Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Oct. 17, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:59:07

3456 FINDING TRUTH - Call In Show - October 12th, 2016

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hello, hello, everybody.
	It's Stefan Mulledy from Freedom Main Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Ooh, we had some good callers tonight.
	The first question was, how was it possible for rational philosophy to emerge in ancient Greece?
	And for those of you who are relatively new to the show, this answer will blow your mind.
	And to those who've been around for a while, I think this is a good reaffirmation of stuff we've talked about before.
	And how on earth can we get back to the preference for universal truth?
	Now the second caller is a staggeringly beautiful young woman who is struggling to find a quality man of her own age, someone to share her life with.
	What can she do to try and find a man that she can love?
	Can anybody find me somebody to love?
	It's my favorite song and it is a passionate cry throughout the world.
	We had a long conversation about this and I hope it's helpful for you because it would be just great if more people found each other and fell in love.
	Now, the next caller had an ethical theory which said something like this.
	The actions which increase net available human time are good and those which destroy it are bad.
	And it's a good conversation to try and figure out how we can evaluate other people's moral beliefs.
	And I really, really enjoyed the chat.
	Ooh, geek alert, geek alert.
	The fourth question was a caller called in because I recently did a review for Doom 2016 and he wants to know to what degree can video games be called an art and what is the content and how could they be improved?
	Now I actually, if I wasn't in this gig, I'd be in the video game gig because I am a passionate gamer from...
	Way back.
	And I think that games have a massive potential to make the world a better place.
	They just need to be a little bit more creative and original.
	So we had a long, massive geek out about video games.
	And I really, really look forward to hearing your thoughts about that.
	And the fifth caller, a conservative and an atheist, and wants to know, how can atheists be moral, given that so many atheists seem to fall into leftism and seem to fall into nihilism and so on?
	Can atheists be moral?
	And what are the most concise arguments to bring to atheists about morality?
	So just a great all-round set of questions, great all-round conversations.
	Thanks, everyone, so much for calling in.
	Please, please help us out at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Sign up for a monthly subscription, 10 or 20 bucks.
	You know, it's a couple of cents a day, and you do a great deal to help us bring philosophy to the world.
	And, you know, you never have to Remember to donate.
	It happens automatically.
	So thanks everyone so much.
	Don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
	Here we go.
	Alright, well up first today we have Elias.
	Elias wrote in and said, How can it be that Greek philosophers questioning the objective intelligibility of lowly matter, human thinking?
	Analyzing the moving and material world, they started the most comprehensive and accurate scrutiny of reality of all times, including the search for the immortal soul and for the transcendent being we call God.
	How can this be?
	I personally see Aristotle as the culmination of this ancient Greek realism.
	You'll probably agree.
	And now that modern science is often used to limit our freedom, maybe even more than religion ever did, how can we retrace universal truth?
	That's from Elias.
	Hey Elias, how are you doing tonight?
	Good evening, Stefan.
	It's great to be on your show.
	You know, I'm your first European, but I thought you...
	You needed some contacts in Europe too because the show was very interesting and I was really relieved and very happy to see that the thought of Aristotle actually is a little bit at the basis of your sight, if I may say so.
	Yes, I think that's very accurate.
	So, well, it's great to chat with you.
	I'm going to just give you a couple of thoughts and then we'll get into a back and forth if that's alright with you.
	Fantastic!
	Excellent.
	Okay.
	So, there is a very important aspect to understand about Greek philosophy.
	And really, there was no philosophy before Greece, at least in the West, and I would argue sort of anywhere.
	And the first real philosopher, his name was Thales.
	And he was the first guy who began to say something like this.
	Hey, you know all the crazy stuff that happens in the world?
	You know, we've got rain, thunder, lightning, meteors, big giant waves, and sudden frosts in June, and all the crazy stuff.
	I've got a crazy thought.
	Maybe, just maybe.
	Maybe the crazy stuff that happens isn't all the whims of the gods.
	Maybe, just maybe.
	There's a rational, scientific explanation for all of the crazy stuff that happens in the world.
	Now, fortunately, he was not immediately put to death for his heresy, and he started talking about philosophy, and really, very early on, philosophy and science were the same thing, but there was no particular difference to it.
	The sort of syllogisms that Aristotle worked with or the Socratic method, well, that was much later.
	But originally, there was just this idea, hey, maybe we shouldn't just think we're living inside the brain of a giant crazy entity called gods or deities or a pantheon.
	Maybe, maybe, just maybe, we can make some sense of this world.
	And yeah, Thales was pretty cool.
	He was the first guy to figure out that the world was a sphere.
	Robot penguin gods accepted and he figured out a whole bunch of stuff about math and science and all that kind of stuff.
	So the question is, why did he suddenly say, maybe we can make some sense of the world and maybe it's not all the whim of the gods?
	Now, my argument, very briefly, will be this.
	When parents restrain themselves from psychotic emotional outbursts, then children can grow up with the sense that the world is rational.
	When children first come into the world, they do not perceive the world as it is.
	They do not perceive the objective world.
	What they perceive, what they process, what they understand, the universe they live in, It's the minds of their parents, the minds, hearts, and emotions of their parents.
	Now, if their parents are crazy, if their parents are hyper-emotional, if their parents are hysterical, then they're going to grow up with a sense that the world is dominated by random emotional outbursts,
	by a massive tidal back-and-forth pendulum of hyper- Feelings and irrational outbursts and anger and then conciliation and love and hatred and their primary reference point is going to be not reason, not thought, not objectivity, but emotion.
	And the more unpredictable the parents' emotions are, the more the children will believe that the universe is an insane realm trapped inside the mind Of a crazy god.
	So, why was Thales the first guy to figure out that the world could be understood in a rational context?
	Well, I would argue, and I don't know if there's any way to know, but I would argue that it's because the parents of Thales, when he was a boy, were not insane.
	And it's really, really important to understand, insanity...
	It's the default position for almost all of human history.
	Just as child abuse is the default position for almost all of human history.
	I mean, the book that I read, The Origins of War and Child Abuse, is really, really important.
	And the author said...
	That if somebody could provide him evidence of any childhood before the 17th century that wouldn't currently get the parents thrown in jail for abuse, he would be happy to do so.
	And the parents throughout almost all of human history were insane and by modern standards would be criminals, would be evil.
	Child abuse was rampant.
	Infanticide.
	Extremely.
	I mean, we've all heard the stories of the child sacrifices that occurred in the Aztecs, right?
	The top of the mountain, you'd cut the child's heart out.
	Even in some Polynesian islands, maybe even Hawaii it was, they would throw children to sharks to appease the gods.
	Infanticide was common throughout the ancient world, just as, of course, it is tragically common in China and other places with restrictions on childbirth, because people want sons.
	And so, if your parents...
	If your parents are sane, then they become gateways to reality.
	If your parents are crazy, then most times they trap you in a world where your primary reference point is other people's emotions rather than objective reality.
	The rise of historical political correctness, the special snowflake stuff, the cry bully phenomenon, that's because there are a lot of crazy parents out there.
	In particular, even if they're not crazy, which they often are, single moms just don't have the time or resources.
	You need to lead your children to reality.
	You need to be the archway or the gateway through which they get to reality.
	You do that by being sane, by being stable, by being predictable, by being affectionate, by being positive.
	We learn about reality through our parents' emotions.
	I'm not going to get into all of the details as to why that is the case.
	I think evolutionarily, we can understand that for children – The most important thing is to please their parents because you are dependent upon the goodwill of your parents for many, many years before you can win your sustenance by dealing with objective reality.
	So if you don't please your parents, well, you're toast.
	Like you're going to die.
	So again, that's sort of the general theory that parenting improved in Athens in particular or other places where philosophy flourished.
	And it was because of that Improvement in parenting that we had the capacity for people to process through to reality, through to objective reality.
	To put it another way, when you're around crazy people, oh, I can tell you this.
	So when you're around crazy people, demands for objectivity or preference for objectivity is considered to be a highly offensive and volatile action or demand.
	And that's something I hope you never have to experience.
	When you're around crazy people and you demand objectivity, like if you're around somebody – and I've had this conversation a dispiriting number of times in my life, though fortunately not for the last 15 or 20 years, but I guess on this show a little bit.
	But when you're around people who say, you know, oh, I have psychic phenomena.
	I have psychic abilities.
	I can blah, blah, blah.
	And then you ask them to prove it and you take them down to play a test.
	They'll get angry.
	So if you have crazy people in your life – And you start to demand objectivity and rationality and science and philosophy and so on, they will get angry.
	Now, children cannot afford to anger their parents because the parents will then not provide the resources and those genes will never make it.
	So, there are two contrasting societies that I'm going to go into at some point in more detail, but let's just do them very briefly here.
	Athens versus Sparta.
	Athens was more genteel.
	Athens was more philosophical.
	Athens was more democratic.
	Athens was less warlike.
	And Spartan, well, we know, right?
	Spartan is like self-denial, asceticism, war, combat, and all that kind of stuff.
	And there's evidence that if you wanted to be a kid who had a decent, happy childhood, you would always want to choose to be born into Athenian society rather than into Spartan, into Sparta.
	So there's artwork that survives from ancient Athens and it shows parents and the entire society attempting to defend young children because there was this infanticide and there was, of course, sexual predation upon children throughout almost all of human history.
	There's gravestones where the depiction is of fathers with arms wrapped lovingly around young children.
	Archaeological digs have shown wonderful toys and evidence of games in ancient Athens.
	They're like dolls, but the arms and legs actually move.
	There are spinning tops, rattles, dice, hoops.
	There are seesaws and swings, playgrounds.
	There's a game called Ephedrimos.
	I don't know if you've ever played the game Blind Man's Bluff.
	It's kind of like that.
	You carry a partner on your back.
	There's knuckle bones, jacks and dice, and when children were buried, their favorite toys were buried with them.
	There's pets, tortoises, bird cages, things for kids.
	So kids had it pretty good in ancient Athens, and even in Rome, and I talked about this in the presentation, the fall of Rome, which Please, if you haven't seen it, please go see it.
	But there was a strong debate, a more vigorous debate in many ways over whether children should be hit or not, whether corporal punishment or spanking was good for children or bad for children.
	Did it make them obedient or did it just turn them into slaves?
	So very – so I think we can go into this in more detail, but very briefly there was – Real indication of significant parental affection of a society that worked very hard to make childhood as much fun as possible and infanticide.
	There have been some reports of infanticide in ancient Athens, but a lot of people think that this was kind of overblown and given the intense affection shown by parents towards children in a lot of the artwork, it seems a little hard to believe.
	So that's Athens.
	When children are surrounded by predictable affection and love and someone, then they can step through the minds of their parents into actual reality without offending their parents.
	When my daughter makes a logical argument, it's not offensive to me.
	It's great.
	When she proves me wrong about something, it's not offensive to me.
	It's great.
	So she has no problem.
	Now, if I was a different kind of parent, And would get offended and upset and enraged by these things, then of course she would stop doing it almost immediately because children cannot afford to offend their parents.
	So let's look at Sparta.
	You have a baby in Sparta.
	The first thing that happens, soldiers come to your house and examine it top to bottom.
	To determine its strength and viability and to look for any deformities or any problems or maybe even any birthmarks that were untoward and so on, you would bathe the baby not in water but in wine to see its reaction.
	Now, if the baby was determined to be deficient or weak in some manner, then the Spartans would just leave it on a hillside and basically it would die of exposure or they would take it away to become a hillot or a slave.
	Infanticide, again, all over the place.
	Spartans, very picky.
	Very, very...
	It's like a Washington Hilton in a shoe store.
	Very picky about their children.
	And the family was not dominant in this.
	It was the city-state that decided whether your child would live or die.
	It was nurses, not mothers, who had the primary care of the baby, and they sure as hell didn't coddle it.
	I mean, this is like the...
	Because abortion was outlawed, there were like 100,000 babies that were just raised at these state farms.
	It was probably something quite similar to that.
	So if the soldiers said your baby could live, or your son in this case, well, at age seven, hey, it's your seventh birthday.
	Knock, knock, knock.
	Who's come?
	Soldiers.
	Soldiers take the boys from their mothers at the age of seven.
	This is a common age.
	It's called the age of reason in some philosophies because they thought, well, look.
	I mean if we leave the boys with their mothers, they're going to get soft, turn into jellyfish.
	They won't be the hard men that we need for our wars.
	They took them to – it's like a boarding school or a dormitory.
	Basically, it was a barracks for children.
	They took the children to these barracks.
	Harsh, brutal physical discipline and deprivation.
	They marched endless miles with no shoes.
	They were starved.
	They learned to fight brutally.
	They learned how to endure pain and try and find ways to survive through their wits.
	This is similar to the prefect system in boarding schools.
	It's less common now.
	The older boys would happily beat the crap out of the younger boys to toughen them, you know, self-denial, warrior code, loyalty to the city-state.
	That's what they were all about.
	And they had these endless stories of like courage and fortitude and one of the favorite Spartan stories about this boy.
	And this is – they weren't fed enough, right?
	The boys weren't fed enough.
	So you were encouraged to go scrounge for food, but you were punished if you were caught scrounging for food, because, you know, you have to get used to irrational commands if you're going to be in the Spartan military.
	So a boy captured a live fox, and he was going to eat it.
	But he knew he would be brutally punished if he was caught with the live fox.
	So half-starved, he's walking back to his barracks, and he sees...
	Adult Spartan soldiers marching up the road towards him.
	So what did he do?
	Well, he couldn't release the fox.
	They'd see him, plus he was starving and needed to eat.
	So he stuffed the fox up his shirt and tried to hide it under his tunic.
	And the soldiers stopped and asked him what he was doing.
	But he allowed, this boy allowed the fox to chew directly into his belly Rather than confess what he had done or admit to the existence of the fox, he had a casual conversation with the soldiers.
	He showed no sign of pain in his face, made no change of expression, no change in his voice, as the fox chewed its way into his stomach.
	That was considered to be the highest ideal for the Spartan society.
	Did philosophy arise in Sparta?
	No.
	Basically, it was a giant training ground for homicidal psychosis.
	There was no way to get through to a predictable, rational universe in such a brutalized and horrifying childhood.
	So, I think that's probably what happened.
	I think that for a variety of reasons, Athens became the seat of affectionate parenting.
	Which allowed children to step through the minds of their parents into the world of reality for the first time in human history.
	We climbed out of the tribe and into the world.
	Out of the crazy and into the scientific.
	Out of the madness and into the rational.
	But we can't really, in general, be any more rational than our parents allow us to be.
	That's why a more rational world.
	Really has to start with parenting.
	So that's my introduction.
	What are your thoughts?
	Well, I certainly agree that the conditioning of the parents and the environment is very important.
	No doubt.
	And I like the comparison between Sparta and Athens because when you read Aristotle about it, it's quite funny.
	He resumes actually opinions of other Greeks about Sparta and they were a bit scared, obviously, but they also laughed about the Spartans because they said they can fight but the woman has the pants on.
	And I found actually quite an interesting analogy between the pressure of the women on the men in Sparta which is quite obvious from tombstones also where they find inscriptions saying my son is a coward he's buried because he died not like a hero or he left his arms on the battlefield so and actually in when I was a priest working in prison I found actually the same pressure of the women on the man that means you
	can have pleasure with me as much as you like as long As you show yourself a man by bringing home nice, jazzy cars and diamonds and nice things.
	It's a very sort of primitive, mutual pressure, the man being abusive and rough for each other.
	The women using psychological stress to have the men where they want.
	It's also actually, at the Olympic Games, the Spartans did quite well, but they were never champions.
	It's just a lack of creativity, of intelligence and everything.
	The whole strange paradox between Having to steal and being encouraged to steal, but then being punished when you're stolen, that resembles very much to the Soviet system.
	They could only survive with a very corrupt economy because then they could keep people busy.
	And punish them and pretend to be a state, giving some safety to the people, you know?
	It's a very common factor of all totalitarian systems to create the deficiency and then show them, you know, and the power shows itself as the savior from all those deficiencies.
	But the deficiencies themselves are extremely artificial.
	Oh yeah, I mean, a lot of times...
	That's a very old story, you know, and it happens all over and over again.
	You make people hungry and they'll be so happy when you feed them.
	You know, and I'm afraid it's happening a little bit in our society also, but on other levels.
	So I think the comparison between Sparta and Athens for, let's say, the other cities would be very interesting.
	Actually, I can tell you, as a pilgrim, I can be very...
	I'll say that.
	I find it fantastic going to holy places like Jerusalem or Bethlehem, but I must say, I also get a kick out of going to holy places of philosophy.
	Actually, the marketplace where Thales sat down and thought about molecules and all that, I sat on the same marketplace, you know.
	It gives you a very strange feeling when you're sitting on a bench Or a bit of rubble, I must say.
	Of course, it's ruins.
	But you sit there and you reflect on it that other people before you started reflecting on molecules in this very same place, you know?
	Apart from the parental, let's say, conditioning, why is it, you know, people have been sort of philosophizing before.
	The Egyptians were...
	They were busy with mathematics, which is part, if you like, of the objective way of thinking.
	The way we imagine things and the way we construct things and the logic of all that.
	The Egyptians were busy with that.
	The Sumerians in the Middle East looked at the stars, you know.
	They thought, what's going on up there?
	And if you want, we can look at China, where the harmony of society has always been...
	A very important preoccupation, this whole Taoist philosophy and Confucian philosophy.
	But why is it that the Greeks starting to look at the moving material world downstairs, the chicken lays an egg and out of the egg comes another chicken and then we have the spring and the fall, you know.
	Why is it that these Greeks who looked at the material, very simple, mortal, down-to-earth objective reality, actually I think, actually, when I follow them, with the most objective proof of the,
	if you like, proof of the immortal soul, and even Aristotle, a very brilliant analysis and synthesis of all his philosophies, where he says, there must be a god, you know?
	The thing is, this is today very difficult to show, because I think we have a false separation between science and philosophy.
	And people think that science is concrete and realistic, whereas actually I think the way people today look at science is just technology.
	I'm an engineer myself, and the only thing that seems left of what was originally meant by science is just technology, whereas philosophy seems to be Something for people opening a bottle and having a discussion about nothing, or like I'm doing now, speaking by Skype in the middle of the night to somebody in Canada.
	Well, let's start with one of the points that you made that I think was very insightful, which is mathematics has been pursued by a variety of cultures, and of course Arabic cultures were really great.
	If I remember rightly, it was the Arabic cultures, the Muslim cultures, that first figured out Can I just interrupt one moment, Stefan?
	Because a lot of the things that came through us through the Arabs were actually either from India From the Indus civilizations, which actually Islam completely obliterated.
	And, well, I mean, it was not the Indus civilization in archaeological terms, but it was the old Greek civilization and the Indian civilizations having mixed.
	And also, let's not forget that the Arabs started philosophizing when they translated the Greek philosophy that was kept by the Eastern Christians into Arabic, because they were governing the Christians.
	But they saw we need that culture too.
	So a lot of the things that we call Arab, like the Arab numbers, actually they're from India.
	And a lot of the medicine actually was from the former Roman and Greek-Persian civilization that was transmitted by the Christians.
	But sorry, that's just a footnote.
	I keep trying to find ways to give the Islamic culture some props, but if that's not the case, then I'm going to go with what you said.
	I'm not denying that they had a positive influence on that.
	They didn't invent it all by themselves.
	They were good heirs of this.
	Right, right.
	Well, I think one thing that's important about mathematics is that mathematics...
	Does not threaten authority, right?
	No, it doesn't.
	No.
	Mathematics is a useful tool for things like calculating crops, for artillery, for calculating how much food your troops need.
	So one of the things about mathematics is that it can be enormously useful for serving the powers that be.
	But philosophy, not so much.
	Philosophy, almost in general, is not really great for serving the powers that be.
	I think that is one of the big differences.
	Why was mathematics pursued in certain cultures when they didn't really get to philosophy?
	For that reason.
	Mathematics can be served to the state.
	So logistical reasoning is very hard to turn to the state and inevitably it turns people away from the state, which is why the Spartans function basically under a military dictatorship and there was significant humanistic kind of democracy in Athens.
	So that would be my suggestion as to why mathematics goes in some places whereas philosophy doesn't.
	I mean the government will – the government funds science, right?
	I mean we just look at sort of the current world, right?
	The government funds science.
	The government funds mathematics.
	The government funds technology, computer science and all of that.
	I mean the government funding was one of the things that laid the backbone of the shaky-daky house of cards we call the internet.
	But the government does not fund me, right?
	The government doesn't fund philosophy in general.
	The government will fund other things that provide useful tools for the dominance of the population, domination of the population that the governments always like to pursue.
	But the governments will usually never fund philosophy.
	I mean governments may fund in general the humanities.
	But they won't fund good philosophy.
	They'll fund the bullshit that goes on in academia, but they won't fund actual philosophy, which makes a difference in people's lives.
	So my guess is that these were fairly stated societies.
	There was some real value.
	I mean, just look at navigation, right?
	It's really a lot easier to navigate long distances, particularly on the ocean, if you've got some math, if you've got a sextant and so on.
	But they don't want to find philosophy, so my guess is it probably has something to do with that.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Now, how do we get back there?
	Yeah, that's of course.
	And I said Thales.
	Is it Thales?
	Is it pronounced Thales?
	Or I think you said Thales.
	Well, it's Thales.
	I don't know.
	I'm trying to get to the correct pronouncement of Greek, but it's Thales or Thales, you know.
	Okay, but not White Boy Thales.
	Okay, that's fine.
	It's in Asia Minor.
	You know, it's today West Turkey.
	That's where the...
	The physicist school started.
	I think it's a remarkable beginning.
