mad.
And that's kind of a young person thing too.
I think it's Malcolm Gladwell who pointed out a lot of the tech entrepreneurs were all born within a couple of months of each other.
Because they could be entrepreneurs before they became dads, you know?
You just don't have as much time anymore.
And so that just level of worker productivity, especially if you are, you know, if you have charisma and you can motivate people, which I was pretty good at, the amount of productivity you can get out of work, and you know, Mike and I work blinding hours sometimes on this show, and the amount of work that people, oh, how do you produce so much?
It's like enthusiasm, terror, and panic.
It's a potent fruit of entrepreneurial activity.
And big companies, it's really, really tough.
There's an inbuilt cynicism to a big company.
It's really tough to, you know, all the money is going to flow to the top.
Whereas, you know, as soon as I could get people into stock option plans and so on, I worked really hard and fought really hard to get that for everyone.
So we all felt like we were on the same team.
That enthusiasm is really tough to replicate.
Plus, you know, in larger companies, you get more admins.
And admins are, in my experience and opinion, you know, giant companies.
Walls, horizontal sedimentary layers of negativity between anybody trying to get anything done in management.
They just badmouth the company pretty regularly and are very cynical about it all.
But anyway, that's a topic for another time.
So go on if you can about like you're trying to get from government to more of a smaller sort of leaner startup.
No, I'm actually trying to get a job at a bunch of different places around where I live that are hiring for information security.
So for the most part in the Air Force I was mainly on the defense side where you secure servers and you deploy intrusion detection systems and everything like that and you do it with alerts.
And for the most part that's kind of what I do now except I also do some server administration and system administration and some network security stuff.
So now I'm just trying to get...
Can I finish your thought?
I just wanted to ask you something else, but go ahead, finish your thought.
Yeah, so I mean essentially put though, what really attracts me to the private market is the fact that you have to have merit.
It's not just, oh, well, okay, perfect example.
So we had my supervisor quit and Within the first couple of months that I started this job a couple of years ago in the public sector.
So then I was doing her job and then I needed to hire some people to help do some stuff.
So doing interviews, one guy for instance said that he was really good at visual basic scripting, yada yada yada, some sequel administration.
I'm like, great!
Let's get you on board.
Guy comes in first day, he's like, yeah, well, you know, how you doing?
Well, hey, I kind of need some help with this.
I'm like, what?
What do you mean you said you knew how to do scripting?
What's going on here?
He's like, yeah, I don't, but if you point me to some stuff I can learn, I can do it within maybe a week or two.
I'm like, dude, I hired you so that you can perform this function.
If you can't, you're just dead weight at this point.
Kind of have to spin off the wall here.
There's just me in this department at the moment and you because I basically go around to a bunch of different other I work at obviously teleconferencing and everything like that at a bunch of different other sites.
So I kind of need somebody to go out to these sites, kind of need somebody to go out and help with asset management, kind of need somebody to go out and help, you know, who knows Windows Server 2003 or 2008 administration, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, if you don't know how to do this, I gotta let you go, man.
I'm sorry, but you shouldn't lie during the interview.
You should have just said, hey, I don't know.
Or at least be a better liar.
You know, like, so let's say that you pad your resume.
Not that I'm ever recommending it, but let's say you pad your resume a little bit.
Oh yeah, I've had some experience with Windows Server 2003.
Okay, if you get the job, let's say you've got a weekend.
Between Friday and you start Monday.
Or you can say, I'm going to need a couple of days.
I got to do X, Y, and Z. Maybe, you know, buy yourself a little time and then learn the living shit out of whatever it is you lied about.
Or let's say, God forbid, you don't even do that.
Don't come to the guy and say, I just lied on my resume.
Say you can do it and then go study the shit out of it that night.
Like, whatever you do...
Just make sure you can do something useful when you show up.
And I'm not recommending that, but at least what troubles me is not that the guy lied.
That's not unusual in resumes, but that he didn't make the lie true through massive amounts of work between getting hired and coming in.
I can see your argument in that.
I kind of disagree about the lying thing because if you lie about the small things, in my opinion, you're going to lie about large stuff.
But it's the fact that if you want a job, if you want to do something, you should have those skills.
Even before you interview, you already see the job requirements.
So just fulfill it then.
And that's why...
Thanks, by the way.
I was kind of scatterbrained a couple weeks ago.
I'm studying for...
Certification for a new one where it's hands-on, it's not multiple choice, you know, where essentially you do penetration testing.
And like for the lab, you know, you have 60 days, you have to hack like 50 servers and workstations all through this one company.
It's all legal.
And then from there, you schedule out your exam, you take the exam, and then you're certified.
And then whenever you go for your next job interview and you have it on your resume, it's like, oh, well, this guy wasn't some check the box.
Oh, I don't really know what I'm talking about.
I actually practiced and shown my ability through merit, through actually earning the certification instead of just rote memorization like they teach in school, which was another thing that kind of upset me.
And you've never been in sales, right?
Never been in sales.
Okay.
Alex, my friend, should you ever decide to drift in the direction of sales?
Oh, God.
Now that is a passionate response.
Oh, God, no!
What have I done in my past life that I should end up in the demonic level of sales?
I'm just saying that, you know, let's say you go to a small company.
I mean, just theoretically, you go to a small company, you're involved in sales.
You may understand a little bit more how the lie can become the truth because, you know, salespeople in tech have been known to say, yeah, that feature's coming or it's going to be implemented or it's just on the verge when they've never even heard of it.
And then somehow the technical team makes the magic happen.
