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Jan. 29, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:45:17

3576 The Most Inert Caller Ever - Call In Show - January 27th, 2017

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	Hi, everybody.
	A great mixed bag in the show from tonight.
	The first was a caller who wanted to know, what do these feminist women want, this new wave of feminist women?
	What do they want?
	Why are they doing what they're doing?
	Why are they picking the people to attack and why are they picking the people to defend?
	I had an interesting hypothesis about that that I think you'll find fascinating.
	Let me know what you think, of course.
	The second caller wanted to know, what objections do I have to Christianity?
	I told him, And we had a very good conversation about it, and I think it will be illustrative and instructive for you.
	Now, you know the old physics doctrine that an object in motion tends to stay in motion, an object at rest tends to stay at rest.
	Well, we have a prize.
	After 10 years, I have met now the most inert caller in free domain radio history, possibly even...
	In history as a whole, the most inert caller.
	I don't think even with all the effort I expended, I was able to budge him, but perhaps it will frighten you into motion to listen to this conversation.
	It really was one of a kind, and I love even those callers because they're so illustrative, and so I hope you will really dig into and find value in that.
	Call.
	The next caller was a young man who was more qualified for a job but was passed over in favor of women because they wanted to have diversity.
	What does that mean?
	And how can you fight it?
	And that is an important question because we're going to face that, some of us.
	The fifth caller wanted to know, is there a relationship between tragedy and intimacy?
	You know, when bad things happen, people tend to pull together.
	They tend to be less fractious, less conflict-prone, less naggy.
	What is the relationship between intimacy and tragedy or disaster?
	It's a great, great question.
	Now, the sixth caller had theories about the nature of reality, about metaphysics, about how we gain knowledge, epistemology.
	Two topics I just love to death, so we had a great conversation about it.
	To me, it was underlined by his grief for his father.
	Which may sound like a bit of a stretch, but listen to the conversation carefully.
	I think you'll hear it.
	And we had a great conversation because he's a relatively new father and how important it is to organize your own thoughts before instructing your children on the nature of reality.
	So thanks so much everyone for giving me the resources, the support to have these incredible conversations available for all time for the whole world.
	Please, please help us out.
	Help me out.
	Help me to do what I do at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Apply directly to Forehand.
	And also, follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux and use our affiliate link at fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
	Alright, up first today we have Jess.
	She wrote in and said, Recently I've been hearing a lot about this new wave feminist movement and I'm confused as to what they're actually trying to accomplish.
	What is the purpose for the divide among men and women using the feminist movement?
	Also, how is it so easy to brainwash young women into believing that men are inferior and the cause of all their problems?
	That's from Jess.
	Oh, hey Jess, how you doing?
	Good, how are you?
	I'm well.
	I'm well.
	Thank you.
	Is there more that you wanted to add to this particular question or issue?
	Well, there's a lot that I'd like to add, to be completely honest, but I don't think...
	Well, you should.
	Please.
	This is the call-in show.
	You can do more than listen to me.
	Okay, so there's kind of a background story to this.
	I was at work when Trump was elected as the GOP nominee.
	And I was talking about Trump and kind of trying to have a conversation with one of my co-workers who was still on the fence.
	And another one of my co-workers who is a hardcore leftist snapped around and looked at me and said, how can you vote for a male chauvinist?
	And I just looked at her and said, well, I actually vote with my brain.
	And then it was all over and the explosion happened.
	And recently...
	Not an argument, but very funny.
	Yeah.
	Pretty much.
	So then the explosion happened and I walked away from the situation and just kind of left it as it was.
	Took everything she said with a grain of salt, of course.
	What did she say?
	It was...
	It was just this mass hysteria of, oh, you're so oppressed.
	Do you understand how oppressed you are?
	And you don't want free birth control or abortion?
	And carry on like it was the end of the world with that type of rhetoric.
	And, you know, like I said, I walked away and just kind of left it as is and, you know, Didn't take too much of it to heart.
	And then I just see this explosion with the women's march and the, you know, women protesting and all these videos that have been posted on YouTube, especially Facebook.
	The majority of the people I know are leftists and it's kind of depressing.
	So I just, I'm very confused as to how these people I don't know how these people believe at all what they're hearing, all the propaganda they hear, all the lies that the media is putting out there.
	I'm trying to wrap my head around it so that I can actually have a constructive argument with these people and kind of try to give them a better idea of What Trump supporters are actually thinking.
	Right.
	Well, I'm sorry about that situation.
	And I think we've all been there.
	And you wanted to know sort of why I think it's so appealing to people?
	Yeah.
	That's the main thing, yeah.
	Right.
	Well, I'm going to tell you the theory I've been thinking about today.
	And you can tell me if it makes any sense to you.
	Okay.
	Well, I'll start with the end product and we'll sort of work our way backwards.
	And feel free to, you know, this is hypothetical.
	This is not finished or polished.
	This is just a potential.
	Right.
	Everybody loves the idea of being heroic, of being oppressed, of fighting for what's right, of fighting the bad guys, right?
	But here's the problem.
	Well, here's one of the many problems with that.
	If you actually fight the bad guys, do you know what they do?
	They fight back, you see?
	And that's considerably less enjoyable, if that makes sense.
	Right.
	So if you want to be heroic, if you want to be part of this big Manichean drama of good versus evil, then the best thing for you to do, if you want to do that but you don't actually want to Experience any, say, personal risk of any kind, right?
	Then what you do is you pick the most peaceful, the most reasonable group in society, the group that you are 150% sure will not fight back.
	And then you claim that group is the group that is oppressing you.
	And that way you get all of the joy and the drama and the excitement of being a superhero villain fighter knowing beyond a doubt that the people you claim are the most evil and the most oppressive will never ever fight back and make you pay for thwarting their interests.
	Right.
	Now, the reason...
	I say this.
	This sort of came to me after having a look at this woman's waddle.
	March.
	March, sorry.
	This woman's march.
	Sorry, occasionally.
	Anyway.
	And this one of the women who was in charge of the woman's march took a shot in the past at High in Hersey Alley, right?
	This woman, she's from Somalia.
	She had underwent female genital mutilation and she said that she would like to take away her vagina.
	Right.
	Kind of tasteless in many ways and kind of unpleasant.
	And there was another woman speaking at the Women's March who had served 30 years in jail for kidnapping, torturing, and murdering a gay man.
	But she was given a microphone to speak.
	Right.
	Amazing.
	Right.
	Amazing.
	Just astonishing.
	Now, I can understand why some of these women, not the most pleasant specimens on the planet, why they might be drawn to an ideology that forces people to wear a hijab, but astonishing.
	How can we make sense of this?
	Well, if you say you're oppressed by some group that may be perceived to be a little bit more volatile than white males, that other group may have something to say about it.
	They may fight back.
	So if you want the drama of being a hero fighting evil, but you don't actually want to risk anything, any blowback, any problems, then you pick the nicest group around and you say, they're the oppressors, by God!
	And that way, you can do a live-action roleplay as a superhero, knowing for sure That you won't get any direct blowback.
	It's the equivalent of a video game, right?
	You have a video game, you're out there lobbing grenades and rockets at people, and they're lobbing them at you, but no one's actually going to end up with third-degree burns, right?
	Right.
	Right.
	See, that makes a lot of sense.
	And going back to the whole hijab thing, I saw something about that, and I... I'm wrapping my head around that now, too.
	Because this was, you know, after I'd gotten in contact with you guys that this happened.
	And I'm thinking to myself, because my dad, when I was a kid, told me, Sharia law is the one thing you have to worry about.
	Sharia law.
	Keep your eye on Sharia law.
	You've got to worry about it.
	I was like, I don't feel like I have to, but okay.
	And there's these women putting on hijabs and, you know, running around like, This is so empowering.
	This is so empowering.
	Isn't this great?
	We're wearing hijabs.
	We're being multicultural.
	And what they should do, of course, is they should try organizing a march for women's rights in, say, Saudi Arabia.
	Right.
	And see how that goes.
	Right.
	And places where these women are actually beaten and tormented and, you know, don't have many rights and, you know, on and on.
	I just don't understand why they're embracing that ideology here when they claim to be for women's rights.
	Well, they're not for women's rights.
	I mean, that to me is very, very clear.
	They are useful idiots of Marxists and other people who are against Western civilization.
	If they were for women's rights, they would celebrate women on the right.
	But they don't.
	They attack women on the right, or at least stand idly by while women on the right are repeatedly, vociferously, and viciously attacked.
	And so, no, they're not interested in...
	Otherwise, they'd be celebrating Margaret Thatcher, Michelle Bachmann, Ann Coulter, Ayn Rand, Michelle Malkin.
	They'd be celebrating.
	These women are incredible, intelligent, brilliant, world-changing women.
	But I guess it's up to me and others to celebrate them.
	So...
	No, they're not.
	They're not interested in this.
	They want to be...
	They want to have the drama.
	They want to have the drama of an enemy and a combat and a fight, but no risk.
	No risk!
	So they make up this delusion where the nicest people in society are somehow their enemies.
	That way they can attack them, knowing for sure they won't attack back.
	Right.
	Right.
	Right, and it makes sense, you know, because every time I have this conversation with somebody, you know, there are some people that I will talk to and I'll, you know, give them my two cents.
	But for the most part, I just walk away from the situation because they're just not worth the time and energy and effort in trying to explain to them how they are so backwards on everything.
	And there's actually women who believed That they are for women's rights.
	And there are women who actually believe this garbage.
	That's where I'm lost.
	I'm lost with the women who actually believe the crap that they're being fed.
	Well, I mean, I don't know what they mean by rights.
	I mean, as...
	If I had time, interest, and energy...
	I would go up to these women and say, okay, tell me what rights men have in the country you live in that women don't have.
	Tell me, please, what rights are you fighting for?
	Tax-free tampons!
	Seriously?
	Is this where we are?
	Tax-free tampons.
	Can I be hugely offensive?
	Yeah, I think so.
	Of course.
	Do you know a singer named Sarah McLachlan?
	Of course, yeah.
	She's kind of one of the central quasi-Celtic goddesses at the center of this.
	I don't know what her politics are other than she was centerpiece at Lollapalooza.
	I actually saw her open for Sting.
	And she is the happiest, most depressing, mournful person that I know or have ever seen sing live.
	So I was listening to, and I like some of her songs.
	And she's got this kind of ethereal, comes with vocal granola kind of folksy, half falsetto singing style.
	It's not bad, although I know she's complained a lot about the uncertainties of her voice.
	And she's written, I think one of my favorite songs of hers is called, I think one of her big hits, it's called Angel.
	I don't know if you've ever heard it.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, okay.
	I won't sing it.
	Don't panic.
	Don't panic.
	That's appreciated.
	Oh!
	Okay, that's it.
	I'm turning on you now.