	I mean, if I were God, it would make me love humanity that they start with such common sense.
	The common things, you know.
	It's the lowly things they started to analyze.
	And they ended up, well, I think getting very close to finding God as much as the human intelligence can say something about it.
	And, for example, the moral of Aristotle, I sometimes get disagreements about this with my brothers of religion.
	But I think if you look well at the history of Alexander the Great, I think the Aristotelian morals had a very important influence on him.
	And actually founded his, I would say, his Macedonian society on this will to have a common goal and not just be slaves of your king.
	But that's a different story.
	It might detract.
	As far as returning to universal truth, unfortunately, falsehood has just become So enormously profitable.
	We are resource acquisition beings first and moralists second, if at all.
	We are animals.
	We are mammals.
	And in order to philosophize, you have to have food.
	You have to have shelter.
	You have to have leisure.
	You have to have some excess time.
	And when human beings are faced with the choice between integrity and And survival.
	We all have these stories of people like Sir Thomas More and other people who chose to not survive for the sake of their integrity.
	And these stories are sort of put forward to us as these wonderful ideals that we should all pursue and enjoy and recognize.
	And it's wrong.
	It's wrong.
	I mean, Jesus would be another.
	It's wrong because that's not how people work.
	That's not how biology works.
	That's not how evolution works.
	Evolution has fine-tuned us to gather resources at the expense of integrity.
	And all of these stories of all these people who choose death before dishonor, it's just a way of making us feel bad for what we know we're going to do anyway, which is to choose to survive rather than I get this question.
	You think taxation is theft but you pay your taxes.
	Yes, I do because I'm a mammal and I choose to survive and I choose to do all the good in the world I can do through surviving.
	I don't have any problem with that.
	I don't consider – I mean anyone who looks at a tax system and thinks that I'm the immoral agent, well, you've got to just look again to put it as nicely as possible.
	So we do have all of these stories.
	Of all of these heroes who choose to die rather than to betray their virtues and their values.
	That's all nonsense.
	It's just setting up an impossible moral standard that almost nobody except a crazy person or two is going to follow so that then we feel bad and we feel like cowards and we feel like we betrayed ourselves.
	It's just a way of defanging the strength of moral resolution.
	So how do we get back there?
	Well, not through pointless self-sacrifice, but right now, We have to wait for the incentives to change.
	Arguing people into giving up material rewards for the sake of abstract virtue is almost never going to work.
	In fact, it's so rare.
	It's like saying, well, we don't need oncology because we don't need to treat cancer because sometimes tumors, they just spontaneously remit.
	They just spontaneously vanish.
	So we don't need – no, of course.
	I guess it happens but it's pretty rare, spontaneous remission.
	So right now, the government is in control of trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars and as resource-acquiring mammals, people are enormously attracted to that money.
	And what they do is they come up with justifications after the fact, if they even bother with them at all, as to how gaining control of or getting that money is fair, right?
	There's an old Seinfeld where Kramer gets some job, I think at an insurance company or whatever, and he ends up with some illicit something or other, and he's like, Doesn't matter, Jerry.
	They just write it off.
	And Jerry says, what does that mean, they write it off?
	You don't even know what that means.
	It's just some excuse that you use for stuff you took.
	They just write it off.
	And so people say, well, you know, let's say you're a welfare mom and you're dependent on the system.
	You're dependent on the state.
	You say, well, the rich people game the system.
	Why shouldn't I? Or you genuinely believe the government is like some rich, wonderful uncle that just loves you.
	Or you say, well, it was the guy's fault who knocked me up.
	And so he's not paying me my child support, so he'll pay taxes and I'll get it from the government.
	Or even if people even bother with that.
	And on the business side, of course, you have to take advantage of all the special favors and bonuses and benefits and lobbying that you can.
	That's Your business model.
	And if you don't follow it, well, you're going to go out of business and you might get sued for a betrayal of your fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders, your employees, your stakeholders and you name it.
	So right now, because the government controls half or sometimes even more of crazy huge rich economies, it's so profitable to pursue and hold on to state power.
	That people will just pursue it because it's a wonderful way to ensure your own survival.
	And it's something that accelerates, right?
	So in the past, you used to be able to get a job out of high school and stay there until you retired at 60 or whatever and you get good benefits and all that kind of stuff.
	And so the free market was – had significant advantages over the government market, right?
	The public sector market.
	That began to change when governments began to unionize and so many governments began to unionize which should never have been necessary because according to any left-wing theory, the reason why you need unions in the private sector is because the private sector bosses, they want to lower the workers' wages because they want to be profitable.
	They want profit.
	There's no profit motive in the public sector so you shouldn't need any unions but you get them anyway.
	And when the unions began to take over in the government, then government work became much more attractive relative to private sector work because as unions took more and more money and destabilized more and more private sector businesses, then job security vanished in the private sector because it was accruing in the public sector.
	I mean you can't have job security in the public sector without destroying job security in the private sector.
	It's a zero-sum game or a negative-sum game actually.
	So you've got tons of people working for the government.
	You've got tons of people dependent on the government.
	You've got lots of big businesses working.
	Part of their assets, right?
	I mean, part of the assets that businesses have is their relationship with the government.
	And that's a genuine, absolute asset that is worth an enormous amount of money.
	And you start saying, well, you know, we've got to minimize or reduce government control over the economy.
	Well, all that means is that the assets vanish.
	You might as well say to Intel where you've got to shut down.
	A third of your plants.
	They're going to say, the hell we do.
	We've worked for years to build up those plants and they're working very well.
	Thank you very much.
	And so until the incentives change, you can't really talk people out of what they feel is their just desserts, what they have aligned and adapted their entire lives towards collecting.
	You can't.
	I mean, you can try.
	I mean, you can go to someone who's like six months away from retiring from their crappy government job they worked at for 25 years, and you can say, well, I don't think you should take any retirement benefits because here's all the moral arguments and this, that, and the other.
	Or, you know, somebody just won a million dollars in the lottery.
	You say, well, you know, you shouldn't really cash that.
	You understand, right?
	I mean, they're just going to do it anyway.
	And it's a way, like, if the incentives are all off, It doesn't matter what you say.
	It doesn't matter what you say if the incentives are all off.
	Now, you can't budge the incentives with words but you can prepare people for the fallout that's going to happen when the incentives fall apart, right?
	When the government runs out of money, when the debt can't be sustained, when the money printing and the kicking the can down the road and the borrowing and all of that can't be sustained, then You can help prepare people for that transition.
	But no, I don't particularly want to go to the Democratic National Convention and say, well, people, this is all money.
	And even to the Republican National Convention, Trump accepted and all – Trump supporters accepted.
	All these guys are – as we saw from the Tea Party, they've got their nose deep in the same trough as everyone else.
	It doesn't matter what you say, right?
	Because we're mammals and we want resources.
	So how do we get back there?
	Well, we prepare the groundwork.
	We remind people of the immorality.
	And we have to wait for the energy to run out of the system before we can change it.
	Well, in a way, you know, I'm a European.
	And I must say, I wasn't much interested in American political life, especially after the whole...
	The Bush administration with its attack on Iraq, which I think was, you know, even not entering too much into politics, but that was a very, very big blow for the...
	I would say for the moral...
	For the moral preference for democracy and Western civilization, I think that was a very big blow.
	But as far as I'm concerned, I found back a little bit of confidence in the politician.
	That didn't come through really, but I think he has had a great moral effect.
	That's Ron Paul.
	I find him extremely interesting because of his humility and And the principles, you know, I think he's a man who analyzes and comes to certain principles and is consistent with them.
	I've lived in Britain actually in the 70s and I've seen what happens to a country where actually unions govern the country.
	I mean, you can like Margaret Thatcher or not.
	But she did a job that nobody wanted to do, that is, break the power of the unions.
	I mean, there might have been bad consequences of what she did.
	I mean, I don't want to enter into that discussion.
	But we saw a country where actually that had fell into a complete sclerosis Oh, I grew up there, I know.
	Oh yeah, you're Irish, aren't you?
	No, I was born in Ireland, but I grew up in England in the 70s.
	Okay, okay, so we were at the same time.
	It's just one thing where I wonder...
	Where you say the evolutionary processes of man, I would say I agree with that.
	That's our conditioning, the survival, that's the animal in us.
	But, you know, there's part of the Greek philosophy, and I think a very intelligent part of Aristotle, where he talks about the immortal soul.
	So I would say that the search for higher...
	Not just moral values, because I don't like the word norms and values very much.
	It's sort of fashionable.
	But what I like is the whole search of a finality which man has in himself to sort of get over this conditioning and not abolish it or destroy it, but sort of give it a new meaning, the human conditioning of which evolution is a part.
	So...
	I actually think that finding back objectivity is also finding back finality, asking questions why you are doing this.
	It means you're going to have to respect a lot of other people who are in search for this meaning that is beyond the human conditioning.
	But of course, I agree with what you talk about, about having to deal with survival and this conditioning is like a foundation for our daily life and the respect we have for each other.
	But I would Talk a little bit more about the fact that we have an immortal soul and that...
	Well, I mean, if there is a God, we are creatures too.
	And although these things are not too obvious to us, we may ask these questions.
	And for me, for example, the existence of God is in fact touching science because Aristotle defines science as the knowledge of things that...
	Are by necessity.
	I don't know if you remember that he says it somewhere.
	That's the way he defines science.
	So I think actually part of finding back this objectivity has got to do with giving back people responsibility of their own lives and having respect for the fact that of the ways that without destroying the others they try to transcend their own conditioning.
	You know, one cult film for me, which I saw when I was 12, you might have seen it.
	It's THX 1138.
	Do you know that film?
	That's Lucas's first film, right?
	Sorry?
	That's it.
	George Lucas' first film, right?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And, you know, I'm not really into Star Wars.
	I think it's a bit too nerdy for me.
	But that first film, I think it's monumental because it shows a complete totalitarian society where everything is like a caricature of Christianity.
	I don't know if you remember the confessional where he's...
	I've not seen the movie.
	Ah, okay, okay.
	Well, go and see it, you see, because I was a boy of 12 and of course all the social media were not there yet and television was really, you know, something, well, I mean, it was the medium.
	That got the kids fascinated.
	So I remember the impression that the film made on this, and the guy escapes at the end of the town, and I sort of felt, I'm going to be like that guy, you know?
	So, in fact, we live very much in this kind of totalitarian society, where you say that a lot of crazy people that Become angry when you are objective.
	And I actually also, or maybe especially as a priest, I'm confronted to this.
	Because if you try to pierce all the ideologies that are around you, people get angry.
	You know?
	And it seems a lot of people have lost the will to be responsible of their own lives.
	you know?
	Right.
	Right.
	Well, we can perhaps call in, we can talk about...
	I would disagree with, sorry, I would just disagree with you saying that the death of Socrates was useless.
	It sparked off an immense renewal of Greek philosophy, which was in a phase of decadence.
	And, well, if I look at the immortal soul, I think I said that it was useless.
	I just think it's a story that very few people can emulate.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, I agree.
	But it's an example for people who are a bit less courageous, like me, and who think, well, I mean, it is a joy.
	It is a joy to search the truth and see other people searching and search together.
	It's conversing about the truth and, you know.
	This search of objectivity.
	We are confronted with the totalitarian tendencies of today's society if we want to find back this objectivity.
	Yes, I certainly think you do.
	We all do need to find ways back to this objectivity, and certainly I'm bending every effort of my will and brain cells to get there.
	But thanks very much for your calling.
	We'll move on to the next caller, because we do have five tonight.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know.
	The poor guys have been listening.
	Thank you very much, Stefan, and it's been nice talking to you.
	Take care.
	God bless.
	Alright, up next is Louise.
	She wrote in and said, Hey, Louise, how are you doing?
	Hey, how are you doing?
	I'm alright, I'm alright.
	Have you had any luck in your pursuit of quality man meat?
	Yeah, sure, I had my luck.
	I would say, yeah.
	As a boyfriend or how are we speaking?
	Well, I mean, you haven't found the man you want to settle down with and spend the rest of your life with.
	Well, obviously, no.
	Unless this occurred since you sent in your email, I guess.
	So what's the most luck that you've had with this scenario?
	I would guess that's probably my last boyfriend, I think was the best boyfriend I had.
	He was Or he is, or was older than me.
	He had already three children, but he was intelligent, very good-looking, polite.
	He had a lot of good qualities, I would say.
	He was very good.
	And we were together for like a year, maybe?
	And then we broke up this spring, so now I've been single again.
	Three kids?
	Yeah, three of them with a woman he was married to twice, yeah.
	What now?
	Married to what?
	Twice?
	A woman, yeah, twice, the same one.
	Yeah, no, the woman part is not the part that bothers me, although I get that with the kids thing and all that, unless she was married to a very fertile stretch of ground.
	They were married twice?
	Yeah, they were married twice and divorced twice, obviously.
	Yeah, I get that.
	So they were together, they dated, they got engaged, they got married, they got divorced, they got married, they got divorced.
	How long into the relationship were you aware of this little dead cat bounce of a marriage merry-go-round?
	Well, he told me, like, in the beginning, and I actually bullied him for that for a while, but then I just got pussy-napped, I guess, and I just kept on dating him.
	You bullied him?
	You mean you sort of made fun of him?
	I made fun of him, yeah, well...
	I laughed at him for that fact when he told me.
	I thought it was funny.
	Okay, so here's the problem.
	Why is it funny?
	Oh, well, because it's a failure, right?
	Yeah, but aren't you kind of missing something important?
	He's got three children.
	I mean, how was that, do you think, for the children?
	Mommy and Daddy love each other.
	Mommy and Daddy are getting a divorce.
	Mommy and Daddy love each other again.
	Oh, just kidding.
	Mommy and Daddy are getting a divorce again.
	Well, that's awful, obviously.
	But there's some part of you that finds it funny.
	Well, you have to look at things in life like that, I guess.
	That's not much of an answer.
	No, it's not funny.
	Of course it's not funny.
	Like, I'm a divorced child myself, so I know the pain it inflicts on you.
	Did your parents get married twice?
	Oh, no.
	Once.
	And how old were you when your parents got divorced?
	About three.
	Ah, okay.
	And did you have any kind of relationship with your father when you were growing up?
	Yeah.
	You know, my mom had the custody and so we spent most time with her and then we We went to my father's like twice in a month.
	Every other weekend we visited him.
	Okay, why was it so lopsided?
	I mean, it seems like that's mostly mom, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	So we were like going to school at my mom's or my hometown and my dad was living In another city like an hour away, so we went there to him just for the weekends and then went to school and lived at my mom's place.
	Right.
	So when the boyfriend that you had was talking about the marriage, the divorce, the marriage, the divorce, how did he discuss it with you?
	What was his sort of emotional tone?
	Well, he was He was laughing at it.
	He told me and he was like, you're kind of laughing and looking down into the table like, yeah, I know, it's bad, huh?
	Kind of like that.
	Inviting you in to sort of see it as funny, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Because otherwise I wouldn't laugh if somebody was really devastated about it.
	But that was the first time he was speaking about it.
	I mean, later on when we were continuing the relationship, it wasn't funny at all since, I mean, we had issues with her, with the children, and yeah, that affected us in the relationship.
	What do you mean issues?
	You mean she became difficult?
	Well, they were not happy about each other from the beginning, and then I came and she hated him even more, and she would Try to make her daughters,
	well, hate me and do nasty things to me and stuff like that and hate their dad even more, you know, telling them that I'm a whore and whatever things.
	Why is this funny?
	Maybe I'm missing something here.
	No, it's not funny at all.
	I'm laughing at it because it's surreal.
	No, it's destructive.
	It's abusive.
	It's using the children as weapons against your ex-husband's new girlfriend, teaching them to hate their father.
	This is monstrous.
	This is not surreal.
	This is...
	Yeah, it was awful.
	It was terrible.
	And I was really sad about it when I was, or I still am, but yeah.
	Well, why do you think it's tough for you to talk about it with the sadness and the seriousness that it actually is?
	I don't know.
	I just try to go on in life.
	I guess it's a way to leave it behind.
	It's a way to leave it behind?
	I guess.
	I don't know.
	I don't have the answer.
	I think I have that tone to many serious things to not get so affected because I'm quite sensitive and I get real sad, so I just try to laugh about things and then just go on.
	Right.
	Well, that's your problem.
	Right there.
	I mean, I'm going to assume that you think I'm a reasonably quality guy, right?
	Yeah, that's why I'm calling.
	Okay, and I appreciate that.
	I appreciate that.
	So, Louise, let me tell you something.
	So, let's say you and I were on a date, and you told me this story with the kind of emotional affect or I wouldn't speak about it, though.
	I wouldn't speak about it though too.
	It would come out in some way.
	And if you told me about it, at some point you would tell me, right?
	I mean obviously you wouldn't keep this secret for your whole life.
	Oh no.
	And at some point you would tell me, I'm sorry?
	No, of course not.
	But I mean, if you speak about it to a person you don't really know, then you speak about it in a certain way.
	If I would speak to my father or my best friend, well, that is something else because then I can be vulnerable.
	I can, you know, tell them about my honest feelings.
	So if I would have been dating someone for a while… Wait, hang on, hang on.
	You called me up to not tell me about your honest feelings?
	No, that's not what I meant.
	Well, no.
	You said that if you were talking to someone that you knew or someone you trusted, that you would speak to them about your honest feelings, but you were giving me the laughing cover-up thing, right?
	So either you will, I hope, commit to talk to me about your honest feelings, or I'm going to have to move on to the next caller because I don't really want to participate in something where you're not being direct and honest with me.
	Like, I'm trying to be direct and honest with you, and I'm telling you what I sort of think and feel.
	But if you don't want to do that, then that's not going to be much of a great conversation for either of us, right?
	No.
	No.
	All right.
	So maybe let's try less laughing and more like the real honest feelings.
	Because that was a brutal situation to be in, right?
	I mean, you've got this harpy turning this guy's kids against you, against him, calling you a whore.
	I mean, this is horrible, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And why were you dating him?
	I think I know why, but I may be wrong.
	So why, Louise, were you dating him?
	For many reasons.
	First of all, I think...
	The times that I do have a boyfriend, something they have in common is that they give me a lot of focus.
	And I get kind of chosen in a way.
	So he chose me, he put a lot of focus on me.
	And he's the smartest boyfriend I ever had.
	We could really discuss Anything I would want to to talk about he I was also impressed by what he had done Like his work in life.
	He's very successful and To me a good looker So I guess these things were for me attractive and Yeah, we got together so intelligence Focused on you.
	Wealthy and successful.
	And handsome.
	Yeah.
	Would you say that he was a wise and virtuous man?
	In the beginning, yeah, definitely.
	That's what I was drawn to, but then the more I got to know him and see him with his children and Well, with his flaws that we all have, of course, then I didn't feel like that anymore.
	And how long after you met him did you find out about the double marriage?
	Oh, the double marriage I found out kind of instantly, like the fourth time or something like that.
	Did any part of you say this is, you know, not only is this terrible decision that's a very terrible series of decisions, it's very bad for his children, but him laughing about it seems inappropriate to how devastating it must have been to his kids, so I'm not sure this is a very wise person who I can trust by heart with.
	I think I would see through that today, maybe.
	But back then, no.
	Definitely just blinded and Yeah.
	No, I was completely in the shadows there.
	I didn't see anything.
	All right.
	Now, when...
	I'll just sort of give you my sort of two bits worth of personal experience here.
	I think it's...
	I'm sure it's relevant, Louise, so just bear with me for a second.
	When we get into a bad relationship, And by that, I mean that we want something more long-term and it doesn't work out.
	That's just not a good relationship, right?
	I mean...
	You're not a teenager, I assume, so you're looking to settle down.
	And so if you invest a year of your life and don't end up settling down, that's a big mistake, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah.
	Because time ticks away and eggs dry up and blow away and we need to get our lives sorted out.
	And so I'm not going to ask you your age, but at some point it becomes a genuine disaster if you've spent a year with someone and haven't settled down if that's what you want, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Now, when we end up in relationships that turn out badly, the fault is not ours alone, and it's not our partner's alone.
	It's not your boyfriend.
	It's not your fault.
	It's a systemic problem, and by that I mean you have a whole system around you, Louise.
	You have friends and family and co-workers and acquaintances and extended family, and there's a whole tribe of people around you, and if you end up Wasting a year of your life and harming your capacity to trust and you end up in a situation where you're talking to me and laughing about something that's very devastating to children,
	then my sort of belief, and this is sort of a hard-won personal experience, my belief is that this is not a mistake of yours.
	This is a mistake of your entire communities.
	In other words, Either you didn't tell friends and family about this guy and his double marriage and laughing about this double marriage, or you did tell them and they didn't try and wake you up to reality.
	Right?
	We so often are left a twist in the wind to navigate ourselves all alone without feedback, without people saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on a second, wait a second.
	Something's not right here.
	I need to know more.
	I'm concerned.
	If you want to settle down...
	Luis, do you want to have kids?
	If I find a man that I would think is a good father, I might want, yes.
	Did you want to have kids with this guy?
	In the first...
	A few months, yes, before I saw him with his children and how he treated them, then I didn't want it anymore.
	So I'm happy I didn't get pregnant.
	Right.
	But if you want to have children, finding a man with three children of his own and a difficult ex-wife and a double marriage is not the way to go.
	No.
	You understand?
	I mean, it's like applying for a job that's currently hanging up the gone-out-of-business sign.
	He's got three kids, and he's got a difficult ex-wife.
	And trying to have a blended family, if you had a kid or two and he's got four or five, blended in with a crazy ex-wife, that's not going to work out, right?
	You know that.