You can sometimes, you know, throw the, I guess you could say, shoot the clamp, you know, your little bat clamp over and then, you know, then you pull yourself up.
So I'm just saying I may have had a slightly different approach to, you Rampant or perhaps obsessive business honesty just because I went from tech back and forth into sales a little bit.
Now, it's different because I could promise stuff.
I didn't lie, but I would promise stuff and I was the guy who would actually make it happen.
So it's a little different.
I just wanted to point that out.
But do you mind if we take a tiny detour?
Let's do it.
Clinton.
Oh, God.
Hillary.
I mean, you know this stuff infinitely better than I do, security guy.
Yeah.
How could this have happened?
What the hell happened with this woman putting a server in her bathroom?
Exposed to the web.
Like...
What?
How easy do you think it was for people to get into this system?
Oh, easy.
I mean, if you look at, so there's this Romanian hacker called Guccifer, where, you know, he hacked Bush, he hacked the Clintons before, he hacked a bunch of other high-level celebrities and politicians, yada, yada, yada.
He came out a couple weeks ago saying, yeah, well, I got into Hillary's email server.
Ah, well.
What the fuck are you going to do?
You already arrested me, right?
So it doesn't make any sense that she would say, oh, everything is fine, but then Petraeus had to leave his job.
Edward Snowden, I really don't agree with the guy.
I honestly think that he might have been a shill for a foreign intelligence service, but I wasn't an intelligence, so I wouldn't people tell you, but people make much better cases.
20committee.com.
If you go on that guy's blog, he was a previous NSA analyst, and he comments fairly regularly on why Edward Snowden probably was a Russian shill or something like that.
But anyway, with Hillary Clinton, it would have been easy.
It would have been cake.
I mean, the name is in the server IP. Anyway, in the DNS address.
Exactly.
But, I mean, everyone who set it up, I mean, she didn't do it herself.
She had tech experts and so on.
Like, wouldn't they say...
Whoa, you want me to store what now?
Like, top secret stuff?
Are you kidding me?
Or wouldn't they say, you know, you might need to patch your server from time to time, and I hate to even say this stuff, but this is like a walk in the park to get in, right?
Yeah, and the whole thing is, like, so there's a really easy tool called Fierce that anyone in their mom can download.
They have different, like, operating system distributions, like, other than Windows.
You already know, but just for anyone if they're listening.
Like, they have, you know, there's Windows, there's OSX for Apple products, but then there's also Linux, and there's different flavors of Linux that people roll.
And one of them is called Kali, where they have a bunch of penetration testing tools that malicious actors, you know, use fairly regularly, and good guys like myself use fairly regularly.
So one of the tools, Fierce, you can essentially put search for DNS domains by name, and then also...
It cross-checks it with the whole registry between, you know, typing in Google.com, you know, computers don't understand IP addresses, so it looks up the IP. You could easily find most domains that would have the word Clinton in it, you know, that would have the string Clinton in it.
And that's, like, the first thing if I was, you know, red teaming or if I was, like, a bad guy.
That's the first thing I'd look for if I didn't really like her or if I wanted to do something political, you know?
Right, and then you look for Unpatched security holes, you look for open ports, you look for anything where you can sneak your way in, right?
Exactly.
Now, but you can't dump code in there, right?
I mean, I'm no expert on this, but isn't it the case that you have to get someone to execute the malicious code either through an email attachment or something like that in order to have the listen and respond?
Not necessarily.
So, like, you have phishing.
So, for the most part, hey, check out, you know, bigboobs.com and you click on it in reality.
I'm sorry, just one sec.
Just one sec.
Okay, well, how did you spell that?
No, I'm just kidding.
Go on.
But, yeah, like...
Like, that's not my homepage.
Sorry, go on.
For the most part, you have different classes of vulnerabilities.
So one of the major classes is called a remote code execution.
So for RACE exploits, for the most part, you don't need somebody to run it or maybe a service.
So let's say, for instance, you have my cool FTP server running on port 23.
If it has this class of vulnerability, you could have it run code.
In the context of whatever users logged in, and most users, you know, they're logged in as administrators, so then you have the keys to everything.
Even then, there's different classes like information disclosure, so you can at least see everything that's on this server.
So even then, let's say you don't fully hack it, like you don't fully get root on it, you can still at least see the files and then plan from there.
Or even then, you have different ways in, like Windows servers, once you can read any file, if you can write any file, then you can essentially execute code.
I mean, all it takes is just time.
Oh, you just, like you write a com or a batch script and then just execute it?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, okay.
All right.
I feel like we're canceling people on how to do bad things, so we'll move on.
But I just, I just think, like, the whole thing to me is just so surreal.
Like, that this, I was reading, like, the Russian government might have all of these missing emails and is thinking of releasing them and stuff.
And it's like, I just find this so incomprehensible that that, All of these people could be around this incredibly sensitive information where literally hundreds of billions of dollars over time have been invested to produce particular approaches, to shield people, to put people into as moles and so on.
And all this information could just be lying around for anyone to go by and scoop up for the price of a DOS prompt.
I mean, it's just, I just find it absolutely astounding.
And the fact that She's still the frontrunner.
I mean, God, the frontrunner?
I mean, if this doesn't tell everybody everything they need to know about the Democrats, I don't know what does.
And see, from an international policy perspective, if I were the Kremlin, this is just red team in here.
If I were the Kremlin, that'd be the thing I'd do.
I'd wait until, you know, Trump and maybe Clinton get in.