	No, but okay, so here's some lyrics.
	And it's interesting lyrics, right?
	So tired of the straight line, and everywhere you turn, there's vultures and thieves at your back.
	And the storm keeps on twisting, you keep on building the lies that you make up for all that you lack.
	It don't make no difference.
	Okay, it's a double negative.
	It's okay, she's granola.
	It don't make no difference escaping one last time.
	It's easier to believe in this sweet madness.
	Oh, this glorious sadness that brings me to my knees.
	And here's where I'm going to be highly offensive.
	Are you ready?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I don't know, Sarah.
	How about just having a family?
	Right.
	No, you're right.
	How about just find a man?
	Listen, I think she married her drummer.
	But they broke up.
	I mean, I don't know much about this.
	Other than I remember being shocked by how much she cursed.
	But anyway.
	It's like, oh, this glorious madness and sadness that brings me to my knees.
	Yeah.
	I'm pulled from the wreckage of my silent reverie.
	I'm in the arms of the angel.
	I hope I'm going to find some comfort in this dark, cold hotel room.
	Just get knocked up, make someone a sandwich, and make the world better by a couple of beautiful human beings.
	That doesn't mean she can't be a singer or a songwriter, but there's this drama, this drama that women...
	Seem to be drawn to in the absence of doing things like having children.
	Now, it's not just women.
	I think men get pulled into a lot of nonsense too.
	But, and I say this as, you know, I spent a long time as a bachelor.
	I spent a lot of time, I've been married now for a decade and a half, been a father for eight.
	Once you have a, once you become a dad, drama just kind of, whoo, I don't have time for a lot of wreckage of silent reveries.
	You know what I mean?
	Right.
	I don't have a lot of time for waiting for the second chance for a break that would make it okay because it's hard at the end of the day.
	I need some distraction.
	Oh, beautiful release.
	I don't have any time for memories seeping from my veins.
	I can't be empty and weightless and maybe to find some peace tonight.
	I can't do it because I'm busy.
	Because I got a kid who wants to pretend to be a baby dragon.
	And then I got to take her to the dentist.
	And then I got to pay some bills.
	You know what I mean?
	And then I got to do a show.
	And then I got to call my...
	I got to do some taxes.
	And then I got to put up a towel rack.
	And then I got to shovel the driveway.
	Right.
	Right.
	I mean...
	I don't have any time to pull myself from my wreckage of my silent reverie.
	Or march.
	You're right.
	And hold up signs.
	I don't have time to knit a vagina hat.
	Damn it!
	There's always time to knit a vagina hat.
	You don't have any kids, do you?
	No.
	See, here's the thing.
	I mean, I don't have time to dress up As a giant vagina, dye my beard blue and go around lecturing people on human dignity.
	Right.
	I just...
	I don't have time.
	Because when you really get busy with life, drama tends to fall away.
	Right.
	Drama tends to fall away.
	Right.
	There's a horrifying, terrible, god-awful nightmare of a play called Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
	George and Martha!
	It's...
	Albie, right?
	I guess George and Martha, like George and Martha Washington.
	This is America!
	And they don't have any kids and they play all these nightmarish psychological games with each other.
	Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were in the movie and I think they were married twice and had all this ridiculous drama and all.
	No kids!
	You know, when there are kids, it's a comedy.
	When there are no kids, it's some brain-twisting drama.
	Right.
	How does...
	Stanley Kowalski cure his household of the nightmarish sociopathy of Blanche Dubois.
	He knocks up his wife!
	Boom!
	Babies!
	Babies kill drama!
	Oh look, Mike, we have a showtime.
	Right.
	But babies kill drama.
	Right.
	And I know that there were some poor, poor, poor children in this march.
	Right.
	But not a lot.
	You've got time.
	You've got time to think about all of these giant penis clubs pummeling you like a baby seal in your imaginary eyes.
	Like, I mean, you have time to imagine all of this drama and all of this patriarchy like men that just wake up and say, how can I oppress women today?
	Right.
	All I want to do is oppress women.
	And you don't have any time to Actually deal with any real even in the world or create any real good.
	I'm not saying, please understand, I'm not saying the only way, I'm going to put a few caveats and people will take it out of context anyway, but just from my own conscience.
	I'm not saying that women have to have kids.
	I'm not saying that they can't do wonderful things in the world without having children.
	Of course they can.
	Of course they can.
	One of my biggest philosophical influences was without wee ones.
	But The majority of women seem to want to have kids.
	The majority of men seem to want to have kids.
	And they don't.
	They don't.
	Now, I know they seem to be very keen on abortions.
	And that's pretty obvious why.
	Because if you don't have the right to have an abortion, then your incentive to get married goes up.
	And if your incentive to get married goes up, then you're going to want smaller government.
	If you're not married, you want bigger government.
	So offering women...
	The opportunity to kill their own babies in their wombs allows them to free themselves from the slavery of having somebody else get up at dawn and work 12 hours a day to provide you with a house and health care and food and heating and all that.
	Ooh!
	Terrible.
	Terrible slavery.
	But no, I mean, if they were really interested in female rights, in the liberation and emancipation of women, then What they would do is they'd take out a map.
	Map of the world, let's say, right?
	And they'd start looking up countries.
	And they'd say, okay, women being oppressed, where's that going on?
	Okay, our country?
	No, not really.
	Okay, Yemen, okay.
	Somalia, Saudi Arabia.
	Ooh, the Congo.
	Ooh, South Africa, where one in every two women will be raped in her lifetime.
	Ooh, how about the migrant crisis?
	Let's check out rape statistics in Sweden.
	Or the recent god-awful three-hour Facebook streaming of a rape of a white Swedish woman by Middle Eastern migrants.
	Not allowed to talk about the ethnic composition of the rapists, you see, because you're only allowed to talk about race when you're denigrating white males.
	But so you would do that, right?
	Anybody who doesn't start from a blank page is just full of shit, frankly.
	Let's pretend we're a space alien with no preconceptions of anything at all.
	And let's see where we should apply our greatest energies.
	I don't think the tax-free tampons would be in the top 10 billion of that crap.
	Now, as to why these women are so able to be propagandized, well, they love the drama.
	The excitement.
	I'm in a fight for liberty and justice.
	I'm a superhero.
	I don't need no cape.
	Just a labia hat.
	Will do.
	I can't believe the things I have to say on this show.
	Yeah, so they like the drama.
	And the drama is what you get when you don't want to have kids.
	You've got to do something that makes your life exciting.
	When you have kids, your life is exciting and wonderful and beautiful, in my experience.
	But if you don't have kids, then...
	The other thing, too, is, as I talked about in a recent video I did on the Women's March, the women...
	Not that attractive, so why not marry the state since the state is going to give you money?
	The state is, for certain, men are inconstant.
	With the state, you get money if you're a worse person.
	With men, you actually have to be a better person.
	And why would you want to go through all the effort of being a better person when you could just get the money and be a horrible human being?
	Right.
	Why not?
	And women...
	Women's brains and men's brains, shockingly, are quite different.
	I wasn't so sure of this before, and I even had a Janice Heimlich who was on the show years ago.
	But the research seems to have been just a little updated since then, and one of the things they're finding is that women's brains have a much more difficult time dealing with negative emotional stimuli.
	When women experience negative emotional stimuli, they react, well, emotionally.
	Whereas when men see or experience negative emotional stimuli, they react intellectually, right?
	They react abstractly.
	The prefrontal cortex kicks in and analyzes the situation, right?
	And we can see this, right?
	So women say, oh, well, you know, when the statement is made about deporting illegals, they say, well, they've got legal babies because of anchor bullshit, right?
	Anchor baby bullshit in the States.
	So you're going to be splitting up families, right?
	And women are like, oh, splitting up families, that's terrible!
	We can't have that!
	It's just an emotional reaction.
	Men say, well, no, we're not splitting up families.
	The people who are here illegally are the ones splitting up the families.
	In the same way that if you go and rob a bank and you go to jail and you have a kid, it's not the police who are splitting up your family, it's you because you went, you know what I mean, right?
	You went and robbed a bank, right?
	Right.
	You can see this with the picture of the drowned kid.
	Yeah, like in Greece or Turkey or wherever it was, right?
	The kid in the surf, right?
	We can't have that!
	And the men are like, okay, well, we should really stop this migrant thing then because they're there because they're all being let in.
	No, we got to let them in!
	That's the only way to, you know what I mean?
	So women react more emotionally to negative stimuli and experience it more directly, whereas men kick into analysis mode, right?
	I mean, you may have seen this with the men in your life when there's a crisis or there's an emergency.
	You know, if a mouse runs along the kitchen floor, the women jump up on the chairs and the men go get a broom.
	Right.
	I mean, that's what I would do.
	It's not a judgment of either good or bad.
	It's just the way that it works.
	And it's not 100%, but it's definitely a very significant trend.
	So, if you tell women there's this dark, sinister cabal Of giant estrogen-crushing testicles roaming across the landscape, hopefully by twos, then that's a negative stimuli.
	And they react emotionally.
	And when women react emotionally, they have two impulses.
	Number one, band together with other women.
	Number two, run to a man for protection.
	And as you can see, all over the place in some of these more extreme feminists, they all band together.
	Female in-group preference.
	Women are wonderful.
	It's actually a psychological effect.
	There's massive bias towards women.
	Governments love women.
	Right.
	We've gone into before.
	And then they run to men for protection.
	They run to the government.
	Go get us some money for men, Mr.
	Policeman.
	And that is...
	Those are two sort of female instincts that are perfectly wonderful from an evolutionary adaptive standpoint.
	It's exactly what you want women to do.
	Perfectly sensible, perfectly rational.
	And when it's not combined with the state, it's a wonderful thing.
	It's just that, you know, when combined with the state, it has some problematic outcomes.
	Right.
	That's the thing, too.
	Like, my fiancé and I We talk about things like this and I get riled up.
	I get so bent out of shape over some of this stuff.
	And I know I'm reacting.
	Talk politics with me.
	Talk gender with me.
	Come on, baby.
	You know what?
	I might try that.
	Anyway.
	So I get so agitated.
	I have a very angry baby, but he's going to end up very happy.
	So I get so agitated.
	And he just sits there.
	He says, Jess, you have to think of it logically.
	They're not logical.
	You are logical.
	They're not logical.
	Drop it.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	And you're right when it comes to the whole drama thing.
	I mean, I've been thinking about that more recently.
	I saw your video.
	On the Women's March.
	And you're totally right.
	I mean, if family, I would, if I had the means right now, like if me and my fiance had the means, I would definitely stay home and, you know, after we get married, have the kids and stay home and raise the kids.
	I have no problem with that.
	See, why would you get married to a man and then say, okay, let's move to opposite ends of the country?
	Yeah.
	You have people in your life to spend time with them, right?
