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Sept. 3, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:50:14

3399 Health At Any Size? - Call In Show - August 31st, 2016

Question 1: [1:42] – “A new facet has been added to the hierarchy of oppression over the last few years that I find especially evil. It's gone by several names including ‘body acceptance/positivity’ and ‘health at any size’, but when somebody starts spouting the same horrible talking points to justify a gluttonous lifestyle its largely still called out as fat acceptance.”“As someone well along the way to improving my life by recently prioritizing fitness, it goes without saying the large majority of claims in this camp of thought about health are complete hokum. But, it's even more frustrating as I see it from the perspective of a caregiver and CNA. It's a drain, not only on financial and physical resources, but on the bodies of caregivers and family members that take that care upon themselves.”“With more strains than I can count over my years of service it's simple math that injuries rise in probability with the weight of patients. It's a story I've seen played out time and time again when good men and women are forced out of commission from physical injuries.”“My question is what are some of the darker elements and outcomes you foresee in the psyche of people that buy into this? What approach would you take to encourage healthy decisions in people that still have hope and haven't bought into or been exposed to this idea? And also out of general curiosity what's your favorite forms of exercise?”Question 2: [47:04] – “I've been in a 7-year relationship with my girlfriend. She's originally from Europe and most summers she goes back to Europe for a month to see friends and family. When she leaves, all of these feelings and thoughts of jealously and insecurity creep up - stuff I don't usually feel when she's home. I get very depressed and feel unimportant to her while she's there. These issues are compounded with the fact that she spends the majority of her time on a secluded island with friends. She stays out literally to 5, 6 in the morning, every night, partying. I feel incredibly suspicious and think the worst in terms of infidelity and really need to hear a different perspective. Am I being too sensitive? Am I being selfish?”Question 3: [1:17:36] – “Carl Sagan stated that we are all made of ‘Star Stuff’. It seems to me that some of that stuff is infinite and some of that stuff is finite. It also seems to me that some of the infinite stuff is out of our control, and some of the infinite stuff is in of our control. Additionally, it seems to me that some of the finite stuff is out of our control, and some of the finite stuff is in of our control. How can objectivity be utilized to explain the ‘infinite’ part of Us, in addition to the ‘finite’ part of Us?”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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	Hello everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	I hope you're doing very well.
	Hey, have you ever been fat shamed?
	Ever been tempted to fat shame someone else?
	Well, we had somebody who was calling in about this sort of question or issue of fat shaming and body image and weight and obesity and health and a really, really great meaty discussion ensued about these topics which I hope you will find illuminating and I talked about some of my Obviously outside the profession views on how some of this stuff developed and where this obesity epidemic originates and how it's sort of spreading.
	So I hope you'll find that interesting.
	The second caller has been in a long-term relationship with a woman who goes out and parties when she's on vacation, out all night, at dance clubs and so on, and he finds himself racked or consumed with jealousy.
	And we talked about maybe some ways in which she may be responsible for that, ways in which they could communicate that might diminish that.
	So, you know, if you've been plagued by jealousy or know someone who has, I think you'll find that very interesting and helpful.
	And the third caller...
	I felt that he was composed of star stuff, of matter that had been produced by stars, and what does it mean to have infinity within you, and it sounds a bit woo-woo, but it actually got to a very productive place about creativity and human potentiality, so that was a bit of a different call, but I really, really enjoyed it, and I hope that you will as well.
	So please, please don't forget to go to freedomainradio.com slash donate to help us out in the show.
	You can, of course, follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
	Use the affiliate link fdrurl.com slash Amazon and fdrpodcast.com to share the show.
	And here we go.
	Alright, up first today we have Adam.
	Adam wrote into the show and said, A new facet has been added to the hierarchy of oppression over the last few years, and I find it especially evil.
	It's gone by several names, including body acceptance slash positivity, and, quote, health at any size.
	But when someone starts spouting the same horrible talking points to justify a gluttonous lifestyle, it's still largely called out as fat acceptance.
	As someone well along the way to improving my life by prioritizing fitness, it goes without saying that a large majority of claims in this camp of the thought about health are complete hokum.
	But it's even more frustrating as I see it from the perspective of a caregiver and CNA. It's a drain, not only on financial and physical resources, but on the bodies of caregivers and family members that take care upon themselves.
	With more strains than I can count over my years of service, it's simple math that injuries rise in probability with the weight of patients.
	It's a story I've seen played out time and time again when good men and women are forced out of commission from physical injuries.
	My question is, what are some of the darker elements and outcomes you foresee in the psyche of people that buy into this?
	What approach would you take to encourage healthy decisions in people that still have hope and haven't bought into or been exposed to this idea?
	And also, out of general curiosity, what are your favorite forms of exercise?
	That's from Adam.
	Hi Adam, how you doing?
	Doing pretty good.
	Yourself?
	I'm well, thank you.
	I'm well.
	It's a great question, and there are, of course, lots of people, I dare say, chewing their way through this challenging problem to try and figure out what the hell is going on as far as obesity rates in the West, which are fairly brutal these days, right?
	Absolutely.
	Now, is this something you said you were a CNA? Well, I'm still a CNA, and I've actually started on a certified nurse assistant.
	Okay, got it.
	Yeah, basically just we do all the dirty stuff that nurses complained about needing to do until things got a little bit more, you know, crunched down.
	So we can't pass meds, but we change all the briefs and whatnot.
	Right, got it.
	Have you noticed something in your career that is changing?
	Because, you know, the statistics are one thing, but your sort of experience is another.
	Well, obviously it's going to be a little bit of a while until the millennial generation that is seeing the real rise sees a nursing home.
	But I am seeing like a...
	I think there is starting to be a little bit of a surge from the baby boomers, which have struggled with it a little bit more than the generation before as well.
	And there is a larger...
	Likelihood of seeing more obese people in general in any given nursing home or care center or general care facility, absolutely.
	Right, right.
	Now, this is US stuff.
	This is from 2012, so it's a couple of years old, but it gives some idea of the problem, which is, dare I say, big.
	I think it's fair to call it, and a lot of people have called it, and remember, I'm no nutritionist or no doctor, it's just my opinion.
	It's called an epidemic.
	35.7% of adults and almost 17% of children aged 2 to 19 are obese.
	And building on sort of the trends, looking forward, state-by-state data from the CDC project obesity rates, In every state, that rate will reach at least 44% by 2030.
	44% of adults.
	And in 13 states, that number would exceed 60%.
	And obesity, say what we like, it raises, this is from Reuters, it raises the risk of numerous diseases, from type 2 diabetes, that's the more lifestyle oriented one, to endometrial cancer, More sick people and higher medical costs in the future.
	Absolutely.
	And so 1.9 million new cases of diabetes a year recently, almost 8 million new cases in the future.
	6.8 million new cases of chronic heart disease and stroke compared to 1.3 million new cases a year now.
	It adds $66 billion in annual obesity-related medical costs over and above today's, or 2012's, $147 billion, making a grand total of $210 billion.
	Total US healthcare spending was estimated at $2.7 trillion.
	So, you know, close to or in the realm of 10% of healthcare spending coming from obesity.
	And what's amazing to that is there was another projection American Journal of Preventive Medicine, by 2030, 42% of U.S. adults could be obese, adding more than half a trillion dollars to healthcare costs over that period, 550 billion dollars.
	And it's huge.
	So from 1980, right, I guess when I was a kid, when was I in 1980, I was 14.
	Obesity rates among U.S. adults have more than doubled from the 15% of 1980.
	In that same time, they've more than tripled.
	Among children.
	And that is some hairy stuff.
	There's a correlation with education and income.
	About a third of adults without a high school diploma were obese, compared with about one-fifth of those who graduated from college or technical college.
	One-third of adults who earn less than $15,000 a year are obese.
	One-quarter of those who earn $50,000 a year or more are obese.
	And, you know, they say this, and tell me what you think, Adam.
	But some people say, well, you know, calorie-dense foods are cheap, fewer playgrounds, sidewalks, and so on.
	I don't know.
	You know, a banana is not really expensive.
	Absolutely not.
	And, you know, I don't find it that expensive to eat in a healthy way.
	You know, it's the stuff...
	That is in the middle of the food aisle.
	You know, the Count Chocula cereal candy bars.
	You know, that kind of stuff.
	That stuff is expensive.
	If you look at that, I remember my roommate in college pointing out that some of those cereals are more expensive than chocolate per gram.
	Absolutely.
	And I don't...
	You know, you're around the outside.
	You're getting your fruit.
	You're getting your vegetables.
	You're home cooking your meals.
	You know, I don't think it's that expensive.
	So I'm not sure about that.
	I would say...
	If I had to sort of guess that if there's an IQ correlation, I would assume that the lower the IQ in general, the higher the obesity rate, all other things being equal simply because the higher IQ tends to look more over the horizon of the future and figure out long-term consequences and so on.
	So it is a big deal.
	It is an ever-increasing deal.
	And of course, it is a very controversial issue.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	And I've seen some statistics as well.
	People used to poke fun at the US about it, but UK and Australia have definitely started catching up with us in the same demographics and obesity problems as well.
	So I think it's starting to become just a first world in general problem as well.
	Yeah, and it is of course different by race.
	Again, you know, it's always tempting to blend all of this stuff in together, but To be accurate, right, we have to point out that this is from 2010.
	Obesity rate for Caucasian adults, 26.8.
	And for adult Caucasian women, 24.5.
	For black adults, so 26.8.
	For Caucasian adults, 36.9% for Black adults.
	For adult Caucasian women, 24.5%.
	For adult Black women, the rate of obesity was 41.2% in 2010.
	American Indian or Alaska Native adults in the U.S. was almost 40%.
	And I'm going to guess whether you think Asian adults higher or lower.
	Most likely lower.
	Yeah.
	That is correct.
	So the obesity rates for Asian adults in the US in 2010 was 11.6%.
	Compare that to almost 40% for the Alaska Natives.
	Hispanic or Latino, 31.9% for adults as a whole.
	For men, 30.7%.
	For Hispanic or Latino women, 33.1%.
	And it is not...
	Equal.
	And, you know, the causes for that, I would, you know, I'll leave you to all mull that over.
	But I think that there are some reasons that people don't really like to talk about.