You know, neck and neck.
And then from there, dump, just like the Panama Papers, oh, we have all these emails because we, you know, we hacked Clinton's server.
What are you going to do?
You already hate us.
Fuck you.
And Clinton doesn't have as favorable or hands off a policy as Trump does.
Which is what I don't really get about people who don't like Trump because Trump clearly said, hey, North Korea, let China handle them.
I mean, we have problems with Iran.
Let Israel, Saudi Arabia, you know, Egypt, those guys handle them.
So if I are the Kremlin, that's the first thing I would do is start going like, yeah, well, we hacked your server.
Spy's going to spy.
What are you going to do?
Well, I don't know much about the inner mind of Putin, of course, but if I were in Putin's shoes, I would much rather have Trump in the White House than Clinton.
Because some serious shit is probably going to start going down around the world over the next four to eight years, let's say, to put it mildly.
And if you ever want to lose a war, just get the Democrats involved.
I mean, they are so are selected all they want, you know, like at a gene level, they, you know, they profit from having the K-selected guys go out and die, which is why You know, they get involved in these disasters like trying to close off Vietnam and lose the whole damn thing and trying to close off Iraq and lose the whole damn thing.
I mean, so if I were Putin and I was looking at China, I was looking at Eastern Europe, and most particularly if I was looking at Western Europe, I'd say, well, you know, some serious stuff could be going on in the next little while.
We're going to have to work with America one way or another.
And do I want, you know, tricky, slippery, false lion, big nose Clinton in there who I won't be able to rely on to do one thing consistently from one day to the next?
Or do I want, you know, the deep seated lion, full throat roaring alpha Donald Trump in there who, if you got to go to battle, might not be the worst guy to have on your side?
Might not.
The part that kind of scares me, one of your talks that you gave recently on Sweden, for the most part, where they have an immigrant crisis, where they're not assimilating low IQ people who totally can't even read their own language.
The thing about Sweden is that from what I understand and from what I've seen online from like the Rand Corporation, Sweden decommissioned their nukes back in 1965.
So, I mean, the way I would play it is just let what happens to Sweden happens because they don't have nukes.
And the rest of the EU sees what happens and go like, oh shit, I need to get rid of all of these people who believe that we should have Sharia law.
Instead of, you know, the laws of our land.
And that would do more, in my opinion, to help out Russia's foreign policy than anything else because, I mean, they've been staunchly, you know, in the counterterrorism fight with us.
Especially if you look at the way they treat, you know, Chechen rebels and, you know, any other sort of terrorist attack that happens there.
That would be my go-to thing.
Like, look, hey, Sweden right now, they're involved in what's about to, in a couple of years or so, or maybe even in the summer, what's going to amount to a civil war here with mass violence?
ISIS is going to end up provoking these people and telling them these people don't really want you here after, you know, they do an attack.
And that's not just speculation.
I mean, DHS and the FBI said, hey, this is probably ISIS's game plan.
Yeah, they want to provoke the moderates into more extreme action, right?
On both sides.
Yeah.
And I find that kind of scary.
I still have to look at the data, but offhand, I mean, if second or third generation immigrants are actually more radicalized than their parents, that would definitely be a cooking pot.
Especially if you look at Germany where, you know, the median age is in the 40s.
I mean, that's not fit to fight.
That's not...
I just don't think that it's going to go well for Europe.
So if whatever happens to Sweden happens and the rest of the EU says, oh, we don't want that happening to us, or at least their people says, hey, we don't want that happening to us, let's get crazy Merkel out and let's get these crazy leftists out of education and out of politics in Sweden, I think that would go well.
My only concern is that People will forget why these things happened and instead assume, oh, well, it's not all illegal immigrants, even though it would be the majority at that point in that country.
Oh, it could never happen to us here.
You know, they're nice now.
Wait until later type of situation.
That's the scariest part.
Well, it is.
And of course, we...
You know, should, and I desperately hope, and it doesn't come to this, but if disaster happens, it will be up to thinkers like you and I to remind people consistently what the causes were.
Now, listen, let's get back to your original question.
Great chat.
Are humans naturally hierarchical?
Is now modern day and hopefully greater future independence due only to technology?
Well, those are two questions.
But first of all, Alex, what do you mean by hierarchical?
Because, I mean, that's one of these things you can take six different ways from Sunday.
Well I mean for the most part Even if...
Okay, video games.
Easy example, right?
Anyone my age bracket can relate to.
If you play a video game, for instance, a lot of people will derive their self-worth and identity from the video game they play based on their level of skill or proficiency.
I mean, the same thing with any other sort of hobby people have or even then in their professional lives.
So my...
I guess I believe that humans naturally...
Assign themselves to this hierarchy, which isn't a fear in of itself until, hey, guess what?
If you're not with us, you're against us.
That's what I'm afraid of.
And if you look at, for instance, leftists, I mean, you have...
Lesbians openly or verbally attacking other women for not supporting their policies, but then also, you know, openly against transgendered people where, I don't know, in my personal opinion, this is just me biologically, there's only two genders, so if you identify as a woman, But you're born a guy.
I mean, biologically, you're still a guy, right?
Well, sorry, I just, I can certainly, nature's playful, and I can certainly see how you could end up with a female brain and a male body and vice versa.
So, you know, it depends on gender.
Is it a brain brain?
Or is it the mere physiology?
And could those ever be mismatched, so to speak?
I could certainly see how it would happen, but I just wanted to sort of mention that.
But let's keep going on with the topic.
Yeah.