	So, you know, dump your kids in daycare and go off to some little cubicle to answer phone calls from angry customers.
	Ooh, that's great.
	Good job.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Exactly.
	No, you're right.
	And then, you know, be constantly thinking about my kids all day.
	Like, are they okay?
	You know, I might miss their first milestone.
	I might miss their first word.
	You know, things like that.
	You've heard about webcams in daycares, right?
	The what?
	The webcams.
	In daycares.
	No.
	This is a thing now.
	It's a thing, yeah.
	So if you drop your kids off at daycares, some daycares, they will give you a webcam view.
	A webcam portal, you see.
	And what you can do is you can see your children grow up at five frames a second.
	Right.
	Hey, ma, m, e, i, w, w.
	And what's great is every time syllable comes out, you jet a little bit more of your mommy milk in your bra.
	Oh look, I have two tiny swimming pools of tragic distance from my children.
	Squish, squish, squish.
	Oh, man.
	That's so bad.
	And I just, you know, here's the thing, like, at what point do we say, this is fucking nuts, this is insane, what have we done, where have we come as a society?
	I am 18 miles away from my children, I'm watching them at four frames a second on a webcam, and I'm lactating because of pixels on a screen.
	Right.
	Right.
	Right, and there's nothing wrong.
	I mean, I said this to my co-worker at one point because we got back into it.
	I mean, it's just constant with us.
	And I told her I wouldn't mind being a stay-at-home mom.
	I would love to raise my children.
	I would love to be there for my family.
	I would love to take care of the house, have a hot dinner on the table when, you know, my fiancé comes home from work.
	I would love to do that because, and this is going to sound very, very bad of me, But men and women do have their roles.
	They do have things that they can and can't do.
	Men can't have a baby.
	But I can have a baby.
	I can feed that baby.
	I can, you know, I have that bond with that baby.
	There are certain things that we can and can't do physiologically.
	And that's perfectly 100% okay.
	There's nothing wrong with being different.
	Who's better with less sleep, you or your fiancé?
	May.
	Right.
	Do you know why?
	Because that's how I'm hardwired.
	Because men are weak.
	Weak.
	Weak.
	If you ever want to take over the world, just shave 18 minutes off the man's sleep time and is like, I can't function.
	I'm too groggy.
	I can't walk you in the walls.
	This is the man, like you, if you shave 18 minutes off a man's sleep, Every
	single morning.
	Every single morning.
	It's because he's had 18 minutes to little sleep.
	And that is incredible.
	When my child was born, how much sleep my wife could get by without is staggering to me.
	Staggering.
	And, and, and, here's the thing.
	Do you ever notice that your fiance gets a little bit testy when he's sleep deprived?
	Oh, yeah.
	Right.
	Right.
	And how about you?
	When you don't have enough sleep, how are you doing?
	I mean, I'm generally pretty okay.
	Right.
	Here's the thing.
	This is why women should stay home with the babies.
	It's the breastfeeding, it is the bond, and I think a lot of instinctual stuff.
	But you all are like superhero giant machines of transforming wonder functioning on so little sleep.
	I don't get enough sleep.
	Not only do I not have a great day, but if I'm not careful, no one around me has a great day, right?
	Right.
	It's not, like, I literally, I feel like my brain has been replaced by some slightly damp cotton wool or, like, the kind of pre-washed egg salad horrifying sandwiches you get on British railways.
	I just, I feel like it's like an old turnip or one of those hollowed out pumpkins.
	And yet, my wife is like, you know, after my baby, I'm like, Baby was up four times last night.
	I probably got a grand total of about 92 minutes sleep.
	Now, at this point, I'd be speaking in ancient Aramaic and attempting to walk through a wall.
	And my wife's like, want some coffee?
	I feel so guilty.
	I feel so guilty.
	Tastes like licking a battery.
	But she can do it.
	Which is how we know Donald Trump is actually a woman.
	Anyway, that's a topic.
	Well, he and Clinton and other people, they have this weird gene thing where they get by on like three hours sleep.
	Donald Trump's like, well, went to bed at one, got up at four.
	I'm like, hey, let's see what's going on in the day.
	Whereas you wake me up at four and I'm like, I can't.
	From four to like eight is when I evolve from like a crustacean to a human being.
	Or more technically, emotionally, from a crab to a human being.
	Wake me up at four, all I'm going to do is try and clip at you with my pincers and mate with your leg.
	At eight, yes, I can get up and be civilized.
	And babies are sleep thieves.
	They're sleep vampires.
	They just have a sixth sense.
	I think they believe that the milk in the boob goes bad if she sleeps too long.
	Wake up!
	Wake up!
	The milk goes bad.
	I can't taste that.
	I don't want any two-week-old buttermilk coming out of those nipples.
	I need fresh stuff!
	Which means you better be awake and alert!
	Ah!
	That's probably exactly it.
	So, that's another reason why the sleep deprivation thing.
	I'm convinced, you know, like they had to invent waterboarding because sleep deprivation did nothing to female terrorists.
	Ah!
	Still a lot easier than having a baby.
	Do you worst?
	First from Anne, it's like, oh no, I got 18 minutes too little sleep.
	I'll tell you anything you need to know.
	Yeah, that would be it.
	Why are you guys not getting married and having a baby?
	You said something about money?
	Well, yeah.
	Yeah, we're definitely waiting on that.
	Do you guys live in the country?
	No, we live in the suburbs.
	That's kind of weird.
	Do any of your neighbors have chickens?
	No.
	How strange.
	I can totally hear this sound in the background when you talk about how difficult it is for you to have babies.
	Do you hear that?
	Do you hear it too?
	Yeah, now that you mention it.
	No, it's just the financial aspect of it right now.
	Yeah, you know, there's cheaper places to live than the suburbs.
	I'm sure you're aware of this in one way or another.
	Oh, yeah.
	Once we get a little bit more money in the bank, we're moving out to the country.
	And how long do you think that'll be?
	Maybe a year or two.
	And then start popping those suckers out.
	Still in your 20s, right?
	Yeah.
	Good.
	Plan, right?
	Huh?
	Give yourself a date.
	To get pregnant.
	And work towards that.
	In my humble opinion, don't wait for life to kind of put you in that position.
	Well, that's probably not the right way of putting it, but you know what I mean.
	Right.
	Give yourself, okay, by next summer, we're starting to try.
	And that way, you'll just organize your life accordingly and you'll do what needs to be done.
	If you don't have an endpoint or a goal, there's a lot of drifting in life, right?
	Right.
	That's just my particular suggestion.
	Have them while you're young.
	I've said this a million times.
	I'll say it again.
	Have them while you're young.
	You've got the energy.
	You don't care about the money as much.
	Your kids won't care about the money at all.
	You'll bounce back from a little sleep much better.
	And then when your kids get older, you've got the whole rest of your life to do all of the other cool stuff that you want to do.
	But that's just my particular suggestion.
	People had kids during the Great Depression.
	People had kids during the Black Plague.
	You'll find a way.
	You'll find a way to make it work.
	Right.
	Right.
	Breed!
	Breed!
	See, and that's the thing, too.
	Again, mostly co-workers.
	That's usually who I associate with right now.
	When I tell them I don't mind being a stay-at-home mom, they look at me like I'm an alien.
	And, of course, they're all feminists.
	It's a rich area that I work in.
	I don't work, you know.
	It's a very rich area.
	So, I mean, all these people, of course, are leftists.
	And, you know, I'm telling them my points of view, trying to open up some minds.
	And I have successfully with a couple people, but for the most part, they look at me like I'm an alien.
	And all I can think is, you're going to miss out.
	You're already 35.
	Just broke up with your boyfriend of 10 years, and you have no idea what you're doing with your life at this point.
	Well, we have a pretty good idea what they're not doing.
	Right.
	Which is having the kind of kids to pay for all of the giant fucking socialist programs that they all want.
	Exactly.
	You have children so that I can own them.
	So that they can be my slave chatter drivers to send me money through the state.
	You have the children that I can feast upon.
	I could do that for a while, but I've decided not to because I've got to save my voice for a long show.
	Here in the...
	No, I'm just kidding.
	I won't go there.
	I won't go there.
	I considered it.
	Was it useful or was it me just entertaining myself with nonsense?
	It was kind of both, but yeah, no, it was.
	Well, you know, that's win-win then for everyone.
	Absolutely.
	Very entertaining.
	But yeah, definitely helped a lot.
	Give me a new insight.
	I really, really appreciate you talking to me because I definitely needed a refresher on how to at least somewhat approach these people.
	It's weird.
	You know, it's weird where you live in a society where you have to apologize for doing what's best for your children.
	It's weird that we live in a society where you kind of have to apologize for loving your children.
	It's kind of weird that we live in a society where you have to apologize for making sacrifices for your children.
	Isn't that weird?
	Right.
	Well, I do want to stay home and love and care and nurture for my children.
	Oh, my.
	How plebeian.
	How pedestrian.
	How philistinical.
	I mean, it's weird.
	Like, how you have to apologize for the greatest glories...
	In your life.
	Right.
	And for doing what's right for your kids.
	Yeah.
	What's right for the future generation.
	Yeah.
	It's unfortunate.
	I mean, feminism, not only is it hostile and irrational, but it's an extraordinarily selfish approach to life.
	Absolutely.
	It's always, always, always me, me, me, me, me.
	Every time I talk to these people.
	And that drives me nuts more than anything.
	Like, think of somebody other than yourself for just a minute, and you'll understand what I'm saying.
	There is, I mean, you know, when you're young, you have this belief that if you don't share your candy, you'll be happier.
	And when you get older, you understand that if you share your candy, you're going to be happier.
	The taste of the candy in the short run does not match the joys of the united relationships in the long run.
	And just letting go of that I, me, me, I stuff.
	You know, it's tough for a lot of people.
	Very tough.
	Right.
	But that's where a lot of the beauty in life is.
	All right.
	I feel I'm running out of useful things to say, which is usually time to move on to the next caller.
	Thanks for the call.
	You're welcome back anytime.
	And I really appreciate the work that you're doing to get people out there to try and wake up to some of this stuff because they can keep you in a fog of now and Until your ovaries dry up and blow away and then you thought it would be a family and all you did was make a desert.
	So you're really helping a lot of people and I hope that you'll keep doing it.
	Thanks.
	I appreciate you talking with me.
	Alright, take care.
	You too.
	Alright, up next we have Timothy.
	Timothy wrote in and said, When I first started listening to Stefan on a regular basis, I didn't even realize that he was a staunch atheist.
	Stephan advocates the two-parent family, personal responsibility, free will, limited government, and capitalism, as many of his views parallel those held by most mainstream Christians.
	Does he have any objections to Christianity other than the existence of God?
	That's from Timothy.
	Timothy, hey, I loved your bit in the Bible.
	How you doing?
