3300 Fifty Shades of Academia - Call In Show - May 24th, 2016
Question 1: [1:45] - “Why would determinism preclude free will? Aren't those two ideas perfectly compatible with each other?”Question 2: [37:57] - “What are your thoughts on the advent of social media in relation to the attitudes, behaviors, and rationales of the general population of western civilization? As in, what impact do you think social media has had on the way people live their lives and choose their actions, and would you say it has been brought more benefits, or more unintended, negative 'side effects' to western society?”Question 3: [1:09:38] - "Is university still worth it? Many of my friends and cohorts from high school have gone off to continue their education at university. I'm one of the last not too. My chief reasons are not wanting to are becoming strapped down with decades of debt, getting a degree that will lose its value as more and more people are funneled through education, and finally, not surrounding myself with Social Justice Warriors that end up turning me into another leftist brain zombie. Are these worries justified and sufficient enough reason not to pursue more formal education or do you think there's still value to be gained from a university education?"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
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Thank you so much for joining us, of course, for this fine, fine call-in show.
Determinism!
Yes, we've mentioned it a few times before.
Oh, but I came up.
With the kind of analogy that gives even me the goosebump piece, which I hope will clarify at least my perspective on free will versus determinism.
I was batting around a somewhat indifferent caller, but we got someplace very, very cool.
I hope you'll enjoy it.
Hey, do you ever hear of social media?
Um...
Well, it's kind of an oxymoron because socializing, to me, is with people and media is not.
But Caller wanted to know what I thought of social media and its effects upon the world, the future, our connectedness, and where the Borg brain of mankind can be turned to.
Third Caller, oh, struggling, I remember it, although I think it's worse for the younger generation than it is for me.
Is university worth it?
And it was a particularly heartbreaking conversation because he had a friend, a black friend of his for 10 years, Turned on him after a couple of years of getting informed by college about white privilege and all that kind of stuff.
So a bit of a heartbreaking conversation, but important, I think, in terms of figuring out, is university worth it?
Do you want to pay to be indoctrinated?
And is there anything good that you can do?
And is there any way to avoid it if you can?
Freedomainradio.com slash donate.
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Here we go.
All right, up first today is Josh.
Josh wrote in and said, Why would determinism preclude free will?
Aren't those two ideas perfectly compatible with each other?
That's from Josh.
Hello, Josh.
How are you doing today?
Hi there.
I'm doing pretty well.
How about you?
Very well.
Thank you.
So your question was, why would determinism preclude free will?
Aren't those two ideas perfectly compatible with each other?
Now, rather than me attempt to disprove your proposition, and I assume you think that your argument is that determinism and free will are perfectly compatible with each other.
In other words, they're kind of synonyms because they're both describing the same phenomenon.
So I'm happy to hear that case.
Well, not necessarily that they're synonyms.
I think that one doesn't have much to do with the other.
I think this stance is just that in a universe that's deterministic, you could still have free will.
Or to put it another way, you could say that free will doesn't require any randomness.
Okay, those are two big statements.
We should probably take them, of course, one by one, as we are wont to do.
So the first question, in a purely deterministic universe, there would be no limitation on free will.
Is that what you mean?
Yes.
That's fine.
Alright, would you like to define what you mean by determinism and free will?
Because they strike me as opposite propositions that you're making, but I'm certainly happy to hear the case.
Yes, this is what I was getting into.
I think we already agree with each other that free will exists, and this is probably going to be a really short semantics discussion, perhaps.
Determinism, I would just define as saying that Identical initial conditions always lead to identical outcomes.
Like if you start with the exact same variables, you always end up with the same results.
So in that case, the human brain being...
An organism that is bound by the laws of physics, that if you knew all of the variables, you would be able to perfectly predict what people would subjectively experience as their choices, but were merely the actions of various forms of physical, biomechanical, chemical energies working their way forward.
Is that fair to say?
Yes, but I still think it would be fair to call those choices generally.
I'm not sure I understand that.
So I've used this analogy before, so I'm aware of it, but it's a very, I think, helpful one.
If we see a rock bouncing down a hillside, we cannot, at least at present, we cannot figure out exactly where it's going to land, right?
Right.
Okay.
Just because we can't figure out where it's going to land doesn't mean that the rock has free will.
It's still obeying the laws of physics and gravity and air friction or whatever, right?
Yes.
So, your argument is that the human brain is effectively the same, or physically the same, or subject to the same laws and rules, as a rock bouncing down a hill, in that if we knew every conceivable variable there was affecting the rock's trajectory down the hill, we would know with perfect precision where it was going to end up landing, right?
Yes.
You could predict that.
I mean, if the universe were deterministic, we could predict that.
Right.
So, if that's the case, then there's no difference between the human mind and a rocket bouncing down a hill, right?
One is a lot more complex than the other.
Complexity doesn't matter.
I mean, the weather is more complex than a ping pong ball being dropped from your hand, but we wouldn't say that that complexity, the complexity of the weather, or our inability to perfectly predict the weather, doesn't mean that the clouds have free will.
Yes, I understand what you mean.
So an escalation of complexity doesn't result in free will.
And so if everything is fundamentally rock bouncing down a hill, if the human mind is a more complex version but subject to the same restrictions as a rock bouncing down a hill, how does the human mind get free will but the rock doesn't?
Because I should probably define determinism, but I didn't define free will.
That was one of the things you asked of me.
I think I would define free will as...
It's not straight up, could you have done otherwise, the way that people tend to use that term.
I think it is the ability to do otherwise had you wanted to do otherwise.
Well, I don't know that the introduction of a preference proves or establishes free will because that's begging the question, right?
Because the whole question is, do we even have – like do our preferences matter or are they merely subjective experiences and so on, right?
Well, if I can get into this, I think that when people talk about free will and saying whether someone could have done otherwise.
Let's say that you get into my car and we drive from point A to point B.
We just reach our destination 65 miles an hour after some length of time.
We get out of the car and you ask me after it's over, could we have gotten here sooner?
Now, if I were one of these hardcore, edgy fatalists, I would say, well, no, we couldn't have gotten here sooner.
We got here at the only way that we could have.
But because I know what you're saying, I know what you're really asking is, Or did you take me the scenic route?
Or did you say, well, this route will add 10 minutes, but it's a very pretty view?
Exactly.
And in that sense, yes, of course, there are many ways we could have gotten here sooner.
We could have left earlier, I could have gone faster, pressed the accelerator harder.
If we had wanted to, there were many things that we could have done.
And that is in the sense that compatibilists use the term.
Okay, I'm still not sure what your definition of free will is yet.
Had you wanted to, let's say.
Could you have changed your behavior if you had wanted to?
Yes.
So, the idea behind free will is that if you want to change your behavior, you can.
Yes, I think that's generally the way people actually use the term.
But the problem is that that encompasses animals as well.
To an extent, some animals I'd say could be swayed by reasons, maybe.
They can plan, perhaps.
I wouldn't say all of them.
But all animals...
Swayed, let's say, by pain and desire, right?
They avoid that which is painful and they pursue that which their desires, like reproduction and child raising, if that's their particular case-selected trait.
They avoid that which is painful and they pursue that which their desires lead them to.
And I don't think, and that goes, I think, down to single-celled organisms.
And so I don't think that we want to include a definition of free will that's based merely on desire, because we share desire with just about every other living organism, and I don't think we'd extend free will that far down the evolutionary chain.
Well, I don't consider this a binary thing, like you either have free will or you don't.
I think it probably exists on a continuum, like as a child grows up from an infant into an adult, they slowly become more and more of responsible agents who Let's say are responsible for their decisions.
They can be held accountable for the things that they do more and more.
Yes, but I don't think that we want to talk about the evolution of human beings and compare it to single-celled organisms, which is where you're going to end up with if you base free will merely upon desire.
There must be desire plus something else.
I'm not sure.
Well, look, I mean, plants desire sunlight, right?
I mean, they grow towards it and they Wither in the absence of it and so on, right?
So plants need to achieve what?
Photosynthesis and so they will yearn and climb and grapple and hook their way onto other plants and strain and thirstily lunge for any spot of sunlight that they can get a hold of.
I'm not sure I would say that about plants.
I think that's like saying that the north side of a magnet desires to be close to the south side of another magnet.
I think that's a little reaching with the definition of want or desire.
They have a, well, it's a biologically programmed thirst for sunlight.
Right.
I can see that.
But it's not a physical, like a physical property, magnets did not evolve, right?
I mean, they're not, the magnetism of certain objects is not evolutionarily selected It is something that is really like gravity, right?
Gravity is not evolutionarily selected.
Whereas the desire of organisms for that which aids their survival and the avoidance of that which harms their survival for the sole purpose pretty much of reproducing their DNA, that is a different mechanism and a different process than the, I guess, eternal physical properties of matter.
In other words, there is preference in life.
There is no preference in non-life.
The preference in life is for survival and reproduction.
I can see that.
So we could say...
And the reason I'm saying all of this is...
I don't know if you've watched my series on free will.
People can find it.
It's a three-part series on YouTube and at fdrpodcasts.com.
But I put forward an argument for free will, or a definition of free will, that is specific to the human mind.
Because as far as we know, other creatures do not possess The characteristics of free will at least infinitesimally small to the degree that we do.
Insofar as other languages, sorry, other animals may possess a certain kind of language, but they're not writing sonnets, right?
So, I mean, human beings are a massive extrapolation of prior abilities in particular animals.
We can sort of debate whether dolphins have free will.