	But I did want to know what your thoughts were on why or why it's going this way.
	Well, I think as far as the narrative and advancement...
	Of the fat acceptance movement, the left has clearly prioritized more than anything else, appealing to as many different demographics that they think they can sell this victimhood narrative to as possible.
	And if you have people who have struggled lifelong, And really don't feel out of control about their life and their eating habits because it's very difficult.
	It is very difficult starting to develop good health habits and getting rid of bad.
	If you give them the option to eat their way into disability and welfare and on top of that feel as if they have some type of Not necessarily moral high ground, but justification for moral or philosophical justification for why they should feel appreciated despite taking resources or requiring labor and care for them,
	then there's always going to be a percentage of those people that will just eat that up, unfortunately.
	Absolutely.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	The obesity is a contributing factor, and this is a huge range, between 100,000 and 400,000 deaths in the U.S. each year.
	And this includes increased morbidity in car accidents, $117 billion in direct and indirect costs, like medical treatment and absenteeism, loss of future earnings due to premature death, and so on.
	So it's more expensive in America.
	Obesity is more expensive than smoking or problem drinking.
	So, it's a big deal.
	And of course, Medicare and Medicaid programs bear about half the additional costs.
	High obesity rates are a major contributor to America's relatively low life expectancy relative to other high-income countries.
	And obesity may lead to a halt in the rise of life expectancy observed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	This is just where it gets really insane for me.
	One of the major platforms.
	I mean, the initial talking points of fat acceptance aren't necessarily bad ones.
	They're initially just a discussion of negative reinforcement versus positive reinforcement, which I generally agree with.
	You catch more flies with honey than salt.
	But they're crazier ones.
	Like I said, this health at any size, they've literally tried to put forward that You can still be fat and fundamentally you're going to have the same quality of life and anybody that tells you otherwise is shaming you because naturally they changed the definition of shame.
	So they completely want...
	People that are really invested into this narrative are trying to just dismiss everything that any health organization would give them as just basic modus operandi.
	It's...
	The cringe is real.
	Now, I've heard, and this is obviously a very complicated subject, so please everyone give us feedback on this conversation.
	It's a very important subject, of course, but I've heard that the obesity epidemic is not quite as much to do with additional calories as it is to do with increasing sedentary lifestyles.
	Long periods of physical inactivity raise your risk, this is from WebMD, raise your risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and obesity.
	In January 2010, British experts linked prolonged periods of sitting to a greater likelihood of disease.
	And that same month, Australian researchers reported that each hour spent watching TV is linked to an 18% increase in the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, perhaps because that time is spent sitting down.
	And, you know, we're designed to be in motion.
	We're designed to be moving and getting around.
	And of course, you know, people, they sit in their cars, they drive to work, they sit at their desks, and then they go down and they sit at the cafeteria or they sit at a lunch counter or they sit in a food court for lunch.
	They go back and they sit in the afternoon and then they sit when they're driving home and then they sit in front of the TV. They sit for dinner and then they sit in front of the TV. Basically, it's a lot of sitting.
	Oh yeah.
	And that has, that I think has changed quite a bit.
	And I think there's a lot more that is going on in society as a whole.
	But yeah, I mean, this is one of the reasons why I stand while doing my show.
	I, you know, I've seen a picture of Rush Limbaugh.
	I can see what goes down or what goes wide.
	And yeah, I just, I didn't want to be middle-aged, pear-shaped, dead body guy.
	And so it is...
	It is a big problem.
	I've changed what I do in light of this.
	I mean, I remember when I had cancer a couple of years ago, I had lymphoma, and I remember saying, as they were wiring me up for my treatments, I remember saying, this is so strange because I've been, I exercise, I eat well, I'm a good weight, and it just feels wrong.
	And they said, well, you know, That's probably why you're going to get better.
	And that gave me some comfort as far as that went.
	You know, the little things that people say, these little bricks that can get you to a better place.
	So what I do now is, you know, I walk as much as I can.
	I will walk and do shows.
	I will stand and do shows.
	Standing is not fantastic, but it's certainly better than sitting.
	And when I write, I put a voice dictation software and I walk on a treadmill.
	With a computer propped up, and I just will try and do everything that I can to stay in motion.
	And of course, that's one of the benefits of being a father to a very active child is that you're getting some moving in.
	You're getting some moving in.
	Except for fishing, which we'll talk about perhaps later in the show.
	So I think a lot has been going on, and I'm going to run through a couple of them.
	I've talked about them here and there in the show, but I'll try and keep it compressed, Adam, and I'll tell you what.
	I think, in my sort of subjective opinion, is going on in a lot of the West, and you can tell me what you think.
	Great.
	So, number one is that women have left the home.
	And that has huge effects on just about everything in society.
	It's one of these giant, almost silent neutron bombs that went off in society, the effects of which we're still trying to parse out and unravel.
	So, when women left the home to go and work, In the 60s and sort of forward from there.
	Two major things happened, I think.
	Number one, neighborhoods collapsed.
	There's no neighborhoods anymore.
	And that has a huge effect on children's activities.
	And number two, processed food replaced home cooked food.
	Because time.
	Who's got time, right?
	Now, the collapse of the neighborhood It's pretty significant.
	In the past, when women stayed home, and there were at least largely culturally homogenous neighborhoods, like the Italians lived with the Italians, the Polish people lived with the Polish, and so on.
	Then everybody kind of knew each other.
	They all had coffee in the morning.
	They'd lean over their backyard fences, and they would have chats, and they all knew each other, and they all had the same standards.
	Here's how you behave.
	Here's how you punish.
	Here's how you reprimand.
	So they're all comfortable disciplining each other's children.
	And what that does is it creates this wonderful...
	A biosphere of culture and safety and security and knowledge of your neighbors that I think was largely responsible for what a lot of people would find incomprehensible now, which is just chew your kids out when they get home from school and tell them to come home when the streetlamps come on.
	Or in my case, I had a big goal.
	My mom had this big bell.
	She'd lean out the window.
	It's time to come in for dinner, right?
	But this idea that your kids would just go, roam, do your thing, go out, and so on, I think that's kind of incomprehensible for a lot of people now.
	And I think one of the—this is not a blame, right?
	It's not good or bad that women went to work as far as this goes, but I think there's causality without necessarily blame in this.
	So women go to work, neighborhoods dissolve.
	Multiculturalism, as we've talked about before, the studies—you can check out Robert Putnam's studies on this—are fairly clear.
	Loss of social trust, loss of social cohesion, loss of— Outdoor playtime for children.
	And so I think what's happened is neighborhoods have vanished.
	And with that vanishing, has vanished a sort of safe, secure, collective area where children can play.
	And this had more effects on obesity than I think than many other factors.
	And it has a huge effect on the development of empathy.
	Unstructured play in nature or unstructured play, not in a playdium or whatever, or Chuck E. Cheese or even necessarily a playground, but just go out and play.
	Kids have to figure out how to negotiate.
	They have to figure out who's going to play what, who's going to be it, what games they're going to play.
	And they have to figure out how to negotiate with different levels of ability and different heights and genders.
	There's a lot of negotiation.
	The whole point of play, I think, is just to help kids learn how to negotiate.
	And that doesn't happen When you take your kids to a structured area.
	I remember a friend of mine telling me this years ago.
	He was a father long before I was.
	And he said, you know, when I was a kid, you didn't need any money.
	Maybe you'd take, you know, 25 cents to get an ice cream.
	Oh, back in the day.
	And you would just go out and play.
	And then you'd come home and you hadn't spent any money.
	He said, now with my kids, everywhere I have to go, I've got to bring 40 bucks.
	I've got to drive them there.
	I got to bring 40 bucks.
	I bring 20, and then, you know, 15 minutes in, they're out of money.
	So everywhere I go, I got to drive them there.
	I got to pay 40 bucks, and then I got to drive them home, and I'm standing there bored, right?
	And that's not how it used to be.
	When you had a neighborhood, then kids could go out, and you'd be...
	Have you ever read, I don't know if they still do this these days, To Kill a Mockingbird?
	Oh, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Okay, so you remember, I won't get into the whole story, but you remember that there was one house on the street with a scary, scary guy in it.
	Do you remember?
	Oh yeah, yeah.
	Do you remember his name?
	It's a great name.
	You know, I can't remember his name.
	All I'm remembering is that they hid the little trinkets and whatnot in the tree, like right in front of his house, if I'm recalling the plot correctly, but I can't remember his name.
	It was a very young Robert Duvall, of all people, who played Boo Radley.
	Oh, yeah!
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Boo Radley!
	What a great name for, like, the weird guy in the neighborhood.
	Now, what was interesting, of course, is that you could, because there was cultural homogeneity in the neighborhood, you could say to your kids, go play anywhere you want, but don't go near Boo Radley's house, right?
	Yeah.
	And there was no, like, oh, that's racist, or whatever, right?
	So, you knew who was safe, you knew who wasn't, and there was no problem steering kids away from the less safe areas.
	So, that I think has happened where outdoors have become much less appealing.
	Much less appealing to be outdoors now.
	And it's one of these things, you know, the network effect, like if you and me are the only people who have phones, they're not that valuable, but the more people who have phones, the more valuable they become.
	Which is why, I don't know, alternative internet has never really taken off.
	But what I think is important is that the fewer kids who are out there playing, the less valuable it is to go out and play.
	You know, if there's one kid in one block goes out and then another kid on another block goes out, maybe they can find each other, but there's not going to be that much.
	But if there's 10 kids on each block out playing, then you can go out and find a game right away.
	You don't have to have the right timing.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	And conversely now today, if you have all the kids on the iPad and they happen to just peek outside for a second to see the one kid who happens to like hopscotch, he just looks like a weirdo now that you think about it.
	Well now he looks lonely.
	Why aren't you playing Minecraft?
	Right.
	We can meet virtually, right?
	Because kids, you know, want to shy away from deviant behavior almost always, right?
	Kids are natural conformists and there's nothing wrong with that in particular.
	It's just natural to, you know, tribal evolution.
	And so, you know, if there's one kid staying home and all the other kids are out there, then the one kid who's staying home is weird.
	But as you point out, if there's one kid out there kicking the ball against the wall and everyone else is inside on their tablets or computers and that kid looks like, well, what are you doing?