	Yeah, that's actually what I'm named after.
	Oh yeah, I wouldn't expect it any other way.
	Yeah, all four of my brothers have biblical names as well.
	Well, of course, I was originally going to be called Yahweh, but people thought they'd have too much trouble spelling it, so they went with Stefan Molyneux.
	They went with something that even fewer people could pronounce.
	That's right.
	And then, please move to the colonies, where nobody has any clue about this stuff.
	So, okay.
	Let me lay it on you, sort of the...
	Major complaint that I would have around Christianity and you can let me know what you think.
	Alright.
	So, my first complaint about Christians is you're so nice that you made me change my mind.
	Very inconvenient for a public intellectual.
	Very, very inconvenient.
	And I hope you're all ashamed of yourself for being so nice and positive and friendly and loving and affectionate and inviting.
	Oh!
	I can win against anything except niceness.
	It gets me every time.
	Alright, I'll send a memo out and we'll change that.
	Please!
	If there's one thing you people have to atone for, it's being relentlessly positive and friendly.
	It really helps me believe that you believe what you believe.
	So there's that.
	But...
	The issue, yeah, so the main issue that I have, and this is not, of course, with all Christians, but is with certain elements of Christianity, which is the child raising.
	The, you know, the old spare the rod, spoil the child kind of stuff.
	Not a big fan of that.
	And I've had some significant luck or skill or capacity to change people's minds in this area.
	Christians included, for which I'm grateful and humbled by the response.
	But many years ago I did Power or Fear, a love story.
	Do you love God because God is powerful or do you love God because God is good?
	Now, if you love God because He's powerful, you're worshipping power, which doesn't seem to me to be very moral.
	If you love God because He is good, then goodness should not evoke loyalty Through fear, through dire consequences, through punishment.
	And the concern that I've had, and for many years and still do have, is, and this is not particular to Christians, and it's to the left as well.
	You know, if you don't believe in the patriarchy, you're a misogynist.
	You're a bad, bad person.
	If you don't think that white people are responsible for all the ills in the world, you're a bad, bad person!
	I mean, it happens in a lot of belief systems.
	But my concern with religion has been how much it frightens children into complying with the ideals.
	That, to me, is the major issue.
	Yes, Christians and I agree on an enormous amount.
	And it took me some time in the wilderness to appreciate that, and I can't apologize too often for some of the statements I've made in the past about Christianity and Christians.
	I was falling prey to, hey, let's take the nicest people around and pretend we're a hero by criticizing them.
	I hope I have redeemed myself with courage since that particular time.
	But yeah, it's that issue where it's the fire and the brimstone and the devil is always watching and he's going to tempt you and the sinful thoughts and the self-censorship and so on that goes on.
	That to me, and it's not all Christianity and there's Arguments for and against this particular perspective in the Bible, but my concern is how much that can debilitate children from a true sense of free will and self-ownership.
	Yeah, I hadn't actually thought about that.
	I know my parents were pretty religious when I was younger, and they went to a pretty strict church.
	But then when I was around 10 or so, we started going towards a church that was kind of more non-denominational and was a little more—a little less sinners in the hands of the angry God and a little more Jesus is love and God is love sort of thing.
	Still pretty strict rules in place, but it wasn't, you know, they weren't out there giving you the evil eye for the, you know, the length of your shirt and, you know, calling women hussies for, you know, it's like, oh, your hem's too low.
	What do you want to get raped or anything?
	Like, you know, kind of borderline Sharia law sort of thing, right?
	Yeah.
	So, I understand that some people kind of have that perception of church, and I get this a lot when I talk with Catholics, is they seem to be more along the side of the cross.
	And I know that with the Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Cross, it was like an hour and 15 minute long gore-fest of And then, you know, five minutes, oh yeah.
	And it doesn't seem to have given him a very positive view of Jews.
	Maybe he didn't have that beforehand.
	I think his father had some issues that way as well.
	But apparently he's back with Hacksaw Ridge and rehabilitated with giant beard.
	Anyway, go ahead.
	And then at like the last five minutes of the movie, that's when they're talking about the resurrection.
	You're like, wait, that's...
	I was always raised that that was like the important part.
	It wasn't about the brutality of his death.
	It was about he came back and he overcame everything there was to overcome in one person's life.
	Even if you go with the Jordan Peterson perspective where it's a...
	What's the word I'm looking for?
	It's a metaphor or he's the moral epiphany of what humans should strive to be.
	So, he overcame all of the, you know, every moral thing that someone could do wrong, Jesus absolutely did.
	He's the epitome of perfection as far as doing the right things for all of the right reasons.
	Well, yeah, I would argue that the resurrection is essential to provide a continuum from the ideal of Jesus to the possibility of humanity.
	If he was the best human being who had ever lived and he died, then his perfection As an ideal would die with him, because you can't match that, right?
	But if he comes back from the dead, I think to me that's a way that you can pick up the thread and continue, because if his ideals or his spirit, his capacities exceed death, then they can move forward through time.
	They don't die with him, and I would guess that had something to do with it as well.
	That's at a very metaphorical level rather than, of course, something literal, but that's one of the things I got out of it when I was younger.
	Yeah, it's basically the idea of a man is mortal, but an idea is immortal.
	Right, right.
	And if you identify Christianity with Christ, you're not a Christian.
	Because Christianity is the emulation of the ideals of Christ in your own life, right?
	You wouldn't want to say that, because if Christianity is Christ, then Christianity died when Christ died, at least the second time.
	So I'm way out of my depth theologically, I'm sure, but that's sort of my impression.
	That's a pretty viable impression, but the reason I started mentioning that was it seems to be more of the orthodox Christianity tends to focus all on following the rules, the rigid structures, and I've always been raised that that's kind of more along the lines of the people that Jesus actually spoke out against, the Pharisees and Sadducees.
	Those were the people who obey the law to the T and just criticize or cast down anyone who even stumbles slightly.
	But all they have in their heart is hate.
	And Jesus was like, you're doing it wrong.
	You're polishing the outside and inside you are dead.
	And that's kind of, I mean, I don't want to kind of belittle Catholics and things like that.
	I know my grandparents were Catholics for most of their life and then they kind of became more Protestant as they got older.
	But most of the encounters I've had with devout Catholics, they kind of go towards that, the follow the rules just to follow the rules without trying to even understand why the rules are there.
	Well, this, to me, was always the challenge about free will.
	And I was raised Protestant.
	And in Protestantism, free will and get the hell up and get to work.
	Two things that I sort of get at.
	Number one, free will.
	Number two, the sun has been up for 18 minutes.
	Why have you not done four hours of work yet?
	That was sort of the two things.
	But...
	The question of hell in my upbringing was not central, was not core to how things were explained to me.
	I mentioned this before, but I have a very strong memory.
	We had a very old preacher when I was in boarding school.
	A priest, I should say.
	Preacher is a tenth thing from the south.
	An old priest who would, who seemed to have a weird fetish for baguettes, you know, like the Bible.
	Everyone starts reading the Bible who's interested in it, and you get to the baguettes and it's like, whoa, worst porn ever.
	Baguettes, baguettes, baguettes, right?
	Can I get a VR baguette?
	No.
	It goes on for like 25 chapters.
	It really does.
	It really does.
	It doesn't matter if you put on the 70s disco music.
	It just doesn't matter if you put on a porn stash.
	It's a lot of begetting and not a whole lot of excitement.
	But we had a young guy who came in.
	I guess he was cycling through.
	And we had a young guy who came in.
	And yeah, I remember him, you know, and God threw Satan into a big pond and put up a big sign saying, no fishing!
	You know, I was seven.
	What the hell?
	It was entertaining.
	But I remember that very clearly.
	He was an entertaining, engaging guy.
	But that was, you know, he was like a joke.
	Not like a joke, like not serious, but he was sort of portrayed like, yeah, don't fish, you know, no fishing.
	Right.
	It wasn't like there is James Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has reproduced a, and he was Catholic or Irish, right?
	It's a powerful book because that is what a lot of children were exposed to.
	It wasn't me.
	It wasn't me.
	I was not overly traumatized by hell.
	I believed in the devil and he was around.
	But it was kind of like a C.S. Lewis devil who was going to tempt you with inconsequentiality and drifting away from God, not, let's go step on some hobos!
	It wasn't that sort of thing, right?
	And so I didn't experience that.
	And I think the reason I didn't experience that was because the focus on free will is antithetical to Waking death by Satan every single moment.
	Because if the hellfire and the brimstone and the lake of fire and the gnashing of the teeth and the wailing is hovering and imminent all around you, like some flaming pterodactyl going to peck out your eyeballs if you look at it the wrong way, where's your free will in that?
	That to me was the big question when I sort of talked to people about this even when I was younger as a kid and was exposed to that.
	It's sort of like saying, okay, I've kidnapped your children.
	You can pay me a million dollars or you'll never see them again.
	You still have free will though, don't you?
	It's like, I don't really know that you do anymore.
	Because the situation is so extreme that you really don't have free will.
	Of course you're free to pay the million dollars or whatever, take the risk.
	But that's not free will the way I would understand it because it's so constrained by the danger of the situation.
	And so as the sort of specter of Satan and hell rises up, You can get more compliance.
	I can get the guy to give you a million bucks if you kidnap his kids, but I'm just not sure.
	I was never sure and I remain unsure that it's fundamentally moral to threaten people into virtue or to bribe them with heaven into virtue.
	And that was one of the challenges that I always had with this focus on hell.
	Are you good?
	If you're scared, are you good if you're bribed?
	Are you good if you do things for the effect they're going to have on your future?
	To me, virtue has always been something that you should pursue for the sake of the moral excellence within virtue, not because you'll get a prize or a punishment on the other side.
	Well, I agree with you on the punishment part, but I'm not quite sure About the reward being a bribe.
	I don't think I would necessarily consider it that because there's that metaphor of the carrot or the stick.
	You've got the horse or the donkey and you can beat it all you want and there's only so much the donkey can do.
	But if you put the carrot and dangle the carrot in front of it, it's more likely to do whatever it needs to do to get the carrot.
	Right, but when you're starting to argue moral choices and moral will using a donkey, You may have slipped down from the divine just a tiny bit.
	Well, it's an analogy.
	But you don't want to treat your child like a donkey, right?
	No, but everybody responds to incentives.
	That's kind of the fundamental principles of everything we know about economics is people respond to incentives.
	If you make something easier, well then people are going to do the easier thing.
	If you make something harder, then they're going to avoid that.
	Right.
	And like I think it's a – it was – I think what the earlier church did or what most of the Orthodox church did is they focused more on the punishment and the downside and you're trying to avoid that.
	Which is why they had, what, the first Great Awakening, and then if the punishment aspect worked and scaring people into following God worked, then there would be no need for a second Great Awakening.