I'm not sure it's particularly important, but certainly if they do possess free will, it's to a very tiny degree relative to human beings, in the same way that they possess a language, but it is a very tiny language compared to human beings.
And so there must be something specific to human beings when it comes to the definition of free will, and that's why I think desire doesn't quite get there.
Well, I don't think that whether determinism is true or not has anything to do with that, because I think we kind of share the same definition on what free will is, and I think that we both agree we have it.
No, no, my problem isn't that you say that we have free will.
My problem is you say that free will and determinism are perfectly compatible with each other.
Isn't the alternative to saying that, saying that free will requires some degree of randomness?
Nope.
Well, if it's not deterministic, isn't randomness the only other choice or the only other option?
Let's be careful with that word.
No, it's not.
We're logical people.
I mean, isn't that the complement of things that are deterministic?
It must be things that are not deterministic.
Well, let me give you an example.
Is evolution a random process?
I don't know.
Well, that depends on how you would define random, because some people just use it to mean, well, this couldn't practically be predicted, like a die roll is random.
Other people use it to mean that they're talking about subatomic particles interacting or something.
So, I don't know what you mean by random in that sense.
Okay, well...
Let's put it another way, then.
Why don't you tell me what you mean by the only other option for predetermined is random?
What do you mean by random with regards to the human mind?
Well, I am actually using that dumb, super granular, like really zoomed in, talking about molecules bouncing into each other kind of definition.
Random being true random.
I think there's something...
is deterministic, then having the exact same variables in it, having all the exact same initial conditions would always result in the same outcome.
And the only alternative to that is having all the exact same initial conditions not resulting in the same outcome.
That seems like a logical binary to me, right?
But wouldn't it be fair to say that human beings behave neither deterministically nor randomly?
I mean, according to, like, you can't predict the behavior of human beings In the same way that you can predict the behavior of inanimate matter, let's just say, sort of human beings versus inanimate matter.
But secondly, human beings...
Sorry?
It would be very hard to predict how human is behaving if it were possible, to predict what they're going to do in the future, yeah.
Right.
So, so far, it's, right, human beings are not able to be predicted in the same way that inanimate matter can be predicted, right?
I mean, we're not talking theoretically, but just talking to now.
In the now, yes.
They cannot be predicted in the same way.
Yeah, like they can send a probe past Jupiter and they don't say, well, unless Jupiter changes its mind and goes the other way, right?
They know that Jupiter is going to fulfill the laws of matter.
Sure.
And so that is, human beings cannot be predicted in the same way that...
Inanimate objects and their behaviors can be predicted.
On the other hand, human behavior is not random, in that one of the fundamental tenets of economics is human beings respond to incentives.
And so human beings are not random in terms of how they behave.
Otherwise, there'd be no such thing as advertising, right?
On the other hand, human beings are not perfectly predictable.
That's not a proof, obviously, because lots of arguments could be made against those two things, but it is at least support for the idea that we might want to look somewhere between randomness and determinism for human behavior.
Well, I think there is nothing in between.
There is determinism, or there are some slight degrees of randomness, and then things might get more and more random.
It could be just on a scale.
Determinism, call it zero, and then it goes all the way up to one.
Point one, point two, point three.
There could be degrees of randomness.
Like if I hit a billiard ball in a perfectly deterministic universe and all the atoms and everything being the exact same way, the billiard ball will always fall in the exact same place if the conditions are the same.
But if there's some slight degree of randomness, maybe it falls three degrees counterclockwise.
It's a little off angle.
If there's more randomness, maybe I hit it and it flies through the ceiling or something.
So when I say randomness, I don't mean everything.
Wait, wait, hang on.
Sorry to interrupt.
I don't understand the billiard ball thing.
If you hit the billiard ball exactly the same way under exactly the same conditions, it will end up in the same place, right?
If determinism were true, yeah.
Right.
But then you talked about hitting it in a different way and it ending up in a different place.
Oh, if I said that, I misspoke.
I mean, if all the conditions were exactly the same, but then it wound up in a different place, then there would be some degree of randomness.
If I hit it the exact same way and it winds up 15 degrees off to the side, then there's more randomness.
It's a matter of degrees.
So when I say randomness, I don't mean like it's equally likely that a pink elephant falls through the ceiling or something.
Right.
Okay.
Okay, I got it.
And have you, in your own life, Josh, do you have any examples of where you got new information and decided to change your behavior based on that new information?
Oh, let me sort of give you an analogy and then I'll have you respond to it.
I understand analogies are not proof, but they're always sort of opening up aspects of the conversation.
So...
At one point, people used to pray to the weather, right?
Like they used to pray to Neptune or Poseidon, the sea gods, in order to have calm seas when they sailed on the ocean.
The farmers in ancient times used to pray to a variety of rain gods in order to try and get favorable conditions for the growth of their crops and so on, right?
Not used to.
People still do that.
I know, but let's just, let's take it out of sort of contemporary.
Yeah, I understand.
You know, where the Bible is the farm's almanac or something.
Let's go back to when people used to pray to Poseidon, right?
Now, that's because they perceived that in the ocean, there was consciousness.
And so they would attempt to negotiate with the consciousness they perceived in the ocean and have it respond to various incentives.
In other words, they'd say, well, I'm going to sacrifice a goat to Poseidon, and then he's going to send his hunger in the form of a shark to eat up the goat I've thrown into the bay or something.
And so because they perceived the actions of inanimate matter to be populated by a consciousness they could appeal to, They attempted to interact with, to converse with, to pray to, and to negotiate with the ocean, right?
Right.
I'm going to assume—I'm going to go out on a limb here.
You're a science-based guy.
I'm going to assume, Josh, that if you are going to go out on a sailing boat, you do not sacrifice a goat and pray to Poseidon.
I sacrifice a cow, but yeah.
As long as it's not a water buffalo— I'm okay.
Got to keep those for your dates.
So you accept that the ocean is not, because it's determined and it's not inhabited by consciousness, you accept that the ocean is not something that you can negotiate with, it's not something you can interact with.
You can't change the mind of the ocean, right?
Yes.
There's an agency there.
There may be things I could do to manipulate it, but You can build a stronger vessel, right?
You can red sky at night, sailors delight, red sky at dawn, sailors be warned.
That's the only thing I know about ocean worship.
So, here's my question.
Once we accept that there are no gods of the storms and there are no gods of the oceans, we cease to attempt to negotiate or, quote, change the mind of the weather or of the oceans, right?
So, I guess my question for determinists is, since basically you have banished the gods of consciousness from the mind and view it as a deterministic entity, in the same way that if you no longer believe in the gods of the ocean, you view the ocean as a deterministic entity, which doesn't mean you perfectly predict, of course, you can't, right?
You never would be able to get enough of the variables in real time to be able to predict what exactly the ocean is going to do.
Right.
But...
Once we accept that there's no ghosts in the machine, we stop trying to negotiate with the machine.
Is that a fair thing to say?
Like, once we no longer believe that there are gods in the oceans, we no longer attempt to change the mind of the ocean.
Yeah, that's fair.
And so this is sort of my question, that if we view, you know, the human mind as the ocean, and if under determinism we say, well, there is nothing to negotiate with any more than there is to negotiate with a wave when there's no god of the ocean, Then why is it that we say, well, why is it determinists would say that the human mind is exactly the same as everything else, while treating it as incredibly different from everything else?
Like, I mean, that's sort of my basic question.
Well, because we're talking about things, how they scale up.
On a very small scale, like, do the particles and the neurons of my brain behave the same way as particles in the ocean?
Sure, they do.
But when you scale things up, It's a lot easier to manipulate my behavior just by talking to me, by putting vibrations of airwaves into my eardrum, than it is to manipulate the ocean.
Are you saying it's easier to manipulate a person than to manipulate the ocean by putting words, by speaking to it?
It's easier to change a person's behavior, yes.
So you're saying it's possible to change the ocean's behavior by talking to it, but less so?
It's possible to change the ocean's behavior by paddling a canoe, but you're not changing very much.
Right.
I guess you could even say that by talking to the ocean, you're putting out sound waves that may adjust its behavior to a tiny degree.
I suppose what I'm saying is, I'm losing my train of thought.
I'm trying to think of a good way to word it.
Sorry, go on.
It's hard for me to believe that determinists say that the human mind is like everything else in the universe when they say it's basically the same as weather or the ocean or a rock bouncing down the side of the hill.
Now, you'd never have a conversation with the weather or the ocean or a rock bouncing down a hill.
I mean, not seriously.
You wouldn't have a debate, right?
Right.
And so you were treating human consciousness as very different from everything else in the universe while at the same time claiming it's the same.
At its core, at a really zoomed-in level, You could say what there is is atoms bouncing into other atoms, but I can pick up a rock and move it or I can talk to another person and I'm making atoms bounce into other atoms and I'm changing things' behaviors.
But when we talk about, yeah, I guess that's a good way to put it.
So you have a desire to change someone else's behavior and you choose the best methodology for achieving that?
Yes.
So you're exercising free will.
Exactly.
Well, then I think we're in perfect agreement that we make choices to influence other people.
We attempt to give them better information or maybe if we're not so nice, we attempt to be sophists and convince them to do X, Y, or Z. But we are making choices to affect other people's behavior through our communication.
We choose to do that and we're appealing to some particular desire or preference or maybe if they have some allegiance to logic, we are requesting or maybe even demanding that they act with integrity towards their own Value called being rational, being logical, or conforming to the data, which is a very, very important thing.
I mean, crazy people reject data, and people who are sane accept the data wherever it leads.