	So, did you not tell your friends and family about his history, or did you tell them, but they didn't save you?
	Oh, I told them.
	And I had different feedbacks.
	I had some feedback, like, you know, come on, who is he?
	I mean, that's bullshit, basically.
	And then I had someone telling me, you know, If it's love, then anything can work out.
	And I really had the whole picture.
	People were saying many different things here.
	Some were very romantic and some were being very like, come on, Luis, you can get anything you want.
	Why are you picking this when you can pick something completely different that is not...
	So you had some real pushback, right?
	People saying this is not good.
	Yeah, I had that as well.
	Yeah, I had...
	Both the romantic and the pushback.
	Right.
	So, who had the argument that with love, anything is possible?
	Well...
	Is that family, friend?
	Friends, yeah.
	And what does that mean?
	With love, everything is possible, so it should have been possible for him to stay with his ex-wife, the mother of his children, right?
	I agree on that.
	So he didn't believe that with love everything was possible because he got divorced.
	Yes.
	And also, if this is his ex-wife, like she's – I'm just going to go with what you say, right?
	She's turning kids against you.
	you, turning kids against him, calling you a whore, instructing her children to be mean to you and so on.
	I think it's fairly safe to say that's not a super nice person, right?
	Yeah.
	And this is the woman he chose to be the mother of his children.
	Bye.
	Yeah, that's something...
	I mean, after listening to your shows and speaking to people around me, I see things very differently from when I first started seeing him, and I would say I'm a lot wiser today, and I would not choose the same path again.
	So today I am more clear of What I want and what I look for, and I might be a little bit more tough, or how you say it, in what I pick.
	Yeah, but that also makes me end up, okay, so where are the normal people who are good, who are not divorced with two or three children?
	So that's where I'm stuck at today, since I know that from my history and from what I learned, there are so many things that I think I would see next time.
	Right.
	Although, you're still laughing to me about things that are difficult and very unpleasant, right?
	Yeah, it's very unpleasant to speak about.
	Right.
	So that's something you have to stop doing.
	I mean, you know, I'm going to just be frank with you as I see it, right?
	I mean, you know, we're not – neither of us are teenagers, so we can be very blunt with each other, and you can tell me if I'm going too far.
	But you have to be authentic to your own emotional experience, and what you went through was very brutal.
	And what the children went through was more brutal, even though they didn't have any choice in the matter.
	You did, right?
	Yeah.
	You could leave.
	They couldn't.
	Yeah.
	And if you don't have the emotional integrity to be honest, because you know you call me up, right?
	And if you're not going to be emotionally honest with me, you know I'm going to say that.
	You've heard me do this a million times, right?
	Yeah.
	And you probably have every good intention, like most people do, like I'm going to be honest, I'm going to be direct, and so on, and then you give me this giggle fest of a story of a destroyed family, right?
	Hmm.
	If we were on a date, that would be a big red flag for me.
	Oh, for me too.
	Yeah.
	It would be for you too.
	If I was saying, oh yeah, my dog just died, it was the funniest thing.
	You'd be like, what?
	Yeah, I know.
	I know.
	No, it would be for me too.
	I guess get too serious because then I would probably just start crying.
	And what's wrong with that?
	Well, I can't do that right now.
	I'm not saying you should.
	I'm just curious why.
	Listen, if you were walking around the room while we were talking and you stubbed your toe and it hurt like hell, what would you say?
	Fuck.
	You'd say, damn, that's, ow, right?
	Ow, oh, hang on a second, I stubbed my toe.
	You'd say something like that, right?
	Yeah.
	You wouldn't giggle.
	Teehee, funny little ottoman, right?
	Right.
	Hmm.
	So you would be honest if you stubbed your toe, because that's physical pain, right?
	Yeah.
	So if you stub your heart, right, if you go through something that's emotionally painful, why does that get a whole different category of honesty?
	I wouldn't know.
	Would you feel ashamed for saying, ow, my toe, oh, I just took my toe, my toe, right?
	No, no, not at all.
	I'm not ashamed.
	So why would you feel embarrassed about crying if you're that sad?
	No, I'm not ashamed of that.
	Well, there's some negative judgment because you said you couldn't.
	You want a good man, you need to be emotionally available.
	That doesn't mean serving your heart up to be carved up by crazy people.
	It means being safe enough and secure enough in yourself to express your emotions honestly and openly and directly.
	And if people don't like it, To help them.
	You know, occasionally I'll cry in a show.
	I'll cry in a video or something.
	People are like, what are you crying for?
	It's like, well, I stubbed my toe and I'm saying ow, right?
	I mean, what's wrong with that?
	I mean, why is, you know, laughter is one of these things that's so totally acceptable.
	But laughter is no different from tears.
	Laughter is no different from crying.
	Laughter is when something positive is happening.
	And crying isn't even necessarily when something negative is happening.
	We've all had sweet tears.
	We've all had Wonderful bits in a movie, or sometimes there used to be these long-distance commercials, you'll never know just how much I love you.
	And I'm like, oh, granddad's calling, right?
	So why is laughter something that is totally fine, but tears are just terrible?
	Yeah.
	No, that's a real question for you.
	That's not a rhetorical question.
	Oh, well...
	I guess my first answer would be that because there's not enough time and you just got to go on.
	I don't know.
	There's not an answer.
	There's not an argument and then there's not an answer.
	I think we've hit it.
	What is wrong with getting emotional?
	What is wrong with being sad?
	No, I don't think there's anything wrong.
	Yes, you do, because otherwise, when you were telling me the story of this destroyed family and this hellacious ex-wife and all of that, you wouldn't have been laughing your way through it.
	You would have expressed it as the tragedy that it is.
	And the tragedy is not only for the parents, of course, who all made choices to end up where they are, but for the three children who are now caught in a war between the parents with you in the middle.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I wish I had a good answer.
	I don't have a good answer.
	But you're feeling something now, right, Louise?
	Yeah.
	And what are you feeling?
	Pain.
	What's the pain?
	What's it about?
	What's it saying?
	I guess just about the past.
	That it hurts and that it's still hurting.
	It's still hurting because you're not listening, right?
	Because you're laughing.
	At least, I know in private, right, we don't sit there and tell our sad stories to ourself and try and tickle ourselves with a fork, right?
	I mean, but in your social life, like in your public life, you have a front, right?
	A what?
	A brave front.
	You said very many times, basically something like, well, you have to keep moving, you have to survive, you have to be tough, you have to, right?
	But laughing about tragedy isn't tough.
	It's fearful.
	Of course.
	It's saying, my heart does not have strength for sadness.
	And therefore, my future doesn't have the capacity for change.
	Because if you're laughing about something and it's just kind of, oh, well, this funny little thing happened, you're not likely to...
	Avoid it in the future.
	But when we really let ourselves process that which is tragic to us, Louise, we tend to avoid it.
	The sadness is trying to inform us of something that is bad.
	If you eat a food that you like, you're more likely to eat it again.
	If you eat a food that makes you sick, You're likely to avoid it.
	Like, I remember when I was a kid, I had a banana, and down at the bottom was some funky little thing that, like, tasted bad and so on, and I was like, literally for like a year, I couldn't eat a banana.
	And we've all had that.
	I can also remember, I thought this, like, my mom used to have in the fridge this ungodly witch's brew called buttermilk.
	And, you know, one day I was so thirsty, and the tap water didn't taste that great, and we never had any pop because it was too expensive.
	My mom would make this funny – what do my friends call it?
	Funny green stuff.
	She'd get some sort of blueberry puree and mix it with water.
	It was pretty gross.
	Anyway, so I grabbed a carton of something and I drank it and it was absolutely disgusting.
	Like, literally half rotten and stinky, right?
	And it was buttermilk.
	And I thought, well, that's like the vilest substance in the world.
	That's like the most god-awful thing.
	Why would anyone buy this?
	It wasn't until later that I found out it had just gone off, and that's not actually how buttermilk is supposed to taste.
	But, you know, it was a lot longer than the banana for me to try buttermilk again.
	So if we laugh about something, we don't avoid it.
	If we cry about something, if we acknowledge our sadness, then we avoid it.
	And you don't want to spend another year of your life like this, right?
	I think, I mean, I have been very sad.
	I don't think I've been running away from my sadness.
	But after a while, I think, okay, so for how long are you going to be sad, please?
	Because that's when I think, you know, Okay, so you've been through something, you've been sad about it.
	Okay, let's move on.
	Let's go to the next chapter, right?
	And at some point...
	It's not working.
	You got into a relationship with a guy who had a double-tap divorce and three kids being used in a battle by a crazy axe.
	So whatever your strategy is, so far, it's not working to help you avoid these kinds of situations, right?
	No.
	So what are you sad about?
	Or what are you afraid about?
	Or what are you angry about?
	I'm afraid of not meeting the right person to spend my life with.
	Right.
	You mean like crazy cat lady?
	Just hanging around, hanging around your friends' places and your family's places, hoping that they'll invite you to stay for dinner, even though, you know, you're imposing a little bit.
	You've been there three times over the past two weeks.
	But, you know, hoping that maybe they'll set out an extra plate.
	You don't even care if you eat at the children's table.
	Heck, you can draw up and on there and just eat sort of in the shadows just because you want to be around people's voices.
	Because going home to the big empty TV screen and the cat that doesn't seem to notice you're there is too heartbreaking for words, right?
	Exactly.
	Right.
	And you are very wise to worry.
	You are very wise to be concerned.
	Because that is the fate of a lot of people these days.
	Single people outnumber married people in America these days.
	If I remember the statistic correctly.
	It's rough out there.
	So you are Without a partner, I would say.
	I would say just with a partner of children, I've never felt a huge need to have one, but I also think that's because I haven't met a man where I would find him suitable being the father for my children.
	So I'm afraid of being without a partner, but I'm also angry about the fact that it's not working out for me and for so many of my female friends in my circle who are,
	in my opinion, very genuine, intelligent, good-looking women who are working hard And who really wants to meet someone, and it's not working out.
	And maybe all of us are just playing, you know, doing it the wrong way and laughing too much about it.
	I don't know.
	But we all have one...
	Is it that men...
	I'm sorry, is it hard to meet men?
	Oh, no.
	No, it's not.
	I mean...
	I meet a lot of men all the time, but not quality men.
	Alright, so what's missing for you, for them?
	For me, I would say they're usually either too old, like they are used up, like they have children or something like that, or they are too young.
	Well, I would say boys my age, they just run around in the nightclubs fucking around and that's it.
	And then we have something in between.
	So they're looking for technical sex, not relationships, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	And then we have like the in between, like from 30 to 35, who are just focusing on the career and they're still just fucking around.
	And this is where we are all struggling.
	Right.
	So, you can, obviously, I mean, just for those who don't know, and we obviously won't publish your picture, but you are very, very pretty.
	So, obviously, if you want it, you can have all the casual sex that you want, but, you know, that's not great for women.
	I read this out recently in a show.
	I won't do it again, but it's, you know, anonymous sexual encounters.
	Women only have an orgasm, like, 10% of the time.
	I mean, it's It's not called the walk of shame for nothing, right?
	I mean, you feel kind of tawdry and gross.
	Oh, look!
	I'm a young, attractive woman, and I actually managed to have a man have sex with me.
	Wow, that's like climbing Mount Everest.
	That's almost impossible.
	It's not much of an achievement for a woman as attractive as yourself to have sex with a guy.
	Look!
	Look!
	I managed to sell a Maserati for a dollar!
	I'm a sales genius!
	So...
	So you can't find men who are interested in settling down?
	No, not that, like I said, that would fit my profile.
	Yeah, in an age that you don't have to speak up over their...
	Benny Goodman records or anything.
	So, someone who's got some kind of education, some kind of career, some kind of future, some kind of stability, some kind of family that you can see yourself joining and is interested in settling down and having kids.
	I mean, you're not looking for like...
	Well, he needs to look like Brad Pitt, but have the intelligence of Einstein and the flight abilities of Buzz Armstrong.
	I mean, you're looking for something not over the moon.
	I'm not saying...
	You shouldn't deserve that, and if it comes along, great, but your criteria are not insane, right?
	Oh, no.
	The looks are so very low down on the pillar.
	I want to meet a quality person, and that does not mean that it has to be a A person with super good looks or super curry or just something normal, stable, intelligent, humoristic, vibrant person with a good heart.
	That's it.
	Listen, you're so attractive, Louise, that if you date an average-looking guy, people will assume he's a billionaire anyway.
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, I have a problem right now.
	What do you mean?
	I have a problem because I was dating a billionaire, right?
	And then I came home and now in the small circle where I am, people assume that I was working with something completely different, if you know what I'm saying.
	You were a hire?
	Is that what you're alluding to?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	People are talking, and it's so...
	Right now, I'm locking myself in.
	Like, it's really a lot of disturbing things for me going around, because people...
	Oh, there are rumors.
	Rumors, yeah.
	People talk, and it's a very small circle.
	And...
	I have to defend myself to people I don't even know.
	And when I moved back here this spring, I started to date a guy my age.
	And, well, that went to hell because he just started bragging about dating me.
	And it all...
	It's all nonsense.
	It's nonsense.
	It's like a bad...
	Movie or something.
	And why didn't that relationship work out?
	Well, because he had three children.
	I guess.
	Oh, this is the same guy.
	Okay.
	Got it.
	Got it.
	All right.
	Yeah.
	Now.
	Interesting.
	You didn't mention the billionaire thing.
	That's all right.
	You did say he was successful in his career, although that could be considered to be A little bit more than successful, but alright.
	I don't know how much that applies to my willingness to date, to meet my future man.
	I mean, he's in the past, right?
	No, I could see if you were dating some very good-looking billionaire, I could see that being...
	A challenge to less secure men, if that makes sense.
	But, you know, your physical attractiveness might be a challenge to less secure men.
	I don't know.
	Do you think that the Swedish men...
	Oh, I don't know.
	I'm trying to sort of ask a question, and I don't want to sort of give you my opinion, but I'm not really sure how to do that, so I'm just going to be...
	Do you find men to be manly?
	No, no.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Well, the thing is, it has nothing to do with, I mean, their looks and stuff.
	It's just, like I told you, the boyfriends I've had, the thing they have in common is that they've actually been, like, they speak to me, they want to take me out on a date, they are really, they make things happen.
	And with, like, the guy I dated this summer, around my age, I mean, I picked him up.
	I was really trying to get to know him.
	And I was very honest and open with him.
	Like, look, I really want to know you.
	And I would like to, you know, go out with you or just have a walk in the park or whatever.
	Just, you know.
	So my experience of men is that they don't know what the I guess.
	And I just know that family and having a relationship is not on the priority list until you are like about 40.
	And then it's like, oh my fucking god, I'm 40.
	I'm done with my career.
	Now I would like to meet a girl.
	And they start to look for women my age.
	Sure.
	Yeah, I mean, you're in your 20s, so I hope you don't mind if I say that.
	I'm not giving you anything specific.
	But yeah, guys, they don't – I mean, if they start dating a 40-year-old, they ain't going to have kids, right?
	I mean, they might squeeze one out in a sort of dust bunny scenario, but if you want to have leisure to get to know someone and to get married, if you're 40, you've got to look for a woman in her late 20s or most early 30s, right?
	Yeah.
	And so where I'm stuck is that the – Men my age, they are still, you know, they are fucking around, they're having a good time, and I don't blame them.
	They're just not interested in settling down, or at least not where I am and where I look.
	I try to be open-minded, like I try to go outside of my circle, like with new people, etc.
	It's still not happening, and right now I'm just sick of going on dates at all, so I just end up clocking the door behind me, you know?
	That's what I'm struggling at, and I meet more international people, like from other countries, men from other countries, and they are so completely different from the Swedish men, and they would do anything to date me, but then we're still back at the fact that they are Usually older than me, and they're also in another country.
	Like, I already did that.
	I'm not moving again.
	I want to meet a man, like, around my age.
	Sure.
	I'm not going to move again and do all that stuff.
	Why don't they just say, sorry, business is closed until I get some kind of commitment from y'all?
	I mean, why is it just...
	Because if the men are screwing around, it's because they can, right?
	So why are men putting out so much?
	I mean, it's like a carousel.
	Yeah, I... I mean, you're complaining about the men, but, you know, it's the old takes two to tango thing here, right?
	Unless these men are Bill Clinton, in which case it's a different situation, but...
	Yeah, um, why?
	Where are their chastity belts?
	Where are their fathers?
	Yeah.
	I mean, why is it this giant blonde orgy?
	Wait a minute, let's just enjoy that image for a moment before I continue with the conversation.
	No, but why is it this, yeah, let's all have casual sex.
	And it's like, gosh, it seems strange why people won't come in.
	Well, I try to look back now on my dating history and I was holding back with one guy for like two or three months before we...
	I mean, we were dating for that long before we got into bed.
	Three-month rule is a good rule.
	Sorry to interrupt you.
	I really apologize, Louise, but I just want to get this off my chest.
	People, people of the West, women of the West, stop banging each other like you're extras with coconuts in a Monty Python film, for God's sakes.
	Maybe it's just because it's dark outside.
	Like, we go inside when it's cold.
	We have baby nights.
	It's dark inside, play charades, right?
	I mean, it's, you know, take a coin.
	Put it between your knees, keep it there, and have a conversation!
	Stop banging each other.
	I know!
	I know!
	There's birth control.
	I know there's pornography.
	I know that variety is the spice of life.
	I know, I know, I know.
	But you're literally destroying Sweden.
	You're literally destroying the West with this late Roman analogy of infertility.
	I agree with that.
	I mean, dear God of mine, women, just stop having sex with men.
	This used to be the deal with women.
	Yeah.
	The deal with women was, we don't put out until we get a commitment.
	Now, that commitment doesn't necessarily have to be a ring for all eternity.
	I was talking about going back to 1840 or anything.
	But we're not going to have sex.
	There's the deal.
	Because as soon as a woman break ranks and starts slinging V around, well...
	It's a race to the bottom because then the women are all basically like this tortured question for women.
	Do I put out or do I not put out?
	Well, if I do put out, he's probably not going to respect me.
	But if I don't put out, well, there's a woman sitting on the next bar stool who probably will.
	It's going to go over there instead.
	And it's this race to the bottom.
	Stop putting out.
	You'll have better sex in a committed relationship.
	Am I wrong, Louise?
	When a woman is in a relationship with a man she cares about and you've figured out How each other's bodies work and what you like and what you don't like.
	The sex is way better in a committed relationship.
	The sex is terrible, particularly for women, but only 30% of men have orgasms with one-night stands.
	I mean it's ridiculous.
	What if they bring a bottle of Ready Whip and just squirt it and say they're done?
	I mean it's terrible.
	It's unsatisfying.
	And men aren't going to stop it.
	It has to be up to the women.
	Stop putting out.
	Three months is not asking the world.
	Because if you put out, it's going to be terrible.
	And if you wait, okay, maybe the guy will leave.
	But at least he'll leave and you won't feel cheap and used.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Okay, that's the end of my rant.
	I'm sorry for interrupting.
	No, no, you're completely right.
	You're completely right.
	It's just...
	And I... I mean, when I was younger, I was not looking at it the way I do now.
	Then I was more like, oh, well, if you want to go and have sex, you should go and have sex.
	And people were experimenting and blah, blah, blah.
	And I felt like, you know, that's completely fine.
	And now today, I've started to feel different about that.
	Now I haven't, I mean...
	Sex like men can do.
	No, exactly.
	Like, that is not possible.
	And I'm starting to get the...
	Just everyone's saying to women, the next generation of women raised, being told, just go out and have sex, just like men would.
	No.
	Quality.
	And it's like, no, no, no.
	Women's hearts, women's bodies, women's minds, women's souls don't work that way.
	It's different.
	It's different.
	I mean, it's vulnerable.
	You've got a guy one and a half to two times your size on top of you, or, I don't know, behind you, or somewhere around you, but he's big.
	It's a very vulnerable position to be in.
	Look, I'm not trying to say that all men are hound dogs and all women will be destroyed by casual sex.
	This overlaps, but they're not identical circles.
	They're overlapping circles.
	Maybe there are some women who can get away with it.
	Maybe they completely are selected to reference my Gene Wars presentation.
	But the majority of women...
	It's really, really bad for them.
	And this is one of the reasons why, as sexual liberation has increased for women, as the number of sexual partners have increased for women, The stability of marriage has gone way down and women's happiness has gone down.
	I know.
	Correlation is not causation, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
	But it's still pretty interesting because there was supposed to be this promised land, right?
	Oh, you can go out and sexually experiment all you want.
	It's going to be wonderful.
	It's going to be lovely.
	It's going to be naughty bits all over the place.
	No little bugs jumping from penis to vagina and back and forth again.
	Everything is going to be lovely and wonderful.
	And then don't you know if you feel like settling down, you can join some hippie commune and share bacteria with each other from here to eternity.
	But that's not, you know, that was the promise.
	That was the promise.
	But what's been fulfilled is sad, lonely, emotionally unavailable, men and women.
	Yeah.
	Because sex is not a plaything.
	It's not like just some personal toy that you can just use and have.
	It is for the making of children.
	And for the bonding of life partners.
	That's what sex is.
	Sex is to help cement the bonds of love and make children.
	It's not just a personal recreational thing that you can just use for your own satisfaction with no consequences, in my humble opinion.
	But please, go on.
	I'm interrupting like crazy.
	I'm sorry.
	No, no.
	I agree with that.
	With what you're saying.
	And as far as with my ex-boyfriend, I didn't feel like I was wanted as a woman.
	And I felt like I was not, you know, beautiful enough or fuck-worthy.
	Let's call it fuck-worthy.