	It's like they weren't quite getting the memo that, you know, maybe this approach isn't working, the fire and brimstone.
	It'll only motivate them so much, and then once they realize the threat is no longer there or it's not as immediate as they were led to believe, Then they do whatever they want.
	But if people always have a goal in mind, they always have the, this is what I'm shooting for, this is my, I want this because, you know, this is what I, this is what I want my endgame to be.
	I'm not avoiding something, I'm going towards something.
	I think that's much more effective.
	Yeah, you could say, you know, do you show up for work even if you love it, if you don't get paid?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, you can quit your job You won't go to jail, but will you show up and do your job if you don't care?
	I mean, I enjoy what I'm doing.
	It would be kind of impractical for me to do it if nobody donated a penny.
	I think that the upside is...
	And I, of course, do talk about the positive benefits of philosophy in the long run.
	So, yeah, I think that's a good point.
	I was about to say, the main reason I wanted to ask the question is, it seems like you parallel Christianity for the most part, and I thought it was kind of weird, because most atheists seem to go completely in the opposite direction, where everything that Christianity has to offer and all of the conclusions that people have arrived at are all bad, and we need to abandon it all.
	And it's kind of like, In my mind, it's whether you believe in God or not, the ultimate way of how to be a good person or how to be a moral person all comes down to the same kind of patterns of behavior.
	Right.
	No, it's a good point.
	I spent some time fleeing from Christianity towards atheism, and then the funniest thing happened.
	The weirdest thing happened.
	I ran into a lot of other atheists.
	Oh no!
	Or as I like to call them, amoral nihilistic hedonists who tend towards massive socialism.
	Oh lordy.
	And then I was like, okay, rock, hard place.
	Rock, hard place.
	And I found that when I questioned the atheists, I got a lot of hostility.
	Yeah.
	Oh, look!
	I found hell, and it comes with a fedora.
	And I got a lot of hostility.
	When I questioned Christians about God, I got a lot of friendliness, a lot of I understand, a lot of let me talk it through you, and, you know, some hostility.
	But for the most part, I got a lot more positive response questioning Christians about God than I did questioning atheists about the state.
	Christians were willing, and maybe it's because Christianity is an older belief system, maybe it has matured beyond its toddler phase, but Christians have, the crisis of faith is well known, right?
	I don't have to tell you anything about this, right?
	That faith is not an automatic, that faith is a constant challenge, that there will be times when you doubt, and there will be times when you re-evaluate, and there will be times when you change direction, not away, but, you know, in terms of how you worship.
	Your parents did that, right?
	Went from more Hellfire and brimstone, you say, to non-denominational and so on.
	So there will be all of this that occurs in Christianity.
	So the wrestling of doubt in Christianity is central and core and has been there from the very beginning.
	From the very beginning.
	Why, oh God, hast thou forsaken me?
	It's been there from the very beginning.
	Now, atheism, modern atheism, admits no doubt about the state.
	It is more fundamentalist in general about the state than anything I've ever come across in Christianity.
	Ever.
	Christianity has a long and rich tradition of doubt and of reevaluation.
	Of reinvention sometimes.
	Look at the Protestant Reformation.
	Reinvention.
	But it seems about as difficult to try and Reform the leftist tendencies of atheists as it is to, well, let's just pick out the religions around the world that have some trouble reforming themselves.
	And it's in that ballpark, in my experience.
	And so I found atheists to be far more dogmatic than Christians.
	Atheists had a far more hostile response to foundational questions than religion and Christians did.
	And so it is hard for me to avoid just having more respect for the intellectual curiosity of Christians than of atheists.
	The god of the atheists is the state, in general, infinitely more dangerous than the god of Christianity.
	Infinitely more dangerous than the god of Christianity.
	When you have a belief system that is fostering a much more dangerous outcome than anything that could be conceived of in Christianity, that is an argument from a fact, but that's another reason why I'm like, well, and data, right?
	I mean, the fact is, yes, two parents are by far the best way to raise children.
	Small government to no government is by far the best way to organize society.
	Free will is essential for moral responsibility and philosophy, and a lot of atheists have a lot of problem with a lot of these beliefs, and they do not seem to have any capacity to look inward and say, My god, the state is a false god.
	My god, the state is a deceptive god.
	My god, the state is Satan in the world as it stands.
	And this is my concern, that Satanism in the theological context is relatively harmless compared to the worship of the devil called the state.
	And secularity in the service Of satanism, of truly satanic forces, the horrors and destruction wrought by the state, 20th century, quarter of a billion people murdered by their own governments, how is that not satanic?
	How is that not, as Ann Coulter reports it, demonic?
	This is not even counting the wars.
	Yeah, those were apparently times of peace for those governments.
	Right.
	So it's hard for me not to look at atheists and not see them as serving the most ancient devil, which is the justification of centralized oligarchical hierarchical violence.
	And I don't think there's anything more demonic or satanic, to use those terms, in the world.
	And if the god they worship is a manifestation of a satanic force, I'd rather be on the side of the angels.
	Yeah, and when atheism started to gain grounds, it seemed to me like, I mean, I wasn't there, but I'm looking back at history and things like that.
	In my mind, I picture it kind of like this.
	People are bathing in the Ganges River, and they're being either cured with quotes around it, Or they're seeing improvements in their health and that sort of thing.
	And the atheists look at it and say, no, God's not real.
	There's no possible way the Ganges is a miraculous or a holy site.
	And then they stop having people bathe in the Ganges River and they have them bathe in, you know, other sources of water.
	In actuality, the Ganges, they're burning bodies upstream of where people do their holy dips and things like that, and burning bodies creates lye, and basically what they're doing is they're disinfecting themselves with soap, and they don't realize it.
	So they're doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, but the atheists are like, you're doing...
	Even though what you're doing is working, but because you think it's because of some supernatural or some holy thing, don't do it at all, and they completely reject it, and they'll have people do something that is – they'll have them bathe in some river that is kind of like a septic tank or standing water instead.
	So it's kind of a weird – I guess it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but – Yeah, Christianity has had 2,000 years to refine how society is structured and organized.
	And it doesn't seem to me to be an accident that coincidental with the fall of religion was the rise of the nanny state, was the rise of the state as the most dangerous and oppressive church that can be conceived of.
	I can choose not to be a Christian.
	I don't pay a tithe.
	I can't choose to not pay taxes.
	That is an all-encompassing religion.
	Of disaster, of exploitation, of the enslavement of the unborn.
	And again, I know, I'm going to just put the caveats out there, not all atheists are like that.
	I know I came out of objectivism, which means I knew a lot of atheists who were small government, anti-free market, and there are atheists in the voluntarist or anarchist community and so on.
	I get all of that.
	But I've done the data.
	I've run the numbers.
	It's very, very clear that atheists are very significantly, if not overwhelmingly, on the left.
	They worship atheists.
	The power of the state, which means they've given up convincing people and turned to forcing people.
	A Christian will say, Jesus said, sell everything you own and give your money to the poor.
	Jesus would make a case for charity that is voluntary.
	But the leftist, who is often secular, atheist, the leftist will say, I'm going to take your money by force and I'm going to give it to the poor.
	They have taken free will out of the equation.
	The Christian will try to convince me, but will accept if I walk away.
	You will, right?
	They're not going to chase me down and lock me in a van, right?
	Yeah, they won't.
	And I was just thinking, compare that to the...
	Compare the pro-life march to the women's march.
	And you're like, if you disagree with them, they will yell at you and chase you down or attack you if you try to disagree.
	Right?
	Right.
	Because...
	Yeah, because when you...
	Christianity is an argument.
	Ever since the separation of church and state, Christianity has been an argument.
	It has been a proposition.
	It has been a series of statements of syllogisms and of incentives and punishments.
	It is an argument.
	And you can walk away from it and nobody chases you down and locks you up.
	On the left, they have no arguments.
	On the left, they have violence, either personal violence in the form of this kind of terrorism that we've seen going on with the marches and riots and so on, or they run to the state and have the state do it on their behalf, because it's safer, right?
	So, Christianity, I could walk away from disagreeing with a Christian and live I can't walk away from a disagreement with the left who's in pursuit of political action because they'll chase me down with the police.
	And they will lock me in jail.
	And we all know this deep down, and this was part of my cowardice, though it wasn't conscious in me, but this is when I was younger.
	Which is, nobody gets in trouble for begging on Christians.
	Nobody gets in trouble for insulting or aggressing against Christians.
	I don't mean physically violently, of course they will, but I mean just in terms of, like, criticizing the beliefs, criticizing the viewpoints.
	But a lot of people don't want to take on social justice warriors.
	A lot of people don't want to take on other belief systems because they're afraid of retaliations or repercussions.
	And that should tell you a lot about Christians and Christianity.
	They must be the nicest people in the room because they're the only ones being bullied.
	And I couldn't sustain that.
	I can't abide those kinds of flaws in myself.
	I can't look and say, ah, brave old me, taking on the nicest people in the room who I know are not going to lash out and punish me.
	Very, very wrong.
	Yeah, and the other thing I was just thinking about is for people who think the government is the only way to solve society's problems and make everyone moral, their system only works if everyone agrees and if everyone is in that same system, whereas people who are against the system They're like, okay, if you want to have that, go do that over there and leave us alone.
	And I mean, Christians are kind of in that same boat where they're like, we would like everyone to embrace Christianity.
	We would like everyone to accept our beliefs, our morality, our system, and behave like us.
	But if you don't, As long as we've presented the message to you and presented our arguments to you and if you don't accept it, then there's nothing we can do for you and you just have your fun over there or you do whatever you want.
	But for a statist or even for an anarchist, or not an anarchist, wow, that's a terrible slip of the tongue.
	For an atheist or most statist, the only way their system works, the only way society can move forward is if everyone embraces their point of view and falls in line in their system.
	And that just seems all kinds of bizarre to me because that's never going to happen.
	You can't have 100% of people all agreeing because it just doesn't work.
	Well, here's the thing too, which is that atheists criticize the Christians for the conception of hell, but the atheists throw people in prison for not following what the atheists want them to do, if they're on the left, right?
	They want these big government programs, you've got to pay for them, and if you don't pay for them, people will come and throw you in jail, right?
	So, how is...
	How is it remotely rational to criticize Christians for this punishment called hell, while at the same time so many atheists advocate for the secular punishment of prison for disagreement with their ideals?
	The Christians aren't saying, come to church or go to prison.
	But the leftist atheists are saying, pay for the welfare state or go to prison.
	And all that interferes with free will is anathema to me, and Christians having the respect for free will and knowing that a compelled action is not a virtuous action, give the respect of difference to other belief systems, which is not a function of the state that so many atheists worship, and it's the opposite of the state.
	All right.
	Well, listen, I'm going to move on to the next caller.
	I really, really appreciate the call.
	You're welcome back anytime.