So I think that, you know, I think that if you can say to yourself, well, we're completely deterministic because then I avoid the problem of randomness, and at the same time, You say that we have free will and can choose how we use our time and how we influence other people and what it is that we do with our lives.
That's not a compatible position.
I mean, because if we have choice, then it can't all be deterministic.
If it's all deterministic, we can't have choice.
It seems to me that you have a solution, which is if you accept pure determinism, then you have to treat every human being as a storm cloud.
In which case, there's no point negotiating with it.
Only crazy people negotiate with things that are complex and unpredictable, but which do not possess free will, right?
I mean, like rocks bouncing down a hill or storm clouds or tsunamis, right?
You don't will the tsunami to respect the non-aggression principle and bypass your house because the tsunami is merely H2O atoms and wind and gravity and momentum.
I tried that with a rising river and it didn't work.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, back, varmint!
That's wrong.
You're flooding me.
That's evil incursion of water onto my property.
Right?
So here's the challenge.
And you found a way that I don't think is rational to solve this challenge, if I understand your argument correctly, which is to hold both views simultaneously, double-think style.
I can't make it that far.
I mean, if I'm only going to talk to human beings...
If I'm not going to talk to the weather, then I have to accept that there's something different with human beings than there is from the weather.
Now, the fact that if you take things down to the individual atomic level, you've answered nothing.
You've answered nothing because that kind of reductionism bypasses all of the sense evidence and bypasses basic principles of biology.
There's no carbon atom that is alive.
However, life is largely composed of carbon or significantly composed of carbon.
And so the fact to say, well, there can't be such a thing as life, because there's no such thing as an alive carbon atom.
Well, it's called emergent properties.
Life is an emergent property that results from the accumulation of a particularly configured series of molecules or atoms, if you want to put it at that level.
And so saying, well, there's no atom that has free will, therefore there can't be free will.
Atoms act in a deterministic manner.
Well, atoms don't reproduce.
Atoms don't have babies.
Atoms don't love their young.
Atoms don't eat food.
Does that mean that we say none of these things exist?
Because if we only look at things at the atomic level, And not at the accumulation, immersion, property level.
None of these things exist.
So diving down into atoms explains absolutely nothing about life and consciousness and free will.
Because if diving down into atoms doesn't even explain how you can be alive to have the thought to dive down into atoms, clearly it is a worse than useless gesture and exploration of what it is to be alive and be conscious.
Exactly.
That's my point exactly, that talking about determinism or randomness Doesn't really have to do with the question of free will.
I think the issues that you have with determinism are more issues with materialist monism.
Like someone might say, oh, we're just made of atoms, therefore we have no consciousness, you're not really making decisions.
We've all dealt with people like that.
And we know what emergent properties are.
We both agree on emergent properties, I think.
So why can I not believe in consciousness or something if I'm a determinist?
And I'm not a determinist, by the way.
I should make that point.
I don't have a dog in this fight.
I don't much care whether there's determinism or degrees of randomness either way.
Well, determinism or degrees of randomness, that's the false dichotomy that we're right back at the beginning of.
The opposite to determinism is not randomness.
The opposite to determinism is free will.
Now, free will is not randomness.
Otherwise, if I get a computer to spit out a bunch of random numbers, it somehow has developed consciousness, and free will, of course not.
So, the idea that...
When you say that in a deterministic universe there can be no free will, what you're saying is that there must be non-determinism for free will to exist.
What I'm saying is that there are three classes of behaviors or three classes of categories of objects.
Non-living entities, which are subject to physical laws, have no choice, cannot be reasoned or negotiated with, are going to do what they're going to do, and just the fact that we can't predict that everything that they're going to do is immaterial, we simply know that it's not chosen.
Which is why people will put up lawn signs supporting Donald Trump, but they will not attempt to negotiate with a Bernie Sanders lawn sign.
They will attempt to negotiate with a Bernie Sanders supporter, but not a lawn sign, even though it's hard to know which one is economically more valuable.
But anyway, so there's non-living entities.
And the non-living entities are in the realm of determinism.
Then there are living entities which are subject to forces like evolution and so on, and they are self-generating movements, right?
I mean, the rock doesn't move, the starfish moves, right?
The rock doesn't reproduce, the starfish reproduces.
The rock is not subject to success or failure.
A rock doesn't succeed or fail, a starfish succeeds or fails relative to its goal of eating, surviving, screwing, and reproducing, right?
And so there's a different category.
Let me just finish.
I'll finish and then you can tell me what you think.
So there's inanimate, non-living matter, there's living matter, and then there's the human mind.
And the human mind...
is, at least to the degree that it's philosophically relevant, is the only entity in the universe that we know of that is subject to the classification of free will.
And we know that instinctively, which is why we only argue with human beings, not with starfish.
We only have debates with human beings, not with starfish.
So, everybody who has a debate with someone is automatically saying that the human mind is radically different, substantially, fundamentally different from every other collection of matter and energy in the universe, Because that's the only thing I'm ever going to debate with.
So there's, just to go over very briefly again, there is non-living matter, living matter, the human mind.
And those are the three categories.
Philosophy is focused on the human mind.
Free will is concentrated in the human mind.
And there are those two other categories which are helpful.
Right, I follow you.
I think those are fine categories.
Especially when talking about free will, but I think maybe we disagree on what the definition of determinism is.
What?
Determinism is the absence of free will?
Or determinism is the atomic mechanism of dominoes falling, right?
Dominoes fall, they don't have free will, right?
Well, that's what I'm saying.
That was why I opposed that definition for determinism at the start.
I think I can give a really small and simple analogy.
Which I think I started this, but I've seen other people use it in later years, so maybe my meme is spreading.
I think a really good analogy is, say that you could rewind time and watch what I had for breakfast this morning.
And you would see me have, let's say, Cheerios or something.
And every time you rewound time, and all the variables go back to exactly what they were, and you watched me eat Cheerios in the exact same way, the exact same spoonful sizes and everything.
I would say that that universe is deterministic.
And the only alternative to something like that is if every time you rewound time, there was some probability distribution.
Like, for example, 70% of the times you watch me, I pick Cheerios, 20% of the time I pick Sugar Smacks, and then 10% of the time I skip breakfast entirely.
There could be some little degree of randomness, rather than me always doing the exact same thing.
And I think it's fair to talk about free will in both of those kinds of situations.
I must tell you that I think that's a non-argument.
And I'm sorry to...
I mean, I'll tell you why, and then tell me if you think...
Well, it's not meant to be an argument.
I'm just trying to get across what I mean when I say determinism.
It's meant to support a particular position, or at least illustrate a particular position, but it is a non-argument.
It is a non-perspective.
Because in order for an argument to be considered even remotely valid, or even an analogy, it has to be falsifiable.
So if I said to you, well, Josh, there's an invisible guy whispering in my ear who's telling me that I'm right, you wouldn't accept that because it's not falsifiable, right?
Oh, yeah.
One cannot travel back in time and see one's breakfast again.
You can't do it.
It's absolutely completely and totally impossible to travel back in.
I'm just using that as shorthand for saying...
No, no, no.
You can't just use something as shorthand that is absolutely unverifiable, impossible, and unfalsifiable.
That is literally the equivalent of saying...
Hang on, let me finish.
It is literally the equivalent of saying, God told me there's such a thing as free will, therefore I'm right.
I can word it in a way that has nothing to do with time travel.
Okay, go ahead.
I'm just trying to use that as shorthand of saying, pretend all the variables are exactly the same as they were before.
Everything at the same velocity and the same momentum and the same mass going the same way.
And we could make something very similar to this.
Like, people have done it in labs.
They have some super cool things like 0.001 Kelvin or something.
Listen, man.
Josh, what you're saying is there's no free will in the past.
In other words, I cannot violate the laws of physics and time, go back and change what I did in the past.
Okay, I accept that.
The past is deterministic, because that's all in the past.
So the fact that I was born in Ireland is a fixed piece of history that cannot be altered.
They can change the name, but they cannot change the fact that when I was born in Ireland in the 60s, it was Ireland, I was born there.
So what you're saying is the past is deterministic.
Sorry, did I interrupt you?
Yeah, I mean, you're just saying the past is deterministic or the past cannot be altered.
Sure, I accept that.
Well, that's not what I mean.
What I'm saying doesn't have to do with time.
I was just trying to use that to say, okay, pretend all the variables are exactly the same in this situation as they were in this other situation.
Do they necessarily play out in the same way?
Do they come to the same result if they have the same starting conditions?
So you're saying, yeah, what you're saying is Rewind and play the movie, does the scene change?
Not exactly, no.
So I still don't know what you're saying.
Are you saying if every single conceivable variable was known, that the future could be predicted of a human being in the same way as weather?
If determinism were true, that would be the case, yes.
What I'm saying is, say that you have two completely different pool tables on opposite sides of the world.
But all the variables are exactly the same.
All the little calcium carbonate bits and the chalk and the temperature of the room and everything is exactly the same as it was.
No, look, they can't be the same because the fact that they're on opposite sides of the world immediately means that they're not the same.
Well, this is why it's a thought experiment.
No, no, but thought experiments have something to do with reality.
Thought experiments do have to have something to do with reality, right?
Yes, and I'm saying pretend the way that you have this one Twix bar on the left, you have an identical Twix bar on the right.
And pretend that what's interacting with this for the next five seconds is exactly the same as what's interacting with the other one.
I'm sorry, listen, I'm really lost here because you say you're not a determinist, but you're arguing for determinism, so I think I'm going to close it off and move on, but thank you very much for your conversation.