So long story short, you see like feminists attacking transgender people.
And it's like, dude, wait, you guys, aren't you technically on the same side here as far as it comes to what you believe to be civil rights?
So what's going on?
Like, why is this happening?
And if you're willing to attack people who have similar or the same beliefs as you, where does this break down in society?
Like, what will happen in the near future as we start to see more of these fights?
Because...
Okay, go on.
Well, okay, so there's sort of two things that I wanted to distinguish, and if there aren't or there's more, then let me know.
So when you talk about hierarchical beliefs, I prefer the term efficient.
Human beings naturally gravitate towards that which is efficient.
And so people made more money working for Steve Jobs than having Steve Jobs work for them.
And so Steve Jobs was at the top, right?
There's a reason why Julia Roberts stars in the movie and doesn't do the catering, right?
Because it makes more sense economically for her to do that.
And so I think human beings are efficient.
I mean, that's what we aim for and that's what evolution has primed us for.
And we have this unique ability to reorganize things based upon more immediate evidence because we can do theory and we can change our social structure and all that kind of stuff.
So human beings are efficient and there are many situations in which a hierarchy is very efficient.
And, I mean, you know this from the military as well, right?
I mean, someone has got to call the shots and somebody's got to drop the plans and other people have to execute them.
You can't just sort of dump a whole bunch of troops and, good luck, right?
Go figure it out, right?
You've got to have a plan.
And so, for efficiency, there is a strong tendency towards a hierarchy where people who know better tell people what to do who aren't as smart or who don't know as much.
And I think that's where a hierarchy is efficient, we will gravitate towards that hierarchy.
So that's sort of the one side of things.
And there are times where a lack of hierarchy tends to be more efficient.
But this is all free assembling and disassembling of voluntary hierarchies.
Now, if you're starting to talk about politics, then we're talking about a different situation because that is a coercive hierarchy.
Which is not spontaneously formed out of people's particular preferences, but is coercively imposed by an existing oligarchy.
So are human beings naturally hierarchical?
Yeah, if the hierarchy serves their interest, if it serves their efficiency, if it's more profitable.
You know, when I was a kid...
I went to go and work for a mining company to do this prospecting and stuff.
Now, I could have, theoretically, gone out on my own and staked my own claims and, you know, done all of that kind of stuff.
But I chose to work for other people for the same reason that I chose to, you know, when I used to clean offices in my early teens and I used to clean...
Travel agents and doctor's offices and stuff like that.
And I could have theoretically gone around with a mop and said, hire me.
But I wanted to work for someone else who collected the bills and sold all the services and so on.
When I wanted to work in a restaurant and start a restaurant.
So there's times where it's efficient to join someone else's hierarchy.
But when it comes to politics, human beings are naturally hierarchical in that People who are better with words than productivity, the sophists, or I call them the linguicides recently, well, they love to create this dualistic moral framework wherein the people in the government are good and the people outside the government need to be controlled because they're mean and selfish and bad.
And they do gravitate towards that and their enemies Are not the people who want to take them out of power, like have a coup or whether it's sort of a peaceful transition of power in a democracy or something less peaceful in other societies.
Their enemies are the philosophers.
The philosophers who say, there's only one moral rule.
We can't, you know, entities should not be multiplied beyond what is necessary.
There's only one moral rule and you can't create a separate category for government.
Well, you can, but you're wrong.
And I want to see the hierarchies be voluntary because then they're continually being refined and there's turnover.
You know, if you can do a better job than Steve Jobs, you get his job.
Whereas, you know, sometimes they're trying to get...
There's a lot of discontent with the president of Argentina, but, you know, he's hanging on like grim death and there's no stockholder revolt that can kick him out or anything like that.
They're going to have to...
Opposition parties are in control of parliament.
They're going to try and get 500,000 signatures.
But even if they get some sort of re-election, it might not happen until like January of next year.
It just takes forever.
It was a free market much faster.
So I think that human beings naturally seek advantage.
They naturally seek efficiency in the free market that can lead to hierarchies.
But with politics, that leads to manipulation, bullying, and ultimately violence.
And that, of course, is our desire for efficiency gets horribly corrupted by the state as a whole.
And that, I think, is where the difference is between hierarchy.
Again, it always comes to whether it's voluntary or coercive.
And that's a perfect example.
So using Venezuela, because I had a debate with somebody the other night, so using Venezuela then as an example, if you look at it, they only have food on the shelves for like two days out of the week, if that.
And for the most part, it's rationed out through this weird, like, fingerprint system.
Yeah, and it's probably like sardines, you know, four-year-old sardines or something, but come on.
Yeah, exactly.
But if you look, and I'm just making an assumption here, when they know, hey, well, you know, our neighbor Todd, you know, he's in his 80s, he can't really go out to this line or whatever.
I would think that, okay, well, hey, I like Todd, so I should make the case to my friends or my other neighbors, hey, Todd kind of needs some food, so we should all chip in some level of rations to help them out.
Like, my debate the other night with a bunch of friends or whatever was, you know, some of them are Sanders supporters, I'm a Trump supporter, but they're like, well, what do you do whenever you have, like, poor people in the streets, whenever you have, like, child poverty, right?
Well, it's like, number one, if somebody's marching towards a cliff, you tell them, hey, dude, there's gravity, you're going to die.
If they jump off the cliff, it serves an example to everybody else, number one.
So, supporting...
Having the welfare state support these people to encourage more out-of-wedlock births for children that they well can't afford without oppressing the rest of us, that doesn't make any sense.