	It was very enlightening, and I hope that at least what I had to say is clarifying, at least for my position.
	It was a great question.
	I have one other topic I wanted to talk about, and hopefully, do you think we got time?
	We have a lot of callers, so let's just keep it quick, all right?
	I was just going to say about...
	Statists will say that and they'll imprison people for not agreeing with them.
	And then they'll say, but Christians don't want homosexuals to get married.
	And to me, that seems like a pretty poor argument.
	But, I mean, I was anticipating that one of the areas where you would say Christians were wrong about this and that sort of thing.
	Well, correct me if I'm wrong, and I know you can't speak for all Christians, of course, but as far as I understand it, Christians would like the state disentangled from marriage.
	Marriage is in the eyes of God, and the separation of church and state should require that marriage be a private ceremony, a contract.
	And if homosexuals want to have a private contract between themselves, whether it's religious or not, I can't see Christians saying, no!
	We must throw them in jail for that!
	I think that the entanglement of the state I mean, certainly Christians, to take a silly example, Christians would have no trouble with homosexuals engaging in a car lease, right?
	Signing a contract to lease a car, or signing a contract to buy a house.
	No!
	You can't!
	I mean, it won't happen, right?
	And so if gays want to have a marriage ceremony in a society which has separated the state and marriage, which of course it should.
	I mean, the whole licensing for marriage is put in by the Democrats to prevent blacks and whites from marrying because apparently they're very anti-racist.
	But this, I don't think that Christians have a problem with Anybody engaging in private voluntary contracts, but when the state owns marriage and Christians are then forced to subsidize and pay for a belief system that a lot of them would have problems with or a behavior or lifestyle, well, that's, you know, forced association is a violation of freedom of association.
	Yeah, and I would agree with that because that was my original stance about ten or so years ago where I was extremely against the idea of homosexual marriage until someone pointed out, why is the government involved in marriage at all?
	And I was just like, Oh, yeah, if we just, if the government just didn't acknowledge any marriages, then okay, yeah, I'm good with it.
	It's not the government's business.
	It's not the government's business.
	All right, thank you very much.
	Yeah, that's my particular, thanks very much.
	All right, up next we have Andreas.
	Andreas wrote in and said, If you assume there is free will, there are still a lot of factors that influence or determine the perception upon which you make choices.
	Your body performs a lot of unconscious actions at different levels.
	A decision cannot feel the same to different people.
	What do people really consider when they make decisions?
	You can find a rational reason if you look long enough as an outside observer, yet can that really be the direct cause for a person's behavior if they are not aware of it at any level?
	That's from Andreas.
	Well, hey, Andreas.
	How are you doing tonight?
	Hello, Stefan.
	I'm fine.
	And you?
	I'm well.
	I'm well, thank you.
	How upper are you on the sort of science of decision-making and all that kind of stuff?
	Impulse control and that?
	I'm not trying to sort of corner you or anything, I'm just curious.
	Well, I'm here to explore it, I'd say.
	Yeah, I mean, so some impulse control mechanisms within the brain have been discovered.
	It was actually discovered by a PhD student, but they have found that there are mechanisms within the brain for controlling impulses.
	When you have an impulse to do something, you have about a quarter of a second to block it as it sort of travels down to make your muscles do a variety of things.
	And you can train yourself to become better At impulse identification and impulse control.
	And the prefrontal cortex, the city of reasoning at the front, that's the part of, I think I've referred to it as a neofrontal cortex, but the prefrontal cortex is where you have your impulse control.
	So self-knowledge, where you become aware of the impulses that you have, your triggers, right?
	The things that make you upset, the things that make you angry, the things that make you...
	Reactive, certain stimuli.
	You learn what those are over time.
	And once you're aware of them, then you Being alert to the stimuli that's in your environment, you then know how you are going to react, your amygdala, your sort of fight-or-flight mechanism is going to react.
	So you can know what your triggers are and be alert to those impulses that are going to arise within you.
	And should they arise, or rather when they arise, you can choose to verbalize them rather than to, you know, what they call acting.
	Acting it out, right?
	So if you upset me, boom!
	And I punch you, then I've acted it out.
	I haven't verbalized.
	And civilization is when we do impulse control and decide to verbalize rather than use our fists.
	That's right.
	I'm looking at you, rioters, on Inauguration Day.
	So there are people, of course, who...
	Stimulus response, right?
	They're like machines, right?
	I mean, they see something that upsets them, Richard Spencer, boom!
	Right?
	And they bust the guy's eardrum.
	Horrendous.
	So there are people out there that kind of like machines, but they're machines by choice.
	They're machines because they have not made the choice to learn about themselves, to learn their triggers.
	Most importantly, and I think this is very true on the left, they're machines because they have turned Acting out into a moral ideal, right?
	Into a moral ideal.
	In other words, Richard Spencer, punch him in the head, unlike Indiana Jones hitting Nazis.
	You know, if you have to go to fiction for your moral justifications, you're in the wrong.
	Sorry, you just are.
	You may be in the right, but only accidentally, right?
	So...
	They say, ah, there's Richard Spencer.
	He's a Nazi.
	He's not a Nazi, but they say he's a Nazi.
	I'm going to punch him in the head.
	And I'm a good guy for doing it because I'm an anti-fascist, right?
	As Churchill said, in the future, the real fascists would call themselves anti-fascists.
	It's an old truism.
	And so a lot of people, and I think this is more true on the left, they've set themselves up so that not only Is impulse control unimportant?
	It's actually a virtue to refuse to control your impulses.
	I'm angry.
	I'm going to hit something with a rock.
	I'm angry.
	I'm going to set fire to yet another poor innocent garbage can.
	It's funny because a lot of them would call themselves environmentalists and the fact that they destroy garbage cans, which is where people put their garbage.
	Well, actually it's where people put their garbage unless they're on the Women's March, in which case it's basically like a big giant paper depository wherever they've gone and garbage and tampons.
	But anyway.
	They view impulse control as immoral.
	See Nazi, or see someone, define person as Nazi, hit Nazi, moral hero.
	See people lining up to a Milo speech, define them as white supremacists, as evil racists, as fascists, attack them with axe handles and balloons filled with human urine.
	So for them, impulse control has become immoral.
	Whereas acting out has become moral.
	And this is where no conversation is possible anymore.
	Because once you've said hitting people is good, whatever you define as moral, That's your future.
	That's all you're going to be.
	That's the train track.
	Whatever you define as moral, that's the train track you go down.
	This is why I tell people it's really, really important what you define as the good.
	What you define as the good is where you're going to go.
	Whether you like it or not, that is the gravity well.
	That is the black hole.
	That is the train track you're on.
	So, yeah.
	Impulse control, certainly possible.
	But you have to have it as a value first.
	And in order to have impulse control, particularly towards physical violence, to have that As a value, you have to value free speech.
	You have to value free speech.
	If you value free speech, then yes, people will be saying things out there in the world that make you angry, but you don't go and break their eardrum by sucker punching them in the side of the head like a cowardly little basic bitch.
	You let them have their peace, and then you respond.
	And you respond with better arguments.
	You respond with better information.
	You respond with evidence.
	You respond caustically, sarcastically.
	You can make your basic snarkyments all you want.
	Whatever it is, you respond to words with words.
	If you respond to words with fists or with calling the state, well, then you have no commitment to free speech.
	If you have no commitment to free speech, you're an enemy of civilization itself.
	Because civilization is saying, use your words, not your fists.
	Does that make sense?
	Yes.
	Can I say something?
	I was mainly wondering about the difference between nature and nurture because I personally find it quite mystifying how some people talk about genetics in that They ascribe way more complicated mechanisms to, well, how genetics influences behavior than I can really imagine would be plausible.
	What's the problem with genetics influencing behavior?
	I mean, there's no gene that just says you're aggressive.
	There's some mechanisms higher up.
	Why do you say that?
	I'm sorry, I'm not sure why you say that.
	I mean, there certainly are indicators that there are genes that contribute significantly to aggression.
	It's called the warrior gene.
	It doesn't mean that it takes away your free will.
	Oftentimes, it is the prevalence of that gene plus the experience of violence as a child being beaten up or abused as a child that produces higher levels of criminality.
	But as I've talked about in The truth about crime, there's a gene prevalence that if combined with child abuse in boys produces a criminal virtually 100% of the time.
	So there are genetic susceptibilities to these things and the whole point is we don't know.
	You know, you do the right thing because it's the right thing.
	You don't hit your children because hitting your children is immoral.
	It's wrong.
	It's evil.
	But also Because you don't know whether your child has a particular genetic sequence that is going to respond to an environmental stimuli to produce a negative effect.
	Some people who smoke live to a ripe old age, right?
	There's George Burns was a comedian, played with John Denver in a movie, Oh God!
	And he smoked a cigar, I think, every day, or smoked a lot of cigars, and lived to be like over 100.
	Freud smoked a lot of cigars and ended up with a ghastly series of jaw cancers and had to have half his jaw removed, and it was, you know, about an awful thing.
	So when you smoke, maybe you'll make it to a ripe old age.
	Smoking only kills half of the people who smoke.
	Half of the people, I don't know, just live on.
	But you don't know.
	That's the whole point.
	You don't know.
	So the fact that there are genetic predispositions towards particular behaviors doesn't mean that you don't have free will.
	It means that it's more important to be moral because you don't know.
	Your susceptibility to environmental stimuli, therefore you should act in as moral a manner as possible to minimize all possible negative interactions between genes and environment, the epigenetics.
	Does that make sense?
	Yes.
	Maybe I went ahead in this case.
	What I really would like to know, say I am this person now, or I'm just any person with some urges that I personally don't have, then I sometimes have a hard time understanding how that feels to them.
	Wait, why are we...
	I'm sorry.
	I feel like we're on a third question now.
	I don't quite understand this conversation at the moment.
	Am I not answering questions?
	Am I answering the wrong questions?
	Until we can sort this out, I don't want to answer another question because it feels like we're just on the third one with no comment on the previous one.
	I'm sorry.
	So...
	I don't know how to formulate it properly.
	I had some trouble doing that on the email contact before.
	It's just all of these influences, be it warrior gene or whatever, in my view they would have to register at some level so you get this urge or whatever and it is a different urge than people would have that don't have that gene.
	So, I'm just wondering if you have any insight.
	I don't know why we're switching all these questions and why I feel like I'm not answering anything.
	Is there an emotional reason or a personal reason that you're interested in these topics?
	Is it something in your own life or in the life of someone around you?
	I just don't feel like we're actually getting to the root of things and I don't want to keep coming up with answers if you just keep coming up with new questions with no reference to the prior answers.
	So, why is this topic...
	Let's just start with this.
	Why is this topic of interest to you in the first place?
	Well...
	The original topic that was of interest to me was about IQ because I don't understand how it would I feel to have a different IQ and I'm wondering...