I'm just saying I don't hold either view.
If determinism were true, that's I wouldn't much care either way.
And I'm just saying, if determinism were true, we could still have free will in the sense that we both agree.
No, I got it.
You just took up an hour of my life for something you don't care about.
Okay, let's move on to the next caller.
Alright, up next is Holden.
Holden wrote in and said, What are your thoughts on the advent of social media in relation to the attitudes, behaviors, and rationales of the general population in Western civilization?
As in, what impact do you think social media has had on the way people live their lives and choose their actions?
And would you say it has brought more benefits or more unintended negative side effects to Western society?
That's from Holden.
Hello, Holton.
How are you doing?
Hey, hey.
Loved you in Catcher in the Rye.
But it's not a common name that much anymore.
Yeah, that book was about me.
It was a biography.
All right.
So, define for me determinism.
No, just kidding.
What do you got?
Social media.
I mean like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
There are other ways.
Like, I don't consider email social media.
I don't consider this right now social media, even though we're using the internet, or I'm using the internet, you know, to communicate with you.
So I wouldn't make it that general.
But more of like, you know what I mean by in the vein of like, people have their own page and they post their statuses and they post their whatever, you know, they post a picture of their Starbucks coffee with a bunch of hashtags and they're supposed to like feel like they accomplished something.
I don't know.
You know what I mean by that, right?
I do.
And do you know how much time the average social media user spends on social media every day?
Sure, it's some disgusting amount.
I don't know.
I'm not a fan myself, but enlighten me.
Almost two and a half hours.
My God.
That's like my main thing behind this question is that...
You know, there are some positives of it.
Like, for example, you've made a couple, actually a lot of videos, you know, supporting, or I don't want to say straight out supporting, but, you know, defending Donald Trump against the attacks of, like, mainstream media and, you know, the echo chamber that is social media for mainstream media.
And social media has allowed him to respond to all this stuff through Twitter and Facebook because he has such a massive following, which is obviously, I think, a positive.
But there are so many negatives, like the example I briefly gave with people post these meaningless things, like a picture of their dog's crap or a picture of their Starbucks cup, and they'll get X number of likes, so they'll feel validated for the day.
And then they'll feel entitled to go and share their opinion about like any subject, even if they're totally uninformed or misinformed, you know, because they'll have this like validation they've gotten from totally meaningless things like these pictures.
I don't know if you have a similar feeling about this or what you think the overall impact of the advent and age of social media has been on society.
Because I think that a large portion of today's toxicity with The leftist militant kind of silencing and safe spaces and social justice warriors is in large part due to social media.
And you just have enough idiots yelling in a big echo chamber, like sharing their totally, you know, uninformed, uneducated viewpoints.
And if you have enough people saying the same thing, agreeing with each other, you're going to start to think they're actually right, even if there are no facts or evidence to back it up.
Yeah, but so what?
I mean, the fact that people have a way to communicate with the world is great.
I mean, I'll take social justice warriors if it gives me a voice.
I know, but what do you think about, like, there are people over in Germany and Sweden getting arrested for posting stuff like anti-immigration.
Well, that's not social media.
That's the state, right?
So let's not conflate the two, right?
We're just talking about social media.
Social media is, and I talked about this a long time ago in the Gutenberg analogy, right?
So back in the day, under Martin Luther, the Gutenberg printing press was invented.
And because before that, books had to be written out in longhand generally by monks and under the control of the Catholic Church and all that kind of stuff.
And the Gutenberg Press was invented, which allowed for the rapid dissemination of books.
And before, priests used to get prosecuted for attempting to translate the Bible into the vernacular, right?
It was all in Latin, and you had to study Latin to learn it.
So they kept a pretty strong grip on knowledge.
And then Martin Luther, a couple other people, well, Martin Luther in particular was translating the Bible into the vernacular, printed it, and it broke up.
The thought monopoly of Christendom.
Now, that had some good things to it.
It had some bad things as well.
And what it did do was it freed up our minds to disagree with the monotheism of established narrative.
On the other hand, it provoked an enormous amount of social conflict.
When paradigms are breaking up, It's like a Brinks truck exploding in a neighborhood, right?
And showering $50 bills all over the place.
And there's a lot of scrambling for power when a mainstream narrative gets broken up.
And the mainstream narrative for the past 70 or 80 years has been, at least in the West, relentless leftism.
Relentless socialism and communism and collectivism, with a few exceptions of course.
But that has been the mainstream narrative.
And we're talking like in Washington, 90-95% of the reporters are like vote Democrat.
And I mean, it's just relentless leftism.
I mean, just look at the history of...
Joseph McCarthy.
McCarthyism is terrible and so on, right?
And if you look into, you can look at a book called Blacklisted.
It's fantastic.
I'm sad the guy died before I could interview him.
But this true story of McCarthyism is very much the opposite of what is constantly portrayed.
And Nixon, and we've done some stuff on this.
So there's been this relentless collectivism, leftism, communism, monotheism of narrative that has occurred for the past 70, 80 years.
And that is being broken up.
And that relentless monotheism of leftism is producing, well, I think it's producing the UKIP, it's producing some of what are laughably called the far-right parties.
It produced a near victory of an actual Australian, sorry, Austrian patriot in Europe recently.
Unfortunately, the guy who wanted to limit immigration, limit migration from third world countries, was voted out Just as we predicted, just as we talked about in this show many moons ago.
I just hate being right.
And the breakup of the monotheism of leftist narrative is causing a lot of friction.
It's causing a lot of conflict.
Good.
If the conflict remains peaceful, good.
And if the conflict doesn't remain peaceful, good.
Not good, but that's what happens when you attempt to control people through narrative.
Eventually they'll either be able to discuss their way out of it or they'll claw their way out of it.
And so we have a monotheism of leftism in academia and in the mainstream media and so on.
And that is being broken up by social media.
Now, are there a lot of idiots on social media?
Well, sure, because there are a lot of idiots in general.
But social media and the internet does give the chance for intelligent people to bypass the gatekeepers and talk directly to the folks, talk directly to the population.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I was going to say, but also, the part of that that I think could be interpreted as a negative, now I understand that you're saying that the negatives that I'm perceiving are more reaction of the leftist narrative getting blown up, not so much social media.
But what I'm saying is that you have these people that Uh, are not, you know, well-informed, intelligent, whatever.
You have enough of them communicating on social media that you have individuals that maybe...
I mean, I think this is something that will go away over time as the younger generations that are more technologically savvy and they understand the internet better are the ones that are the older generation.
But some of the people in our older generation, they will, like, venture onto social media and they don't necessarily understand it.
So they see all these different stories being put forward and everything, and they might genuinely think that, oh, these are what most people are thinking.
There's no way to validate these people's sources.
And I guess you could say then that those people themselves are not being very intelligent by just trusting this.
But what I'm saying is that – So what you're saying is people have confirmation bias.
Okay.
But at least they have multiple differing perspectives to get now.
Yeah.
When I grew up in England, there were like two channels.
Right?
And one of them, BBC One, BBC Two, and ITV. BBC One, eh.
BBC Two, complete waste of time.
ITV was like the cooler channel.
It was the MTV of, I guess, my early childhood.
And the news was monotonously the same.
And I watched the news as a kid.
Now, of course, I didn't really understand a lot of it.
I do remember, actually, I do remember being six, getting a splinter, going to the nurse's room, where there was only one television in the entire boarding school.
and it had a black and white, it was a black and white shot or footage of a tank rolling through a building.
And this was something, I guess, that was occurring in the world at the time.
And I just remember thinking, okay, so these people are in charge, and that's what I see on television is tanks destroying buildings.
I wonder if they know what they're doing.
I just remember getting that really eerie feeling of like, well, you know, they're very violent, they're very aggressive, I do get caned.
But they don't really seem to know what they're doing, because if they were so sure and right of themselves, why would there be tanks rolling through buildings?
Anyway, so there's a multiplicity now.
It's like saying, well, the Gutenberg press allows for the printing of dumb limericks as well as Aristotle.
Well, that's what the printing press does.
The fact that people can communicate to each other with very few barriers, well, okay, there are a lot of idiots who get to communicate.
So what?
I mean, at least there's not this monotheism of leftism now.
The other, there is definitely a form of bullying and lots of bullying.
Well, yeah, people have their lives ruined, like all of their personal information.
I get it.
I get it.
At the same time, is it really the freedom for people to share their thoughts and opinions so openly as you're suggesting whenever – if you share a certain – but I guess that goes back to your original point of saying that it's the state.
Look, look, look.
Here are the facts.
Here are the facts.
If you want to challenge a narrative, there will be negative repercussions.
Of course there will.
Of course there will.
I mean, people have been threatened with torture.
People have been burned at the stake.
People get shot for not enlisting when they're drafted or not showing up when they're drafted.
They get thrown in jail.
Eugene Debs, a socialist who spoke out against Woodrow Wilson's entering of America into the First World War in 1917, spent like 10 years in prison.
I think he died in prison.
So saying, look, if you counter a particular mainstream narrative where probably tens or hundreds of billions of dollars are involved and supported by that mainstream narrative, if you speak out against a mainstream narrative, then there will be negative repercussions.
That's nothing new.
That's nothing new.
And listen, I don't mean to sound insensitive, and I understand that it's difficult for a lot of people, but for heaven's sakes...
Losing your job, compared to what a lot of people have had to go through throughout history in opposing a mainstream narrative, losing your job, it's not bad as far as punishments for challenging a dominant person.
Very true.