And on top of that, if you know the situation's going on, then you just make the case to us and we make the case to other people.
Probably come up with a plan to help try and resolve this.
I mean, obviously, you'd have to deal with adoption or XYZ problem or whatever, whatever solution you can come up with.
But for the most part, when it comes to people willingly associating and coming up with their own plans, I mean, the web of trust definitely works.
So why would you expect some sort of central agency that doesn't know what these people's parents are like, doesn't know that, you know, dad's an alcoholic, you know, the mom's never home, you know, X, Y, Z. Why would you expect some sort of giant central, like, death machine to know that these kids need help?
How do you know that they're allocating their resources properly?
They lack local knowledge of the area and what's happening locally.
That's where it's up to us.
Why would you want to force other people to support these bad habits, number one, and number two, these other people who are in other neighborhoods, in other cities, in other states, or even in other countries, why would they have the best interest and the best knowledge of our local lay of land and how to help these people out?
So once I made that case, I mean, it was kind of hard to refute, but you still have this, okay, well, so you're clearly then against kids.
Well, no, I just gave you a solution.
What are you talking about?
Right, right.
I really, really want to help the poor voluntarily.
Oh, you must hate the poor then.
What?!
Yeah.
And it's like, okay, so you say all this, but what do you actually do to donate your time?
You know what I mean?
I volunteer.
I do stuff whenever I can because I also have a side job.
I do fuzzing.
I find vulnerabilities in software.
I'm not going to bore you with that.
You do fuzzing?
Yeah, man.
It's the only job.
Sorry, I don't know what that means.
It's the only job you can have while you drink beer and chill and watch videos.
So there's programs that take different input and stuff like that, like Chrome or whatever, and essentially you give it random input and eventually it'll crash and one of those crashes could lead to that type of remote code execution vulnerability I was telling you about or some other vulnerability.
But anyway, I do stuff on the side though.
I volunteered.
We have a local...
Summer camp that one of my friends she volunteers at called Girls Rock where it teaches girls, you know, how to play instruments and everything like that.
And wherever they have benefits, you know, they have like the karaoke and everything where, you know, all the all the proceeds goes towards this program.
Right.
And it's a charitable organization.
It's great.
It helps people out.
You can do things like that.
It doesn't have to be coercive.
But instead, you just want to use other people's money and wipe your hands and say, oh, well, I did my part.
I'm lazy.
So whenever people try and make a case we don't care about the kids, I believe that it's feigned virtue, that it's virtue signaling, you know?
I agree with you on that.
There's a, and we're going to get this in more detail, but there's a study that was done recently where they spent $23 teaching children philosophy.
And it turned out to be the equivalent of like three months of regular schooling, how quickly these children advanced.
What?
And they advanced in areas that had nothing to do with philosophy, like reading, math, other things.
Just some philosophy.
Nothing major, nothing, you know, but not anarchy or atheism.
They just taught some kids some critical thinking skills, some philosophy, got them going on some questions.
And the kids leapt ahead.
And the most interesting thing about it, Alex, was that the kids who were the most disadvantaged moved ahead the most.
Oh, wow.
Moved ahead the most.
And people say to me, Steph, how are the poor going to be helped in a free society?
Well...
That's exactly what I'm doing.
The poor people, the disadvantaged people benefit far more from my show and from this conversation we're having.
They're going to benefit far more from my show than rich educated people.
Now I have a question just to play devil's advocate here.
So when the poor people in this study where they taught philosophy for, you know, $23 I guess a month, No, no.
$23 was the total investment.
Oh, wow.
That's awesome.
That's even better.
Well, $23 total investment, though, were the disadvantaged children leaping ahead more because they already held back?
Were they needing...
Who cares?
I'm sorry to say, like, I don't care.
The fact is that teaching critical thinking skills helped the disadvantaged kids more than it helped.
I mean, I'm sure maybe they were artificially held back, or maybe they were disadvantaged because they were so smart, they were completely bored, and maybe philosophy got them interested in education.
I don't know if any...
I mean, we're going to have the researcher on, and we'll talk about this in more detail.
They're good questions, but in a way, I don't care.
The fact is that philosophy, $23 closed the gap between the disadvantaged and the advantaged kids quite significantly.
And this is so funny, because this is the free market versus...
The government.
It costs like $7,000 or $6,000 or $7,000 to educate a kid in a government school for like three or four months.
$23 replaced $6,000 or $7,000 worth of government education.
$23.
And people say, well, you know, education's so expensive.
It's like, it's really not.
It's really not.
Government education is expensive and crappy.
A little bit of philosophy, these kids are sprouting wings like Icarus.
And that was the whole case I made the other night too.
I just got them crunching the numbers.
So for the OECD countries, they have the program for national student assessment.
And if you look, just in America alone, right, in the year 2000, we actually dropped...
For math, science, and reading for their metrics since the year 2000.
And we've spent more in education, $146 billion more in education since the year 2000.
Like, our math was 20th range.
You know that, though.
The more government spends on something, the worse it gets.
That's almost a more physical.
Yeah.
I mean, $4,600 staplers.
Yeah.
But that's the crazy part where, I mean, since the year 2000, we've spent $146 billion more, yet our math, science, and reading stats compared to 86 or so more countries have dropped.
Right?
I mean, math, we used to be 20th in place, now we're 36.
You know, science, we used to be 15th, now we're 28th.
You know, reading, we used to be 16th, now we're at 24th.
You know, as of 2012, because there's still estimates for the 2013-2014 period.
So I didn't calculate those.