	I didn't feel fuck-worthy.
	It's a coarse term, but I get what you're saying.
	Yeah.
	So I was heard on many...
	And then I came back here and started to try to date again.
	And now with the rumors that I would have been some kind of escort girl when I moved and then also feeling that I'm not as much as of a woman anymore and the clock is ticking and And then I see all of my other girlfriends in the same situation where as they want to meet someone really
	badly, but there is just no man who wants to take it this seriously.
	And what I am applying on to myself is, well, like you said, I'm closing my legs for...
	For people, and I hope that improves things, but what it still does not improve is who are the men that I meet.
	I'm being continuously, ugh, my English.
	I'm being asked out on dates all the time.
	I'm saying no all the time to the dates because I already know, like, Kind of who they are or I've met them like once or twice before and it's a small circle and I can't go on a date with the whole fucking city.
	So I just keep on saying no because people talk and I tell them look maybe I'll see you out sometime like and we can say hello and that's it.
	Oh, yes.
	The old...
	Well, maybe we can all hang out with friends together.
	Yeah.
	Well...
	Yeah, yeah.
	I know.
	Not that that's ever happened to me, Louise.
	You understand?
	Never.
	Never.
	Not once.
	But no, okay.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	So my problem is not that there is not enough men asking me out or anything.
	I... There's a huge amount, but it's not the right thing.
	Well, listen, let me ask you a question.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	Let me ask you a question, though.
	This just sort of popped into my mind and tell me if it makes any sense.
	Yeah.
	Do you think you hang out with a social circle?
	Yeah.
	I mean, what about getting everyone together and saying, what does everyone think of these issues?
	Mm-hmm.
	What do you think they, I mean, I don't know if, because it seems like women talk about it and men talk about it sometimes, but it's not like everyone gets together and talks about it.
	Mm-hmm.
	I mean, you've got women like, do you want to settle down?
	Do you want to have kids?
	Say to the men, do you want to settle down?
	Do you want to have kids?
	Is the casual sex so great that it's worth not settling down when your sexual market value is at its highest?
	Because you know the story, right?
	I mean, women can get a lot of attention when they're younger because eggs, right?
	And then they get older.
	Suddenly, when they're in a big rush, their sexual market value has declined enormously, and that's a terrible, terrible position to be in.
	Again, I sort of complement your wisdom in looking down the tunnel of time and seeing that kind of destination.
	But if you got all your friends together and said, isn't this a big problem for everyone?
	I mean, compared to our parents, we're living lives of perpetual adolescence forever.
	I mean, how old was your mom when she had kids?
	Well, like 23 or 24, so she was already a mom, and I'm not.
	So what's happened where, like in one generation, nobody has to grow up anymore?
	Well, the thing is, you know, people even tell me, like, when I speak about this with even male friends around here, they're like, well, Louise, you're young.
	I mean, you're You're so young.
	And I can tell you, I'm 26.
	And they're like, you're so young and you've got your whole life ahead of you and blah, blah, blah.
	And here I am starting to see my wrinkles come and I'm like, wait, I should really like meet someone and maybe in a couple of years.
	Maybe have children.
	That's how I see it.
	But they're like, no, this is a big city.
	You know, just go with the flow.
	You'll meet someone eventually.
	And yeah, maybe they're right.
	Maybe they're not.
	I hate that talk.
	I had the same talk, right?
	And women I knew had the same talk.
	Oh, there's infinity ahead of you.
	And it's like, what?
	You just like, you just want white people to like not breed.
	Why don't you just be honest?
	White people!
	You have forever.
	Don't worry about it.
	Fertility just goes on and on.
	Hell, they can dig up your dead body after three weeks and get you pregnant.
	Don't worry about it.
	Eggs don't age.
	I mean, you know, your fertility is already a little tiny bit starting to decline, right?
	And even for men, it's like, oh, you've got forever.
	It's like, actually, no, your sperm quality does begin to decline as well.
	Yeah.
	I don't know how it suddenly became.
	Whatever you do, white people, don't breed.
	Whatever you do, don't breed.
	We've invented some pretty cool stuff, which the world seems to kind of like.
	I'm not just talking about technology, but entire countries and civilizations that everyone's trying to get into by hook or by crook.
	So I don't know really what the benefit is to say to all the people like, okay, young white women, whatever you do, don't breed.
	Have a lot of casual and empty sex and lower your emotional sexual market value and wait till later, wait till it's, you know, and it's like, man, that's a great way to really, really crush the birth rate, right?
	Yeah.
	I'm not saying you should have five kids by now, but When you start to say, look, I'm 26, I've got to start thinking about settling down now.
	And you want to do that now.
	As you say, the wrinkles are starting to come in, and when you hit 30, that's...
	I'll tell you...
	Boom!
	Your face just falls like an elevator with a cut cable.
	And you want to do that sooner rather than later.
	Because as you say, as you get older...
	You know, there's this – it's called the used car principle and I – please understand this does not apply to you at this time in your life.
	But it's the used car principle and people say, well, I'm just going to wait to find a really good guy once I'm in my 30s, right?
	But here's the thing.
	The used cars that are for sale are the ones that people don't want.
	Exactly.
	Like if there's a really great used car that needs almost no maintenance and is really great on gas and is wonderful to drive, people don't sell it.
	Yeah.
	So if there are really great people in Stockholm, like really a great guy, a guy who's like a great friend, a great lover, a great father, a great provider, whatever, whatever, Well, he ain't going to be on the market again, because whatever woman gets him, she's going to hang on.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Right, so the good guys are being hoovered up really quickly, and they're not coming back on the market, and that's why.
	I mean, I was lucky, like insanely lucky, to meet my wife, who was, you know...
	In her 30s as I was.
	And that is not something you should bank on, right?
	I mean, and so I would say, yeah, it is important to think about it because down the road, what's left?
	Who's left?
	Oddly constituted guys, quirky guys, guys who've never had a relationship and don't know how to relate, guys who have anxiety disorders, guys who are twitchy, guys who have Tourette's, guys who have weird body smells, guys who have four kids and alimony payments, what's left of Deutsche Bank, and guys who don't speak English.
	I mean, who knows, right?
	Guys who don't speak Swedish, right?
	So, it is important because...
	The guys are disappearing.
	Good guys are disappearing.
	And if you're having trouble finding them now, boy, imagine what it's going to be like in five years.
	You know, and people question this all the time.
	How can you not have a man?
	Like, you're smart and you're quite funny.
	You're okay, Louise.
	You're not, like, the worst person ever.
	I mean, worst persons than me have got it all together, right?
	But here I am and actually right now seeing someone who has Tourette's and that's why I was laughing so hard.
	Because I don't have anything else to do in my spare time.
	Yeah, so that's how it is.
	And I just, you know, because we haven't talked about me enough, but I, you know, when I was younger, I honestly, I could not, there's an old line from a movie where someone's like in Central Park.
	And he's saying, you know, people who don't live in New York, they're kind of kidding, right?
	You know, like New York is such a great place.
	They're not serious about not living in New York, right?
	They're kind of kidding, right?
	And I remember thinking when I was younger, like, women who aren't dating me, they're kind of kidding, right?
	Like, they can't be serious.
	Now, you know, and I, you know, since, especially since I went through therapy and all that self-knowledge and all that kind of stuff, I mean, I thought, damn, I'm a great catch.
	You know, a reasonably good-looking guy.
	I'm smart.
	I'm affectionate.
	I have self-knowledge.
	I'm intelligent.
	I'm well-educated.
	I had a good career at the time.
	I was an entrepreneur and all that.
	And I was like, Man, I mean, women who aren't dating me, they've got to be kidding, right?
	I mean, what are they looking for?
	What are they looking for?
	And as it turns out, you know, I'm a great husband, I'm a great father, I'm a great friend, and all that, and yeah.
	Sorry, ladies.
	But that sort of feeling, you know, and I know that you're, you know, that Northern European humility thing.
	You are very attractive.
	You're obviously intelligent.
	Obviously, you've bounced around a little bit of emotional unavailability, maybe from your family, maybe from the guys you've dated.
	Maybe that's something.
	I don't know.
	But it should not be impossible for you to summon up a guy to go out with.
	And I don't know.
	I mean, the first thing that I would say is just you've got to grit your teeth, Louise, and you've just got to be straight up honest and open with your feelings.
	There's this thing that people have, which is that emotional vulnerability is like a weakness.
	Oh, people will take advantage of you.
	No.
	That is actually not true.
	It was when I was defending myself and when I was hiding from myself, when I was avoiding myself, that's when I was the most exploited because I was already divided against myself.
	And I was already inauthentic to my own genuine experience.
	And I was already acting as if the world was a dangerous place.
	And therefore, I was defenseless.
	We think it's a defense.
	It's actually a great vulnerability.
	Whereas emotional honesty, emotional openness is a great strength because it drives inauthentic people away and it draws authentic people towards you.
	It drives dishonest people away.
	It draws honest people towards you.
	So, if I were you, I'd stop practicing this.
	I know it's alarming.
	I know it feels weird.
	I know it's funny.
	It almost feels like, well, it's inconvenient to other people if I'm emotional.
	No, I'm not afraid to be that.
	Afraid.
	So, what are the consequences if you do that?
	What happens?
	No, I am not afraid to do, I mean, or to be emotional or show my emotions.
	I mean, as I... I told you with a guy this summer I was really interested in...
	No, but you were with me.
	You can tell me, but I'm an empiricist.
	Yeah, but I don't know you.
	I don't see you.
	I mean, I have my...
	Yes, but that's true of everyone you meet for the first time, right?
	Every first date, every first thing you go on, right?
	Don't be guarded.
	Be open.
	Be open.
	Because what happened with this guy...
	I would guess is that he invited you to view his story as kind of like a comedy when it is in fact a tragedy.
	He invited you in to view it as a comedy and for some reason you wanted to follow him in that direction to comedy and then you internalized it as comedy and then you got your heart broken.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	He told you it's a comedy when it in fact is a tragedy, and it turned out the relationship you thought was going to be a comedy was in fact a tragedy.
	So be honest, be open, be passionate, be direct.
	You know, you didn't die when I said, this seems to be an odd thing to be laughing about.
	And I think we had a better conversation, a much better conversation after that, right?
	Yeah.
	He's not going to die if you say, why are you laughing about this?
	Isn't this really, really tragic for your children?
	Now, he may say, well, that's highly offensive to me.
	How dare you say I'm a bad father.
	Get out of my house.
	In which case, it's like, okay, thanks.
	You just saved me.
	My eggs are now one year younger.
	Oh, and you also saved me from really bad false rumors about me being a lady of the evening or something, right?
	Yeah.
	Efficiency.
	Authenticity is efficiency.
	That's your mantra, I would suggest.
	Authenticity is efficiency.
	You ever seen, you go to the bank and they count out bills by hand?
	One, two, three.
	They lick their hand.
	Four.
	It's like, ew, don't lick my bills.
	But you ever seen them put the bills into those machines like...
	Yeah.
	Just counsel the machine.
	Well, that's authenticity.
	If you're inauthentic, you're counting the bills off one by one.
	It takes forever, right?
	Yeah.
	But if you're authentic and honest and direct and challenge people to be more honest with you and to not give you weird Non-authentic emotional responses like, haha, married twice, right?
	You're like that machine that just counts the money like crazy.
	It's such an efficient sorter.
	Because if the guy is like 50 down the row, you want to get 50 rather than 1, 2, right?
	The more authentic you are, the faster you get to your million dollar bill.
	Yeah.
	And is it really there's nobody in your circle, right?
	It's not nobody in my circle?
	Sorry?
	That you would want to date?
	No.
	No.
	God.
	I mean, so...
	You can't wait for them to grow up, right?
	Because then they've had a whole lot of years of not being grown up, which is going to be tough to date, right?
	But then there's not...
	I mean, the people that I meet, they are, as I see it, either it's like go-out people, like men who go out a lot, like on the nightclubs, and I don't find them serious.
	They just drag women home every weekend and blah, blah.
	And then we have the other ones who are just working, working, working, and they are like...
	But you see, you just tell them to snap the hell out of it.
	I mean, it's very passive.
	I know.
	As an attractive woman, you wait for the tide to come in.
	You don't go fishing, right?
	Oh, I do go fishing.
	That's the thing.
	Don't go to you in the bar and say hello.
	Trust me on that.
	That's for other countries.
	Men do not say hello.
	Can I get to know you?
	What do they do?
	They would say, hello, do you want to fuck?
	They wouldn't.
	Well, basically, do you want to come home with me and have some tea?
	Like, they would do that kind of thing.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Like, it's not classic.
	I've got to think of what problem thing tea is the first letter of, but okay.
	All right.
	So, basically, they just say, hi, would you like to share my...
	Well there was a guy just like a week ago my age who I thought you know maybe I should get to know him is just like two years above and I've been I've seen him before like on a dinner or something and and he started to text me and it's always this fucking texting you know nowadays people just text on Facebook and it's always he doing and He has been texting me a lot,
	like on Friday nights, Saturday nights, like, hello, are you out in the, well, in town, like in the club, and yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And that's what they call a booty call.
	And that's what they call a booty call.
	Hey, it's 11 o'clock on Friday.
	I've struck you out at the bar.
	Are you busy?
	Exactly.
	And every time, I'm like, yeah, but, you know, no.
	And then he started texting me on daytime instead, and he said that he would want to see me.
	I said, okay, so...
	So what are you proposing?
	Well, why don't you just come over to me?
	And I said, well, how do you mean come over?
	He said, you know, he said, well, you know, I have some wine and I said, you know what, I do like wine and dine, but that has to be on a public place, like on a restaurant.
	That's the normal thing to do.
	And he said, well, you know, miracles can happen, so why don't you just come over?
	This is my address.
	And then he has just continued to do that, like, five times, and every time I just text him back, ha-ha.
	And he continues, and he thinks he's funny and that he will probably get a catch on this.
	He's, you know, he has a good job.
	He's a smart guy.
	He's funny.
	He's...
	He's a looker, but this is how they approach you.
	Wow.
	And so if you did go over, I mean, that'd be half-drunken sex, and then that would be it, right?
	Yeah, yeah, definitely.
	So, no going over.
	No, no, quite right about that.
	Quite right about that.
	And then, well, yeah.
	When I travel and stuff, I do meet a lot of But then again, it's the older middle-aged men with cash, so it's not interesting.
	And then...
	Well, not interesting again, right?
	Not interesting again.
	I've been there, done that.
	So just putting that aside.
	And here at home, I don't know what I'm going to change to meet different people.
	Like...
	Yeah, I don't know what to do.
	Like on the weekends, I run to the club, I go to dinners, I go to...
	I try to meet as much people as I can.
	Yeah, what pubs do you know?
	Who are you going to meet in a pub?
	So where else do I meet them?
	Well, it depends how passive or how active you want to be.
	Super active.
	Good.
	Okay.
	That's what I like to hear.
	So you can change up your circle.
	You can meet people in clubs that would have something to do with your interests, right?
	I say you're interested in philosophy.
	You can go join a philosophy club.
	If you're interested in politics or economics, you can go join those kinds of clubs.
	I'm sure there's social gatherings around there.
	You can meet people.
	Just change what you're doing, right?
	And it's an old thing in life.
	If you're not getting the results you want, you have to change what you're doing, right?
	Because if you keep doing the same thing, you're going to get the same...
	That's sort of the basic level, right?
	I mean the most basic level is just wait for a miracle to happen, which is not going to happen most likely, right?
	But then you can start really mixing up who you socialize with and combine that with being really assertive about – Your feelings and other people's feelings.
	And if you feel people are being inauthentic with you, say, I think you're being inauthentic with me.
	I think that this is, you know, like, why are you laughing about something inappropriate?
	You can do it in a nice way.
	I think I did and it was fine, right?
	So that's the kind of level of assertiveness.
	Now, there's another level of assertiveness that you can also get to if you want, which is you can write an article about these issues and you can attempt to get a public discussion going About the eternal adolescence of the Swedish specimens.
	And you can get a conference going.
	You can give a speaking tour.
	You can ask people.
	You can write a book.
	You can write a series of articles.
	You can blog it.
	You can do a documentary.
	You can film people.
	You can try and figure out what the hell is going wrong.
	Why so many highly attractive people who are having a lot of meaningless sex are so rootless and unhappy.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And you can go even further than that, but I mean, I was really dissatisfied with the level of philosophy in the world, so what did I do?
	Oh, yeah.
	And if you want to be that active, that proactive, if you were to be out there making a documentary, giving speaking tours, writing books, talking about all of this stuff, the odds of you finding a man...
	Who's in line with what you want.
	Go as high as humanly possible.
	Other option, convert to Islam.
	Because, okay, maybe some downsides for, you know, a nice young Western girl.
	On the other hand, they're not going to a lot of bars, these young men.
	Anyway, I'm just sort of kidding.
	But no, you can be really, really proactive and raise the discussion because your frustrations, Louise, You're not alone.
	I thought I was kind of alone in being really dissatisfied with the level of philosophy in the world.
	As it turns out, there's a lot of people who are really dissatisfied with the level of debate and philosophy and reason and evidence in the world.
	We've got a quarter of a billion downloads and views.
	We've got almost 500,000 subscribers on YouTube.
	I'm just talking to you.
	Aren't you special?
	You know, our deepest frustrations are where we really connect with others a lot of times.
	Should I? I've been speaking a lot about this question with my father, and it's about the fact of how I dress.
	I like to dress up, but I like to make myself pretty, so to speak.
	And in his opinion, I should be, well, dressing down more to attract different men or to make...
	What's your father's track record in relationships?
	My father's what?
	What's your father's track record?
	What's his history?
	What's his success in relationships?
	Yeah, well, he met my mom.
	They got divorced.
	And then he...
	We're single for a couple of years and now he's been married to my stepmom for...
	When did they get married?
	Maybe...
	A long time.
	50 years?
	I don't know.
	Right.
	50, yeah.
	Well, I mean, I can't speak to that because I don't really know the culture.
	I mean...
	Maybe some men would be intimidated by that.
	But I don't know that you want a man who's going to be intimidated by a nicely cut blouse and a pencil skirt, or whatever it is that you're wearing.
	I don't know that you really want a guy who's going to be fearful and intimidated of a well-dressed woman.
	Yeah, but on the other hand, do I want a man who sees a blonde girl in a pencil skirt or whatever?
	Who actually sees me?
	I'm on your side here.
	I would want a man who appreciates both sides, right?
	Who would appreciate both the pencil skirt and my brain.
	But my father's point here is the fact that I might be scaring away really good quality people by looking like I'm a bimbo bombshell.
	Right.
	And being intimidating people.
	Yeah, I mean...
	Again, because I don't know the culture, I mean, there's no harm in trying, I suppose, right?
	It's not going to kill you to sweat panted down.
	Probably not that far down, right?
	You don't want to look homeless.
	But it may not be the end of the world to sort of see what happens.
	But again, if I were you, I would try to be more proactive because this is not just a you problem.
	This is a young people problem, right?
	Yeah.
	Dating has become this...
	A horror show.
	Yeah.
	For a lot of young people in Europe.
	You're not alone in this.
	And you have, you know, good communication skills.
	You've got a great look.
	You've got a deep frustration with it.
	And you're obviously highly intelligent.
	I just give that as a blanket statement to everyone who's on this show.
	But you're also coachable, right?
	Insofar as I said, the conversation wasn't working for me and we adjusted it and it worked well.
	And, you know, you didn't like slam down the phone or whatever.
	Not that you can do that anymore with cell phones or whatever.
	But, um...
	You know, you may want to look upon this as a call for action that is bigger than just your future.
	In other words, can I just, you know, you've been fairly blunt with me, so I'll be blunt not with you as a whole.
	You people need to get fucking serious and you need to grow up.
	Yeah.
	You inherited this fantastic civilization that took thousands of years to build, and you're pissing it all away in one generation of screwing around, getting drunk, texting people, having ridiculously short-circuited non-relationships, having completely shallow hedonistic desires for nothing but your next orgasm, and you're pissing everything away.
	I mean, there's a little bit more important stuff going on than whether you can drag the next blonde over to your house for a mini-orgy of dissatisfied bad sex.
	So young people, and I appreciate you calling in.
	I'm not putting you in this category because you're talking about this stuff.
	Young people in Europe, you need to get fucking serious with your civilization, with your life.
	It's all hanging by a thread.
	This grand experiment of freedom and equality is hanging by a thread.
	And so the issue that you have is a very big issue That is encompassing all of Western civilization, but Sweden seems to be kind of leading the charge at the moment.
	We're going down, baby.
	Oh, God.
	Right.
	Right.
	And, you know, you're going down, baby, because too many people are going down, baby.
	Yeah.
	And get serious.
	Start waking up to the threat to your civilization and your way of life.
	Mm-hmm.
	This level of hedonism is inviting in some pretty challenging elements in society, and I'm going to put this as nicely as humanly possible, but nature doesn't care how much fun you had.
	Demographics don't care how much fun you had and how much you were able to stretch out the idiocy of your average 15-year-old's existence, which is not idiotic when you're 15, but it sure as hell is when you're 30, Nature doesn't care.
	You have a civilization that you're willing to do some uncomfortable things to fight for intellectually, or you can just dissolve yourself into stupid hedonism and extended adolescence and then bye-bye West.
	So that's sort of, like, I feel for you and the challenges that you have.
	There's a lot that you can do.
	If you're looking for someone rare, you simply have to raise your profile.
	You have to raise your profile.
	You have to raise your profile.
	Until you're so well known that the guy can find you.
	Right?
	I mean, look, if I was a single guy and I'm doing what I'm doing, I wouldn't have any trouble getting dates, right?