	Freak!
	Freak!
	Right?
	So...
	So very, very briefly, the outside has become less appealing for kids, and that's where you move, right?
	That's where you do your moving.
	Now, at the same time, as outdoors, and I think there's some coincidental ratio here, but as the outdoors has become less appealing for children, the indoors has become a whole lot more appealing.
	Because you've got big screen TVs, you've got PS4s, you've got Nintendos, you've got tablets, you've got Dance Dance Revolution Evolution Party Brainhead with music.
	I think that's the original title in Japanese.
	And you have movies.
	Watching a movie, when I was a kid, the entire country of England would shut down for James Bond twice a year.
	The whole...
	You'd watch it on your little 12-inch black-and-white TV that every now and then there'd be the elevator rollover of the picture and you couldn't turn it up too bright.
	Otherwise, it'd get all ripply along the top.
	I mean, it really was.
	You know, if you can imagine watching Jurassic Park play itself out in clamation on a postage stamp, that was kind of what we did for movie entertainment.
	Right.
	And so, yeah, as outdoors have become less appealing, indoors have become vastly more appealing.
	And...
	The hypnotism of technology is enormous and considerable.
	I was at a coffee shop the other day, and except for one group in the back, every single person, whether they were sitting alone or together, they had a phone face, right?
	Yeah.
	Phone face.
	And Gollum phone back, too.
	Yeah, I think I have seen some type of headliner or news piece on spinal, not spinal injuries, but spinal changes happening because of these darn phones.
	Well, they are tempting.
	They are tempting.
	For a lot of people, it sure beats sitting alone with the thoughts you're not having.
	Yeah.
	So, you know, so that's, I think, the two things have cojoined there, which I think has reduced activity enormously.
	Now, reducing activity isn't, I think, all the story, of course.
	I think that you also have to increase caloric intake and certainly, I would assume, negative caloric intake.
	And so when women left the home, you had to switch to more processed foods.
	I remember the introduction of TV dinners.
	A TV dinner on a TV tray designed...
	You put them in the oven.
	The Hungry Man, you put them in the oven and it's just like you're on an airplane.
	But you're not.
	You might as well just cardboard.
	Yeah.
	Do I take the wrapping off?
	Does it matter?
	You know what happens when you don't have the time to cook from scratch.
	Then you end up Taking something frozen and throwing it in the oven or throwing it in the microwave or some sort of pre-prepared meal.
	And what happens is it's been prepared a long way away in a galaxy, far distant in time.
	And the process of processing it, I think, takes out a fair amount of the flavor.
	So what do you do?
	What do you do?
	Well, you've got to get your kids to eat it.
	Yeah, you add sugar and you add fat to make up for the flavor.
	As a guy who obsessively grows vegetables in his own backyard, I can tell you, a fresh tomato out of your own backyard is like carrot cake.
	It's so good.
	However, the sad, shrunken old lady boob tomato that you're getting from Timbuktu brought over on a camel, well, it's not quite as tasty, to put it mildly.
	And so you've got to add sugar and you've got to add fat, which is why so many processed foods – I can't remember the number, but it's just enormous, the percentage of processed foods in America that have either obvious or more subtly added fat.
	You really need fat in tomato sauce?
	Do you really – it's not jam for God's sakes.
	But anyway, so you add sugar and you add fat.
	Now then, of course, there was this big anti-fat movement.
	I can't remember exactly when it started, but suddenly it all became – Now that's a great speech.
	Now it's – fat-free is – fat-free is the new good thing and you've got to buy stuff that's fat-free.
	But if it's processed and fat-free, it's not going to taste that good, I think, at all.
	So then you have to crank up the sugar.
	Now, of course, in American, I think it's still the case.
	America has very high tariffs on sugar, so it becomes too expensive.
	So you've got to substitute fructose glucose and other kinds of fairly unholy Satan sweat sugar substitutes.
	And so, yeah, you're basically pumping up a lot of sugar into people who are becoming increasingly sedentary.
	Yeah.
	And high fructose corn syrup, I mean, there's one, there's an argument for like some benefits of sugar, but the high fructose corn syrup is just absolute cancer as opposed to if you were to actually go away to get sugar the right way from a piece of fruit, which frankly I find more delicious, is actually very good for you because it has so much more fiber and vitamins and minerals and whatnot.
	Hey man, don't make me jones for a peach.
	I still, my most vivid memories were like the 12 days that you could get a really great peach in England when I was a kid.
	So good.
	Now I can just, I can like bathe in peaches these days.
	I love them so much.
	Right, and of course that's why we like sugar.
	Because sugar drew us to fruit and fruit kept off scurvy and gave us the vitamin C that we needed and all kinds of stuff.
	So yeah, we're drawn to fruit.
	That's why it's sweet.
	So that we take the effort to go and get it.
	So we shit out the seeds and you get more trees.
	It's all part of the cycle of life that is usually grosser than you ever want it to be.
	So, yeah, so you ended up with no home-cooked meals.
	You ended up with deserted, emptied-out neighborhoods where kids don't want to go out to play, and you ended up with...
	And I think part of the...
	It's not the only thing, but I have a feeling that the vacuum of the neighborhood created a pull for electronics.
	In other words, if kids could have gone out to play in the way that a lot of kids went out when I was young, I think there would still have been some, but there would have been less, I think, of a pull.
	But if parents don't feel comfortable with their kids roaming around for whatever reason in the neighborhood, or maybe there just aren't enough kids out there, then the kids are home and they're bored.
	And then the parents are like, okay, fine, we'll get you a video game unit, which drives the demand for the video game unit that comes because the neighborhoods are emptied out, which further empties out the neighborhood.
	And anyway, you get the general pattern.
	So, I mean, these are just a couple of the thoughts I've had.
	I mean, I'm sure we could add to them fairly significantly, but that's, you know, I was thinking about this since you sent the question, and those were some of the things that I had come up with, and I just wanted to get your thoughts on it.
	Yeah, as far as the first one on processed foods, that's one of the, like, starting fitness and starting to prioritize it and be conscious about how I eat.
	The first thing I started to understand is how many myths can go out the door if you just take a minute to look.
	That's the one that frustrates me the most is people saying healthy food costs too much.
	That's absolutely ridiculous.
	Compare a bag of chips to an apple, right?
	I know.
	And the most you could say is that it's time-consuming, which is fair.
	So technically, if you're going to think about it in terms of labor, depending on the meals you make and the ingredients you choose and whatnot, it can balance out one way or the other.
	But there's plenty of good, cheap, and even fast healthy ways to eat.
	So I really wish people would just, like, if nothing else prior to ours, like, I need more green stuff in me today.
	I'll just, heck, I'll just go buy a green pepper and shove it in my mouth.
	Something green.
	And just, it doesn't have to be cooked necessarily.
	Just start, like, getting a more balance of getting rid of the bad and putting in the good.
	And really, I mean, once you start on some basic steps, you start feeling so much better that it's a good cycle that gets you into better habits.
	But, uh...
	As far as...
	I'm not sure what my thoughts would be on women leaving the home, although definitely there's the facts, the statistics to back it up in regards to households where both parents try to work or balance it and they have to rely on daycare, which...
	Which makes it so the family doesn't have as much of a say on the good habits of making family play and having at least some superficial supervision so the mom can say, all right, come back in.
	I think there is decent evidence for that.
	But thinking about the general trends and hearing the way you talked about the progression from the outside to the inside, it really is just mind-blowing now that I think about it.
	I'm technically a millennial.
	I'm 27, so I was born in those 90s ages.
	But I was on the early onset where we just barely started to see the very first Nintendo systems and the very first computers and internet access.
	So now that I think about it, it really is a perfect, clear-cut divide in my mind where I can remember thinking, About all these times I went out of my way to just go out into the open wild and be a kid on a bike, going around his neighborhood with some other friends, kicking stones, throwing rocks into lakes and stuff like that.
	I remember my mom prioritizing more outings and stuff like this and going into really wonderful hiking trails and picnics.
	Even when I had like a bigger yard, there was a time when I just had more space that I just lived on that I loved, you know, playing around in the sandbox and climbing the tree and whatnot.
	And then the Nintendo and TV rears its ugly head around my teens and making closer trends.
	And I can definitely think of myself It was a bit of a struggle since that day until I just had the oh crap moment looking at myself in the mirror just a couple years ago.
	It's just Brutally stark divide that I can definitely acknowledge in my memory now.
	I'm glad that I was lucky enough to be born just on the early onset and the very first spots because now at least I remember what good activity feels like and I remember what good activity even is.
	And now we have a closer generation to just being born in the age of PC, Steam machines and PlayStation 4s and I don't know if they're ever going to be able to put the great outdoors on the same level of their PlayStations and their heads.
	Now I prioritize at least hiking once a week and it feels so much more refreshing.
	I can't wait for it at the end of the week.
	And to me now, the video games have almost no pull on me.
	I'll enjoy them if I have them, and sometimes I'll occasionally indulge myself just on a weekend or something.
	Everybody has their guilty pleasures, but if I had to choose to give up something, I can't imagine giving up just being able to go outside.
	That would be a nightmare to me.
	Right, right, right.
	And a couple of other things, you know, there's this energy drink thing, which I don't know, seems a bit like just is water not something that your body can handle anymore?
	Soft drinks, right?
	Like one can of soft drink a day will make you 15 pounds heavier a year, all other things being equal.
	I don't even touch that stuff anymore.
	That was the first thing to go when I had to start making things about stuff to go.
	If you're going to look for soda replacements, because I did need soda replacements, have you ever tried a kombucha, actually?
	No.
	It's something of a new trend.
	It's like a fermented...
	It's a mushroom tea that has a hint of the carbonation, a bit of a tanginess that's almost like apple vinegar, but it's mostly tea and it has barely as many calories as fruit juice, and it still has some fizziness, so I don't know, in case there's anybody looking for alternatives.
	Right, good to know.
	So, yeah, I mean, it's a big topic.
	And many years ago, I read a blog.
	I don't know.
	I was maybe 15 years ago.
	No, more, more.
	Maybe 20 years ago.
	And it was this guy who was overweight.
	And he basically went for his checkup.
	And his insurance company was like, no.
	No.