I only did up to 2012.
But still, that's a lot of money that's just being pissed down the drain with no effect showing, hey, more money in education definitely improves things.
And that's the first argument you hear from a lot of These leftists, like, hey, dude, we need more money in education.
Don't you think the kids are worth it?
No.
Like, if you're going to drop more money in this only to get worse results, clearly something is wrong.
Clearly it's the system of education in general.
Alex, you know diversity is a strength.
No, and of course, I mean, teachers love to promote diversity because that way, or administrators in the school system because that way they can demand more school money.
More money for their schools, because they've got to deal with all these different languages.
And, you know, 22% of the recent migrants to Minnesota tested positive for tuberculosis.
That's not particular to education, I just think it's a kind of jaw-dropping statistic.
And it's not to me surprising that the media pushes diversity, because diversity destroys social trust, or at least undermines it significantly.
And when social trust gets undermined, people stay home.
It's too much bother to go out and there's no block parties and it's too complicated and it's too confusing.
You don't know who you're going to offend or who you're going to upset or who you should spend time with or what's acceptable, what's allowed.
So people just stay home.
So if you can promote diversity through TV and movies and video games, what happens?
People stay home.
What do they do when they stay home?
Why?
They watch more TV, they watch more movies, and they play more video games.
You know, outdoors is the enemy of the media.
And so the fact that TV promotes...
Social disintegration, which results in people watching more TV, well, yeah, of course they do.
I mean, if they're promoting less diverse neighborhoods, then people are out having barbecues and block parties and not watching The Good Wife.
Anyway, listen, man, I've got to move on to the next caller, but a real pleasure to chat.
You're certainly welcome back anytime, and let us know how it goes with your transition to...
Well, out of the government for obvious reasons.
And yeah, really glad you called in.
Nice to meet you.
Thank you.
All right, man.
Take care.
You too.
Okay, up next we have Vince.
Vince wrote in and said, The idea behind this is if your kids do not become the poster children of free-thinking, rational individuals, then they can at least fall back on their beliefs that better promote that Western society stands for.
And hey, if they're rational people and later come to the realization that God doesn't exist, then they can just throw that concept away then.
No harm, no foul.
That's from Vince.
Hi Vince, how you doing?
Pretty good, how about you?
Well, thanks for your patience for the show.
Do you have kids at the moment?
I do not, no.
Alright, so there's a future theoretical, right?
Yeah, exactly.
When you hear the phrase false dichotomy, what arises in your mind?
Basically just believing in something that isn't true to promote something that you believe is better than the opposite.
Yeah, I would sort of say that it's being given an either or choice in a world that is not limited by that either or choice.
Yeah, sure.
You know, like my kids play this game, you know, would you rather, you know, be dropped into a pond from 100 feet or into a pine tree from 10 feet?
You know, like, which would you rather?
And, you know, it's a kind of fun game.
None of the above is the opposite to the false dichotomy.
So here what you're saying is, and I'm willing to entertain the question while pointing out that it is, I think, a false dichotomy.
Would I rather my daughter go to church or be indoctrinated into far-left political views?
I would rather her go to church.
Okay, fair enough.
Much rather her go to church.
I mean, it wouldn't even be a, let me think about that.
I would, you know, far-left political views or be indoctrinated into the church of Satan.
Okay, maybe then I'm mulling things back and forth a little bit and weighing the pros and cons of, you know, the hammer and sickle versus the pentagram.
But I would say that, I mean, I was raised in the church and I was a choir boy and I went to church and When I was young, a couple of times a week, and I did the whole thing.
And I think it left some good things in my heart and mind.
And now, I was not...
It was Anglicanism, which is basically agnosticism with stained glass.
No, it wasn't quite that much.
But anyway, it was really more about the teaching.
I was not taught that, you know, I was going to burn in hell much.
I mean, there was some of it, but it wasn't, you know, portrait of the artist as a young man.
It wasn't James Joyce style.
You can smell the bubbling flesh of your future perfidy.
It wasn't any of that Ian Paisley stuff.
Teeth will be provided!
That's an old joke from Dave Allen where he says...
He's going to say, you know, there would be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
And the old lady says, well, what if you don't have any teeth?
Teeth will be provided!
But, yeah, so I mean, as long as it's not some real fire and brimstone, hold the talk and snake stuff, I think that there's fantastic values that are being taught.
I watched a fundamentalist speech in a different religion recently.
And there had to be like 2,000 or 3,000 people all sitting attentively listening to this speech.
And I mean, I'm a pretty popular philosopher.
Could I go out and do a speech and get 2,000 or 3,000 people to come see?
I don't know.
Seems doubtful.
And these people were out there talking about ideas.
They were talking about virtue.
They were talking about the compatibilities between various religions.
They were reading from the text.
They were sitting, listening attentively, good questions at the end.
And it's like, wow.
When it comes to talking ideas, when it comes to talking ideas, well, religion still has philosophy beaten hands and feet down.
And, um, That's a basic fact.
The transmission of value still remains largely in the purview of religion.
Now, the far left to me is a rather unanchored and hysterical form of religiosity.
It's the R-selected religiosity.
Christianity is case-selected because it really is about the deferral of gratification.
And a focus on substantial ethics over immediate effects.
Like, yeah, I get it.
Stealing is going to get you that bike quicker, but it's wrong.
You have to wait.
You have to earn.
You have to pay.
You have to maintain.
We're the far left.
Has almost no capacity to defer gratification.
We've got to help the poor now!
We've got to help everyone now!