Conceptual oligarchy.
And look, again, I sympathize.
I sympathize.
I mean, I haven't lost my job.
I'm just saying that people...
Okay, we'll help you with that.
No thanks.
Right, so, you know, I mean...
If you are going to go and challenge the foundation of state power, the foundation of leftist power, then there are going to be negative repercussions.
People are going to bully, they're going to fight.
That's natural.
Socrates would have taken a firing over Hemlock, I'm pretty sure, as Aristotle did.
He quit.
There is quite a bit of There are negative repercussions, but those negative repercussions, this is the degree of progress, if you want to call it that, that we have in human history.
That the negative repercussions for challenging a mainstream power narrative are less, in a sense, now...
than they were through most times in history.
I mean, in Russia, there used to be these things called samizdat, and these were like scribbled or hastily photocopied bundles of paper that people would pass around, and this is how Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead got passed around, and this is how other Austrian economics, Murray Rothbard, Friedman, all of these guys, they all got passed around in Russia.
That was some seriously dangerous stuff.
When you got caught with this stuff, I mean, you could vanish.
You could go Siberia-bound, right?
Yeah.
And those guys did it.
So those guys did it, and they took that risk, and what they did helped to shape where Russia went after the fall of communism.
And, you know, if I put information out there about...
Votes or the Brexit.
Well, okay, so I'm attempting to change people's minds about a particular course of action with reason and evidence as my supporting band, my backup band.
And if it were traceable that I had changed some vote somewhere, well, people would be upset with me.
Of course they would.
And the price of that is that people will Do mean things, say mean things or whatever.
And what is my choice?
Well, my choice is then to say, okay, well, I'm not going to get involved.
I'm not going to take my considerable powers of intellect and eloquence and I'm not going to get involved in social issues.
I'm not going to try and make the world a better place.
I'm not going to say to people that spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle because it's going to upset people.
Okay, well, there's an old saying about newspapers that everything in a newspaper is something that someone desperately does not want to be printed.
And There is a wild series of bullying that occurs to fulfill a particular narrative, right?
Like the hard left is zero for four in their attempted prosecution of racist people who just kill unarmed blacks for no reason or whatever, right?
Because the first officer in the Freddie Gray debacle has just been cleared of all charges.
That's still an internal investigation, but he decided to get tried in front of a judge instead of a jury, and he was cleared of all charges.
So these guys are, you know, because of the race baiting and all of this sort of stuff, their lives are incredibly harmed.
And I think that that whole area of policing has seen a mass exodus of cops, of course, right, naturally.
So the idea that there are negative repercussions, there's lots of different kinds of bullying that occur in the world.
I mean, and a lot of those predate it.
Social media, right?
Like America has 80% of the world's lawyers.
And in America, 15 million lawsuits are launched every year.
95% of them against people who have money.
Right?
So there was lawsuits beforehand that would be used, right?
So there are challenging repercussions, negative repercussions to anyone who chooses to challenge an existing social paradigm.
You know, everybody who swims with the current gets along with everybody who swims with the current.
And if you want to be invisible to the future, if you want to not have an effect in this world, if you want to have a life of empty, quiet ease and slide down the dissolution of your own society and not raise a finger to stop it or attempt to reverse it, well, you can do that.
And I understand that.
I understand that.
But It's parasitical because all of the freedoms that we enjoy, the remaining freedoms that we enjoy, we're all hard fought for and hard won by people willing to take on very difficult issues and challenge the existing status quo.
And if we enjoy those, I think we should add to them.
I think in particular in these days of crisis, we should really focus on adding to them.
So, I don't like people who are free riders.
And the people who aren't going to get out and fight for what is right in this world are free riding off the labors of other people who do.
And of course, the more people who fight, the less credible the counterattacks are.
Right?
I mean, one guy in a parade can be ignored.
200,000 people in a parade can't be.
And the more people who step up to fight verbally, right, the mainstream narrative, the more hysterical and ineffective the left is going to become.
And there is strength in numbers in this.
So everybody who backs down from the fight is betraying and exposing to danger those of us who stand up.
And I think that's cowardly and reprehensible.
I'm not speaking to you, of course.
I mean, we've kind of veered a little bit off the main subject.
That I was more curious about, which is your thoughts on just what social media has done to the way that people think about what is important and what is not important.
I understand now from that topic- Hang on, hang on.
Social media doesn't do anything.
It's just a platform.
It's just web code, HTML, TCP, IP. Social media doesn't do anything.
It's like blaming the road for the crash, right?
It's just a vehicle for the transmission of information.
That's all it is.
Yes, I suppose...
But if the vehicle didn't exist, I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, so you're saying that social media has had zero impacts on the way that people think, behave, what they prioritize.
You yourself said that they spend...
When did I say that?
When on earth did I say it has a real impact?
That's how I took it.
I don't know.
Maybe explain it.
I'm just curious where the listening is here.
What did I say that made you think that?
Well, whenever you said, is the road to blame for the car wreck?
And you said that it has nothing to do with social media.
No, no.
What I said is that social media doesn't do anything in terms of it's not an active participant in the conversation.
The computers at Facebook...
Well, that's not totally true because the computers at Facebook routinely filter out different posts.
I got banned for a day.
No, no, no.
The computers at Facebook only do what the programmers at Facebook tell them to.
The computers do nothing.
Social media does nothing.
It is all human agency, all human choice.
Well, I guess, okay, so you're saying it all routes back to an eventual human choice, but they actually have artificial intelligence bots that go around and filter out things on Facebook that are not controlled by human beings at this point.
They were created.
There's no such thing.
You've got to be specific and just because I assume you're not a technologist and I do know quite a lot about computer programming.
There's no such thing as artificial intelligence as yet.
They're, you know, they're just programs.
And they, you know, the way that Facebook apparently has had some agency in promoting, as some people suggest, a more leftist agenda is that they will.
Well, they have direct injection apparently into their newsfeed.
So when they were criticized for not covering enough of Black Lives Matter, apparently they injected Black Lives Matter reports into their newsfeed.
And secondly, they had a list of approved sources.
In other words, if there was some story, they would ping a website, a news website, and if the ping was valid, in other words, if the story showed up on a variety of news sites, or at least on one of their, however many they had, I think it was about 12 or something.
So they would then promote the story, and that was their way of validating that the story was true.
Oh yeah, I've read all that.
Or just, yeah, okay, but maybe other people haven't.
So what they did was their support websites were somewhat more on the left than on the right.
And what that meant was, but that's all a choice, right?
That's all a choice.
You could choose to have right-leaning websites validate your stories, or you can choose to have slightly or maybe more than slightly more left-leaning websites to validate your sources.
And if you choose more left-leaning websites to validate your stories than right-leaning ones, then you're going to end up with more leftist stories floating to the top.
Of the feed.
And, you know, people's issue is not that Facebook manipulates its information to perhaps promote sort of a leftist agenda, although today they say they've conducted an internal self-investigation and have found themselves entirely innocent of that.
But if you go to, you know, if you program and say, well, we're going to go to Huffington Post to validate these stories rather than to Breitbart, well, then you're going to get a particular kind of, oh, and just by the way, if you want something, want to see something pretty funny, Yes, And it is row after row of white women.
Yes, it's very diverse.
Did you see that picture?
Yes, it's very diverse.
It's beautiful.
So apparently diversity is not really such a value.
Yes.
Diversity is just a way of getting rid of white males and apparently minorities.
And then when everyone is a young white female, everything is perfectly diverse.
I will have to disagree with you on your comment about artificial intelligence not existing.
Now, maybe your definition of artificial intelligence is different from the one that I know of.
But Facebook, it's been being reported for well over a year now that Microsoft and Facebook both have been implementing artificial intelligence in their Bing, for Microsoft, their Bing searches.
And with Facebook, they have artificial intelligence.
What they call them, Facebook calls it artificial intelligence.
Now, maybe they're misusing the term, but it can detect what is in photos and present questions that it creates itself to the users that there's no human on the other end doing this.
There was a human that wrote the AI's programming or whatever, but They are calling it artificial intelligence.
All the reports on it are calling it artificial intelligence.
Oh, yeah.
Well, whatever the mainstream media calls something is usually the opposite.
The official test for artificial intelligence is called the Turing test.
Named after the mathematician.
And the test goes something like this.
If you and I are typing back and forth in a chat window, and if after an hour or two of typing back and forth with me, you cannot possibly tell that I'm not a computer, that's artificial intelligence.
Not, I've scanned photos and I'm going to suggest, oh, you took a picture and I found the words gap in the background, so I'm going to serve you up an ad for the gap.
It's a very strict...
Fully developed artificial intelligence for it to be classified as any form of artificial intelligence from the way you're using the definition then?
Well, that's the official definition of artificial intelligence.
That's a test that was developed by one person to say what it was, but that's not necessarily official definition.
No, it's not a test that was developed by one person.
It's a test that's been proposed and widely accepted.
Anyway, I don't want to get hung up on the question of artificial intelligence.
I did.
It was spelled by Alan Turing.
I've done huge amounts of computer programming in my life.
I do not think that I have created life and consciousness.
But anyway.
Okay, so I just think it's a vehicle.
And what it does is it reveals conflicts that hitherto were suppressed by a monomania of generally Marxist or leftist ideology or socialist or collectivist ideology.
It is exposing particular problems.
Conflicts in society that were suppressed beforehand because what happens is when people get new information, they get choices, right?
Free will has a lot to do with new information and the internet is fantastic at providing people with new information.
And people say, well, there's confirmation bias.