	No.
	Because I'm doing what I'm doing.
	I'm known, right?
	I'm a known quantity.
	If you raise your profile and you're more visible, then the rare guy can find you.
	But if you're just trawling around your own circle and you say Stockholm is very small, okay.
	There are no fish in the pond that you want.
	Throwing your net in, throwing your hook in, throwing your depth charge in isn't going to change anything.
	There aren't the men around that you want.
	And you don't want to be randomly trying to get to other countries.
	So you have to raise your profile.
	You have to become famous.
	And you can, if you want, I guarantee you, you've got the look, you've got the intellect, you've got the language skills.
	You can become as famous as you want and do some great good, not just for your own future happiness by finding the husband that you want, but for society as a whole.
	But Wake the Fuck Up Young People of Europe might not be a bad name for a book.
	Yeah.
	Or however you would translate that into something a little bit more genteel and pencil skirt enabled.
	But it's a serious thing and it's not just you.
	It's not just you.
	Europe is literally dying off because of all of this empty-headed, dick-moved, stupid, sodden, hedonistic screwing around.
	Europe is literally dying off.
	And it's a big issue.
	If you wanted to write about it, if you wanted to talk about it, if you wanted to get the conversation going...
	You would stand the greatest chance of finding the guy that you wanted, and you would do some great good for the West as well.
	Yeah, well, it's funny that you say that.
	You know, we all, I guess, look for what we want to do in life, and I was dating a quite decent guy for a while.
	The one I actually didn't have sex with until like three months, I told you about.
	And he was coaching me a lot.
	He was an entrepreneur, very driven, smart guy.
	And I was looking for, at that time as well, what I wanted to do.
	And he said, well, I don't know anyone who is as good as, you know, like speaking and coming with good...
	He said he loves to listen to me speak about important things.
	And he said, why don't you do that?
	Well, in Swedish, of course.
	And I said, I wouldn't know what to speak about.
	And he said, you know what, I would pick you in to take you into my company to just speak of how to...
	Write emails.
	Because people don't know how to write emails, but you know how to write emails very well.
	Like, you know the etiquette.
	Oh, God.
	You're so much bigger than that.
	Oh, man.
	Oh, man.
	And again, I don't mean to praise you unwontedly, but, you know, because people haven't seen your pictures.
	I mean, you know, you're stunningly a beautiful woman.
	And if you stand up in a public forum and say, I can't find a man.
	No, seriously, seriously, I can't find a man.
	And if people look at that and just hear, you know, I can't find a man.
	Those four words combined with your look, if that doesn't make people think that there's something seriously wrong with Western civilization...
	I don't know what will.
	What I'm saying here, Louise, is you standing up and saying that is equivalent to about 4,000 of my podcasts.
	So you really should do it if you have any inclination at all.
	So I guess I have a profile picture on Skype, huh?
	I didn't realize that.
	I didn't look at it until halfway through the conversation.
	And honestly, I mean, it doesn't affect how I'm chatting with you.
	I'm just saying that if a young, beautiful woman stands up and says, I can't find a man, there's got to be some kind of wake-up call of what the hell that would ripple through some people's minds.
	It's a vulnerable thing to say.
	It's a powerful thing to say.
	And I've said this just a week ago, I think, and I won't repeat the story here, but When I really connected with my desperation and really put out a cry for help across the universe, wow, did I ever get answers.
	You know, the vulnerability of expressing, I dare say, a naked need, right?
	The vulnerability of expressing a need in this world generates absolutely astounding and wonderful responses.
	Because vulnerability, open vulnerability, everybody recognizes It's such a powerful and courageous thing to do.
	A few people will hate you for it.
	Who cares?
	Completely irrelevant, right?
	They're like flies trapped in the boot of a car you sold three years ago.
	It doesn't matter, right?
	But that frustration, if you connect enough with your frustration, if you connect enough with your passion, you will connect with the world and someone out there will connect with you back in a way that will make it all worthwhile forever.
	Yeah.
	And if you end up doing anything and you want some boost from what we do here, please let us know.
	I'd certainly be happy to help.
	Well, thank you for your time and your input.
	I appreciate it.
	I appreciate it as well.
	Thank you very much for a most enjoyable conversation.
	And let's move on to the next caller.
	Thank you.
	Bye.
	Alright, up next is Austin.
	Austin wrote in and said, That's from Austin.
	No!
	But that's not an argument, but go ahead.
	No, alright, well, um...
	First of all...
	Thank you for your call!
	You are not a woman.
	I will be moving on.
	It's hard to compete with your previous caller, sadly.
	Oh no, listen, listen.
	I hate to sound like an overly gay philosopher, but I'll take ethics any day of the week and twice on Sundays when it comes to these conversations, even over hot Swedish chicks.
	So, go on.
	Well, again, like I said, thanks for having me on your show.
	And one of the things I did want to say to you before I got into the question is...
	I think nobody's ever called you this before, but I think you might be a modern stylite.
	You know what a stylite is?
	I don't, but I'm intrigued.
	Okay, so a stylite...
	I thought I'd heard all the names that people called me, but apparently not.
	So a stylite was a type of monk that was, I think, very popular in early Christianity in the Byzantine Empire specifically, and they would sit upon tall columns and yell advice down to passerbys.
	So you sort of gave me that impression when I first...
	We're sunscreen!
	Okay, yeah, I got it.
	Well, my thought has been called Byzantine, so I'll certainly go with that as a – yeah, I'll take that as a compliment, but that's interesting.
	It should be.
	All right, so let's get to the time expansion, time shrinking.
	Right.
	So part of the impetus for this is I want to try and maybe mechanize or systematize.
	Or even quantify ethics.
	And a little bit of a backstory on this.
	So there's a YouTube video called The Philosophy of Liberty.
	So I'm credit where credit's due.
	Anyways, I watched it and it basically says that the most important principles to the libertarian philosophy, your life, liberty, and property, are really just manifestations of your time.
	So your life is...
	Your present is your liberty, the set of actions that you're free to take in the moment.
	Your past is your property, the set of productive life that you've lived spent acquiring property.
	You've got to show up to a job to get money, but that money is representative of the time that you've spent at that job.
	With that identity, basically Everything that we care about is time.
	I think you can do some interesting things with this identity.
	For example, A lot of relationships that you find in civilizations are those which maximize the efficiency of time.
	For example, like capitalism, the whole division of labor.
	I'll go farm the wheat, you go Make the fire.
	You go hunt the fish.
	If we're all doing these separate things, that's not very efficient.
	But if we divide our labor, that's very time efficient.
	So that's good in the system that I'm trying to communicate.
	And if you look across a lot of different...
	Like structures that are present in a civilization.
	You can see that the dominant ones, at least from the evidence that I've seen, are the ones that conserve and maximize available human time the most.
	If I can get another word in, the converse of these things, life, liberty, and property, I'm sure you've heard of it.
	The bad things here, to deprive life is murder, to deprive liberty is slavery, and to deprive property is theft.
	That's all just taking various portions of your time away.
	So, in that sense, because all of those effectively remove time, you know, available time to you, because you essentially lost whatever unit of your life because of these actions, those are all bad.
	So, does that make sense?
	It required a bit of an intro, and it's hard to convey in the question, but does that make sense to you?
	Well, look, I mean, I certainly accept that For the most part, in general, that which makes more efficient use of our time is a benefit and that which costs us our time unacceptably is a negative.
	Okay.
	So, you know, I could walk to your house to have a conversation or I can call you on the phone.
	I call you on the phone, it's more efficient and therefore that's what most people do.
	But I don't know how we get to morality from that.
	Because, certainly, there are some people who want things done by hand and there are some people who don't, right?
	There are writers, even in the modern age, even in the 21st century, even in the current year, who still use typewriters.
	There are some writers who still write by hand and won't touch a word processor or anything like that, even though, for me, voice dictation is the way to go.
	It's just how I sort of learn to organize my thoughts over these many shows.
	So there are some people who enjoy hand-painting miniatures.
	You can buy them pre-painted, but they like to hand-paint them, so they prefer things that are less efficient.
	There are some people who swear by push mowers rather than some big moon unit zapper thing that fries your grass with electric bow arcs or something.
	There are people who prefer organic, although organic is harder to grow and they prefer it for various reasons, some to do with health and some to do with taste and so on.
	So there are some people who prefer efficiency and some people who prefer, quote, inefficiency, right?
	When I was a kid, I used to love putting together these model airplanes, right?
	172nd scale, 124th scale, and so on.
	124th scale was very rare.
	It was wonderful.
	Now, you could have bought these things pre-made, but in general, you could buy them and then assemble them yourself with glue that would end up having your hands be sticky for about 14 days.
	But is it efficient?
	Is it not efficient?
	I don't know.
	There are some people who like to drive and some people who like to walk, which is more efficient.
	I think in general, if you give people a chance to do something that is more efficient with the same outcome, like make a phone call rather than walk over, but there are other times when people want to meet face to face and will prefer walking over or driving over to a phone call.
	I think there's a general trend, you could say, that people prefer things that are more efficient, but there's lots of counterexamples, and I'm not sure how you can get to the universality of morality from people's desire for, in general, efficiency.
	No, fair enough.
	I mean, personal preference is definitely something you should take into account.
	I guess, I mean, I can't touch you on that one, but what I can say is I perhaps intended this to Speak towards things like capitalism is a good idea because it conserves time better than, let's say, socialism, right?
	Many people making...
	Well, no.
	Hang on.
	It doesn't in some ways.
	Oh?
	So, I mean, I've used this example before, but I'm a lazy bastard, so I'll use it again.
	But, you know, the guys who did all of the...
	They did all the horse and buggy, right?
	And then some guy comes along and events the car, and now people don't want the horse and buggy anymore, right?
	So the guy who had spent his life savings building the horse and buggy factory, the guy comes along and events the car, now his time has all been, quote, wasted, right?
	Years of academy training wasted!
	Sorry, I watched Toy Story 2 a couple of times with my daughter when she was younger.
	I just remember that line.
	Years of academy training wasted!
	That was Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear.
	But anyway, so yeah, I mean it's efficient for society as a whole, but there's lots of losers.
	No, sir.
	I mean, there always will be losers, but the population as a whole will benefit.
	Like, there's no, like, you know, I think in one of your… Ah, but you see, now, sorry to interrupt, but now you're swinging to collectivism.
	Ah, as soon as you say as a whole, you're in pragmatism, you're in collectivism, and I can't follow you there when it comes to morale.
	I would never dare to be a collectivist.
	Yeah.
	Okay, then you can't be saying as a whole and blah-de-blah, right?
	Society is not some big organism.
	It's sort of like saying, well, as a whole, the jungle is stable, but 10,000 animals get eaten every day, right?
	Well, it's not stable for the animals that got eaten.
	No, that's true.
	I mean, I meant it on a sort of a large net aggregate kind of… A collectivist.
	Yeah.
	You can say large and net if you don't like the word collectivist, but I don't think it changes much.
	It's better for me that somebody invents a car than the horse and buggy because I can get to my job faster, I can go home faster, I can...
	Go to the movies faster.
	It's better for me.
	Well, you don't have a load of shit to shovel in the town all day, right?
	That used to be a significant job in cities.
	Seriously, shoveling horseshit was like a serious job in cities.
	You go hiking in the country, and suddenly there's this big stegosaurus pile mound of caca.
	And it's like, well, guess people rode horses through here.
	And imagine that with millions of horses in a city.
	And that was a big job dealing with all that stuff.
	I think they've got a four-year degree in that these days.
	Alright, so I guess if you can't universalize that...
	I like the idea, don't get me wrong.
	I mean, time is very important, right?
	It's the one thing they ain't making more of, land and time.
	So time is very important.
	And there certainly is an argument you said, stealing is bad because if I spend 10 hours earning something and you steal it, you've kind of made me a slave for those 10 hours and so on.
	I've used those arguments before in the past, but What's wrong with UPB, man?
	Why don't you like UPB? I love UPB. Just read UPB and then come back.
	What's wrong with UPB? Everyone's like, reinvent the wheel.
	It's like, there's UPB, you know?
	Just try that.
	Try that on for size.
	I actually did read UPB, and I thought I'd come take a swing, so to speak.
	Right, right.
	Yeah, I mean, collective benefit is tough, right?
	Because as soon as you start talking about benefits, and I agree with you, of course, that the free market is beneficial.
	To society as a whole, but it is only beneficial because it puts a whole bunch of people and businesses out of work, right?
	Which is not beneficial at least in the short run to those people.
	And so you can't – I mean don't get me wrong.
	Collective benefit, I completely agree with you.
	Capitalism, the free market is the best way for people to improve their lives, improve the arts of society and technology to advance and all of that.
	There are some problems, too, right?
	I mean, as soon as you get an excess of resources, people seem to stop having babies, and society tends to decline.
	And there's a whole bunch of other stuff that I talked about in the sort of Rome presentation and so on.
	But, yeah, you've got to stay away from that collective benefit stuff.
	I mean, it certainly is true from society as a whole standpoint, but ethics is an individual thing, right?
	There's no such thing as collectivist ethics anymore than there is a collectivist kidney, right?
	No, I mean, the intent was just to say that any solution that is faster does something better, whether it's capitalism, whether it's, you know, frank traditional marriage, or any number of, like, societal institutions, the one that does it best, or does whatever it does to preserve and maximize human time is best.
	But, I mean, if you, like, you know, you're trying to universalize it.
	No, I think there's use to that.
	But again, you have to make very broad judgments about that.
	So you're starting to talk about statistical trends.
	It's like saying, well, people prefer to live.
	Well, sure.
	Except people who sacrifice themselves, except people who take great risks because they enjoy their thrill junkies.
	You've got a serious thrill issue, dude.
	Okay, I watched a couple of kids' movies when I was younger.
	Or people who commit suicide or whatever it is, right?
	So yeah, people in general prefer to live, but the moment you've got to put an asterisk on things, then you can't be in the realm of ethics, right?
	Except for, right?
	Not well, right?
	I mean, because ethics has to be something that's universal.
	And that's why sort of the framework of UBB is not...
	Well, people in general like to do this asterisk, except for this category and this category.
	As soon as you've got an asterisk, you're out of the realm of universals, right?
	Right.
	No, I mean, I think you caught me there.
	So I was definitely looking more at, like, statistically what outcomes are generally beneficial to civilization.
	So that's where the thinking comes from.
	And I try to base it in the libertarian basis that I – No, that's good stuff.
	But here's one of the challenges, right?
	You don't know after the fact whether something is more efficient, right?
	So the car initially was enormously not efficient, right?
	I mean, it was a hobbyist dream for decades, right?
	It's like the personal computer, right?
	I mean… Couldn't do a whole lot with a ZX80 or a TRS-80, or as they called it, a trash 80, right?
	I mean, the first computer I programmed was a PET with 2K of RAM. You could type things and see the RAM going down if you wanted.
	And so nobody knew at the beginning whether there was going to be efficiency in computers or not.
	Nobody knew in the beginning whether cars were going to replace the horse and buggy because, you know, there were no gas stations.
	You had to crank it all the time.
	They kept breaking down.
	There were no parts.
	I mean, it was just...
	It was a hobby thing, like computers were at the beginning.
	My first computer I bought was an Atari 800 with 8K of RAM for $1,200, $1,100 at the time.
	It was crazy.
	And you don't want to know what I'm running right now.
	I do.
	Oh, no.
	I'm also a software developer.
	Well, I mean, I know you used to be in a previous life.
	So I've actually got several thousand EC2 instances spun up right now doing a batch migration job.
	So, I mean, it's a world of difference.
	So that can run Zork, I assume.
	Zork, sure.
	Zork can change.
	Can it run Depression Quest?
	That's all I need to know.
	So, we don't know what's going to be efficient beforehand, right?
	But what we do know is that the more efficient something gets, the more it harms existing industries.
	Yes.
	And so, at the beginning, when it's just beginning to change...
	I'm sorry, go ahead.
	I was going to say, but I mean, as a net, it produces beneficial change to everyone else.
	The people affected lose their jobs.
	No, no, no, I understand that.
	But the problem with the argument from efficiency is it tends to be very conservative when you combine it with the state.
	So when the car begins to chip into the horse and buggy manufacturers and all the people who take care of the horses and brush the horses and all the people who clean up after the crap and exercise the horses, there's a whole industry.
	Millions and millions, countless millions of people all taking care of these horses that people used to carry stuff around to themselves in their wagons or whatever.
	So when the car begins to chip into this, Those people have a huge incentive to prevent the car from manifesting itself as an economic entity, right?
	Because it's going to put the horse and buggy people out of business.
	And again, I'm not saying you're suggesting any of this, but if you're going to start to talk about efficiency and utility, the people who will be benefited from the car in the future don't know the degree to which they're going to be benefited in the future, right?
	Sure.
	No, they don't know.
	Because nobody wants horses anymore, those people have a very strong incentive to prevent whatever is coming down the road.
	And the sort of creative destruction of capitalism and so on, yeah, it's true to some degree, but certainly when you combine it with the state, capitalism is very conservative when it's combined with the state because… Everybody who loses their job is going to be really upset, and so they're going to lobby for the governments to maintain their existing industries.
	But the people who would have gotten jobs or whose lives would have been much better, they don't know that.
	The guy whose life would have been saved because a car would have gotten him to the hospital whereas a horse couldn't, or at least in time, he doesn't know any of that.
	And so the unknown benefits never trump the known costs and that's why with the state, there's a terrible conservatism when it comes to the market.
	And what happens is this is why there's a lot of stagnation in various fields and this is why incomes – one of the reasons why incomes have stagnated or declined is that politicians don't like large numbers of people to lose their jobs.
	Because those people would then vote them out of office.
	And all the people who benefit from that, which is greater than the people who lose their jobs, they can't trace it.
	They can't figure it out.
	And they're just like, wow, cool new stuff has come along.
	That's great.
	So anyway, I'm not saying you're arguing for any of this, but the utility argument is really tricky.
	From a political standpoint, the utility argument serves to shore up the perspective that we should maintain existing industries and their employment rather than Risk whatever new thing might be coming along.
	Right.
	So even if the state disappeared overnight, you still disagree with the premise?
	Yeah.
	No, I just want to...
	If the state disappeared overnight, industries would still try and sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt into new industries, right?
	Because they don't want people to leave the fault, right?
	Yeah.
	But no, I like the argument.
	Time is always involved in punishment.
	Time is scarce.
	Time is precious.
	But I think it's a tough case to move it all to morality because you've got a lot of asterisks and you've got a lot of people who go against the brain of efficiency.
	No, I mean, there's a lot of generalizations and statistics involved with it.
	And I'm going to work on a whole thing to do with this.
	I know after the election, I promise we're getting back to more philosophy, but I've got most of the presentation put together on inductive versus deductive reasoning, and we'll get more into that after the election.
	Stay on Donald Trump.
	Stay on Donald Trump.
	I'm aware of the priorities of Western civilization, but I'm also aware that I do want to get back to that other stuff as well.
	I'm going to move on to the next caller, but you're welcome back anytime, man.
	I really, really appreciate the call, and thank you for letting me talk about ethics.
	All right.
	Thanks, Stephan.
	Thanks.
	Alright, up next we have Jordan.
	Jordan wrote in and said, However, I'm a little short in the tooth.
	I was not around for the induction of home gaming and thus have only seen it evolve from the stage I jumped in at around the late 90s.
	Is this art form as promising and full of potential as I and others in my age group think it is?
	What do we have to do to protect the ethical and moral production and covering of the video game industry?
	See GamerGate.
	I'd also love to hear your thoughts on the new frontier of virtual reality and its application outside the video entertainment realm.
	That's from Jordan.
	Hey Jordan, shorten the tooth.
	You like that one, eh?
	How you doing?
	Yeah, it's good.
	It's good.
	Short in the tooth, thick of the hair, I don't know.
	I'm doing well.
	How are you doing?
	I'm very well, thank you for asking.
	I want to point out, I just literally came straight from work to do the show, and the therapeutic decompressing that I got from the previous callers was...
	It was real nice.
	I was a little wound up after work, so thank you for kind of holding...
	Philosophy, it does help to center it.
	I'm glad you found that to be the case as well.
	Yeah, listen, I have spent a lot of time video gaming in my life.
	Occasionally I'm like, oh, did I spend too much time video gaming?
	But I don't feel that way because I really, really enjoyed it.
	Yes, it's never a question in my mind either.
	No, and it's – well, you're young.
	But I mean, A, I really enjoyed it.
	And B, it's not like I haven't got other things done with my life, right?
	I mean, I'm getting other stuff done with my life.
	So I think some of the extreme gamers who are like 40 hours a week and 50 hours a week, I think that's perhaps a little too much.
	But I have spent a lot of time.
	And for – let's see.
	I'm trying to think of the big ones that I've played.
	Recently.
	Well, of course, I played Doom 2016.
	Doom.
	I think Doom was one of the best.
	Best new, but kind of old.
	Yeah, this new one is great.
	Yeah, it's kind of classic.
	It's real purity of the mechanics.
	There's not a lot to bog you down in the new one.
	It's completely hysterical.
	Oh, it's great.
	You can't be anywhere else than in the dungeon.
	You're not thinking about anything else.
	It is a zen, pixel-mangling, brain-twitchy moment.
	Gore zen.
	There you go.
	Yeah, so, but yeah, I mean, I'm sort of, there's sort of two kinds, there's three kinds of games that I like, right?
	The one is the first-person shooters.
	The other is medieval RPGs.
	Okay.
	You know, your basic Morrowind.
	Yeah, Skyrim.
	I'm trying a little bit of Witcher 3, but I know that's a pretty big time commitment, which I don't really have at the moment.