We've got to fix all these problems now!
And I don't care what it takes!
And I feel so uncomfortable with this free speech now!
It has to stop!
I don't care if my free speech might be infringed later.
I've got to stop this negative stimulus now!
It's a blinding, infantile whine of now-ness.
And that's not what I was raised with.
I was raised with big-time deferral of gratifications.
I mean, isn't that, I mean, basically the left is like, let's have sex now!
And, you know, the Christians are like, yeah, wait till you're married because you kind of need the commitment before you create human beings who depend on you for a quarter century or so.
And I would much, much rather a kid of mine, where I'm faced with the choice, Imbibe the deferral of gratification, the focus on basic central premises.
Like seriously, let me ask you a basic question, Vince.
How do you satisfy the left morally?
How do you know that you're on their good side forever?
Christians, you can do that.
How do you do that for the left?
You keep your mouth shut.
No, that's if you disagree with them.
Oh, okay, sure.
You just basically just succumb to their every whim on everything.
Okay, so that's subjugation, right?
Yeah.
And that's not a principle, that's just a conformity, that's an obedience, right?
Sure.
But that's what I mean.
So how do you satisfy the left?
And not just, like, if you don't steal, you have satisfied the Christians for that thou shalt not steal forever.
It doesn't change tomorrow.
It doesn't change next year, next month.
How do you satisfy the left?
When I was a kid, the left wanted X, Y, and Z. And they got it decades ago.
They got it decades ago.
Affirmative action.
Okay.
Affirmative action.
Are you satisfied?
No!
Like an Eric Holder was saying, oh, affirmative action?
We've barely even begun.
Really?
Really?
It's not what people said in the 60s and 70s.
Oh, we'll just need this for a little while.
Now, close to a half century later, turns out we've only just begun.
We've barely even scratched the surface of affirmative action.
Excellent!
Oh, how about equal pay for work of equal value?
Well, that became the law in America, what, in 1965?
But now, 50 years later, it turns out we've barely begun and there's so much more work to do.
When is this giant, moving goalpost ever supposed to stop in the left?
You know, I would say when everything, every statistic is exactly 50%, like, equal share for everyone, but...
No!
Yeah, I can't even say that.
You're wrong about that!
Yeah, I mean, they're just gonna...
No, they're gonna bitch about something else then, so I can't even say that.
No, no!
We already know this!
Yeah.
Because they're still not satisfied with women's opportunities in college, although women are over 60 to 65% of the college people now.
Correct.
So they've gone way past 50%.
And are they saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, a little too far, ladies.
Back those boobs up a little bit.
You're crowding the testes.
No, none of that.
Now it's like, okay, women are 65% of people in college.
And still everything's wrong, and still everything needs to be fixed, and still there's a rape crisis, and still they need safe rooms, and still they need more funding.
When does it ever stop?
When do they just go like, whew, okay, we're done with that.
That's, whew, good job, you know?
Civil Rights Act is supposed to solve all this shit.
Nope.
Nope, now it's Black Lives Matter.
matter now it's got to be some other thing and this so this you know and this moving goal post to me is foundational to an abusive relationship An abusive relationship, oh man, in an abusive relationship, you can never permanently satisfy the other person.
They will always withhold their discontent like a grenade with a ticking pin.
Oh, are we out?
Oh, oh, oh.
Grenade in, grenade out.
Oh, who knows, right?
Never be satisfied.
Never be satisfied.
I remember this, you know, when I was a kid.
My mom, she was in a bad mood.
If she was in a bad mood, she'd just stalk around the place looking for something wrong.
She'd always find something or some damn thing.
Can't be satisfied.
You have no hold over the other person Because their discontent is going to find some way to shit on you.
And this is why there's all this moving goalposts with the left.
Never satisfied.
Okay.
Because all they're constantly doing is trying to race bait or class bait or gender bait the right.
Creating some situations like, ah, you don't want men in your little girl's washroom?
You must hate gays or whatever.
You must hate transgendered people and so on, right?
And they can't let people voluntarily find a solution for this themselves, which in the free market I'm sure they would.
And they always have to come up with something that they're discontented about, something that they can nag you about, something that they're upset about, something that makes you a bad person and them glorified moral heroes.
And it will never stop.
People say, oh, we'll concede this, we'll change this, we'll do that.
It will never work on the left.
And the idea that my daughter would be exposed to that kind of verbal abuse toxicity, the idea that on the left she would be judged not by the content of her character, but by the color of her skin, because apparently she'd have a white privilege.
That is repulsive to me.
Yeah, so I mean, I understand what you're getting at, I think, which is that, you know, if you raise your children well, this shouldn't be an issue in the future.
Is that correct?
I don't know, that sounds like a very generic bumper sticker, Vince.
I don't know what that means.
I would say that you can raise children to be good people without necessarily placing them in a religious environment and certainly without putting them into some sort of leftist indoctrination camp.
That's what I mean by false dichotomy.
It's like, oh, socialist or religious.
It's like, well, as a philosopher, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to check none of the above.
Sure.
Now, I will say this, though, that until philosophers get their shit together and find some way to help people transmit values to their children, I'd rather they go Christian than socialist.
I'd rather the kids...
You know, if you're out there and you've got to teach your kids values, maybe you can't do it yourself, and Lord knows I don't make children's programs, then if the church transmits the best values...
Like, I'm glad I was raised a Christian rather than a leftist or a nihilist, which is basically the same thing.
So, if you have no choice, maybe it's not a false dichotomy for some people.