	No, no, no, no.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	We'll insure you.
	But we're going to have to take a kidney and sell it on the black market or something like So you get these kinds of wake up calls.
	That I think are important, you know, for people trying to make best.
	So, you know, he did the whole, you know, recognize you've got to change your lifestyle.
	You've got to change it forever.
	You can't go back.
	And you have to avoid eating out.
	Particularly, you know, I mean, I find it the case.
	Maybe it's just my imagination.
	But in America, I mean, food portions, you know, like they basically back up the pasta truck with the beep, beep, beep and just bury you when it comes to portion sizes.
	And a lot of people, I don't know, they just don't feel like I can get three meals out of this.
	I'll take it to go.
	I finish it.
	And so there is a lot of those just bad habits that people get into.
	And I don't know how people don't notice that they can't fit into their clothes, that they have no energy.
	You have no energy because this is the vicious cycle of the sedentary lifestyle.
	Like, I haven't exercised in a long time, and I think it's like 20-25% of Americans are basically sedentary.
	Which is sort of like being without limbs, but you still have them, at least in a titular sense.
	And you have little energy, which means that you don't want to get up anyway.
	And so when you've got a bunch of kids who haven't been moving, and let's say you do suddenly teleport them to the outdoors for a nice game of tag, how's that going to go?
	I'm good.
	Just tag me.
	I lie down here.
	Let's play meditation.
	So there is this kind of vicious cycle of inactivity that, and of course, you know, I mean, binge watching and, you know, snacking on your, whatever it is you're snacking on, I mean, it's dicey stuff.
	And it drives, you know, when people don't have the economic consequences of their own decisions, it's the economics that I think help remind people of the actual costs.
	And the economics of people's bad health decisions are often shielded from them.
	By, you know, socialized medicine or various aspects of government control or management and things.
	And I don't, I mean, I don't know what the rule is in America anymore.
	Can you, do you charge people more for higher BMI on their health insurance?
	I don't think you can at the moment.
	Yeah.
	And it's funny you mentioned BMI. That's something people in the Fed acceptance movement bring up as something of an issue in it being...
	Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is...
	Lou Ferrigno!
	Yeah, absolutely.
	But that's not the majority of people who have those proportions.
	There's a big difference between a Lou Ferrigno and a Whitney Thor, I'm sorry.
	But yeah, there is some truth.
	I mean, if you get healthy enough to the point where you have your six-pack, you really should stop even giving a crap about your weight because there's more useful metrics.
	But I don't even think they...
	I usually get it from an employer, and I can't recall it from my personal experience being asked about my weight during that.
	You still get asked about smoking, thankfully, but I can't recall being asked about my weight for any type of insurance purposes and stuff like that.
	Let me just drop one other thought back to my last one, and this is really speculative, so forgive me if it ends up being completely false, but I'll throw it out there.
	It's like a wet nap against the wall.
	Let's just see if it sticks.
	Yeah.
	I think that deep down, people stress eat.
	And I think life in the West is pretty stressful these days.
	A lot of economic uncertainty.
	Huge numbers of Americans have like no money for savings.
	And they are like one carding or medical bill away from disaster.
	And I mean, it's really stressful.
	And because...
	The economy is not doing well.
	There are more people who want to work than are working, which means that everybody's kind of insecure in their job.
	And people are stressed because, you know, they don't have a lot of social support in terms of raising kids.
	There's a lot of studies that show that a lot of people get less happy after they have children.
	And a lot of it has to do with just not having the social support that they need in order to be good parents and do the right thing and be happy with what they're doing.
	And I think that deep down, when we lose our communities, it's very stressful for us.
	Because we are social animals.
	We are tribal animals.
	We are designed to be in a community.
	Which is why, you know, there was real dysfunction in my home growing up, but at least there was a community out there.
	You know, it wasn't a great community in a lot of ways, but there was people to play with.
	There was things outside the home.
	And you really need that if your home life is not that great.
	It's nice.
	Nice to get out and about.
	Yeah.
	And so I think when neighborhoods fragment and fall away from us, I think we are very stressed.
	I think our bodies experience that as a very stressful condition.
	Because the reason we banded together as a tribe is because we're so exquisitely vulnerable for our childhoods and, you know, we need to sleep for a long time and we're not great at sleeping in trees, so we need people to guard us and we need the security of a tribe, of people around us.
	And because people live these pretty isolated lives without communities and And because of bad economics, they often have to move away from where they grew up.
	You know, the jobs are all gone and you've got to move someplace new.
	And all that.
	I think that people are at a very sort of deep level experiencing a lot of stress in the West.
	Very deep level.
	A lot of stress.
	What's going to happen to the future?
	What's going to happen?
	I mean, look at the polarizing elections that are going on in the United States.
	Which way is it going to go?
	What's going to happen?
	What's going to happen with the national debt?
	What's going to happen with immigration?
	What's going to happen with the difficulties of integrating widely different cultures?
	What the hell is going to happen?
	And I think people experience quite a bit of stress, and I think that when human beings experience stress, they will often overeat, and I think that they'll tend to eat stuff that's less good.
	And I can sort of understand that, right?
	Because stress is the body's way of saying there's something dangerous in the environment or something that's risky in the environment, so we might as well pile some fat on just in case, right?
	So that's very, very speculative, but that's just a sort of thought out of the blue.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	I was going to say, that's why they call it comfort food.
	The fattier, the better.
	Your boyfriend breaks up with you, you faceplant into the ice cream, right?
	Yep.
	So, that's really all I had to say.
	My favorite forms of exercise, I love to walk, I love to hike, I enjoy weights, I Cardio has always been a bit of a nemesis for me.
	I know I need to do it and I do it.
	I'll generally do it on a bike machine because at least I can read or, you know, something.
	Because cardio is...
	Sorry, it's a little boring.
	It's a little bit, you know, when I was younger I did swim team and water polo and cross-country running and tennis and all of that.
	And tennis I still enjoy, but it's...
	Cardio is a little boring.
	Look, I'm running.
	Look, I'm bouncing.
	And of course, the entire swim-teeing experience is summoned up this way.
	Yurgle, gurgle, burgle, yurgle, burgle, gurgle, yurgle, burgle, for like you can't talk with anyone, you can't listen to music, there's just Stuff, chlorine creeping its way into your inner ear and bleaching your brain.
	So, yeah, those are the exercises that I do.
	I enjoy running races with my daughter and her friends, and I enjoy a good bike ride.
	If you've got a good trail that's challenging and interesting, I enjoy a good wood trail on a bike.
	You know, upy downy side to side is always lots of fun, but that's been a little thin lately.
	My daughter's up on her bike now, but...
	That was a little thin, of course, when she was younger.
	So those are the things that I like to do.
	And I try to limit sit-down time during the day.
	If I can keep it to under an hour or two, fantastic.
	Because you don't need to go nuts to exercise.
	You do half an hour of fairly vigorous stuff five days a week.
	I mean, you're doing okay.
	But it seems really hard for people to even get that far.
	And the last thing I wanted to mention is that breastfeeding.
	Breastfeeding your babies, particularly with boys, will slow down weight gain later on.
	And so the giant experiment of having giant chemical boobs feed our children these days may also have something to do with what's going on.
	So it's a lot of things to...
	To ponder.
	And again, please call in.
	I find the topic fascinating, as I think a lot of people do.
	So please, please call in and let us know what your thoughts are on this topic.
	And remember that I'm certainly no expert, but I do find the topic very, very fascinating.
	All right, so let's move on to the next.
	Alright, up next is Tristan.
	Tristan wrote in and said, Stays out till literally 5,
	6 in the morning, every night partying.
	I feel incredibly suspicious and think the worst in terms of infidelity and really need to hear a different perspective.
	Am I being too sensitive?
	Am I being selfish?
	That's from Tristan.
	Well, hello Tristan, how are you doing?
	Good, how are you?
	Is she back yet this summer?
	She is.
	She is.
	She is, alright.
	Alright.
	What do you mean by selfish?
	How would you know?
	So you say, am I being selfish?
	How would you know if you were being selfish?
	What would the standard be, or how would you judge that?
	I think if...
	I feel like...
	I don't know.
	She's just having fun, and here I am.
	I don't know.
	I feel like she's just...
	I'm having fun and I'm being too selfish to think.
	Honestly, I don't know.
	That's where I'm working.
	Why don't you go with her?
	Sometimes I do.
	Other times it's just a matter of, you know, a three-week trip to Europe is expensive, so sometimes I just can't afford it or I have work or other commitments.
	How does she afford it?
	Well, her family lives there, so sometimes her family pays for her to go.
	But not you?
	No, no.
	Yeah, well, you're not married or whatever.
	And why do you think you're not married?
	I'm not saying you should be or shouldn't be.
	I mean, obviously, it's a logical step.
	It's certainly a question that would come up, right?
	Yeah, I'd eventually like to be.
	But I'm 26, so I've been waiting until I got a little older to be better financially stable before that happens.
	I'm not there yet.
	How long do you think it will take for you to get where you want to get to in terms of financial stability?
	I'm hoping by the end of my 20s.
	Wow, that's a haul.
	And she's in your age group?
	Yeah, she's a year younger than me.
	Right.
	And have you had any indications of any potential infidelities?
	No.
	No.
	See, that's the thing.
	Right.
	And when she goes out, you say till 5 or 6 in the morning, which, you know, it's Europe.
	But are they going to nightclubs?
	Is it people's houses?
	I mean, where is she going?
	At this point, the caller's audio quality started breaking up really bad, so we called him back in a phone line.
	So I was asking if it was sort of nightclubs, and you said it was kind of a mix of the two, and that she's going out every night.
	these parties all night.
	Now, I mean, you know, this may be old guy perspective, but man, I'll tell you, nightclubs are pickup joints.
	I mean, look, let's, I mean, it doesn't mean that everyone who goes there gets picked up.
	Of course not, right?
	But let's not fool ourselves about what they're for, right?
	They're not for baccarat.
	They're not for, they're not for poker.
	Well, maybe strip poker.
	They're for drinking and sweating and dancing and bumping and grinding because I spent a lot of time in nightclubs when I was younger and I don't think they've changed an enormous amount from the days when I used to go clubbing a lot.