Sure, there's confirmation bias.
But at least the confirmation bias is multiple now, rather than everyone going to Walter Cronkite and getting apparently all the facts they ever needed in the known universe.
So I do think that the internet is great at providing counter-narratives.
It's great at giving voices to people who otherwise would never have made it in the mainstream media.
And it's a way of getting non-young white females access to the Internet if they don't happen to work at the Huffington Post.
Don't get me wrong.
I spend time on the internet every day.
I'm not criticizing the internet.
I'm specifically talking about social media.
And I guess what you're saying is that...
And I'm still a little unclear on what your statement meant then if you weren't saying that social media doesn't have an impact on the way people behave and act.
No, no.
God, what I'm saying is social media is just a vehicle.
It's just a platform.
Social media doesn't do anything.
People use social media to influence each other.
But I guess, so what are you saying?
So you're saying it enables them to do the changes?
It's just, it gives people a voice.
It gives people a voice.
It gives people capacity to share their thoughts, ideas, and obviously pictures of their dogs with the world.
And that is, you know, I have no problem with that.
It is inviting more people into the marketplace of ideas.
And yes, that means that you're going to get a whole bunch of idiots, but that's just another intelligence test.
Can people filter out the idiots and get to the facts?
So you're saying this avenue, this road for them to, or this vehicle, whatever, for these people to share, you know, pictures of their coffee or their dog and get their likes, and then that, like...
That becomes more of a priority to them than other things that maybe used to have been more important to them that should be more important to them.
So you're saying that social media doesn't influence behavior like that at all and make them feel more justified in posting stuff like that that might not actually be very meaningful.
God, who cares?
Why do you care that people post pictures of their lunch?
What does it matter?
Who cares?
Well, because then people don't care about stuff like politics.
They're, like, afraid to talk about it.
Okay!
So what?
What do you mean?
These are the same people.
Do you think that if there wasn't the internet, that people would then be really interested in politics?
No, but I'm saying that if...
No, no, no.
I've already said I like the internet.
I'm talking about social media in particular, where you get likes and you get this validation from your actions that...
So what's wrong?
Okay, we're talking about women, right?
I mean, let's be clear.
Well, I don't know.
I guess women are the primary people that post pictures of their Starbucks and stuff, but...
I know the guys that do it too.
Guys post pictures of their hamburgers and crap and I just...
I don't know.
So I guess I'm just kind of surprised you're saying that there is no negatives to social media in the way that...
Oh man, you are like the worst listener I've had in I don't even know how long.
You have such an agenda and you are not interested in what I say.
Why don't I say there's no negatives?
I just said people lose their jobs and there's terrible repercussions.
Where on earth are you getting what I'm saying?
But I thought you said that that was the state.
Do you think that social media reduces people's capacity to listen to other human beings directly talking to them?
Are you checking social media during this conversation as we speak?
I am not.
Okay.
I don't know what to say.
I'm just not on the same page as you with what you're saying then because whenever you say stuff like social media is just a vehicle of For people to do these things that they would already be doing and there's already stupid people.
And then you're saying that things were way worse.
I don't know.
Okay, I'm not saying that social media allows people to do what they already were doing.
Because before social media, people didn't take pictures to lunch and share it with the world because there was no physical way to do that.
So again, I don't know where you're getting what you're saying.
But the thing is, you have an irritation with people in your life that is spilling over into a philosophy show.
And you're not really talking about the irritation in your life.
You know, maybe there are people in your life...
I don't know.
With people having access to the world?
Of course not, right?
I mean, I am not a censorious kind of person.
I'm very much for the free market of ideas and people should be able to say whatever they want.
They should be able to say what is offensive to others because all moral progress is offensive to the vast majority of people.
They should be able to do all of this kind of stuff and the best ideas should win.
The best ideas should be able to make their way to the top.
of the world and that allows people, you know, the fact that I have to work very hard to get attention on the internet is a beautiful and wonderful and great thing because it means that I have to keep getting better.
I have to keep getting better.
I have to find a way to rise above the noise and hubbub and all of that kind of stuff and I love the challenge.
You know, if you want to be the fastest runner you can, be run against the fastest people you can.
And the fact that there is a huge amount of signal to noise ratio in the internet is just another way to up your game and get even better at what it is that you're doing.
And I think that is wonderful.
And so I have no problem with social media.
I think it's a wonderful vehicle.
It's also fantastic for evaluating people.
So, I mean, if you're interested in, let's say, somebody who's interested in politics, she's dating some woman, or you're interested in some woman who says, hey, let's go out, or some man for that matter, and you can go on social media and see, wow, they post a lot of pictures of dog poop.
Look at that!
You just saved yourself a dinner.
Isn't that nice?
So, there's lots of facts about people out there on the internet, and lots of nonsense, right?
The stuff they post themselves, we can assume, is somewhat factual, and lots of nonsense as well.
But it's...
It's great.
And it tells you who wants to be inoffensive, who wants to blend in, and who has the scope of thinking of your average cheese magnet.
And so I have no problem with it.
I'm sorry that you do.
I think you might be getting frustrated at little people.
And the whole point of little people in the world...
It's not even that I have a problem with social media, though.
I actually think it's very, very positive overall.
I was just wondering if you thought that it was changing the way certain people acted.
Of course it is.
All right.
Thanks very much for your call.
I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I appreciate that.
And I just also wanted to mention that there have been some studies.
You know, if you think that the people spending too much time on social media are wasting their lives, their unconscious might agree with you.
A huge study asked people to self-report the amount of time they spend on social media per day, rated their levels of depression.
They found a strong correlation between social media use and depression.
And worse, the more time spent on social media per day, the more likely young adults were to feel depressed.
In fact, the most active social media users were over twice as likely to suffer from depression as the general public.
And social media is just a tool.
You know, I mean, you can use a saw to cut down a tree and make a cabin, or you can use a saw to hack a cat in half, right?
You can't blame the saw either way.
All it does is reveal what people are interested in and what they're like.
And it's a great snapshot of the world.
So, all right, let's move on to the next caller, but thanks, Will.
Alright, up next is James.
James wrote in and said, And finally, not surrounding myself with social justice warriors and ending up turning me into just another leftist brain zombie.
Are these worries justified and sufficient enough reason not to pursue more formal education?
Or do you think there's still value to be gained from a university education?
That's from James.
Hello, James.
How are you doing?
Hey, brother.
Thanks for having me on.
My pleasure.
My pleasure.
All right.
So, look, I've got a whole presentation.
Called The Truth About College Debt, Truth About Student Debt.
We'll link to that below.
So I'm not going to get into the sort of financial arguments behind all of this stuff.
But it does really seem to be the case that, at least in a lot of the U.S., maybe other places, sure, in Europe as well, like this leftist social justice warrior stuff has, I think, made it fairly difficult to get a good education these days.
I mean, we've had some people calling in to talk about this stuff.
And it is...
It is pretty brutal.
And so I think that if you're in a sort of leftist indoctrination camp, then I think it's really, really tough to get a good education.
In fact, it might be damaging to you.
So from that standpoint, I'd avoid that stuff like the plague.
But I would say that, you know, in terms of the sciences, sorry, yeah, the science, the hard sciences and math and so on, it probably is a little bit less, well, quite a bit less involved in that stuff.
So it really depends what you're studying.
But I think certainly the humanities seem to have fallen to a pretty low ebb as far as quality goes and critical thinking goes.
Yeah, I imagine it's still pretty good in the hard sciences.
But my primary interest, like I have a very deep passion for history.
I think if I put my mind to it, I could produce a great value that a lot of people could benefit from.
But I wish I had your tolerance for dealing with these crazy bastards.
My tolerance?
You're not talking about the delightful listeners who call in, are you?
No, no.
I'm just constantly challenging the leftist mainstream narrative constantly.
Oh, I don't deal with them, though.
Right?
I mean, just to be...
I don't mind being praised, but just, you know, don't praise me.
I'm not going in there and tangling it up with leftist professors in the classroom.
Oh, okay.
My bad.
But, yeah, so I'm not sure.
Well, the thing is, this became a really big worry for me when I started seeing my friends and talking to them as they would come back from university.
And whenever I would bring up You know, just political issues, they become very difficult to speak to and extremely difficult to have any kind of genuine conversation without having to constantly swat away accusations of bigotry left and right.
And the idea of going through four years of that really just grains on my mind.
But the reason I'm indecisive about it is because I feel like we'd be giving...
Well, I shouldn't say we.
Something would be lost if we just...
There I go again.
My bad.
Something would be lost if university was completely left to all of the social justice crazies.
And if no reasonable people are going in...
And I like to think that I'm a reasonable person and trying to challenge some of this stuff.
Or just provide different viewpoints.
I have a feeling that that's like I'm giving up.
That goes against my personality.
Am I making sense?
It does.
It does make a lot of sense.
And I appreciate your honor and integrity in this area.
While respectfully disagreeing enormously.
I think the university should be abandoned to the social justice warriors.
I think you should not go in there attempting to change the minds of people who have no minds to change.
I mean, I think we should, like, don't dignify them with a debate.
I mean, do I invite a lot of social justice warriors onto this show?
God, no.
Why would I want to give them a voice or a platformer?
Right, I mean, it's not, you know, I mean, if the conversation goes that way with a caller, fine, but no, God, abandon it.
Abandon it.
I mean, there's certainly no obligation to go in there and try and make it rational.
I mean, you're going to pay.
You're going to suffer.
You may get kicked out.
You may get who knows what, right, launched against you.
And for what?