	You gotta kind of disappear for six months to get the full Witcher experience.
	One of my friends does not stop talking about how much he likes that game.
	Right.
	And I just like that it's prettier than Skyrim.
	I did play Skyrim, which I liked, and even an expansion pack or two.
	But, I mean, that took me years to say an hour or two a week if I was lucky.
	You'd be in that content.
	Yeah, you'd be in that forever.
	And I really, really like Space Sims.
	To me, one of the great tragedies of...
	The very first game that I saw that I loved was called Star Raiders.
	And you can find videos of this.
	I just, believe it or not, I mean, I just, a couple of days ago, I can't even remember why, I found an emulator for my old Atari 800 and booted it up.
	And I was like, whoa!
	I feel I got pimples just looking at this screen.
	Didn't have to overclock to run the emulator, I hope.
	No, did not have to overclock to run the.01 gigahertz monster that the Atari 800 was.
	Yeah, it's insane.
	Because I look at the games that I jumped in, like the N64, the first 3D, the polygon stuff, and that looks barbaric to me now.
	I don't even understand how you guys could have played with that.
	Where's the problem mapping?
	Yeah, exactly.
	How could you guys...
	Stereoscopic filter, where's my 3D? What is this weird triangle thing?
	What is that supposed to be?
	This is so irrational.
	Yeah, and there was this game called Star Raiders.
	My math teacher showed us this, and it was drifting through space, and it was shooting cars.
	Incredible game.
	The guy who designed it, the guy who wrote it, never made any money from it.
	And it was one of the greatest games to sell that entire system.
	And, you know, it's still an amazing game to fit in 8K. I mean, it's astounding, right?
	And so I like me a good space sim, a good space flight sim.
	But you can't find these things for love or money.
	I played Wing Commander three years ago, which I liked a lot.
	Elite Dangerous was kind of okay.
	But you can't.
	I mean, you've got to go, oh, fine.
	I'll do Galaxy on Fire.
	Fine.
	Fine.
	I'll do something on a tablet because I just need my fix.
	But it's like, why can't I get...
	You know, they did a Star Raiders for the Xbox.
	It was not the best game in the world.
	But it's like, why can't I just get a space flight shooty sim?
	I don't want to trade any crystals.
	I just don't want to shoot things.
	Please, God.
	And so, like everyone else, I was like, I'll try No Man's Sky.
	And...
	Oh, man.
	That's my crying game moment.
	It's like, you're the most beautiful woman.
	See ya.
	You're Canadian, right?
	So it wasn't $69.99 or whatever the normal premium price is.
	It's like $80 for us who live in Canada.
	So that's just a little bit extra salt in the wound.
	I don't want to cry on air.
	That's just bad.
	Because, boy, you ever had those movies where...
	This trailer is hilarious.
	It's going to be the funniest movie ever.
	And all the funny jokes were in the trailer, and the rest of it is just lame.
	But enough of Austin Powers 3.
	Thanks for your money.
	Yeah, with this one, it's like, wow, that's cool.
	You've got dinosaurs.
	You can fly around.
	You can shoot stuff.
	And it's like, okay, I've spent 20 minutes slowly wandering around a planet shooting at Lycan.
	And Sean Murray has left Twitter.
	And I'm supposed to pick something up to fix my spaceship.
	I don't know what it is or where it is.
	And I refuse, as a matter of masculine pride, to go online and look for the solution of a game I've only been playing for 20 minutes.
	You will never ask for interstellar directions.
	I respect that.
	I, you know, every now and then, I'll be crumbled.
	You know, I still don't know half the secrets in Doom.
	But that's fine.
	Yeah, no, Doom's got content for days like...
	I played that straight through 30 hours, the two weeks of its release, and I've got like 50%, maybe 60% of it done.
	And it's just like, I can't really justify going back when I've already got what I think is a pretty good value out of it.
	But yeah, there's so much stuff to do.
	So much.
	It's insane.
	So with No Man's Sky, it's like, I'm wandering around, and I have a jetpack.
	And my jetpack lasts...
	One and a half seconds.
	Oh no!
	Sorry, that's a little too much excitement for me there, boys.
	Oh, this animal again.
	Oh, this is great.
	No Man's Sky was just a great example of the hype culture around pre-order games now.
	And just, as soon as that thing released, you could take a look at Hello Games' Twitter account.
	Drops to zero the day after release.
	See ya, suckers.
	What do you mean?
	What is Hello Games Twitter again?
	Oh, Hello Games was the developers of No Man's Sky.
	Like, the big thing surrounding No Man's Sky is this.
	Oh, there was more than one guy?
	No, I'm just kidding.
	There was eight of them, but I don't know.
	Maybe some of them were contractors.
	Turns out the number of planets does not equal the amount of fun you're going to have in the game.
	Who would have thought, right?
	And they're all the same.
	Oh, hey, we've seen this before.
	I'm like, I am now enraged at this game.
	I am now angry at myself for getting so excited.
	And that's just because it's been so long since there's been a good space game.
	Oh, yeah, no.
	Yeah, it had Elite Dangerous, and that was kind of fun, but it's one of those things where wide is an ocean, deep is a puddle.
	I can go to this planet again and trade for more Starbucks, but I've done this empty times before.
	Yeah, I feel it just gets more repetitive, and that's tough to do in a space game, because that's half your content right there.
	So yeah, that's kind of the trouble.
	But Stefan, I think your wishes are good.
	Go ahead.
	Sorry.
	Well, I just want to chase something through a canyon up into a space, fly it past the moon, shooting the crap out of it, with bits flying off and great polygons.
	It's all I want.
	It's all I want.
	I'm sure you've heard the rumblings of Star Citizen.
	It's been in development for at least an APOC. Ah, see, this is the thing.
	This is the thing.
	This is the annoying thing about these games, man.
	Oh, you started.
	So, everyone's like, a new space game is coming out, right?
	And I'm like, I'm not going to get excited.
	And you know why I'm not going to get excited?
	Because I know they're going to say it has all of these incredible features that will take you months to learn that are incredibly complicated.
	Getting them wrong will cost you your progress.
	And I'm not going to chase anything through a canyon over a moon, blasting it while bits of it fall off the crop.
	That's all I want to do!
	Don't give me any complicated alliances with things that have nine heads.
	I don't want to know how to trade various things.
	You know, if I want to trade her, I'll open up a Forex account.
	I don't want to do all of this complicated stuff.
	I don't want enemy AI. I don't want to be in a universe with 20,000 other players and 6 billion planets.
	I just want to shoot some stuff that's flying over a moon now.
	It's all I want.
	Don't give me all this other stuff.
	Because, oh, it's a space game, and it's got all these incredible things, and it's really complicated, and you're going to be able to assemble things, and you're going to be able to hunt for, mine for things.
	It's like, no!
	No, I'm old.
	You need a two-year degree to appreciate this game.
	You need a two-year degree to appreciate this game.
	Yeah!
	Realistic physics...
	No!
	Realistic physics.
	More realistic than...
	I don't know.
	What's that one?
	You build a spaceship and if you get the rocket wrong, it turns and blows up.
	Oh, Kerbal?
	Yeah, no.
	Kerbal Space.
	Yeah, that's the one.
	That one's the one.
	That one.
	Hey, if you guys could give me another game that makes me look like an idiot in front of my daughter, I'd really be thankful.
	Hey, let's try out this game.
	Oh, look.
	Daddy crashed another spaceship.
	That's an experience you can't pay for.
	The only thing I wish is you could mod it.
	And actually, no.
	I'm sure you could do this.
	But as soon as you crash that ship, you get the little game over sound from The Price is Right.
	Like the dun-dun-da-da.
	Boo!
	And then it counts the casualties right in front of you.
	Yeah.
	So anyway, I'd even be okay with a good flight simulator.
	But because, I mean, you can't – I mean, those are tough to find out, too.
	I just – I think people – I don't know.
	It's a generational thing, maybe.
	I mean, because, you know, kids these days, you all have time to learn complicated games.
	I don't.
	Yeah, I guess you got that whole holding up Western civilization like Atlas with the world on his shoulders.
	And I get nappy!
	Oh, yeah.
	No, but the good news is...
	I used to have the capacity to process sugar in my body.
	I don't really anymore.
	But no, I just...
	Look, I understand that.
	Like, when I was a kid, like, wow, a really complicated combat system in Ultima 3?
	Cool.
	Dive-righted?
	What?
	Are you saying I can go around in Ultima 4 and pick up reagents and then make them in a vat and experiment and figure...
	It's like, oh, man, don't.
	Just give me the grant.
	Somewhere along the line, it became like work.
	Wait a second.
	Well, yeah.
	I mean, I remember a friend of mine saying about Ultima 4, I think it was, it's like, hey, you know, you can get the flour, you can get the water, you can actually bake the bread.
	And I'm like, I don't think that's what the word actually means.
	You can virtually actually bake this bread in real time.
	Oh, that sounds wonderful.
	In real time.
	Yeah.
	No, I get that.
	Yeah, that's a big problem in those big RPGs and MMOs.
	It's like, oh look, I'm cooking, I'm mining.
	These are all things that could be done in real life.
	Hmm.
	Except I'm an orc doing it, so woo!
	Just as boring as a real job, but with slightly less black lung.
	So, I just, you know, I mean, if I was a game dev, like if I was...
	I'm not doing what I'm doing.
	I'm sure I would have gone more into game development, but maybe Fox Day can hear this and it's like, I think there's a giant market out there.
	Just give me a good space shooter.
	I don't mind a little bit of trading.
	Fine, fine, fine.
	You want to create some work for voice actors?
	I can live with it.
	Okay, fine, fine, fine.
	But But shooting.
	The man just wants to shoot.
	Galaxy on Fire 2 was pretty good that way.
	I mean, you tilt the tablet, so it's not the joystick thing that I remember, but Galaxy on Fire 2, that's for Android.
	I don't know if it's out for iOS, but it's out for Android.
	So it uses the gyro gimbal in the actual iPad to...
	Steer the vehicle?
	Yeah, you steer by tilting the tablet.
	I need stuff to do on a bike machine because exercise is godly boring.
	And if I'm playing a video game or whatever on a tablet, that's okay.
	And occasionally I'll...
	I'm going to lower myself to Candy Crush, but the problem is it makes my balls fall off, so I can't do it for too long.
	So yeah, I mean, something with a joystick where you can fly.
	I mean, I remember when I was...
	The flight simulators that were out for...
	The second big computer I had was the Atari 520ST, and that had some pretty good 3D stuff, and the...
	was actually pretty good and i was pretty good at it wasn't really a shooty one but you know just flying around learning how to land all that kind of stuff oh yeah it was pretty cool um but yeah the flight stuff seems to have kind of gone by the wayside i don't think they're even doing the micro simulator anymore i think they've kind of i have not seen one of those since like yeah 2012 if even and on top of that for those ones you get those super enthusiasts who'd get like the 200 dollar uh entire cockpit kind of uh gimbals and controls just so they could get the legitimate experience
	so i think it was a real like high-end user kind of thing so that's why it fell off no it's like guys who want driving sims who get like the pedals and the steering wheels and shit like that it's like buy a car and go to a track there you go but hey you know what i think at that you know you're pretty close You want to put your money on that.
	So Sims, medieval RPGs in particular, I played a little bit of StarCraft when I was younger.
	But medieval ones I find really cool.
	And that just comes out of my own Dungeons& Dragons history.
	Oh yeah, definitely.
	And that was the point I wanted to touch on.
	Definitely the tabletop gaming is a blast.
	And the first-person shooters.
	I mean I just – the zen of pixel mayhem straight to the cerebral cortex.
	Like to me, I spend so much time in like the neofrontal cortex.
	I need that deep elevator shaft straight down to the lizard brain.
	Just some fun.
	Just some release of those beautiful chemicals.
	I want the entire upstairs city to go dark.
	You know?
	Just like electricity hit the entire power station.
	Everything post-reptile, I just want it to go dark.
	Shut the lights down, boys.
	I'm shooting aliens.
	That's right.
	I just want to get straight back to basic reptilian samurai brain.
	That's what I want.
	I haven't done it for a while, but Doom was to me kind of irresistible, and it did fulfill expectations, and it is a very, very good game, and it does that for me.
	It's like, I'm not thinking about Western Civilization.
	I'm I'm thinking about not having my bowels ripped out by that big giant floating eyeball.
	And that, to me, is not thought at all.
	Yeah, it's more instinct, reaction.
	You're not really having to put all your thoughts through the filters and get bogged down with your own kind of inward look.
	It's just, I want to shoot these things.
	And you know what?
	Let me shoot these things.
	Ain't no political correctness in the first-person shooter, at least not a good one.
	Not yet, at least.
	Demon lives don't!
	Please don't.
	Yeah, when you drop that Depression Quest reference, I could feel myself kind of clamming up a little bit.
	It is, yeah.
	And I think it is an art form.
	And I think it has significant philosophical potential.
	Which I think is not being manifest at the moment.
	I mean, I'd love to do a medieval game where you get rid of the king...
	Peacefully.
	You get rid of the king, and guess what?
	There's no new king.
	I mean, Tolkien, Lord of the Rings guy, he was an anarchist.
	And his final book was The Return of the King.
	It's like, I don't think you really know what anarchism means if your whole big bank opus is Return of the King.
	No, I get that.
	So to me, it would have been great if, like, hey, the solution to Sauron is no rulers.
	And I think that would have been fascinating.
	And I think that there is room for a game where you overthrow some central authority, and the solution is...
	Freedom.
	Like, no central authority, no rulers, no...
	And you could really make a great case for that.
	It could be well-written, it could be beautifully done, and it would have a huge impact.
	Yeah, it'd be a great way to introduce...
	It'd be a great way to introduce, like, my generation, younger people as well, to all these new concepts when we've all just been force-fed.
	Hey, you know, government's good.
	The prime minister's a great guy.
	He's got your best interests out for heart.
	Like, all that kind of stuff.
	So it'd be good to see Kosh Bech.
	I love Unreal Tournament, but dear God alive, I mean, they just, every single, the corporation is in charge of her!
	It's like, come on.
	It's not really, most corporations don't tend to get angry, governments generally do, so it's just, you know, the little kitten calling yourself a tough guy, but yeah, I think it would be fantastic to have a game wherein the solution to authority was freedom, but the solution to authority seems to be New authority.
	Oh yeah, definitely.
	And I think, yeah, if that message is in a video game as opposed to a book or a movie, because you're experiencing that video game a lot more actively than you would, I'm not saying you turn your brain off completely.
	There's some films that are obviously more thinkers, like A Good Will Hunting.
	You're not turning your brain off.
	But you're not as active as you are in that art form as you would be with a video game, right?
	So I... Just...
	Go ahead.
	The only thing...
	Sorry to interrupt.
	Good Will Hunting.
	It's just resentment.
	If you think you're a smart person like I am and then you watch somebody playing a stone genius, it's like, I resent you.
	Oh, yeah.
	No.
	Anyway.
	But no, you're in the story.
	You are the story.
	I mean, that's the beauty of video games, particularly now, where there is very compelling voice acting, and there is very compelling storylines, and you can...
	There's almost nothing that you can't imagine that you can't visualize.
	Yeah, you can build these big, beautiful narratives, like Witcher 3, for an example, is, what, 60-plus hours of just main storyline stuff, and in this entire experience...
	Should I not tell you that?
	Maybe 200.
	I do that too, right?
	Yeah, you're playing this character, so obviously you're really invested in his goals.
	You're really invested in seeing his story to the ending, and then somewhere along the way you realize, oh, we're sharing this story.
	No, no, don't.
	No, no, no.
	I might play it.
	Don't spoil it.
	Let's suck all that right back in.
	But I think it would be...
	Yes, I think there's a wonderful opportunity for narratives that are...
	Outside the mainstream.
	And I think there's still quite a bit, and again, I'm no expert on modern games, but it seems to me that there's still quite a bit of conservatism, of sort of traditional, you kind of know what's going to happen, particularly in the ending.
	There's not a lot of real innovation in storytelling as yet, I think, in video games.
	And I think that there should be, and I think there could be, But I think that, of course, a lot of the people who are into video games, the design, the writing and so on, are younger people and younger people these days don't have the same literary tradition that I grew up with.
	Like I was trying to explain to my daughter the other day what life was like when I was a kid when there was no TV really.
	We had no money.
	You could go to the library and you could get books there and that's what you did.
	Library?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Just think of it as a DLL but with paper.
	That's where I go to get video games.
	No, I'm kidding.
	You can actually rent those out or take those out in libraries now.
	It's kind of crazy.
	No, and my friends and I would go garbage picking.
	And I remember one thing that was a huge haul.
	Was we went through an industrial park, an industrial area, and we found these giant rolls of paper that were being thrown out and we got them home.
	And I was showing her, I was sort of trying to explain to her that my friends and I, we would draw these little tracks and then we would take pencils and we would push the top of the pencils with the tip down on the paper until it skidded.
	And that's where your car would go.
	And if you skidded off the track, you lost.
	You had to try and...
	I know it sounds – it's totally lame.
	Make your own fun.
	I know.
	I get it.
	Yeah.
	I mean literally like skidding little pencils and you wanted to go far but you didn't go off the track because then you'd lose.
	And that was our – paper airplanes would be a big fad because you could make those with discarded paper and stuff like that.
	And I remember dragging a whole door home.
	There was a house being dismantled.
	I dragged a whole big white door home.
	I set it up in my bedroom and started painting a huge – It was a pastoral landscape when I was a kid.
	I had my model train set and you try and figure out ways to make all of that work without spending money.
	I was introduced to capitalism.
	I took two coaches.
	These are tiny little stories that otherwise would mention history.
	I took two little coaches to a train store in Toronto and sold them.
	The guy gave me four bucks for both and then he later sold them for $8 a piece.
	I'm like, huh?
	So that's how it's going to be.
	So, okay.
	I think I want to be on the selling side of that and the selling side of this.
	And so that was sort of my insight into, okay, bit of a markup.
	I can sort of understand where they're coming from.
	At the same time, it still felt he tripped me off because, you know, everyone's a socialist when they're a kid because you live in this paradise of everyone providing stuff.
	Yeah, you just get free stuff.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, so trying to explain what it's like to not be able to get your money because the bank's closed for three days.
	Anyway, nobody knows.
	Wait, what?
	You're scaring me, Stefan.
	Don't tell me tales of that old time.
	No, and I remember getting up at dawn before school and writing screensavers.
	Like OS screensavers?
	Atari.
	Oh, jeez.
	Yeah.
	Writing little triangles that float around the screen.
	And I remember writing a paint program.
	You know, you move the joystick, you push the joystick button, and that's how you paint.
	And it's like, oh no!
	You have to have it skip over stuff you've already done and you have to hold it in memory.
	I remember writing – I called it Lemlander for Lunar Emissions Module or whatever it was.
	There was an old game called Lunar Lander where you would try and land this little pixel thing on a moon and you had to conserve your fuel and all that kind of stuff.
	And I wrote one and it was pretty cool except I had stars up there.
	You couldn't have the tip touch the stars otherwise they would think it had landed because I tested the two tips.
	You had to be a certain speed, below a certain speed and all that.
	And it was great.
	It was fun.
	I really enjoyed that kind of stuff.
	I wrote a dungeon game, a sort of walk around with blood priests.
	I remember that was my big phrase that I kind of liked.
	I wrote a sort of game, a lot of really cool stuff.
	But it would be a pretty wild thing to be involved in game design at the moment because you can literally do anything that you want.
	And I think that...
	The stories, I think, are still a little bit too traditional and derivative, I guess you could say.
	Derivative of comic books, derivative of Dungeons& Dragons, derivative of Star Wars, derivative of all this kind of stuff.
	Oh yeah, you see all the old narratives like the hero's journey and the coming of age.
	You see those just kind of slightly changed and applied to the setting.
	So yeah, I agree with you in that point.
	It's something really surprising.
	Really surprising.
	And to me, I've always thought about it, that it would be cool to have an overthrow the evil lord and replace it with...
	Nothing.
	Now deal with it.
	Now you're free.
	Nobody new is going to be in charge.
	You are rulers of yourselves.
	I think that would give goosebumps to people who would open them up.
	That's the trailer right there.
	That's the last line.
	Rule yourselves.
	Oh, I like that.
	I'd play that.
	Oh, yes.
	Yeah, and the reviewers would be like...
	This is the most subversive game that has ever been made.
	I mean, just think if the, you know, people would go insane about it.
	They would shake things up.
	Oh yeah, because it's a very, I don't want to say like standardized, but there's definitely kind of what's expected and accepted in like your independently made video games these days and those who stray from that often don't do well with the current...
	Atmosphere of video game journalism.
	So I feel there's definitely probably kind of a preference for those people making those stories over and over again.
	Right.
	Right.
	Or how about a story where society's decay was occurring because of hedonism and a lack of belief in religion or a lack of belief in deeper values or a lack of – oh, what if there was a game about how multiculturalism causes societies to fragment and infight?
	Like I mean some anti-DC or at least irreverent to politically correct culture.
	And a pushback and something to help educate the people who usually consume this a little bit more – well, no, definitely more liberalized kind of media.
	Yeah, like the Angry Birds, right?
	I mean, like, just something where it's like, it's just a little bit different, where the fragility of people is mocked rather than nurtured.
	You know, like, oh, the snowflakes, right?
	I encountered a different idea.
	I'm really upset.
	It's like, where, you know, there's that great scene at the beginning of The Godfather where Don Corleone, the guy's crying because he can't get a movie part, just slaps him in the face.
	Oh, yeah, definitely.
	What are you crying for?
	Be a man!
	And I remember seeing that.