	So again, if she was going on church picnics, you probably would feel a little less concerned, but it's the nightclubs with the booze and the dudes and all that, right?
	it.
	Exactly, exactly.
	And, I mean, to be fair to her, you know, really on the island, there's not that much to do.
	Well, why go for a month then?
	Anyway.
	Yeah, well, I don't know.
	But yeah, no, totally.
	And I guess that's where all the kind of fear and insecurity stems from.
	Well, we don't know if it's insecurity.
	I mean, you're putting, like, the words that you use to describe it, you sound like, and I've just based upon, you immediately said, to be fair to her, you sound like a very fair-based person.
	Yeah.
	And that can have its advantages and it can have its disadvantages too, right?
	You see every sides of every issue and you maybe don't want to call people on stuff and you're self-critical, right?
	In other words, you say, well, I might be being selfish or whatever, right?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Okay, right.
	Now, I assume that your girlfriend knows about this, right?
	Yeah, I tend to get pretty freaked out and not ruin her time, but I put a damper on because I talk to her about these things and I obviously sometimes don't do it in the best of ways.
	I don't want to just, you know, you're going to have to grit your teeth and just be more straight with me, you know, because it's like, this is what I do, but it may do it badly and not in the best of ways and so on.
	I get that.
	I mean, that's natural for everyone.
	Not everyone does everything perfectly, but I understand.
	I don't need all the caveats, right?
	And I know I use caveats sometimes too, but we've got to get to the heart of the matter.
	Let me just go through a couple of basics as to what may be occurring.
	Obviously, I don't know, but these are just some possibilities.
	Yeah.
	So, how would you rate yourself in terms of looks or sexual market value, the old 1 to 10?
	7.
	Okay, 7 out of 10.
	And how would you rate your girlfriend?
	8 in half.
	8.5, okay.
	So we have an insecurity discrepancy at the beginning, right?
	Which is that now, if you're 7 and you have other compensating factors, You're the lead singer in a band.
	You're nine feet tall.
	Whatever.
	I mean, a lot of money or you're famous or whatever it is, right?
	But you're still struggling to get where you want to get to financially, right?
	Yes.
	Right.
	So she's more attractive than you and you're broke.
	Is that too strong a way to put it?
	Yes.
	Pretty much.
	All right.
	And I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but just trying to figure out whether...
	There's reasons behind what you're feeling.
	Does she want to have children?
	I think eventually, yeah.
	No, you didn't just tell me that, did you?
	You didn't just say that, those words.
	That you have been with this woman for seven goddamn years, and you don't know whether she wants to have children?
	Yes, the answer is yes.
	Is she too hungover to chat with?
	I don't know why you wouldn't know these things.
	No, no, yes, she does.
	But you sounded more doubtful before.
	Maybe I sound doubtful because we're just kind of in a bad place in our relationship right now.
	Well, no, but that's, you know, that wouldn't make you doubtful as to how old she is and whether she wants to have kids if that's something you've already decided and talked about.
	Because if she wants to have children, then she is, in general, right, I'm sure you know the concept of hypergamy, but in general, if she wants to have children, she's going to be looking for resources.
	She's gonna need him, right?
	If you don't have those resources, then it's possible, it's theoretically possible, again, I don't know this woman, and you know, she wants to chat anytime she's welcome to, but she may be, she may have the radar app.
	Right.
	Especially if also you're not doing well as a couple at the moment, right?
	No.
	Right.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	That's true.
	Because, you know, trusting your partner is...
	they're not going to choose anyone over you.
	Right.
	Now, I'm just going to...
	I'm not going to talk about you guys.
	I'm just going to talk about theoretical stuff.
	Right?
	And I think maybe it'll have some utility for you.
	Let me know.
	Yeah.
	Love is what...
	Draws at least heterosexual people together to make babies.
	Love and lust know nothing of birth control or whatever, right?
	I mean, so love is the attraction that we have that brings us together to make babies.
	So love is very practical.
	Why?
	Because taking care of babies is very practical.
	You know, you can write a poem for your lover.
	You cannot feed your child with a poem.
	And so there's a lot of romance that has to do with wooing that doesn't really have much to do with actually raising children, which is why romance exists in the first place.
	It's why sex drive exists.
	It's why the sort of heady connection in the first six months of a relationship.
	It's why all of that stuff, all of the endorphins you get flooded with when in the presence of your loved one, particularly for men, when we lose our minds, right?
	So romance is about sex, and sex is about babies, and babies are very practical.
	They need stuff.
	They need resources.
	They just, like this big giant well, you throw money, time, resources, food, energy, sleep, and everything down, and the only thing that comes back to you is a real-life human being.
	It's a cool deal and all, but there are very practical elements to love.
	And the best way Biologically speaking, to maintain the interest of your girlfriend is to be the best guy around.
	And that doesn't mean like some abstract thing, but to have the most success, to have the most resources, to have the most whatever.
	Right?
	Because a woman's love...
	A woman's beauty is designed to gain her resources to feed her children.
	A woman's sexual attractiveness, a woman's cooking ability, like whatever it is.
	A woman's sexual market value is designed to attract a man who will give her resources by which she can take care of their children.
	Does this sort of make sense?
	I mean, I'm just talking about a sort of bald mammalian survival level.
	Yeah, yeah, definitely.
	Right.
	So, if you think deep down, at some level, Tristan, I would guess, if you think that there's someone out there that's better for her or could be better for her, then that may be part of the insecurity that you described.
	Yeah.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	On some level, deep down, I believe that is true.
	So the question, to me, a lot of jealousy is, You have to answer that fundamental question, which all lovers must answer.
	Can she do better than me?
	Now, question on a bit.
	You were talking before about, you know, What a woman kind of seeks out in a man.
	What would be the opposite when we're talking about like this?
	What just for a woman seeks out the best mate to have his kid or what exactly is the opposite?
	Like what would a man look for?
	What's hypergamy for a man?
	Is that what you mean?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	What is a man looking for?
	Well, a man is looking for three things.
	Quality, fertility, loyalty.
	Quality, insofar as it's nice if her face is proportional, it's nice if she's intelligent, she has virtues and characteristics that are positive and all of that.
	Because, you know, that's the, you're dipping your dick into a big vat of genes, right?
	And so, you know, you want to make sure you're getting some good genes coming out of there, which is why Sexual market value has a lot to do with good genetics, right?
	Lustrous hair indicates good health, a good hip to waist ratio.
	Fat deposits on certain parts and nonfat deposits on other parts indicate fertility.
	Clear eyes, clear skin, white teeth, like all of the things, even features which indicate a good genetic mix.
	So, a man is looking for quality, And fertility, because if the woman is infertile, then you'll have fun, but your genes won't have a future, right?
	Right.
	And loyalty, for two reasons.
	One is that you want to make sure you're raising your own child, so you'd want to have loyalty.
	And secondly, you don't want her having kids with you and then running off for someone else.
	Whether she takes the kids or not, I mean, but it means that...
	That's not good for your sexual market value, and it's not good for your kids, which is obviously the most important part.
	So yeah, quality, fertility, and loyalty, I think, are the important characteristics that men look for.
	And the virtue and all of this is important for both genders.
	So I'm not trying to say women are only looking for money.
	They're looking for quality.
	But quality for women includes money more than...
	It includes money.
	It includes more than money, but resources is very important.
	There's an old movie with Ralph Fiennes and Jennifer Lopez called Made in Manhattan.
	Yeah.
	And she's got a son who gets it, right?
	Because Ralph Fiennes plays a rich politician, a scion of the city, and she improbably plays a poor maid.
	You know, but she's got a nice butt.
	Apparently that's shown in the movie.
	And she's like saying to her son, why is he interested in me?
	I'm just a lowly maid.
	And his son says, Mom, I don't think he's interested in your money.
	Right.
	And she laughed.
	How could you say that?
	Oh, right.
	Well, but...
	You know, a...
	A man will look at an attractive cashier and think, well, you're pretty, you know, he's a nice figure, right?
	Because the fertility is not as important as, you know, does she have money?
	But I don't know that – well, I mean, of course, women will find an attractive cashier, but it's a different strategy, right?
	Yeah.
	Because you can take that cashier if she's a quality person and fertile and you can marry her and make babies with her and you can provide the resources if she's going to be a great mom and a great wife.
	It's great, right?
	You need to bring the money because you can bring the money as the man.
	But it's a little less...
	I mean, maybe it's changing now with more our selection.
	It's a little bit less common, I think, the other way around.
	So that's the question.
	Because you...
	Have you closed the deal with her?
	I mean, as far as are you guys in it for your lives?
	I mean, you don't have to be married to do that.
	I mean, just make the commitment.
	Well, honestly, I would have said I felt pretty confident about that until pretty recently.
	Well, you know, when you close the deal, you don't have to feel confident because you've closed the deal.
	You know, like if you've got someone to sign on the dotted line to buy the car, if you're a car salesman, you're not pretty confident about the deal.
	You've closed the deal.
	And so, you haven't closed the deal as far as, I mean, do you want to be with this woman for the rest of your life, Tristan?
	I do.
	Alright.
	And does she know that that's what you want?
	She does, yeah.
	And does she feel the same way?
	I don't know right now, to be honest.
	She doesn't know right now.
	She says she doesn't know, and how long is she not known for?
	I don't know that answer.
	Well, how long have you guys been having significant problems?
	Well, see, that's what's kind of frustrating is I thought we were doing pretty good right now, but I had a really bad point in my life a few years ago, and she never really got over that.
	So I kind of bubbled up.
	Quite recently, even though I kind of changed my life around and I'm doing much better in all these different ways.
	So I thought we were doing better, but this shit hasn't worked out with us.
	So everything's really up in the air right now.
	Well, I would say that...
	That's the issue.
	I'm not telling you anything you don't know, of course, but I would say that's the issue you need to work on, not where she is at 4am.
	Because if you've got your relationship worked out, you're probably not going to be paranoid or fearful about where she is at 4am.
	But if there are significant issues right at the core of your relationship, and one of you is more certain than the other about your future together, you know, after seven years, you should know.
	You know, if I bought a house and seven years into living there, I'm like, you know, I don't know if I want to live in this house.
	I don't know if I like this house or not.
	I don't know if I want to keep this house or not.
	What would people say?