	Okay, why is that a no?
	Now we've got a fourth question.
	My question is why are these topics of interest to you in the first place?
	We all have emotional reasons.
	It doesn't mean that it's good or bad to have it.
	It's just we have emotional drivers as to why particular topics are of interest to us.
	So my question to you is why are these topics of interest to you?
	What is the emotional driver behind them?
	Because if we can't get that, we're just going to keep batting around things to no purpose.
	Now, if you want to call back in, if you've had a chance to think it over, if you don't know this kind of stuff about yourself, then that's fine, too.
	But I just wanted to ask up front.
	Well, I guess, to some extent, I have problems figuring out my own intelligence, because when I consider taking IQ tests and stuff, I would see that I could Got reasonable values, but it doesn't seem like my life success is working out in any considerable relation to that.
	Okay, so now we're getting somewhere.
	Did you get formally tested?
	Because people talk about IQ tests like you could just take them online or fill out a form.
	It needs to be formally administered by somebody, usually a psychologist, I think trained in the provision of IQ tests and so on.
	So, have you had that kind of test, like a formal biopsychologist or by somebody trained in the administration of an IQ test?
	No.
	I just took online tests.
	Okay.
	I don't think those are particularly relevant, but just out of curiosity, how did you score on those tests?
	Well, it differs from Test to test.
	Okay.
	No, I understand that.
	Come on.
	You work with me a little here.
	I mean, let's just try and keep this moving.
	Yes.
	High, medium, or low?
	How's that?
	Let me go with that.
	Medium.
	Medium.
	Okay.
	So, of average intelligence or so, right?
	Yes.
	All right.
	And how is your life going in terms of the success that you have achieved?
	Well...
	I was unemployed for a year and then I managed to use connections so that now I can work for free.
	What do you mean work for free?
	Well, I'm doing what I wanted to work as, in some sense, but I do not get payment for that.
	Okay.
	So you're unemployed in a sense in terms of having no income, but you're busy in terms of acquiring, like an intern, like kind of getting job experience that way?
	Okay, alright.
	Alright.
	And do you have a plan by which this is going to transfer to some paying occupation?
	Well, I'm working on that.
	That's not an answer.
	Do you have a plan?
	No.
	How long have you been doing the unpaid work?
	Three months now.
	What are you using to pay bills?
	What are you living on?
	If you're unemployed for a year and not getting paid now?
	I live with my parents.
	And how old are you?
	26.
	So 26, living with your parents, unemployed for a year, working for no pay.
	Yes.
	I'm sorry to hear that.
	That's rough, right?
	I would say so.
	Where did you think you would be when you were younger, like 18 or whatever, when you say fast forward eight years, where did you think you'd be?
	Well, I was hoping to be doing what I want and getting paid for it, at least.
	The place that you're working now, do they have a plan to transition you to salary?
	No, not at all.
	Well, I probably have to figure it out and approach them, but at the moment I would like to get into a better position so that I actually have something to show for so that they might be more inclined.
	I don't understand what any of that means.
	So they don't have a plan to transition you to a paying position?
	You just keep showing up and working for free.
	That's the plan.
	For them, right?
	Like they haven't said, after four months we're going to re-evaluate this and we're going to move you to this hourly if you're working out or let you go if you're not.
	I mean, I don't...
	I quite understand how this is supposed to work.
	I'm in academia.
	That is a field, not a job.
	What does that mean?
	I mean, as far as this goes.
	Well, I have...
	When I applied there, I proposed my own project that I do research on and they agreed to let me have, well, enter their facilities and do my research with them.
	Is this in science?
	Yes.
	And are they giving you materials?
	Well, I use the materials that are in the laboratory.
	Right.
	Okay, so is it like after hours kind of thing?
	Like if you're a musician, they give you studio time when no one else is using it kind of thing?
	Like you can go in there when no one else is there?
	No, I'm officially training.
	Officially training, okay.
	But there's no plan to move you to...
	Okay.
	And what are you hoping to do with this?
	How long is your experiment going to take?
	Well, my traineeship is set for eight months.
	Eight months, no pay?
	Yes.
	And then what?
	We don't know, right?
	Well, I tried to apply for a PhD at the same lab before, but I just got a three-line answer and, well, I'm hoping that maybe I can try it again now.
	So you were basically just using their lab.
	It's not even like you have a job that you're not being paid for.
	They're just letting you use the lab when no one's using it, right?
	Well, other people are using it too, so I walk amongst them as one of them, but I mean, it's common practice not to pay interns.
	But an internship, as far as I understand it, it has some sort of time frame that leads somewhere, right?
	Yes, well, hopefully I will be done with a project within the eight months and publish it.
	And what do you do with the project when you're done with it?
	What happens then?
	Do you get it published?
	I mean, what happens?
	Yes, I have a publication then as first offer, hopefully, if they don't change their plans on that.
	And how long will it take for you to write up the results of your experiment when it's complete?
	Probably two.
	One or two months, I guess.
	Okay, so after eight months, you're going to have another one or two months, and then you submit it for publication, right?
	And do you know how long it might take for them to figure this out?
	I don't know.
	I mean, depending on if there's anything they want to change about it.
	I know, roughly.
	Is it weeks or months or years?
	I would put it on the order of weeks.
	Weeks.
	Okay.
	Seems rapid to be, but all right.
	So it's going to be weeks for you to figure out whether they're going to publish it or not.
	Well, I guess they will figure that out long before I write it up because obviously I report to them and they see if I have any.
	I mean, are you guessing weeks or have you talked to them and say, how long is it going to take for me to get published?
	I haven't talked to them about that yet.
	Okay.
	This passivity is going to lead you nowhere.
	And this passivity is probably why they don't want you in the PhD program.
	If I had to take a guess, I don't know for sure.
	If I had to take a guess.
	This passivity.
	Where is this coming from in your life?
	I'm going to do this and I'm going to wait and see.
	Maybe it's weeks, but I couldn't...
	Where does this passivity come from?
	Is this something that's been around you your whole...
	Sorry?
	I'm not exactly passive.
	I'm doing the experiments.
	Yes, you are.
	No, you are.
	You are passive.
	Because this is make work.
	This is busy work.
	You don't know where the hell this is going to lead.
	It's not going to lead to a job that's in particular.
	It's not going to lead to anything paid.
	It may lead to a publication.
	It may not.
	You don't even know how long it's going to take.
	It may lead to you getting into a PhD, but you have no way of knowing if this will.
	You didn't go to the PhD people and say, hey, if I go and do this eight-month experiment and here's my plan, will you reconsider me for the PhD program?
	Has that conversation occurred?
	Nope.
	Okay, that's what I'm talking about.
	Passive.
	You're just doing stuff in the hopes that something positive may occur at some point in the future, right?
	You don't have any facts.
	You don't have any goals.
	You don't have any structure.
	You don't have any commitments?
	It's like if I let someone come in and use my studio when I'm not home, and they say, well, maybe I'll be a YouTube star...
	That's not a plan, right?
	Especially if I've already told them, no, you can't join my organization in a three-line response, right?
	So you don't have a plan, and this is going to cost you at least another year.
	I mean, it's cost you three months already.
	You've got five months to go, a month or two to write it up.
	It's going to take months to figure out if you're going to get published or not, I would assume.
	I have some...
	Knowledge of the academic process.
	Not a very great or detailed one, but some knowledge.
	And it takes a long time.
	A long time.
	I mean, people don't even know that your research is coming, right?
	You don't have a contact at the magazine.
	That's what I'm working out.
	I'm going to have it done by this time.
	And they're like, oh, that does sound interesting.
	You haven't done that, right?
	You haven't established the contacts to find out if this aimlessly drifting helicopter has any damn place to land, right?
	So where does this passivity, this cross your fingers, this time wasting, this is my question, where does it come from?
	Is this something that's been always in your life or is this something that is new as the result of things that have happened to you or how you've interpreted what's happened to you as an adult?
	Well, I guess it was the year of unemployment in which I tried to find other jobs and this is the only thing that I could secure in the end.
	Okay, but this is not a job.
	This is nothing that's secure.
	I hate to overuse the term, but you're kind of LARPing this way.
	What was your process?
	What job did you have before you were unemployed?
	No, I was at university after I finished.
	I had applied Before I finished university to several things and I didn't get any of them and then I kept applying during the time afterwards and now I'm doing this.
	Now, let's say that your parents weren't around.
	Let's say that you didn't have a place with three hearts and a cart, as they say, right?
	Three meals.
	What would you have done if you didn't have a place to stay?
	I guess I would have had to go on welfare.
	What would you have done if you didn't have a place to stay and you couldn't get on welfare?
	Apply for jobs like I did.
	Thank you.
	But that didn't work.
	What else would you have done?
	I don't know.
	Right.
	See, this is the thing.
	You've got this backup plan called, well, I'll just go on welfare.
	If mommy and daddy won't pay for me, the taxpayers can pay for me.
	What the hell gives you the right to feed off people in this way?
	You're 26 years old.
	You don't have a right to a job in the field that you want.
	You don't have a right to a job doing what you love.
	Go and get a job doing something, doing anything.
	But this attitude of like, well, you know, I applied for jobs in the field that I wanted.
	I didn't get any, so I'm just going to take rent and food from my parents.
	And if that didn't work out, well, I'd just go on welfare.
	And if that didn't work out, I have no idea.
	Well, actually, I applied for a job filling vending machines.
	I applied for a job cutting out paper signs, and they all didn't take me.
	The only thing I ever got was Job where I pretended to be women on the internet chatting with men and It turns out because I would have to be self-employed in that case that the compulsory health insurance was three times as Expensive as anything I earned over a month so I would have actually made negative money doing that so you got a job pretending like this is sex chats you got a job pretending to sex up guys and you were pretending to be a
	woman and Yes, that's the one thing I got.
	Holy Ashley Madison Batman, are you saying there are men out there on the internet pretending to be women talking to men and you've actually got several gay lovers who don't even know it?
	Holy Lawrence Southern gender switch Batman, I don't know which way is up anymore.
	Oh well.
	Okay, so why do you think you're having such trouble getting jobs?
	Are you going to tell me it's because of the state?
	Are you going to ask me rhetorical bitchy questions or are you going to answer the question that I'm asking you?
	Why do you think you're having trouble getting work?
	I don't know.
	Well, I guess for the...
	Okay, see, this is the passivity, man.
	You've been unemployed for 15 months, right?
	I mean, this isn't a real job that you have, right?
	And I ask you, this is the biggest question in your life, the biggest question in your life is, why can't I get a job, right?
	And you have no idea why you can't get a job.
	Isn't this the most important thing?
	Because if you could solve this, you could move on with your life, right?
	You could move out of home, you could have your own place, you could get a car, girlfriend, whatever, right?
	This is the most important question.