	It's like, all my friends are raised by single moms?
	You can't do that!
	Bad touch, bad touch!
	Yeah, yeah, bad touch.
	Put that hand right back.
	Show the officer where the Mafia Don hit you in the face, son.
	It was right here.
	He used his knuckles.
	Yeah, but that's one of the reasons, you know, when you get single moms, you get those movies, because people are just desperate.
	That's why there's so many Mafia movies, and of course the caricature of masculinity, but at least there's some male strong ones.
	There's a little bit, yeah.
	Yeah, no, no, I definitely get that.
	And something like, what was it?
	They just came out with a new one.
	Gears of War, just hyper-masculine, the video game.
	Like, that's kind of a guilty pleasure for me.
	I enjoy being this giant muscle-bound front lineman chopping with a chainsaw, and I shouldn't have to feel bad for that.
	Have you seen the new railing on those kinds of games?
	I probably don't have to tell you exactly what's being said.
	What do you mean?
	Oh, you mean people nagging at them for being overly masculine?
	Look at all those dudes shooting people.
	Yeah, I totally remember that when the Muslims were at the gates of Vienna during the Crusades.
	I remember everyone saying, oh yeah, those Crusaders who were trying to push them back and reclaim Europe.
	Oh, they're just too big in media and it's very patriarchal.
	No, they were like, save us!
	Yeah.
	Save us!
	I think the narrative would have been a little bit different when they're standing over you with their maces and their battle axes.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I agree with you there.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Let's say you have to choose between two patriarchies.
	Which one do you want?
	I get the image of that episode of The Simpsons when they're going down the canal and they look one way and it's like this dark, horrible forest and the other way you see like a cloud and a rainbow and the sun peeking out from behind.
	Hmm, what's it going to be?
	Right, right.
	So yeah, I think it has huge potential.
	Now, I don't know much about virtual reality.
	I've been sort of mulling over whether to get it from my phone, but I'm trying to figure out in between doing – I did like four shows today, including this one.
	Oh, boy.
	I told my daughter I'm going to be a little busy for the next couple of months – sorry, next couple of weeks.
	But I'd like to give it a try.
	I mean I remember trying it many, many years ago and you sort of strap on a helmet.
	You could look around the virtual world and so on.
	Again, I think it's got great potential.
	Like all technological advances, it will first be used in porn and nobody will buy any secondhand equipment.
	But it will – it again has immersive storytelling potential and I would really just like – I think so much.
	Like the video games for VR, that's going to be cool.
	That's going to be a cool experience.
	But the completely immersive kind of like a VR-based movie or a VR even lecture, something where you're completely immersed in it, you're going to be way more receptive to the content.
	So it's going to be a great vehicle for like helping educate people.
	I hesitate to use the term, but maybe even propagandizing people.
	But it's going to be a really, really useful tool in that, just because it's the next step in immersion.
	Right, right.
	Yeah, no.
	Yeah, so I mean, if I wasn't doing this, I'd be all over that as an entrepreneur.
	Oh yeah, it's...
	Proposals and scripts.
	I'd just be all over that stuff.
	In 10 years, that's going to be everywhere.
	Maybe even less.
	It combines two things that I love.
	I love video games and I love philosophy.
	And to be able to combine the two, I think, would be really powerful.
	Oh yeah, definitely.
	So that would be my intention if I wasn't doing what I'm doing now.
	Maybe that would be a better way to do it.
	Maybe you'd reach more people that way.
	I don't know.
	I think you're doing pretty good with your current setup, if I can say so.
	Yeah, no particular complaints, but yeah, huge potential, but people need to start taking more risks.
	And the problem is, of course, with all this potential, it means that you can create and imagine anything you want, but of course everything has a price tag.
	And because the game is getting so insanely expensive, they don't want to take risks.
	It's kind of like movies.
	Some are blockbusters.
	How much innovative stuff are you really going to get?
	When you port 250.
	Well, it's got to play in every single culture.
	It's got to play in every single country.
	It's got to be translated into 15 different languages.
	Some African clicking language is going to be what the Hulk says or whatever.
	How is this going to play in the foreign market?
	You have to be kind of conservative.
	Just hang on.
	You have to be kind of conservative when you make these kind of things because you've got to hit as wide an audience as possible.
	And the more expensive a video game gets, of course, the more conservative the script tends to be.
	Oh, yeah.
	And conservative – well, I don't mean conservative like republicans.
	I mean the less risky the script is going to tend to be.
	No crazy flashing lights.
	You've seen this all before with the new coat of paint.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And it's because all that money is invested in it.
	It makes a difference that says it faster.
	Exactly.
	And you could point to that, like the Ghostbusters remake, X, Y, and Z. People don't want to take risks.
	And especially when the admission ticket price for VR is something like $3,000, yeah, they want to play it as safe as possible.
	Well, the funny thing is, and this is...
	I haven't read...
	Sorry, I haven't seen the new Ghostbusters movie, but in particular, Milo has...
	Talked about it, and what used to be a safe bet, which is the sort of lefty social justice warrior stuff, no longer seems like a safe bet, and that's where I think there is an opening.
	Conservative is the new edgy.
	It's the new rebelliousness.
	Being on the right and being a comedian has such incredibly fertile ground at the moment because we have hit peak political correctness and people are so hungry for this big, giant, mutated monstrosity of PC to finally take a couple of blows to the shins and come down.
	I think that's true in video games as well, in movies.
	There's such a huge opportunity for edgy, brilliant, evocative, exciting stuff.
	Oh, yeah, definitely.
	And not like cheesy conservative stuff like the left-behind movies.
	There was this whole range of really cheesy religious stuff that came out I think in the 90s or whatever.
	But no, like really intelligent stuff that has as its villains the fragile.
	You know, the cry bullies.
	And there is a huge, huge potential.
	And again, if I was still writing stories and plays and novels and all that kind of stuff, that's stuff that I'd really be working on.
	And in fact, my big novel, The God of Atheists, which I wrote, oh God, 15 years ago, something like that.
	That was a huge cry against politically correct culture and a huge cry against conformity in universities and a very – a great and powerful book and people should just buy it and read it.
	It's fantastic at freedomainradio.com slash free, although that one isn't free because I have to print the book.
	But there is a lot of room in art for railing against all of the bloated, monstrous cliches that have so infested and dominated art.
	You know, like the plucky do-everything woman kind of – I mean when George Lucas is doing it these days, you know it's a bloated, tired cliché.
	Oh, yeah.
	So there's lots of ways of pushing back against this stuff that I think would be really exciting.
	And it would be that literal breath of fresh air.
	And art needs to challenge stereotypes because the moment that things become tropes, They die.
	They die in people's hearts and minds.
	The moment something becomes a cliche, the moment you know what's coming next, the moment you know all of this, repetition is for children.
	Innovation is for adults.
	Like kids love reading the same book over and over again.
	I know I did when I was a kid.
	I used to love reading the same bits of books over and over again like when Nazgul – when the Nazgul are recalled to Mount Doom because these – I love reading that book a bit over and over again.
	But innovation is for adults.
	Repetition is for children.
	But we've taken the repetition of children and we've applied it to adults, and now we need real adults to come along and blow it all away with artistic innovation.
	And I'm hoping the video games will do some of that.
	I don't have a lot of hope for movies, and I don't have a lot of hope for novels, but I do have a lot of hope for podcasts and video games.
	Yeah, especially seeing now you could self-publish.
	One person can make a video game with tons of content, so it's really opening up, and I think those people need to be embraced because they're going to be, yeah, the people who shatter.
	What's that?
	Dev tools for video games are fantastic these days.
	Oh, it's crazy.
	I mean, you don't have to sit there and see from the ground up.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Any coding language is completely foreign to me.
	I tried to take a class in college, and I just don't remember it.
	I ended up with sweaty palms standing outside the classroom.
	And there's some of these games that are just kind of the drag-and-drop, the SnapMath interface, and Doom, as an example, that are just really simple tools that you can create something completely divergent from the original.
	And it's just so easy nowadays.
	Yeah, no, it's as far away from programming as swiping your phone screen is from programming.
	So I hope that helps.
	I mean, I hope it's not too boring for everyone else.
	I'm fascinated by the art form and have a long history with video games, and so I really, really appreciate it.
	Thank you for your time, Stefan.
	Have a good night.
	All right.
	Who's next?
	Alright, now we have Ryan.
	Ryan wrote in and said, I'm a conservative and atheist.
	Too often I have heard from other atheists, leftists, and even libertarians, the morality is ambiguous.
	Can atheists be moral?
	If so, how can I, as an atheist, counter these types of arguments and assert some sense of moral certitude?
	That's from Ryan.
	Hello, Ryan.
	How you doing?
	I'm doing well, Stefan.
	How are you?
	I'm very well.
	Thank you.
	Can ACS be moral?
	Before we get started here, I had no idea you were a big video game fan.
	That's really cool.
	Oh, yeah.
	Huge.
	Huge.
	For myself, I felt the pain with No Man's Sky 2.
	It was so much garbage.
	You know, every now and then, you just need to get that wet slap of cold fish across the face to remind you that sometimes hype is hype, and you've got to be more cautious.
	But I'm like, ooh, dinosaurs, I can fly spaceships through.
	Just take my money.
	Right, exactly.
	I've learned to stop pre-ordering games.
	Now, some people are trying to get their money back, as far as I understand it, saying, look, the stuff that was promised wasn't delivered.
	Anyways.
	I pre-ordered it.
	You're kind of stuck with it.
	Yeah.
	I'll give it one more try.
	It's not worth it.
	At some point.
	Is it really not worth it?
	No, there's nothing in the middle of the universe, or the galaxy.
	There's nothing there.
	But you could have space battles somewhere.
	I saw those.
	No.
	They're...
	I don't know.
	They're not worth it.
	They're shallow.
	Okay.
	Well, sometimes you just have to spend a little bit of money to buy a little bit of cynicism, but that's alright.
	Right, right, right.
	That's alright.
	That's alright.
	Alright.
	Um...
	So, can atheists be moral?
	Well, I guess the first question is, what do you mean by moral?
	Sure.
	Let me give a little bit of background to this, and then I'll also want to add something to it.
	I've been grappling with this question pretty much ever since I graduated from college, about a year and a half ago.
	I guess what I mean by moral is that I've been an atheist pretty much my entire life, but as I said, I'm also a conservative, and I cannot agree with leftist Yeah,
	and you know, the people who say that, we should totally turn back the migrants, right?
	that this culture is better, but it's not.
	So they're risking life and limb to cross the Mediterranean.
	They're coming across in leaky boats.
	They're drowning, some of them.
	They should be turned back because they're wrong.
	They think they want to come to Europe because Europe has wealth and goodies and whatever it is that they want, but they're totally wrong.
	Right.
	Everyone – anyone ever make that argument?
	No.
	Exactly right.
	I actually posed this question.
	And I guess when I say morality, I mean, is there something at our core, something that, I don't know, maybe we're born with, something that doesn't just pop into our head, that tells us what is right, and I posed this question, actually, to Andrew Klavan on his show with The Daily Wire.
	For those who may not know who he is, he's an author.
	Does he do a show?
	Yeah, he does do a show.
	I mean, I know.
	Does he call-in show?
	He doesn't have a call-in show.
	He's got a mailbag, so you can write in a question.
	He's with The Daily Wire.
	He works with Ben Shapiro.
	No, I know him.
	I've always admired his hairstyle.
	Right.
	Right.
	All right.
	Anyways, his answer to this, he more or less focused on just the first part of the question, which was, can atheists be moral?
	And his answer was fairly eloquent.
	I'm going to paraphrase it.
	But essentially what he said was that, of course atheists can be moral.
	It's that is, you can be moral if you're acting upon the values that you discover as a non-atheist.
	Essentially, he says that Christians and other religious people, they don't act morally or seek out morality because they think it'll get them into heaven.
	They feel like they have to do it.
	They do it because they want to, because it makes them happy, because it's the natural state of their soul.
	So he says that religious people, non-religious people, their souls turn towards God, this moral arbiter, the way that a compass turns the true north.
	Ah, if only religious people knew, or political people knew, an analogy is not an argument.
	But anyway, go on.
	Right, exactly.
	And so, essentially what he's saying is that there's a moral argument and you're gravitated towards it because that's just the natural state of your soul.
	And I thought that was eloquent.
	I really appreciated the answer.
	I mean, that's all fine and good, but that really does me no good.
	I'm an atheist.
	I don't believe in God.
	And what I want to do is assert some sense of moral certitude.
	Just say, no, incest is morally wrong.
	Pedophilia is morally wrong.
	There's absolutely no defense of that.
	Absolutely not.
	Without appealing to a higher power.
	Well, let's start with something that's slightly less challenging.
	Okay.
	as far as rape, theft, assault, and murder, right?
	I've got a whole book on this, so I won't go into too much detail, called Universally Preferable Behavior, Irrational Proof of Secular Ethics, which I still think is some of the greatest stuff I've ever done.
	I've done some great stuff, let me tell you.
	I don't think the argument can be made that our souls are naturally inclined towards virtue.
	It's like saying that our bellies naturally gravitate towards vegetables.
	If it did, we wouldn't need nutritionists.
	If our souls naturally gravitated towards virtue, then there wouldn't be so many evil people in the world.
	And there are a lot of evil people in the world.
	And there are a lot of people who do wrong because of ignorance and As the All-Socratic argument goes, if you give them better knowledge, they will make better decisions, and there are those people as well.
	But there are a lot of just outright evil people in the world, and it comes back to if you're not religious, and I'm not religious, although I do have a significant amount of respect for religious Christians these days because they're so annoyingly, persistently positive and friendly and loving.
	I can't ignore that.
	I mean that's a very real and rational factor for me to take into account, and I appreciate it.
	People say, God bless you, and I'm like, you know what?
	Thank you.
	That is a lovely sentence.
	I really appreciate that.
	I've had a similar experience with that.
	But when you don't have the religious side of things, you have to look for other things as to why people do what they do.
	And I won't repeat my speech much from earlier in the show, but people do what they do because of evolution.
	And chocolate tastes good on the tongue.
	It's not so great for your body in excess.
	And...
	Using force of fraud, particularly indirectly, is really, really great for getting resources.
	I mean if – the old thing, it's really hard to go hunt a deer.
	You've got to stalk the damn thing and hit it with an arrow or whatever.
	And then you've got to carry it all the way, bleed it out and carry it back home and cut it all up.
	It's a lot of work, right?
	But if you can just steal something from the barbecue, you've just saved yourself a huge amount of time.
	And this is all over the place in the animal kingdom, right?
	It's animals stealing each other's food.
	I mean, cuckoos will even lay their eggs in other birds' nests to have them raise them, right?
	Right.
	Or cuckoos, or as people on the far right call them, cucks.
	Anyway, so stealing and misdirection and fraud and all of these things are all over the place in Cuckoo.
	I mean you have particular butterflies that look like poisonous butterflies.
	You have particular frogs that try and imitate poison frogs without all the expense of producing poison.
	It's all kinds of deception and fraud and force and theft and every violation of every commandment that you can imagine.
	I'm sure there's some salamander out there that covets his neighbor's ass too.
	So it's all over the place in the animal kingdom and we're sophisticated animals and so it is a perfectly valid evolutionary strategy.
	To use force or fraud to get resources and that's why it's so prevalent.
	Now, it's tough because it's limited by retaliation.
	So if I go steal some of my neighbor's food, then they could probably figure it out.
	Maybe I left some footprints.
	Maybe they saw me or whatever and then they can come over and beat me up or steal the stuff back.
	So whereas if I cooperate with my neighbor and we help each other with our harvest and our food or whatever, I mean it's just generally better to cooperate than to steal.
	So theft in human societies is limited by effort and risk and fear of retaliation and so on and lack of cooperation from other people in the tribe, right?
	Because there's a general fairness matrix or fairness algorithm that goes which is like, I'm not going to treat you much better than you treat me.
	Now again, I know for some Christians, they go more for – less for an eye for an eye and more for if your enemy asks you to walk a mile, walk two miles and so on.
	There is a fear of retaliation.
	Now, when the state comes in and the state will take on your behalf and give to you, then there's no fear of retaliation.
	None.
	For women in particular, it's kind of tough.
	This is from New Zealand studies.
	This is quoted by, I think, Black Pigeon Speaks is the name of the channel.
	He was talking about how in New Zealand a study was done that women get $155,000 a year More out of the tax system than they pay in – over their lifetime.
	They get $155,000 more out of their lifetime than they pay in.
	Most taxes are paid by men and most of the withdrawals are made by women.
	Women – it takes until their early 40s for women to start being net positive contributors to the tax system and then they taper out in their mid-50s.
	So it's not really very long.
	But men start being net contributors to the tax system in their early 20s, right?
	So men pay a lot into the tax system in general and women withdraw a lot from the tax system.
	Now, for a woman to go around stealing $155,000 in the course of her life would be rather tricky because they're somewhat delicate creatures and somewhat risk-averse when it comes to physical confrontation.
	And so women ain't going to be stealing $155,000.
	On the other hand, if the government does it for them, There's no risk whatsoever.
	It's all reward and no risk.
	And so when you have the natural human impulse to get something for nothing and you combine that with the power of the state which completely removes the risk of transferring wealth from other people to yourself, well, you have a situation where this kind of theft is just going to metastasize and it's going to be justified and it's going to be perfectly legal because the government always has to provide the illusion that it's adding value.
	And the way that it does that is Taking some of your money, using it as collateral to borrow a whole lot more and pumping the excess back into the economy and calling itself a net contributor.
	It buys votes this way and this is why it doesn't ever want to restrain its spending because it's a net drain on society pretending to be something that is adding to society but you can only do so through money printing and bonds and leverage and debt and all that kind of stuff.
	I don't think that human beings naturally gravitate towards morality.
	I think that human beings naturally gravitate towards survival.
	And the acquisition of resources and the expenditure of resources, particularly in the production of children, because evolution says that that's what's going to be the big primary determinant for the success or failure of certain gene sets or certain individual genes, I guess you could say.
	And so, human beings gravitate towards survival, as all living organisms do.
	And when you set up particular incentives, then human beings will gravitate towards those incentives.
	And there will, of course, be a few exceptions.
	There will be...
	People who don't take old age benefits because they consider it wrong and so on, but most people will be like, yeah, I paid into it or I've been a taxpayer, I owe the money back or whatever it was.
	So human beings gravitate towards survival.
	The state changes incentives to the point where human beings can take goods and services without risk and therefore that is going to extrapolate and we can see this happening.
	Right after the welfare state went in, people started working less and having more kids and Marriages in minority communities in particular dissolved, although white communities and eventually Asian communities aren't that far behind.
	When the incentives changed, people's behavior changed.
	So I think that is the case.
	I do think though that particularly Western people – and I say this because I'm not really an expert on other cultures in particular – but I think white Western Europeans, maybe a little bit more on the Protestant side, have – Either a culture or physical brains or whatever it is, maybe it's genetics, with a unique predilection or preference for universalization.
	And so I think to be a hypocrite for a European is an uncomfortable thing to be, an uncomfortable place to be emotionally.
	It's like a splinter in the mind's eye.
	And other cultures don't seem to have as much problem with corruption and hypocrisy but wasp cultures in general have a problem with corruption and hypocrisy and for reasons that we've talked about in winter and we've talked about this before, a need for cooperation.
	You have a high capacity to punish people socially if you have winter because people can't survive on their own.
	And so I think that there are certain groups or certain cultures wherein – Since God is consistency with these moral commandments, there are certain cultures where inconsistency in the realm of ethics produces acute discomfort, which is called the conscience, and therefore people are more likely to gravitate towards that.
	I must say I don't find that a universal phenomenon at all.
	That's my thoughts on that.
	I'm certainly happy to turn it back to you.
	Sure.
	I guess...
	That absolutely makes sense.
	I guess one of the things that I always felt was maybe where we get this sense of right and wrong is in evolution or anything.
	Like you said, it's biological.
	But...
	And absolutely, we gravitate towards survival.
	That's the instinct.
	That's the natural state of things.
	That being said, and I guess I also understand that we would develop a code of ethics, essentially.
	That we have large numbers of people.
	We have a society that we're trying to maintain where the most people live and the most people are interacting with one another.
	And to where everybody...
	I guess not everybody, but to where people are having interactions with one another where we're not stealing, we're not killing, we're not raping and these kinds of things.
	We develop ethics.
	But I guess why I've been having trouble with this is I guess I just wonder where do we get this sense of morality from?
	How do we develop these Judeo-Christian values, some of which we've abandoned, but these sort of core tenets of morality that Well, do you find that they get it in, say, Africa?
	I guess I haven't really thought of that.
	I would assume so.
	I would not assume so.
	If you look at the corruption level, if you look at the amount of totalitarianism, if you look at the injustices, if you look at the brutality, if you look at the civil wars, if you look at the child soldiers...
	I would say that Africa has some moral challenges.
	It's not solely to Africa, but in other areas as well.
	But I don't know that it's a universal thing.
	Now, of course, we've talked about this before, that the average IQ in sub-Saharan Africa is 70.
	Right, right.
	Right?
	So, you know, and according to Helmuth Nyborg, a researcher who's been on this show, and you can look for his NYBORG on the channel at youtube.com slash freedom and radio, he says you need at least an IQ of 90 to have Basically a democracy or a basic civilization that we would understand in the West.
	So it's impossible.
	I mean the standard answer to why Africa is such a mess is – well, Hillary Clinton.
	Actually, that's a fair answer.
	That's a fair answer.
	But the other thing is Western imperialism and racism and legacy of whatever, right?
	And those things are a factor.
	But there is also, of course, sub-Saharan Africa.