The university system needs to return to a meritocracy.
It needs to stop being social engineering.
Right now, what is it?
It is a...
Mad desire for quota systems, which means that they have to keep lowering their standards.
And when you get a lot of idiots in higher education, the idiots don't get smarter.
You just take both the higher and the education out of the equation.
So, trust me, it's not, you know, you don't have to go in there and try and fight this system.
I think that universities, well, obviously they need to be privatized.
And right now, the hand of the government is so deep down the throat of universities that they can't even get a sensible word out edgeways.
And how do you fight a statist institution?
I mean, would you want to join the IRS and convince people about the questionable morality of taxation?
No.
It's their job.
You're not going to convince the professors.
Because a lot of the professors is what's important to understand.
A lot of the professors, just statistically, a lot of the professors in universities are there, not because of innate ability or appeal to students, but to fulfill quotas.
To fulfill quotas.
Do they want the quota system to go away?
Do they want anything to be privatized?
Of course not.
Because they have a pretty sweet life of moral posturing, of not having to work that much, lots of time off in the summer, sabbaticals, conferences, six-figure salaries.
It's a sweet gig.
And you can only oppose people who are capable of critical thought.
Now, critical thought requires emotional maturity.
Because it's uncomfortable to question your basic assumptions.
It is destabilizing.
It's disorienting.
It's oogie.
It oogie feels.
And why do we do it?
We do it because we know on the other side of that discomfort is clarity, is truth, is effectiveness, reality.
So we confront ourselves and I do this continually.
I'm like a plow churning over the earth, just churning over the basic assumptions all the time.
And it's uncomfortable at times.
It really, really is.
And we do that because we know it's the right thing to do, it's the better thing to do, and we're willing to put up with the short-term discomfort for the sake of the long-term gain.
But that requires intelligence and or emotional maturity.
And where's the emotional maturity in the modern arts campus?
Where's the dedication to facts?
Everybody's so busy finding their voice, whatever that means.
Here, choke yourself.
It's right there.
I mean, they're so busy finding their voice that they're shutting down all legitimate debate.
I was talking with the last caller about the value of social media.
Well, someone posted this on Facebook and then it was removed.
Now, the statistic...
Being portrayed by feminists as proof of rape culture, one in four women will be raped by the time they finish college.
Wow.
That's like a higher death rate than the Second World War in the army.
Man, you could really want that degree.
I think that's a higher rate of women raped than in the Congo.
I believe I've read that somewhere.
Here are the actual numbers of reported sexual assaults in three colleges in 2009.
These are reported.
I don't know if they're proved.
I doubt they are.
University of Pittsburgh...
14,800 female students.
How many sexual assaults were reported?
Four.
That's one in 3,700.
Carnegie Mellon University, 3,900 female students, six reported sexual assaults, one in 975.
These are reported sexual assaults, not actual rapes.
Again, could it be rapes?
I don't know.
I mean, just reported sexual assaults.
Dickesney University, 5,700 female students, three reported rapes, one in 1900.
So the average is one in 1,877, a little bit different than one in four.
And apparently debunking myths violates community standards.
So...
Being around...
You know, the other thing, too, dating in college, if you're in the arts, man, that is Russian roulette.
You know, I mean, that's dicey stuff.
And the degree to which you can get holed up on these Kafkaesque-style assaults, star chambers, I mean, it's really dangerous.
But I certainly would not say that...
You owe it to whomever or whatever to go in and fight the good fight in college.
I think that they're just going to have to...
Society will adjust itself eventually no matter what.
It always does.
Because reality can only be postponed for so long.
So the guy who runs up his credit cards looks like he's having a great life for a year, maybe two years, and then he loses his house.
And...
Reality always reasserts itself.
Late Roman Empire, yeah, you can have breads and circuses.
You can make divorce easier.
You can dilute the currency.
You can run up debts.
And then reality reasserts itself.
You say, ah, the Dark Ages.
Well, in the Roman Empire, a lot of young men were forcibly thrown into the army for 20 years and then given an acre or two of land at the end of it when their bodies were broken up and if they even survived, which not many did.
I'll take the dark ages over the late Roman Empire.
Thank you very much.
I keep getting messages that they weren't as dark as...
So reality will always reimpose on society.
You don't actually have to fight that hard for it.
I like to.
It's my particular preference, and I think you can help.
But this idea that reality needs you to reassert itself...
I think is not true.
And just sort of jump back to this one in four.
Women has been the victim of rape or attempted rape.
This is the official figure on women's rape victimization cited in a lot of women's studies departments and so on.
And this was written, this is Christina Hoff Summers, a feminist.
She wrote in 1994 about this.
1994!
Yes, that would be a long time ago.
The origin of this statistic is a 1985 survey of college campuses conducted by Professor of Psychology Mary Koss.
A little over 3,000 women were asked three questions to determine how many had experienced rape or attempted rape and the results were shocking.
15.4% had been raped and 12.1% had been victims of attempted rape.
And...
The media, of course, you know, women in peril, right?
I mean, Trumpa did this.
But a bunch of scholars said, well, hang on a sec.
This is really, really different from everything that's been estimated before.
It turned out that one of the three questions was, have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?
Christina Hoffs-Sommers points out the ambiguity of the phrasing was called into question.
Quote, that question opened the door wide to regarding as a rape victim anyone who regretted her liaison of the previous night.
If your date mixes a pitcher of margaritas and encourages you to drink with him and you accept a drink, have you been administrate and intoxicant?
And has your judgment been impaired?
Certainly if you pass out on a molested one would call it rape.
But if you drink and while intoxicated engage in sex that you later come to regret, have you been raped?
Just does not address these questions specifically.
She merely counts your date as a rapist and you as a rape statistic.
If you drank too much with your date and regret having had sex with him.
Um, And of course, this is not specific to women.
I mean, women will offer to go and get a drink from Ann, bring it back to him, and later will try to have sex with him.
And is that right?
Again, it's just a one-sided thing.
But the actual assault stuff is not...
Not quite as common as people think.
So, sorry, I just wanted to circle back and mention that.
And Christina Hoffsummer, she's got a great little series on YouTube that you can check out.
So, is it worth it?
I got to tell you, it depends what you want to do.
Like, if you want to be a professor, then I guess you have to go through the ringer, right?
But...
If you're a clear-thinking person and you want to go into the arts and you want to be a professor, well, I probably think that only two of those three could be true at any given time.
Or maybe even one.
So it depends what you want to do.
Look, I mean, I have a graduate degree.
Does that mean that if I didn't, that...
I mean, half the people I follow online have no idea what their education is.
No idea.
I only care about the quality of...
They're arguments.
And the accreditation process used to mean a lot more than it does now.
Now, when I see a university degree, I just assume, in the arts, I just assume it's four more years of indoctrination.
And to me, it's even worse than high school in that way.
So it depends.
It depends what you want to do with your life.
Clearly, if there's a way that you can get what you want in your life without going to college, it's a really great idea to not go to college.
Obviously, because it's expensive and it's time-consuming and so on.
So if you want to be a novelist and you can do that without taking four years of a creative writing degree, then you should be a novelist and so on, right?
I mean, that I think would be the best.
And if you want to be a novelist, you can sit there and say, okay, well, I'm going to go do four years of a creative writing degree.
Is that better than going and living the world?
And traveling and meeting people and writing down your observations and starting a blog and getting feedback and getting criticism and...
I don't know.
Could argue that life experience is better than getting a college degree.
And all the money that you were pouring into a college degree, you can use for eight years, probably, of low-rent living to start your writing career.
So, if you want to be an actor, you know, do you need to go to the London Academy of Dramatic Arts?
Well, I don't know.
It'll open some doors, for sure.
But...
I think Marlon Brando took one acting class with Stella Adler his whole life.
And it seemed that people didn't say, well, you know, Brad Pitt, I don't know if he went to Radha or the National Theatre School or whatever.
So, you know, if you are...
If you want to pursue excellence in something, there's no substitute for just going out and doing it.
So, again, I can't answer that question in any specific detail, but these are some things that I would certainly take into account if I was...
Trying to figure out whether to go to school or not.
Yeah, I don't know if it's so much that I feel an obligation to help the university per se.
It's more that, and I guess I go back to, I harken back to the friend that I mentioned.
Well, he's black, I'm white, and we've been friends, or we're friends for almost, I think, Ten years or so, all the way back to sixth grade or something.
We used to get along great, but he spent two years at college and he's just become, I don't want to sound hyperbolic, but just radicalized by a lot of the black ethnocentrism that's going around right now.
I've essentially had to end the friendship because He keeps trying to...
He asserts that I have white privilege, and of course that's just nonsense.
But it...
I more just feel bad for a lot of the other younger people.
I consider myself incredibly lucky that I'm more aware of this than a lot of other people are.
But if...
I don't know.
If nobody goes in to counter it, then...
How much...
Damage could be done indirectly.
Wait, wait, wait.
Okay, but why do you have to go in to counter it?
First of all, if you go in, you're going in in a subjugated position because you're a student, not a professor.
Right?
So you're not going to have any power.
Right?
The professor can shut you down.
And what are you going to do?
The professor controls your marks.
What are you going to do?
So you don't have to go to college to counter leftist propaganda that may be coming out of college.
I mean, there's so many places that you can publish information and you can get information out to counter particular narratives.
You don't need to go into college.
I mean, if you want to counter radicalization of people, you can do that with sort of facts and reason and evidence.
Yeah.
You have a good point.
Maybe I'm putting too much emphasis on...
You go in and you get...