	Yeah, you're never really too much into the house.
	But that raises the question, what about divorce?
	I grew up and divorced.
	Divorced parents.
	And so I believe that one time, yes, my parents loved each other, but they fell out of love, or rather my mom fell out of love with my dad.
	So I've always grown up with this idea that, I don't know, there's no such thing as sealing the deal.
	Because even when you think it's sealed, it might not be.
	Right, right, right.
	Well, of course, you're not married, so the divorce thing doesn't matter as much.
	It doesn't apply legally, right?
	I don't know if you're common law or whatever, but you don't have to tell me that.
	But the other thing, too, is you don't have kids yet.
	No.
	Right?
	I mean, to my mind, Tristan, divorce becomes really, really important when you have kids.
	Right.
	Which you don't have.
	No.
	It's this issue of history and repetition always frustrates me, and it's not to do with you, and I apologize if this sounds harsh, Tristan, but it's like, well, my parents did this, so that's the way it has to be, or, well, my parents made a commitment and their commitment didn't work out, so how am I going to know, blah, blah, blah, right?
	But it's like that old story of two brothers.
	One's an alcoholic and one doesn't drink at all.
	They go to the alcoholic and they say, why are you an alcoholic?
	He says, because my dad drank.
	It's all I know.
	They go to the brother who doesn't drink anything, alcoholic.
	They say, how come you're a teetotaler?
	You don't drink at all.
	He said, my dad was an alcoholic.
	I saw how terrible it was.
	Right.
	You have a rare chance to learn about commitment because you saw a commitment being broken, which means you can analyze what happened with your parents' marriage and talk about it with them, hopefully, and get some answers about what happened with your parents' marriage.
	And you can figure out how to avoid that stuff.
	You know, if you've got a dad who died of a heart attack when he was 40 because he was 300 pounds, You can choose not to become 300 pounds.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, you can look at your parents and say, okay, well, there's a big sign that says, don't go this way.
	Don't do this.
	Whatever you do, don't do what they did.
	And that is, you know, if your parents made bad decisions, in my opinion, the best you can get out of those bad decisions is wisdom.
	And that actually brings a certain amount of redemption to those bad decisions.
	You know, if your parents made bad decisions about who they married or they made bad decisions about getting divorced, Well, if you can extract the principles of commitment and love and respect and honor and all the good things that are going to keep you together with your girlfriend, it brings some redemption to those bad decisions.
	It does redeem them in a way.
	Does this make any sense?
	It absolutely does, and I'm right there with you.
	The thought that I'm having while you're saying this, though, is...
	That would be perfect if the relationship was solely in my control.
	When there's another person in the mix, they might not have the same drive to keep the commitments and not do what parents did.
	So you're talking about your girlfriend here, that she may not have the same commitment to you, right?
	Well, to the idea of No, no, there's no idea.
	There's you.
	There's you.
	You're not dating.
	You're not in a threesome with an idea, right?
	There's just you two.
	And so then your choice is to find a way to win her over to full commitment or to recognize that you got into a seven-year relationship with somebody who's not committed.
	And there's things to be learned from that, too.
	Yeah.
	That's true.
	There's an old saying that Dr.
	Phil has.
	He says, the only thing worse than spending two years in a relationship that's bad for you is spending two years and one day in a relationship that's bad for you.
	I'm not saying this applies to you, it's just a perspective.
	People do sometimes hang on like grim death and drag the relationship around like a weekend at Bernie's.
	Maybe that's where you are, maybe that's not where you are, but I think it's time for some really honest soul-searching uninterruptedly with your girlfriend.
	You know, what are we doing?
	What's her plan?
	What's her goal?
	Are we both committed to the same level, to the same degree?
	And, you know, we have this eternal youth these days.
	It was coming in definitely when I was around.
	But it's much, much stronger now.
	Where you're hoping to become an adult in a way in your late 20s, right?
	Yeah.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	And that's a long time to wait to become an adult.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I couldn't get my shit together soon enough.
	Right.
	And I sympathize, you know, with the bad time.
	And we did your adverse childhood experience score, which was six.
	And that's tough.
	That is hard.
	That is a very difficult childhood.
	I won't go into the details, but I just really wanted to offer my sympathy.
	And it does take a while to dig yourself out of a bad childhood, right?
	Yeah, definitely.
	And there is a movie called...
	You know what?
	I'm just...
	I'm going to check on this.
	I'm going to check because I'm...
	Yeah, I think that's it.
	All right.
	There's a movie directed by Mike Lee starring...
	The volcanic David Thewlis called Naked.
	And I think I saw it.
	I used to go out with a woman who had the inside scoop on the Toronto Film Festival.
	I think I saw it at the Toronto Film Festival.
	I saw some great Sin Compasione, an incredible Spanish film, an adaptation of Crime and Punishment.
	Amazing.
	Anyway, so David Thewlis was in this movie.
	Called Naked.
	And it's old.
	It won Best Director and Best Actor at the 1993 Cairns Film Festival.
	So it's a very sort of nihilistic and dark film.
	And at one point, and I apologize, I'm sorry I'm murdering the dialogue, but at one point the woman turns to the man and she says, how old are you?
	And he says, I don't know, 25 or 26.
	And she says, you know, When my mother was your age, she already had three children or two children.
	And he holds up his hand and says, stop!
	Stop.
	Because the idea that he was living this perpetual adolescence while this woman's mother had children and was a wife and by that age was unbearable to him.
	And given your childhood, I mean, again, massive sympathies, this is not any kind of negativity, but it can be possible to live in a kind of timeless way in your 20s.
	And you've got seven years into a relationship that it sounds like is kind of hanging on.
	Not by a thread, but, you know, it seems to have significant problems.
	Yeah.
	So, mortality panic can be helpful.
	But I, you know, my suggestion would be that your concern about her being out on Europe's all-night party island is probably more to do with the fact that there is A lot that I think is not resolved or not communicated at the bottom of your relationship.
	And I think having those conversations about where your hearts are at, where your future is, what she's looking for.
	If you went through, as you say, a dark period a couple of years ago, And if she remains goosed by that, and if she remains unable to commit, then that needs to be very clear to you.
	Because if there's something foundational that she can't accept or can't forgive about who you are or what you've done, that's important information for you to have.
	So I hope that helps.
	I know it's not much of an answer, but I've got a book called Real-Time Relationships, which talks about Some of the stuff in more detail from my perspective.
	So that would be my suggestion.
	Just, you know, get a completely unobstructed night and just talk.
	All right.
	Thank you.
	You're very welcome.
	And I hope it works out.
	Thank you so much for calling in.
	Thanks.
	Have a good night.
	Take care.
	Alright, up next is Morgan.
	Morgan wrote in and said, Carl Sagan stated that we are all made of quote-unquote star stuff.
	It seems to me that some of that stuff is infinite and some of that stuff is finite.
	It also seems to me that some of the infinite stuff is out of our control and some of the infinite stuff is in our control.
	Additionally, it seems to me that some of the finite stuff is out of our control and And then some of the finite stuff is in our control.
	How can objectivity be utilized to explain the infinite part of us in addition to the finite part of us?
	That's from Morgan.
	So it's a little vague.
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	No, it's a little vague.
	That's fine.
	It's big picture stuff, which I'm always thrilled to do.
	So perhaps you could like to unfog it a little.
	You know, we breathed on the mirror and let's rub something on it.
	Well, more specifically, I feel like I am...
	An infinite being, in a sense, or at least part of me is.
	And I feel like I'm constricted by my culture.
	I feel like I'm sort of like in this house of mirrors, if you will, because I live in the United States.
	And just because of everything that's going on and everything you talk about in your monologues and in your dialogues.
	And I was wondering if you could maybe give me some advice on how objectivity could help me protect that part of myself or maybe expand that part of myself or somehow...
	Become more effective in coping with the culture I'm surrounded by.
	If that makes any sense.
	What are the parts of you that feel infinite?
	My creativity.
	My perception.
	My thoughts.
	I never stop thinking.
	My interests.
	My desire to learn.
	I don't think that learning is something that ends when you graduate from college.
	And love, knowledge, things that connect me, my family.
	I just feel like there are these things in life that are permanent, that are unchangeable.
	And also I feel like law, you know, the universal law, law with a capital L, maybe you could call it the Dharma or the Dhamma, that I feel is also timeless and unchangeable.
	And I feel like I feel like there are a lot of forces acting upon me from the outside that are sort of getting in between me and myself.
	And I feel like I need to kind of reconnect with the truth and become more objective in the way I lead my life.
	Is that still too vague?
	I think we're circling something.
	Infinite.
	It's a big-ass word, Morgan.
	Infinite.
	Your creativity.
	You're not very creative.
	Extremely creative or Infinite.
	Help me understand that word, choice.
	Well, maybe to say everybody is a genius at at least one thing.
	And that thing that we call genius, that one thing that we're really good at, is the infinite part of ourselves that never stops making, that never stops producing, that never stops connecting and impacting the world at large.
	And I feel that a lot of people, especially in my country, in the United States, Are being strongly encouraged to somehow either curtail that or somehow wrap that around itself and just kind of shut that part of themselves off.
	And I feel like the media maybe to a certain extent is doing that.
	It can also be feminism, the dark side of feminism.
	Certain isms, a lot of the isms I think may be doing that to us.
	Well, okay, but if we want to start with precision and objectivity, your creativity is not infinite.
	It's not?
	Okay.
	No, I mean, it can't be.
	Because we're bound by time and space and mortality and so on, right?
	I mean, if you're...
	I guess you could be painting a picture with two hands, but you're not painting with your feet or your ass or whatever, right?
	Exactly.
	Just technically, it can't be infinite.
	Right.
	I mean, if space is not infinite, your creativity, which is smaller than space, can't be infinite, right?
	And it's not a negative.
	I mean, we're just trying to be more precise, right?
	Exactly.
	And so in terms of my creativity being finite, what are the things that make it finite?
	Is it perhaps my biology, my nervous system?
	Well, I just gave you some examples, right?
	I just gave you some examples, which is that You're mortal, which means that at some point your creativity, like your life, will come to an end, right?
	Right.
	So it can't be infinite.
	You were not creative before you were born.