	There is the average IQ of 70.
	And, you know, whether that's genetic or cultural, it's still 70.
	You know, whether you could have been six foot tall, but you're five foot tall because you didn't get enough food rather than it's genetic, well, you're still not going to grow past five foot.
	Right?
	So, the genetics – I'd love to have the question answered, but unfortunately, people won't – Search for those answers because it's too politically incorrect and apparently people would rather, I don't know, destroy everything than face some basic facts about human biodiversity.
	So you have to sort of say, okay, well, if there's these particular cultures or regions or cultures or ethnicities or races where a sensitive conscience appears to be front and center, unless you're willing to sort of abandon a lot of the research that's out there, Then you do have to say, okay, well, it's not universal to all people because different races have different characteristics.
	In which case, if it's more particular in certain areas, right, sort of white Western Europeans, and now, of course, there is Japan and there's Singapore, there's South Korea and so on, other places which have developed high degrees of pretty wonderfully civilized behavior in many ways.
	Then, you know, it's not looking at IQ or it's a culture and whatever it is.
	But it's certainly not universal across the world for there to be these kinds of sensitive conscience in the population.
	In which case, if you're going to start to say, well, it's different among ethnicities, then you have to start to look at evolution.
	And if you start to look at evolution, then you can't sort of say, well, there's some sort of universal thing that we're drawn towards.
	Again, I don't have any huge final answers and I don't think they're already out there.
	but these are considerations.
	In my approach to this question.
	Okay.
	No, I appreciate that.
	So I guess where I really get stuck here is why do we consider taboos to be taboo?
	Where do we get that from?
	Well, incest is clear.
	Incest from a biological standpoint is pretty clear.
	That cousin marriage strips 10 to 16 IQ points off the general population.
	Right.
	It kind of narrows the gene pool.
	Yeah.
	I mean it's – and it produces a significantly increased – Birth defects and mental retardation and I mean it is not good.
	It's not a good breeding tactic.
	If you looked at human beings as livestock, you'd view that as not a good breeding tactic.
	So those cultures which would have some coincidental ban.
	On cousin marriage.
	And those things could come about any number of ways, right?
	Maybe the king had a hot cousin.
	He didn't want to get married.
	Someone else to get married to her.
	I don't know.
	Whatever it is, right?
	So a culture that would put a ban on cousin marriage would quickly find that the intelligence and able-bodiedness and so on of its members would rise considerably.
	I mean if in a couple of generations or more, you could get a 10 to 16 point IQ bump and vastly reduce the amount of birth defects and so on, well, you as a tribe would do a hell of a lot better.
	You'd be able to withstand attack.
	You'd be able to expand.
	You'd be able to hunt better.
	It would be a virtuous cycle of continual improvement.
	So as far as incest goes, I can see quite easily how evolution would put pressure on to ban those things.
	I saw a story recently that you had a mother and a son, both of legal age, are having consensual sex.
	And I see this story and, right, the son and the mother, they say, well, people just don't understand.
	I would say that's consensual myself.
	I mean, but that's a topic for another time.
	I mean, the mother relationship is so powerful that it's hard to say that it's...
	Feminists will say that the boss can't date the secretary because the secretary is not consensual, right?
	Because he's got too much power over her.
	Well, the person who gave you – anyway.
	But anyway, go on.
	So I guess my problem, though, is that the minute I hear that I was actually doing something else and just heard it in the background, I immediately turn around and go, no, that's heinous.
	That's wrong.
	And that's why I guess I asked the question, so why do I feel that way as an atheist if I don't believe that there's a moral arbiter, if I don't believe that But I have that gut feeling.
	Sure.
	Well, I mean, there's a number of...
	You could say it's heinous because if it were more universally practiced, civilization would destroy itself.
	Because we would have so much inbreeding that we would not have The intellectual capacity to defer gratification, to defend abstract principles like separation of church and state, like freedom of speech and other things.
	We wouldn't be able to enter into lengthy contracts.
	We wouldn't have any impulse control.
	Level of criminality goes up enormously when IQ shrinks, right?
	The sweet spot for criminality is IQ 85.
	And so if there was a lot – you may sort of get a sense that if this practice were continued or if this practice became widespread – I mean, we'd be spiraling back to the Stone Age in a couple of generations.
	I mean, everything that we've got that is beautiful and great and wonderful would be destroyed.
	So it's essentially, I guess, a biological protective measure to ensure, I guess, the maintenance of your tribe.
	Well, yes, and another way you could put it is, as an atheist, you're smarter than your average bear, and your intelligence genes, the genes for your intelligence are an animal like any other, and it recognizes a competitor when it sees it.
	So if the tribe turns dumb, you won't want to have children, because you couldn't stand being shackled for 20 years with some mouth-breathing One tooth dullard woman.
	So if the genes for less intelligence spread, the genes for more intelligence are directly threatened because they will die out.
	Now the genes for less intelligence view the genes for more intelligence as a threat because they don't interbreed.
	You don't generally find really smart men with really dumb women or vice versa.
	So they are two different species, I would argue, and a species in competition.
	Technically, they'd be called a subspecies, right?
	Like biologically subspecies, they don't inhabit the same – like red squirrels and gray squirrels and black squirrels, they don't all inhabit the same area getting along.
	Like one of them wins.
	The other one gets pushed out or it goes extinct because they're all competing for the same resources.
	So in human society, the dumb genes are in direct competition.
	It's a win-lose situation with the smart genes.
	So when you see breeding patterns that bring your major predatory competitor right into your tribe, i.e.
	incest, you're like, oh!
	Right.
	Because when the tribe gets dumb, dumb people don't want smart people around because the smart people won't breed with them.
	Dumb people need to breed more dumb people so that they'll have someone to breed.
	Their kids will have someone to breed with.
	The genes don't pass on.
	If you're the only dumb person around, nobody's going to breed with you.
	So this is what I mean.
	It's a win-lose proposition.
	This is kind of what I'm trying to get across throughout Western civilization as a whole.
	It's a win-lose proposition.
	You get the dumb people breathing like crazy or coming in like crazy, they're going to push out and conquer and dominate and subjugate the smart people because it's win-lose for those gene sets.
	They are predator and prey.
	Okay.
	In my opinion.
	Right?
	It's just an argument.
	I'm not a biologist.
	I'm not an anthropologist.
	But this is sort of how things make a certain kind of sense to me.
	Sure.
	And I guess simply by posing and saying that, look, I think Insess is wrong.
	It's self-evident that I have a certain set of core values that… I suppose for society, for my community.
	So obviously atheists can be moral then.
	So that leads me on to another question, and this one maybe we can frame more historically.
	When we have societies that turn away from God, that say that become either Completely atheistic.
	They get rid of the church.
	The state religion essentially is atheism, right?
	Like the Soviet Union.
	Or just what's more important is the individual.
	What's more important is the mob, like the French Revolution.
	How do we...
	When our society turns atheists, somehow we end up there.
	And we end up with mass genocide.
	We end up with horrible, horrible immorality and just degradation...
	It's degrading society.
	We're cutting people's heads off.
	There's no law and order.
	I feel like...
	I don't know how we get around that.
	One of my favorite...
	The problem there is not with atheism, in my opinion.
	The problem is with nihilism.
	I'm not saying all atheists are nihilists, but what I'm saying is that When you become an atheist, generally it's a letting go of a particular moral structure, and it's letting go of a belief in transcendence, a belief that you're part of a larger story, a larger picture, and it's the end of a belief in commitment to a larger moral goal, a larger social goal.
	I mean, there's this general lefty, let's take care of everyone kind of crap that I've talked about in this show before, which again is common but not exclusive to all atheists, but I sort of – like I look at Europe and I look at the people coming into Europe from the Middle East and the Europeans are kind of hedonistic.
	They don't really believe in much and I don't think they fundamentally understand people who have a larger-than-life mission because how long has it been since Europeans have had a larger-than-life mission?
	Certainly a couple of generations.
	Definitely.
	And for the women, it's been longer than that or the men sort of in the war.
	Second World War, 70 plus years, right?
	So, I don't think that Europeans, who are significantly secular, I don't think they understand or remember or can comprehend or conceive of what it's like to have an eschatological, larger than life, end of the world mission.
	I mean, Europeans in the 19th century had a mission to spread European civilization around the world and became imperialists, and part of it was profit and part of it was exploitation, but part of it was also the white man's burden to bring civilization to the corners of the earth, right?
	That was a larger-than-life mission that Europeans had, for better or for worse.
	I got the truth about colonialism and imperialism.
	It's on the channel.
	But how long has it been?
	150 years.
	I'm not talking about surviving Nazism.
	It was like a cornered rat situation.
	It was not a big, larger-than-life mission.
	But Europeans, it's been like 150 years or more since Europeans had a world calling.
	And the last group of Europeans that had that Hegelian spirit of, you know, the world spirit chooses particular nations to act out its divine will from time to time.
	Hey, Germany, would you like to give it a go?
	I mean, it's been a long time.
	And my problem with atheism, Christians have a larger than life, bigger than themselves, giant world mission.
	Bring people to Christ, bring Christianity to the four corners of the world, attain heaven, Defend civilization, defend Christianity, and so on.
	Atheists, as people point out, calling atheism a belief is like calling bald a hair color.
	It is a nihilism insofar as a rejection of belief.
	What takes its place?
	This vaguely lefty multiculturalism PC correct bullshit, that's going to stand up against nothing in this world.
	That is – not only is it not going to stand up against anything, it invites in things that are not particularly great.
	And so to me, it's not, well, you know, why atheism spreads and things get worse because atheism – OK, let's say we take down the church and people say, oh, we took down the church, done and dusted, off we go.
	No, no, no, no.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	What are you going to build?
	Took down the church.
	What are you going to build?
	Now, I think we should build philosophy when we don't have a church.
	But as we heard from our Swedish friend, basically shallow, retarded hedonism seems to be most people's answer.
	And that will fail.
	Will fail horrendously.
	So what do you build?
	Atheists will often turn to the state.
	Right?
	Raise the church.
	R-A-Z-E. That's a terrible way of putting it because it sounds like R-E-I-S-E. Tear down the church.
	Build up the legislature.
	But that's worse than religion.
	Religion is voluntary.
	The state is not.
	At least in the West.
	So I would look at how many atheists you know who have a big giant mission that they're willing to go to the wall for intellectually.
	That they're willing to sacrifice for.
	That they're willing to suffer calumny and insults for.
	That they're willing to be slandered for.
	How many people have that giant mission that they're willing to take metaphorical bullets for?
	I don't mean a lot of atheists who have that.
	Many of the atheists that I know, that I knew in college or that I followed...
	If they do have that goal, that target, it's taking down the church.
	However, I came to a much different conclusion.
	I don't see the church as dangerous.
	Actually, my favorite book, nonfiction, is actually Robert Nisbet's Quest for Community.
	What was so critical about this book, it completely shook my foundation and sort of redefined my conservative ideology was essentially it became clear to me that what the church does is creates at the local level a community center.
	Just a place where people can go, a place where people know each other, where they share the same values, where they do things for their community.
	Maybe it's charity, maybe it's just fun, it's whatever, and it's very positive, and it's completely and utterly separate from the state.
	100%.
	And it gets kind of at this, like Alexis de Tocqueville talked about soft despotism, is that it's not going to be some Hitler-esque dictator who's going to come up and say, I'm going to take away your rights.
	You're going to be oppressed now.
	It's going to be...
	It's very slow.
	It's going to be, we're going to give up more and more and more of our rights for these little comforts.
	The state will take care of that.
	The state will take care of that.
	We move away from those little things that connect neighbors to each other, like the church.
	And what is there left when you get rid of all that to connect you?
	It's just the state.
	It's just your government.
	And you end up with a despot who has all this power, who you have no idea how he got all that power.
	Just because it was so slow.
	And sort of Nisbet suggested that the way to avoid that was to endorse the church, or at least your local church, essentially.
	And I guess what I've been grappling with is, how do we achieve that and not be religious?
	Well, I mean, atheists have to stop turning away from the church and towards the state.
	If the only thing you have to substitute the church for is the state, stay with the church.
	But if atheists are more dangerous than religious people, if they're statists, and most of them are.
	I've done the whole presentation on this, so I won't get into the details, but many, many times more.
	And I'm not even talking anarchists.
	I mean, like, compared to libertarian, I mean, overwhelmingly lefty, right?
	I mean, atheism, modern atheism...
	Kind of jetted straight out of a lot of communism and state worship and totalitarian worship.
	And they recognized the state...
	Sorry, they recognized the church as an enemy that needed to be destroyed in order to make way for the all-powerful state.
	And the Christian church's focus on individualism as opposed to the collectivism of the socialists and the communists was an impediment, right?
	So, I mean, we just have to As I do keep hammering atheists and say, you have traded a less dangerous religion for the most dangerous superstition of the state.
	You have not made progress.
	You are retrogressive.
	You are not scientists.
	You are cultists of state power.
	You are not advancing society.
	By destroying the church and raising the state in its place.
	You are turning us back to a time where primitive force ruled human relations.
	At least the church generally tends to convert by...
	The Christian church generally has a preference for spreading by the word, not the sword.
	But the state only spreads by the sword.
	There's no other possibility because it is not an agency of convincing.
	It's an agency of coercion.
	It's not an agency of facts.
	It's an agency of force.
	It's not an agency of debate.
	It's an agency of violence.
	And getting atheists to understand that fleeing from the church to the state is falling backwards in time and is exchanging a voluntary God for an involuntary dictator is really hard because atheists are kind of a philosophically pig ignorant and arrogant lot in general.
	And I say this with – as an atheist and I say this having had many, many years' interaction with atheists.
	They are ungodly, unbearable know-it-alls a lot of the time.
	And when I've tried to talk to atheists about this, I have had way more positive conversations talking to Christians about atheism than talking to atheists about statism or talking to Christians about anarchism than talking to atheists about statism.
	They don't know the damage they're doing, and what's worse is they don't even want to know when you tell them.
	See, they say God doesn't exist.
	I say the state doesn't exist.
	They say God is just a belief in people's minds.
	I say the state is just a belief in people's minds.
	And they say, well, sure, the state exists.
	Look, here's a picture of a capital.
	And I say, well, are you saying that God exists because I show you a picture of the Vatican?
	They can't do it.
	It's so obvious.
	But they can't, like they literally, physically, it feels like they can't do it.
	And that is deeply disturbed.
	When you can't understand a parallel, clear argument...
	When you can't understand that all of the arguments you apply against God apply even more so about the state, you have a serious wiring problem in your head.
	What's that line from Full Metal Jacket?
	What is your major malfunction, son?
	What is their major malfunction?
	The state is far more dangerous A belief set than religion is at least – it tames Christianity in the West.
	It's such a parallel system.
	It's literally like one twin looking at another twin and saying, guy looks nothing like me.
	How could you insinuate that?
	It's ridiculous.
	Highly offensive.
	He's ugly and I'm beautiful.
	You're twins.
	You look exactly this.
	No!
	No!
	I mean that would just be the mark of like a seriously disturbed human being.
	Is there a way to break atheists of that?
	I – My senior year of college, I read Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.
	I believe so.
	Closing of the American Mind.
	Yes.
	He described Ayn Rand's sub-Nichean assertiveness.
	I've always liked that phrase.
	Right.
	In one of those chapters, he talked about that he enjoyed...
	He got so much more out of teaching students who showed up to day one of class having...
	Like a deep knowledge of the Bible, of having grown up in Sunday school, of having the parents really, really Teach it to them.
	And they come to class, they come to school with these deep-seated values.
	And he said that those were the people that he really liked to teach.
	It wasn't these people who came in with these sort of amorphous, morality is ambiguous, I'm open to anything.
	Those people, he felt like he couldn't teach them anything.
	they couldn't learn but it was the the students with those deep-seated moral values that he felt could really learn and i guess without without that real without religion without without that need to say well i've got to bring this to my kids because i want them to go to heaven because i you know i want them to be there in the afterlife i have i I'm obligated to bring that to them.
	When we're atheists and we don't have that obligation, how do we give them that value that they can then take on to college?
	You have to do it philosophically.
	If you're going to abandon religion, You can't say, well, we're good because we obey the state.
	I mean, that's a complete disaster.
	So you can't say we're good because we obey the state.
	So you can't use the state.
	You can't use God.
	You have to use philosophy or just raise them as out-and-out radical and skeptical nihilists, which is also a complete disaster.
	And you can't survive that way.
	So it's philosophy or bust, right?
	I mean, you can't convince atheists to go back to religion.
	Obviously, right?
	I know some do.
	I know some do.
	C.S. Lewis.
	But the majority of atheists, you can't convince them to go back to religion.
	There's no unringing that bell.
	So atheists kind of stuck between religion and philosophy.
	They're stuck in their self-destructive hell of statism.
	So you've got to, sorry, your trip ain't done yet, boys and girls.
	Come on, everybody, grab the rope.
	Hold on to it together.
	We're going out into the storm and we're getting to philosophy.
	We're getting to voluntarism.
	We're getting to the non-aggression principle.
	We're getting to UPB. You ain't done yet.
	It's easy pickings.
	And I've done this myself.
	I'm not above it.
	I mean, easy pickings to pick apart the inconsistencies of religion.
	It's not an intellectual triumph to be able to disprove the existence of God.
	It's not.
	It's not an intellectual triumph to point out that there are inconsistencies in the Bible.
	That back 40 has already been hoed quite a few times.
	Definitely.
	So it is a significant intellectual triumph to come up with a system of ethics that withstands rational scrutiny and doesn't rely on gods or governments.
	Or some innate soul or some innate conscience or whatever it is, right?
	Which is my book, University Preferable Behavior.
	So just reminding atheists that you can sit in the squalor and self-satisfaction of having pushed over a house of cards, but let's go build something real.
	Sure.
	Okay.
	But to do that, you have to piss them off.
	Right.
	You do, right?
	Because they've been picking fights with Girl Scouts, right?
	They've been picking apart the irrationalities of religion, which is not a huge feat to do.
	I say this, I mean, I've done it, and I mean, I'm not saying I'm not proud of it, but it was not that tough.
	But yeah, you have to annoy them.
	You have to annoy them and say, this negation of the spiritual, it's fine.
	Now what?
	And now what cannot be the state, because that's a way worse religion than the one you have trashed.
	Sure.
	Let me ask you one more question.
	Okay, last question, man.
	It's been a four-hour show, so it's not your fault, but last question.
	I've got to get myself some downtime.
	Sure, absolutely.
	I'm going to say this first, and then I'm going to add a caveat to it.
	Is he the moral choice in this circumstance?
	And the caveat is I don't say that to mean that Hillary… No, no.
	The choice is… Okay.
	Let's say that you're an athlete and you've really hurt your knee.
	By the way, Roseanne, I'm sorry to hear about your knee.
	Thank you for retweeting me.
	But if you're an athlete and you crack your knee something fierce, does going to the surgeon make you a better athlete?
	Well, yes.
	Because if you ignore the problem, right, it's just going to get worse and then you're going to blow out.
	No, no.
	You can't even walk on it, right?
	Can't even walk on it.
	I mean, let's just say you really – I mean, you're like – your kneecap is floated around somewhere to your armpit.
	I don't know.
	Some damn thing, right?
	Like you can't walk.
	Does going to the surgeon make you a better athlete?
	Well, I would think so because you get to – if you don't go to the surgeon, you're not going to play another day.
	Going to the surgeon does not make you a better athlete.
	Going to the surgeon makes it possible for you to become a better athlete in the future.
	There's a difference, right?
	You can go to the surgeon and retire.
	It doesn't make you a better athlete, but it makes it possible for you to be a better athlete in the future.
	The surgeon is not the same as the elite coach.
	Because the elite coach, you go and say, my kneecap is in my armpit.
	He'll say, go to the doctor.
	Can't help you.
	Now, when you're better and you're rehabbed and you're physioed, come on back, right?
	So, to me, Donald Trump is that which allows the conversation called Western civilization to continue.
	He's like the surgeon.
	You have to go to the surgeon in order to have a potential career as an athlete in the future.
	And you have to go...
	You have to restrict immigration from third world countries.
	You have to simplify the tax code.
	You have to try and lower taxes.
	You have to try and get people to stop being as dependent on the state.
	You have to find some way for America to stop being ripped off by all these foreign trade deals.
	You have to find some way to reduce the price of healthcare and he's got solid ideas for all of these things and he's not owned by Washington.
	So when you ask, is he the moral choice?
	To me, that's a confusion.
	Between the doctor and the coach.
	I'm the coach.
	He's the doctor.
	And the West has broken its knees to shit.
	Now they got to go to the doctor and if they go to the doctor and it works, then we can continue their training as an athlete.
	So you're saying, is Donald Trump a good coach?
	I don't think so.
	But I'm not a good doctor.
	But the doctor is necessary for the coaching to continue.
	I had never thought of it like that.
	All right.
	Well, thanks everyone so much for your time and your attention.
	A wonderful show.
	And sorry for those of you who just...
	I love watching me drink my coffee while I'm doing my show.
	But I had a bit of a sitting kind of day doing a bunch of shows and a standing day doing the shows, preparing for shows and doing the shows.
	So I wanted to stroll around a little bit and that's nice for me.
	Thanks everyone.
	A wonderful, wonderful set of conversations.
	Thanks to all the callers.
	Thanks to you out there listening in the world.
	Whatever you're doing, please, please remember.
	To go to freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
	We need your support.
	We need your help to do what is necessary to save the world.
	If you can find a better course, please support them.
	I think we're the best around the greatest hope that we've got.
	freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux and user affiliate link fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
	Thanks everyone!

▲