Maybe there's 50 people in the classroom.
And you go in and you have a fight where you get shut down.
Because the professor has the final say.
And maybe you failed out of the class.
Well, what you've done is you've shown people that opposing the narrative is disastrous.
Have you really served freedom or liberty?
Probably not.
As opposed to...
As opposed to writing a great article that can get published and get hundreds of thousands of people to read it, right?
So, I get the pain that you have with your friend, and I'm really sorry for that.
And maybe you feel that if you'd been part of that process with your friend, but who knows, right?
People love drama, right?
They love having a sense of narrative that makes them important.
And we talked about this recently.
About a woman who was saying that, you know, feminism has you embodied this drama.
It gets you into this drama and this world-saving and victimization, and it's really, really hard to resist that.
And it's hard for people to resist that sense that they're part of this big apocalyptic drama, whether it's, you know, gender-baiting or race-baiting or whatever it is, this big drama that they can be part of that they can define their lives.
And once you give people the definition of their identity, you pretty much own them.
And, you know, if you're a white male and you're going to college in the arts...
Suzanne Venker was the name of the woman I was chatting with.
V-E-N-K-E-R. It's a great interview, and she was wonderful.
I really enjoyed it.
Thank you.
But if you're a white male going into the arts these days...
I mean, you might as well be working in a hardware store while some sociopathic creep with a bubble butt comes around and demands you to show them where the duct tape is.
If you're a white male, I mean, aren't you just paying to be abused?
Isn't it just like the big red velvet dungeon of leftists lashing 50 shades of academia?
I mean, isn't that exactly what you don't want to do with your time and resources?
I mean, you know, because the women in sex dungeons I assume are hotter than your average leftist professor.
And, you know, you can shake off the hot wax crust on your nipples, but it's a little tougher to shake off the infestaceous cobwebs of leftist programming.
So I would pay good money to avoid that kind of stuff.
And when I was younger, going to college, I went to three different universities.
It was Marxists.
But it was not...
Well, they were smart Marxists, for one thing.
It was not personal attacks.
Like, I would have very strong debates.
But people were smart enough to know that personal attacks or being hurt or being upset or being offended or whatever...
Facts don't care about your feelings, as the saying goes.
People knew that you could not cry your way out of losing a debate.
You could not scream your way out of losing a debate.
You could not chant your way or sit in your way out of losing a debate.
That basic standard seems to have largely fallen by the wayside, and now the most emotional person tends to win the argument because feelings have replaced facts.
As far as having a compelling approach goes.
And the last thing I wanted to mention, of course, is that if you want to be an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer, then you have that basic licensing reality.
You have to go through the hoops, you have to jump through the hoops in order to get To where you want to go.
And those are sort of basic realities that obviously I can't do anything about.
I can't do much about any of this stuff other than keep speaking the truth.
But those are realities that you have to take into account.
You know, I wouldn't say if you want to become a doctor and you've got to take one class on gender sensitivity or whatever it is, I wouldn't let that necessarily stop me if that was my dream.
But those are some basic realities that there are hoops that are held that you have to Get through if you want to get to what the state puts in the way of you and your dream.
Hello?
Yes, that was it for me.
I thought I dropped, my bad.
I know you've touched on this before, but I was wondering if you could maybe explain it again, just to shift gears maybe a little bit.
How exactly do you know, when you're trying to reason with somebody, And maybe get them to think more critically about government or about the social justice narrative.
How do you know when to throw the towel in and just say, okay, you can continue to be delusional?
Because I always, I don't know if it's just my personality, but I have a hard time quitting.
Like I'll just keep, I'll keep banging my head on the wall and hoping it'll just all come tumbling down.
Yeah, sure.
You lost a friend of 10 years.
That's heartbreaking.
It genuinely hurts me because we were very good friends and I trusted him with a lot.
It started off slow where he would ask me these questions about race and we've talked about everything.
We pretty much had no secrets between each other.
And he would ask me, well, how did you feel about...
He asked me something like, how do you feel about what white people did to black folks back in the day?
I'm like, well, obviously it was horrible.
But I think we should move on.
I mean, this is something that at this point happened 150 years ago.
I mean, how long must the white man...
Well, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but I mean, had you been better educated in this stuff, you'd have understood, right?
That, first of all, it was what black people did to black people, because black people owned slaves.
It was what Muslims did to black people, the Muslim slave trade responsible for 100 million deaths.
It was blacks owned slaves in America.
Many more blacks were shipped off to South America and Central America than to America as a whole.
And white people ended slavery around the world.
White people were the, white males in particular, white people were the group that engaged or indulged in slavery the very least and were the ones who ended it around the world.
So he's already got you because, you know, it's the white people did this to the black people.
How do you feel?
It's like, how do you even know?
I mean, that's not even a fact.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, the white people did it to the black people the least, and they're the ones, the white people are the ones who ended slavery.
So, you know, maybe a bit of a thank you from the world for ending slavery might be good, but of course, thank you doesn't get you white guilt money, right?
Yeah.
I wonder if it's because for some reason, whether it's genetic or cultural, I'm not sure, but since White folks were the only ones to acknowledge their participation in slavery.
Maybe that's why these constant parasitical attacks never stop.
Because I don't want to say we, because I'm not a collectivist, but since white people are the only ones who, figuratively speaking, stood up and said, hey guys, sorry, we're done.
We're the only ones who made our...
White people are the only ones who made themselves vulnerable.
Oh, we feel bad about slavery.
Yeah.
White people felt bad about slavery and white people worked very hard to end slavery, which you'd think would be a resounding yay, thanks from the world.
But the reality is the one white people said, we feel bad about slavery.
A lot of other groups said, great, now we can guilt them into giving us money because they've already admitted by trying to end slavery and in fact ending slavery that they feel bad about slavery.
And so...
Yeah, it is.
Expressing a moral concern in this world is a giant invitation for a massive pecking piranha party from a lot of different groups.
I feel bad about X. Okay, well then people know you've just exposed to the whole world exactly which buttons to push to make you feel bad.
Yay.
Hey, torturer, it really hurts when you do that.
Would you mind not doing it?
Hey, good.
Now I know where it hurts you, so I'm gonna keep pushing that button until you get me what I want.
And this is a very big generalization, but I think that there's some validity to it, that expressing moral concerns is a very dangerous game in the world.
And if you express moral concerns, And you don't shield yourself from the inevitable manipulations that come afterwards.
Your moral concerns will be your undoing and in this way virtue gets not just punished but the cultures that express that virtue or embody that virtue literally get destroyed.
I have yet to see throughout history that the pursuit of virtue by a society Is anything other than self-destructive?
The desire to bring peace and order to other countries and other cultures, the desire to instruct the world, the desire to make the world a better place, I have yet to see how that is not a self-destructive action.
Or another way of putting it is I've yet to see how the expression of universal ethics is even remotely positively selected in the competition of civilizations.
It seems to be something that precedes self-extinction.
That's a good point.
He's definitely, my black friend's definitely the farthest gone about this, with this social justice narrative.
I've seen it, but it's pretty much all of my in real life friends, as the saying would go, who've kind of adopted just these really casual views.
Excuse me.
They've adopted these views, and they express them very casually, but are incredibly...
I don't know what other phrase to use other than aggressively ignorant.
They get very aggressive and extraordinarily emotional whenever I would just ask them simple questions.
I think I asked one of the old girls I used to talk to once, How do you think a group of Moroccans who have an IQ lower than the IQ of the average German, how do you think they're going to incorporate or how do you think they're going to assimilate into their society the whole migrant issue going on in Europe?
And she just flat out said that's preposterous.
What do you mean that's preposterous?
That's just a ridiculous thing to say.
How could you possibly say that?
And just completely shut me down.
Right.
And there used to be a system whereby complete idiots were generally kept out of public discourse.
And they would generally be kept out of higher education.
Because this is somebody who, after a dozen years of government education or more, genuinely believes that calling an argument ridiculous or preposterous is some sort of rebuttal.
Drop some arguments in, And see if the other person comes back.
Let them do some work.
Don't be a reason stalker, right?
Don't be a philosophy stalker.
You know, three o'clock in the morning, I've got a new argument for you.
I'm outside your window.
Didn't you hear me throwing rocks again?
No, let them, if you love someone's mind, set it free.
If it comes back to you, there's a chance for reason.
If it doesn't, there never was.
Drop a few pills on the sidewalk and walk on.
Couple of points here and there.
Move on.
And if they come back to you, great.
Then they're curious and they've done some reading and they've got an active mind.
And if they don't, well, if the woman's not going to go out with you, there's no point following her on a moped, right?
Through them all.
I mean, all you're doing is making her not want to go out with you even more.
Right?
Just drop a few bombs in.
Sorry, I shouldn't say that.
Drop a few thoughts in.
And move on, right?
Donald Trump says rapists and so on are part of the horde coming across from Mexico.
Does he call everyone up and say, no, no, no, here's what I said, this is what I meant, you know, here's my data, no.
You move on confidently, you see who follows, you see who's interested.
Do not be in a begging position when it comes to facts.
Have the confidence of knowing that you're right.
But the information out there, whoever's capable of thinking will engage with you, and whoever's not will run away and has saved you a huge amount of time.
Don't keep buying flowers for a woman who's married.
Yeah, well, I wasn't trying to date her.
I don't know if I thought I might have said that.
That's an analogy.
Okay, my bad.
Well, thanks for having me on.
You're very welcome.
Thank you for calling in.
Thanks everyone so much for a very enjoyable chat on our new Tuesday show.
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