	Maybe you invented your own sign language in the womb or whatever, but certainly, let's say before you had hands, when you only had pseudopods or whatever fish stage we're going through with fins or whatever the hell happens that early on.
	But you were not infinitely creative.
	I mean, Neither am I, neither is any mortal being.
	By definition, we are within a finite system, and therefore we cannot be infinite.
	Make sense?
	Yeah.
	Have you ever felt, though, that there were certain parts of you that just wanted to keep going, keep pushing the limits?
	Me, push the limits?
	Why, I don't know what you're talking about.
	I've never thought of pushing, of course.
	I mean, every damn show it feels like.
	Yeah.
	Now, you are to some degree eternal, but that which is eternal about you, Morgan, is the least human part of you, which is your atoms, which you share with, this is the star stuff, right?
	Stars are just, you know, hot messes, you know, even more so than Hollywood starlets, right?
	So they're just hot, boiling, exploding, eternal bombs, or not eternal, but long-lasting bombs, right?
	And so the energy and the matter that you are created of existed before you and will outlive you.
	You know, we go from our lives to our coffins, to the worms, to the soil, to the plants, to the sky, you know, we're part of the cycle of life.
	The law of conservation of energy, the law of conservation of matter.
	Yeah.
	You know, the atoms that composed me were not created with my birth.
	They have existed for billions and billions of years.
	So the stuff that is most long-lasting about us is the stuff that is least associated with our humanity.
	Our humanity is, in a sense, the briefest part of us, because our bodies, the atoms which compose our bodies, have been around forever.
	Almost.
	And whereas our humanity, we're not even born with humanity.
	It's something that we develop and grow.
	And of course, it can end if we make bad habits, or we're in bad environments, or we make bad decisions, or for a variety of who knows what or how reasons, we can lose our humanity.
	We can become cold-hearted.
	We can become cruel.
	We can become unkind.
	We can become selfish.
	We can become destructive.
	All of these things can happen to us.
	We lose our humanity.
	It is a...
	Sometimes keeping your humanity in the world feels a little bit like cupping a tiny candle in a windstorm.
	Oh yes, I guess I'll use my Elton John analogies.
	Like a candle in the wind.
	And of course we can lose it through senility as well.
	If we get old and our brains start to work less well, we can lose that essential part of us.
	Brain injuries can do the same thing.
	And So that which is most human and humane about us is, in a sense, the last to develop, the first to go, and sometimes it seems the toughest to maintain.
	So what I'm arguing to you is that that which is best about you is the opposite of infinite and eternal, and that's why we need philosophy.
	Yeah, so would you say that a lot of it has to do with maintenance?
	A lot of it has to do with maintaining some sort of practice or Discipline in order to continue, you know, to uphold my humanity in the face of all this inhumane stuff that's going on around me.
	Well, I mean, I think that virtue is knowledge plus courage.
	I mean, you have to know what is right, and then you have to, well, you have to do what is right.
	If you do what you think is right without knowing, you're going to most likely go wrong.
	And if you only know what is right without doing what is right, then you have knowledge without action, which is really a form of self-reproach.
	So, because it inflames your conscience into calling you a coward.
	So, philosophy, of course, will tell you what is good, and self-knowledge and discipline will give you the strength to do what is right and do what is good, and damn the consequences.
	So, yeah, I mean, as far as what is good, what is right, you know, the non-aggression principle and...
	Self-ownership and property and all of these.
	I mean, these are the things I've gone into in great detail in my free book on ethics, universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics.
	So all of these virtues, I think, at least I think I've done a good job of explaining them.
	And then all that is needed when you have a great car is the key.
	And the key to the ignition is your self-knowledge, your choice, and your will to do I feel like I do have courage, but I'm also very much guilty of acting before thinking.
	You know, just getting the feeling rather than the thought and then acting upon it because in my gut it feels right.
	And then having to justify it later to whomever.
	You know, somebody I'm in a relationship with, maybe my spouse or my employer.
	And in a sense that's not ethical.
	From what you're telling me.
	That's what I'm understanding.
	Because I see myself as a very creative person, and so I'll get these creative inspirations and feelings, and I'll do things.
	But I'll have to justify them later, usually.
	Oh, okay.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm sorry to interrupt you.
	So you're one of these, you know, maybe I'm wrong, but tell me if I'm wrong.
	It sounds to me, Morgan, like you're one of these, I'm creative, so have different standards for me kind of people.
	I used to be much more like that when I was younger.
	I've been working on that.
	Right.
	Okay.
	No, and that's important because to me, if you're creative, you have an additional responsibility.
	You don't have lower responsibilities.
	You have higher responsibilities because your creativity can do so much good in the world that I think you're held to a higher standard if you're creative, not a lower standard.
	Because creativity has a certain amount of charisma to it, and to the non or less creative, it looks like a kind of infinite magic, which is perhaps where your self-characterization of your creativity came from.
	It does look like a kind of magic.
	It's like a shy person watching Freddie Mercury, oh yeah, he's back.
	He would have been 70.
	I'd love to have heard his voice at 70, but anyway.
	So it's like a shy person watching Freddie Mercury...
	At Live Aid, this is magic.
	How is it possible that he's singing this ferociously, this concentratedly, this passionately, this excitedly?
	To all these people, I'd be up there frozen, right?
	And it looks like a kind of magic, these sorts of abilities.
	There used to be an old show called Whose Line Is It Anyway?
	with Drew Carey and others.
	Oh yeah, I used to watch that.
	Yeah, so you've seen it, right?
	There was this guy who was really good at singing.
	He had a talk show later.
	He was really good at making up songs on the fly.
	And of course, you know, these people have had years and years.
	He's the one I remember most from the show.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, he was great.
	He was great.
	And then a guy who showed up on Drew Carey's show, and he showed up on Two and a Half Men, I think, as the husband of the ex-wife.
	Anyway, I shouldn't know all these things.
	I really shouldn't, but...
	Yeah, so if you've not done a lot of improv, I mean, we did a lot of improv in theater school.
	Right.
	And if you've not done a lot of improv, it looks like magic.
	Like, how on earth did they know what to say that is really funny?
	Well, that's one thing.
	And the other thing is, you know, these guys would do shows for, like, hours and hours and hours, and then you get 20 minutes of funny stuff out of that.
	So it's not like, that's not 20 minutes of stuff to do a 20-minute show, I don't think, anyway.
	Right.
	So if you don't have a particular skill or ability, you haven't trained it in yourself, then people who can exercise it, it's a kind of magic, they get really excited by it and it looks like you're larger than life.
	And some people will use the charisma of ability to try and...
	Diminish the standards that are expected of them.
	Well, I'm so creative, how can I possibly expect it to be on time?
	You know what I mean?
	And I think that's turning creativity from a glorious skill into a sort of petty excuse and using it to get yourself off the hook of behavior that you loftily would not accept from other people.
	But you're creative!
	Right, right?
	Well, to be honest, I have experience writing songs and playing with my friends in my band and being up on stage and doing a wedding.
	I do have that experience.
	And to be honest, there were times when it felt magic to me.
	Even though the people in the audience thought I was a magician, it also felt magic to me while I was doing it.
	And it had to do with muscle memory.
	It had to do with...
	Just my grasp of the language, the English language, and my understanding of rhythm.
	You know, all the components falling together for me in time and being in the present moment.
	It also felt like magic to me.
	But of course, a lot of that had to do with me practicing at home and rehearsing with my friends as well.
	But I think maybe I get caught up in my own magic to a certain extent.
	And then I start to think, well, I guess it's magical thinking.
	I start to think, well, maybe those parts of me That existed before I was born and that will continue after I'm born have a consciousness.
	No, no, no.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	I think we might be zeroing in here, Morgan.
	Look, I understand the magic.
	You know, I'll stand here in this white ping pong ball studio and sometimes I think I come up with some quasi-Shakesperian speeches, sometimes largely off the cuff.
	It feels amazing.
	It is incredible.
	It's like climbing a mountain that you're building with your mind.
	It's amazing to watch you do that, too.
	I'm sorry?
	It's amazing to watch you do that.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	Spin off these things that are hilarious.
	You know, like there was one about the candy trail to the windowless fan of something.
	It was hilarious.
	Yeah.
	That stuff comes together well.
	I think most times it comes together well.
	But here's the thing.
	I view the abilities that I have, Morgan, as a service to the world.
	Not as a service to me.
	Not as a service to my ego.
	Not as a service to my vanity.
	Not as a service to my My sense of being important or my sense of being special or my sense of being great or wonderful or wise.
	I view the abilities that I have as a form of service to the world.
	I was going to say a form of bondage, but that may take a little bit more explaining than we have time for, so I'll just leave it there and move on.
	And as I've said, I think with great abilities come great responsibilities.
	So the question is, if you have the ability to make magic, how does it serve the world rather than you?
	Yes, I have thought about that as well.
	I've thought about education.
	You know, it's a way that you can educate kids through magic, through performance, through Whatever kind of creativity you have, like teaching my daughter to draw or teaching her things about music.
	I think it works really well with parenting.
	It's also, I've experienced it as a good way to kind of bring people together, you know, like playing music with the band at a party and it brings everybody together, you know, all the friends, all the people you work with, family.
	And so I've experienced it at that level, but not really much beyond that level.
	Right.
	So it's good entertainment, and I'm not saying that's bad.
	I love good entertainment.
	That's great.
	But it's good entertainment.
	But I think, I believe, that what the world needs now, with 6,000 channels and Netflix and Flixster and Hulu and Lord knows what.
	Right.
	What the world needs now is not more good entertainment, but more morally courageous people.
	Because what you're doing is something experienced as pleasurable by other people.
	I think what the world needs are conversations, insights, thoughts, arguments, speeches, perspectives that are not comfortable for people.
	I know certainly that for myself, when I come across an idea That I recoil from, I have to grip my teeth and say, okay, well, I'm going to try and understand this and I'm going to try and understand what value I can find in this argument, this idea, this approach, even though it may rail against my historical sensibilities and it may shock me to my Victorian core at times,
	I am willing to explore and to share ideas and arguments that were uncomfortable for me, but which I think are important for people to know.
	And if you're about creating that sort of connection with people, and there's nothing wrong with it.
	It's like you can't do it or it's bad or anything like that.
	But that's not controversial.