Well, that would be my particular suggestion.
You know, some largely secular denomination.
I don't mean like totally goopy Unitarianism, but, you know, something where the values can be transmitted.
Because...
When people are hollowed out of their values, they're very easy to push over.
It's like a tree without roots.
You lean on it and it falls.
And the roots need to go deep to resist the endless torrents of verbal abuse coming out of a lot of the extreme leftist positions.
And, you know, we need to raise a generation of warriors at the moment who are willing to really, you know, verbally and honorably fight for the good and the right in society.
And the far left, kind of like a soul-eating acid.
And you can teach children about morality and about goodness without telling them they're going to burn in hell, right?
I mean, there is verbal abuse in extreme religiosity, hyper-religiosity, burn-in-hell religiosity as well, as the left.
But there's, I think, less of it now in the church.
Sure.
So, I guess my question, I might have overstated it, maybe.
So, I mean, this is more of, let's say an atheist were to marry a Christian.
Like, you know, so, in a lot of cases, it seems like you agree, it might not be such a bad idea to, you know, attend church, things like that.
And, you know, at the same time, like, try to teach your kid how to think critically.
Would you say that's fair to say?
Are you dating a Christian?
No, I'm not, but...
Are you interested in dating a Christian?
You know, at this point, it seems like a lot better idea than a lot of the atheist options out there.
Okay, let me ask you this.
This is the bear and the woods and the feminist question.
Sure.
If you could choose to marry...
A leftist feminist or a Christian woman, and you had to choose one of the two, who would you choose?
The Christian at this point.
Is there any point at which you wouldn't make that choice?
Oh, man.
It's not a trick question.
It's not a trick question.
I don't think there is.
Right.
Right.
Yeah, if I had a choice, I would choose the Christian.
Woman.
I mean, again, that's not even close.
That's not even, let me mull it over.
Because the feminist or the leftist woman, well, you can end up in divorce court, I think.
At least you know that the woman is going to, the vow before God, she is going to love, honor, and obey you.
If you're a good man to her, she's going to take those vows very seriously.
And...
I'm not really sure that the feminist would.
So, you know...
And of course, in the Christian faith, men and women are complementary to each other.
And designed to fit together and work well together and be a team as God intended and so on.
Whereas, you know, for a lot of feminists, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle and so on.
I try not to be extraneous in essential relationships.
It's not really a very good plan.
So, yeah, if I had to choose between a feminist and a Christian...
Take me to church.
I mean, easy peasy.
Okay.
So, I mean, I guess my question when it involved the kids too, I guess I'm...
So, I mean, I realize there are people out there who, you know, they're kind of more moderate in their beliefs.
They're willing to take in facts and information and, you know, maybe change their beliefs a bit.
And then, you know, you get the other people who are just strongly one way.
They will always disagree with you if you go against what they say.
So I guess my question is, like, is there any research showing, like, there's a way to avoid having your kid, like, fall into one of these far right or far left ideologies?
Well, teach them how to think.
I mean, I'm sorry, I don't know that there's any, you know, like, I went, I was a man yesterday, I went with my daughter to a trampoline park.
Oh, oh, the bouncing.
Like, two hours of solid bouncing.
Well, I should say two hours minus about eight minutes, at which point I had to stop, because I'm like, okay, I can't, I can't.
That's too much for me.
And...
On the way, she asked me how my show was, and we talked a little bit about the caller.
We were talking about evolution, and she wanted to know more.
So we did the giraffe, you know, we did the blowhole, we did the vestigial tail, we did the whole thing, right?
And, you know, she was really excited, you know?
You frame stuff for kids by, you know, sounds like...
When you say, when things are cool or excellent or rare for kids, they're just glued, you know?
Like, every rock my daughter finds is a really rare rock, and every butterfly is a really rare...
Like, if it's rare, fantastic.
And I said, you know, this has been called the single best idea that has ever occurred to a human being.
She's like, whoa, really?
And so, yeah, teaching her all of this stuff and teaching her...
You know, why did Darwin sit on this for a long time after he came up with the theory and even wrote it down and what happened with the religion and so on with regards to it and so on.
So all of that is really important stuff to just get that critical thinking juices going, you know?
I mean, why do you have eyebrows?
Because we talked about, you know, each cell wants to make itself as more efficient as possible.
Eyebrows to keep the sweat from running into your eyes and stuff.
So that kind of critical thinking, thinking for yourself, trying to reason yourself through, and having the example of great ideas that have come before you, I think that's just going to make people skeptical.
And...
Helping kids to be skeptical of those in authority is important.
And to do that, you have to not subjugate them to irrational authorities, I think, as a whole.
All right.
Fair enough.
Sounds good to me.
You sound a little down.
Oh, geez.
Yeah, sorry.
This is just my voice.
I can't really do much about that.
It's just your voice?
Yeah, this is how I always talk.
You mean you're a happy person with a sad voice?
Yeah, kind of.
I don't know what that means, kind of.
Well, this is just how I talk, so I get that all the time.
There's just no way around it.
So you get that all the time, and everyone else is wrong.
How you come across to people, they're completely wrong, and you're right, and there's nothing to be explored about with that.
The impression that a lot of people get of you when they talk to you, they're just wrong.
It could be.
I just want to be clear.
Yeah, I'll go with that, sure.
Okay.
Well, I think that tells me all I need to know.
Thank you so much, Vince.
I appreciate the call.
Thank you so much, everyone, for calling in to this most magnificent and wonderful show.
Mostly because of y'all, but a little bit for me.
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