	And right now, I think that the world needs a little bit more shock and controversy because we have become enormously complacent.
	As a culture, by God, we just think we have all the answers in the known universe.
	We think we've got it all figured out.
	This-ism is good.
	That-ism is bad.
	These people are right.
	Those people are wrong.
	Everybody who says this is great.
	Everybody who says that is really bad.
	The arrogance is shocking in our culture.
	This is an arrogance that was...
	Never matched by the priesthood.
	The priesthood had contradictory statements within the Bible.
	The priesthood had translation difficulties.
	The priesthood had humility kneeling their tiny consciousnesses before the infinite mind of God.
	Yeah.
	Now, okay, Pope accepted, right?
	But in general, the priesthood had a fair amount of intellectual humility, which I've been reading about quite a bit lately for the conversation I had with Dr.
	Duke Pesta, which is, I think, coming out in the next day or two, which you should really...
	Watch.
	But the amount of arrogance that we have in the world now.
	This is racist.
	Hang on.
	They say, this is racist.
	This is sexist.
	This is homophobic.
	This is misogynistic.
	This is evil.
	This whole movement.
	This whole group.
	Trump is a racist.
	This alt-right is...
	Just coughing up all of these vomity hairballs of certainty.
	With no doubt.
	No doubt.
	Listen, there are ideologies that I consider enormously immoral.
	Yes.
	Communism is one.
	Yes.
	However, I'm not going to say all communists are evil.
	I want to try and understand what is motivating them, what is driving them, where they're coming from, what their goals are.
	Because they're sure as hell not all evil.
	Some of them have the very best intentions that can be imagined.
	And they have bad information, or they have not heard alternate arguments, or this is how they were raised, or whatever.
	And so this certainty that we have, and by that I generally mean the mainstream media, and the certainty, you know, the culture clash these days has been characterized as a war between the article and the comments section.
	Because the articles generally say, this, this, this, and this.
	These are all facts.
	This is what's going on.
	This is the reality.
	Boom, boom, boom.
	Trump said Mexicans did this, right?
	It's a fact, certainty.
	And then in the comments, people are saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on, hang on.
	What about this?
	There's this perspective.
	There's this perspective.
	This fact is incorrect.
	This was too broad a sweeping generalization.
	This is reasoning after the effect.
	This is an ad hominem.
	This is whatever, right?
	And so the people who are putting forth their certainties are doing so with the ultimate arrogance of ideology, right?
	And the people who are pushing back, and this is free market versus central planning.
	Central planners are full of people who have what I believe to be truly mental levels of certainty.
	Well, I know how healthcare should be organized.
	I know how much people should pay for this.
	I know how it should all be funded.
	I know where should it all be.
	I should know which doctors should be available to who.
	I just know all of this.
	It should never be pulled from the marketplace when it can be pushed from my Genius.
	And the free market approach is saying, I don't know.
	I don't know how healthcare should be organized.
	I know that we shouldn't use force to organize it, but the free market, the voluntarism, the non-aggression principle are all expressions of fundamental humility.
	I don't know what's best for you.
	I mean, how often do you hear me tell people what to do in this show?
	Forget it.
	Forget it.
	Won't do it.
	Would have no value even if I was tempted.
	That ring has no draw for me.
	That ring is a noose.
	And so the question is, I think, can you create the magic of puncturing the mad vanity of the modern world?
	That is the great magic.
	And I have this.
	I see this.
	You know, I'll come up with an argument or come up with a perspective or even invite someone on the show.
	Even if I don't agree with them, good Lord.
	It's important information to have.
	And people are like, oh, what happened?
	I'm shocked.
	Steph used to be this, now he's this.
	It's so terrible.
	But where's the argument?
	Where are the facts?
	Being shocked is not an argument, right?
	Hello, leftists.
	Being shocked and appalled is not an argument.
	Being shocked and appalled is a confession of both vanity and impotence.
	Okay.
	Vanity and impotence.
	Because if you find some idea that is shocking and appalling to you, and I'm not talking about, I don't know, let's fry up kittens for a cannibalistic orgy.
	You know, like ideas that are out there that have some intelligent people propagating them with some reason and evidence behind them.
	And if you're shocked and appalled, that means that you don't have a counter-argument, because if you did, you'd just say, well, here's where this is false, and here's the fact, fact, fact, right?
	And it also means that you're You're vain because you wish to reject the idea in the absence of having a counterargument, which means that you just wish to retain your existing ideology, though you have nothing to push back against the new idea, no way of disproving it.
	Well, it means that you have the vanity of wanting to be certain and the arrogance of rejecting ideas that you cannot formulate an argument against.
	And I think that the world needs, and this is what the great genius of Free speech is, let's let's let all the bad ideas out into the sunlight.
	Let's let everyone say all of their bad ideas, all their terrible ideas so that they can be evaluated and repudiated in the public sphere rather than driving them underground where they can't be directly challenged.
	And the magic that you are capable of creating I think is wonderful.
	But I'm not sure it's number one on the needs of the world at the moment.
	Exactly.
	I feel the same way.
	I haven't done a lot of music lately.
	I'm trained as an architectural designer.
	My background's in architecture as well.
	And I have a master's of architecture.
	But it sometimes feels like, you know, in the United States, there's this attitude where you have your profession, you have your work, and that's so you can get money.
	And then you have your hobby, and that's so you can feel good about yourself.
	But it's not about changing...
	It's not about shocking people or moving the culture forward as much as it is just about self-soothing.
	I mean, I think Americans are...
	People in the United States, when I say Americans, I'm focusing on the United States.
	I think that our religion is individualism.
	I think we have a true separation of church and state, but then everybody's so obsessed with being...
	Being a creative individual or being a productive individual or being right, just like you said.
	So, I guess, what can I do to get beyond that?
	I don't know that America is very individualistic these days.
	It seems there's a lot of group and identity politics and people are being...
	We're victimized as groups and judged as groups and, you know, all people on the alt-right say this and, you know, there's all the women are this and all the, you know, minorities do that and I think that there's a lot of collectivism in the U.S. at the moment but that's perhaps a topic for another time but, you know, find an idea that startles you.
	Explore it.
	Find out if there's validity to it and if there is, it doesn't have to be perfect, then communicate it.
	You know, one of the things that I found Very surprising.
	I mean, I could do four hours on these topics and more, but just to pick one off the top of my head, Morgan, one of the things that I found really surprising was the degree to which childhood trauma seems to have an effect on wartime, on war.
	And it was first mentioned to me by someone, and I thought, oh, come on, that's a stretch, right?
	But, you know, I try to be I try to have that kind of curiosity and integrity.
	It doesn't, hey, let's have the flat earth people, you know, like, let's, okay, let's hear it.
	I'm happy to give a platform.
	I'm, you know, I'll have debates with people I disagree with.
	I'll have people on the show I disagree with.
	And I will try to figure out What they have that is of value to offer and where the limitations are and all of that.
	And so, yeah, I became very interested in that.
	And the guy who was doing a lot of work on that was Lloyd DeMoss.
	And we had him on the show a couple of times.
	I read his The Origins of War and Child Abuse as an audiobook because I was going to read it anyway.
	And he kindly gave me permission to do it.
	And I thought I might as well read it with the care and attention of this and give it in a reproducible format.
	Me reading it is great, but me reading it in a way that tens or hundreds of thousands of people can download and listen to it Now, is everything in that book correct?
	I don't...
	Oh, sorry, let me just finish.
	Is everything in that book correct?
	I doubt it.
	I don't know that anything in any book is correct.
	But...
	Everything in any book is correct.
	But is it a stimulating and thoughtful examination of a potentially key causality in human conflict?
	Well, yeah, I think it is.
	And that idea came as a real shock to me.
	And all of that was...
	You know, the progress that I've had in my life, in this conversation, in this show, I think has a lot to do with people kind of get that sense that, well, he's not saying the same thing over and over again.
	He's learning and growing.
	He's exploring new avenues of causality.
	And there is a kind of, there's a humility in that.
	I mean, if I was still saying everything that I said 10 years ago, it would mean that my knowledge was perfect 10 years ago.
	I mean, come on, how could that possibly be?
	I am God!
	Yeah, so I think people get that.
	So you just find some idea that shocks you, explore it.
	If you find it has validity, use it to help other people out of their complacency.
	Okay, so it has to shock me, too.
	Because if it doesn't shock me, then it means I'm already comfortable with it, right?
	Yeah.
	Well, and it means then, if you're already comfortable with it, it probably means that the people around you are already comfortable with it.
	You know, because there are people who love when I challenge them with new information or new ideas, and there are other people who are uncomfortable with it.
	And it is for the people who are uncomfortable with it that I do it.
	Because that's how the culture stays alive.
	That's how the culture grows.
	That's how philosophy grows, is having people confront challenging ideas Find the weakness or find the strength, but not recoil.
	And that is the great challenge.
	And most likely if it doesn't shock you and you've had these same friends around for 20 years who you're gonna chat about it with, it's probably not gonna shock them.
	But if it shocks you, it's probably worth exploring and I think you'll get great Growth.
	And that's why you'll need your courage.
	Because if it shocks you, it may shock other people.
	And that's how you know you're going to need courage to get it across.
	Because it's not going to create that instant communal magic that, you know, Freebird does.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Excellent.
	Let me know how it goes, and I really appreciate you calling in.
	It was a very interesting conversation, and I do like it when I get to chat about the roots of what I do, so I hope I didn't totally hijack things for that, but I really appreciate it.
	No, it's okay.
	I listened to that whole book, too, the one that you read, The Origins of Child Abuse.
	For Child Abuse, yeah.
	Yeah.
	It was amazing.
	It's quite something.
	Yeah, and people can get that from freedomainradio.com slash free.
	So thanks everyone for a great and exciting and wonderful show.
	Oh, look at that.
	Pinch punch.
	The last day of the month.
	And so if you would like to go, you listen to this, please go to freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	To help out the show, to give us the cheddar we so need to keep ourself in hair oil.
	And so it's freedomainradio.com slash donate.
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	Let's get ourselves up to half a million.
	Why not?
	The sky's the limit.
	Thanks everyone so much for watching and for listening and most importantly at the moment for donating.
	Stefan Molyneux for Free Domain Radio.

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