	Do you have any theories about why you are having such trouble getting jobs?
	Well, the problem is that every time I get an answer for an application, there's only just one line saying there was another applicant that fitted our application better.
	Right, so what is that answer?
	That's a description of the process by which you don't get a job.
	That's not why you don't get the job.
	Yes, but I cannot figure out why I didn't get any of those jobs.
	Okay, you're a scientist.
	You know that it's important to hypothesize about things.
	You're running an experiment, I assume, to confirm a hypothesis of some kind or another.
	Do you have any hypothesis about why it's so tough for you to get a job?
	Well, I've heard that 80% of all official jobs are not actually really for offer to the public, but I have already been assigned before they were written out.
	Fantastic!
	Okay, beautiful.
	Now we're getting somewhere.
	I appreciate that answer.
	Thank you, thank you, thank you.
	Okay.
	So, you're down to 20% of jobs that are available because they're not being filled by someone someone knows, right?
	So this should reduce your chances by 80%.
	But if you're running zero, you've been reduced by more than 80%, right?
	Which means that's not the entire answer.
	That's number one.
	Number two is if you know that, then you should be out there working your contacts.
	You should be calling friends, calling relatives, going in person, Charming people, getting them to like you, getting them to think you're going to be a wonderful guy to work with, and doing whatever it takes to work your network so you can get a job because you have that piece of information.
	The information is the jobs aren't advertised.
	80% of them go to someone that someone knows, so be someone that someone knows, right?
	That's what the point of that information is for, right?
	I actually did that to get what I'm doing now.
	You don't have anything now.
	This is not a job.
	This is someone saying, yeah, I'm not using it, you can use it.
	It's not going to lead anywhere, you're not getting paid, you might not even get published.
	So, let's go back.
	15 months, something's not working.
	You're not getting a job.
	What do you change about what you do because you're not getting a job?
	I stopped applying for things where I didn't explicitly say that, well, I looked More carefully at what the qualifications were and excluded all the opportunities beforehand that said something that I couldn't fulfill.
	And did that help?
	Well, obviously it didn't.
	Okay.
	What else did you try?
	You got a year.
	You tried changing one thing, which was to actually read the job application to make sure you were qualified.
	That didn't work.
	What else did you try?
	Well, it was the shotgun method.
	Just trying many, no matter what they are.
	Okay.
	Which also didn't work.
	Okay, what else did you try?
	So now we're on the fifth week of 52.
	What else did you try?
	Well, I did set a call center job.
	You did accept a call center job?
	The sex chat job I talked about.
	Yes.
	That I did quite early.
	Okay, and how long did you work there?
	A month.
	Then I found out that I paid $300 in health insurance and got $100 out of it.
	Wait, you worked for a month sex chatting people on the internet for $100?
	What?
	I don't understand.
	$117.
	You got $170 for sex chatting.
	Was this a full-time job?
	It was...
	The problem is that you were paid by messages and a few cents and therefore...
	It would have taken about a year or two to get fast enough to actually make enough money in that field.
	So you had a job that paid you $170 a month?
	Yes.
	Well, actually, it lost me $200 every month.
	Because you had to have the health insurance, right?
	Yes.
	Yeah, you don't want to get like heavy porn carpal tunnel syndrome and you don't have your employer on the hook for it or whatever.
	Okay.
	So, then what?
	What did you change?
	This is what I'm trying to wake you up to is this passivity.
	And then I'll tell you why you're not getting work.
	But go ahead.
	Then I tried putting a lot more effort into my applications.
	I read about the other publications that the people I applied to had published so that I could, if necessary, reference to them.
	I gave presentations and prepared more than one presentation in case they wanted to hear something differently and I could cross-reference.
	Yes, I looked for more specific things that I thought if I looked for something that I would really be passionate about and I could show that, that it would register at the other end.
	And what have your parents been doing during this time that you've been unemployed, this 15 months?
	Did they know you were a sex shop operator?
	Yes.
	They knew that your job was talking dirty to people on the internet using a keyboard, hopefully not shared by everyone in the family.
	Yes.
	They obviously told me to get a job.
	So they told you to get a job and you said, I've got a job offer as a sex check operator where I'm going to lose money.
	And they're like, yeah, go for it.
	I didn't realize that I would lose money because I Didn't know how fast I would get the messages, and so only after this one month I found out that it would be two.
	Well, no, you didn't have to wait till the month, right?
	I mean, you know something about math if you're a scientist, right?
	I was increasing at the beginning, but I reached a plateau two weeks in.
	Because you couldn't type any faster?
	Well, it also takes some reading and thinking, and Are you saying that you couldn't have worked any faster?
	I could have worked faster.
	Of course, because there wouldn't be an industry.
	If you lost money doing it as fast as you possibly could, there'd be no industry, right?
	Well, apparently many people have student health insurances who do it, so that's only 80 every month, so then it's easier to make plus.
	Oh my god, oh my god.
	The problem isn't that you were making less than $300 a month.
	Come on.
	Here's the thing.
	You don't have a whatever-it-takes attitude.
	And I'm not saying this to be mean.
	I'm saying this because somebody needs to say it to you.
	And you need help.
	You're failing massively.
	Right?
	If you can't type fast enough, get voice dictation.
	Take typing lessons.
	Practice.
	Do whatever it takes.
	I can't believe I'm telling somebody how to be a better typist in a sex chat, but if that's your thing, get great at it.
	Study people who are really good at it.
	Find ways to be faster.
	Make it happen.
	You give yourself permission to be inert, to fail.
	Because your parents are propping you up.
	And because nobody's telling you that your life is slipping you by.
	And it's going to continue to slip you by.
	Because now you've got this vague hope out there, I'll get published, and maybe I'll get a PhD.
	No!
	They already rejected you for the PhD.
	They already rejected you.
	Find something else.
	If you want to know, this is my opinion, it's not fact, I'm just telling you, I have...
	I have interviewed a lot of people in my life from senior executives all the way down to interns.
	I have interviewed probably a thousand people or more throughout my career.
	I've hired 100 or 150 probably over that and managed and been responsible.
	So you understand you probably never ever going to be in a situation where you're talking to an experienced hiring manager About why you can't get a job.
	Do you want the feedback?
	I mean, I'm not going to force anything on you.
	Oh, sure.
	Go ahead.
	Doesn't sound like you want it.
	I'm glad for any advice I can get.
	I'm sorry, my voice.
	I mean, this is why.
	I'm giving you the opportunity to solve the biggest problem in your life, which is why you can't get a job.
	I'm the most experienced person in hiring that you are ever likely to talk to.
	And I say, would you like this problem solved?
	You're like, yeah, I guess so.
	And you say, well, I want to do something that I'm passionate about.
	I'm holding the solution to your life problem here in my hand.
	And you can't even muster one tiny fucking ounce of enthusiasm as to the solution.
	And you wonder why you're not succeeding in your life.
	Do you understand?
	You're cynical.
	You're distant.
	You're absent.
	You're entitled.
	You're annoying.
	This is why you can't get hired.
	It doesn't matter.
	If you sent me a letter typed from an email called I'mReallyFuckingEnthusiastic.com I would know exactly What your personality type was like.
	And I would say, I don't know about this.
	This is a problem that you need to solve within yourself.
	It's not a problem with the market.
	It's not a problem with the 80-20 rule.
	It's not a problem with how fast you could type porn on the internet.
	The problem is that you're waiting for your life to come to you.
	The problem is that you won't Stand up, walk out into the world, and enthusiastically get what you want.
	And make people believe in you.
	Make people enthusiastic about you.
	You're waiting for people to come and cough up your life on your lap like some fucking mommy cat with a hairball.
	And it's not going to happen.
	You're in the adult-ish world now.
	You're still living at home.
	But you're in the adult world now, which means nobody has to give you anything.
	Nobody has to give you anything.
	You can walk up to someone, you can say, hey, what time it is?
	And they can say, not telling you, and walk off.
	Or they can not say, nobody has to give you anything.
	You have to go out and make it happen.
	You have to go out and get what you want.
	Do you understand?
	Make people enthusiastic about you.
	Make it, holy shit, that guy is incredible.
	I've got to call him back.
	What an incredible letter.
	I can feel the heat of this guy's enthusiasm coming off.
	I got me a Richard Dreyfuss Close Encounters of the Third Kind single-sided tan on my face just holding this email up to my head.
	Enthusiasm.
	Excitement.
	Passion.
	Love.
	Value.
	Value, value, value, value.
	Do you know who people want to work with?
	People they like.
	Now, it's great if you can provide value.
	Don't get me wrong.
	And you will at some point actually have to provide that value.
	But the reason if this 80-20 thing is true, I don't know if it is, but if the reason is 80-20, it's because if you know someone, you know what their personality is like, you know if you're going to like them or not.
	Do you think that to somebody who's not part of your family, do you think that you come across as a likable person?
	I don't know.
	No idea?
	Probably not.
	Why do you think that is?
	If that's true?
	I thought you were getting there.
	I'm not entirely sure.
	Okay, if you're not entirely sure, tell me the parts you are sure about.
	If you're not 100% or 80%, give me the 50% that you think.
	About one.
	Did you forget the question?
	About whether I'm sure that people like me?
	I'm sorry, I'm just not sure where you went in your head because this was only about 10 seconds ago.
	Did you forget the question?
	I'm not trying to be me, I'm just curious.
	I mean, the question is quite personal and I feel that I probably don't want to answer it.
	Because you said that you may not come across as that likable.
	And if you're not likable, people aren't going to want to hire you.
	I mean, there may be exceptions to that.
	Like, if you are some incredibly successful movie star, or, you know, if you're Mandy Patinkin, who apparently can be, or at least was in the past, kind of a nightmare to work with, if you're Mandy Patinkin, and you can sing like an angel and put out that Graf-Jewish-Uncle-Gethic vibe after sword fighting with Carrie Elwes for about four hours,
	you can make demands if you're a diva, and if you can provide massive amounts of value In other words, if you're charismatic to the audience, then you don't have to be that liked.
	But if you're just some guy coming in and out of the street or some email dumping in someone's box, you have to give off a vibe that you're different, you're special, that they're going to enjoy picking up the phone and talking to you.
	Do you think people are going to enjoy picking up the phone and talking to you?
	Well, apparently they don't.
	Okay, why?
	Why don't they want to pick up the phone and talk to you?
	I don't know.
	I know.
	I know you don't know.
	Why do you think?
	Well, you said you don't know totally or you don't know completely.
	Do you have any clue whatsoever about why people might not be picking up the phone to talk to you after they receive your email or after they receive your resume or after you...
	Do you phone them at all?
	Do you leave messages on their machines?
	Yes.
	I tried phoning companies too.
	Usually, they then ask you why you haven't sent your CV and so on in first.
	Right.
	And do you think that they do that to everyone?
	I'm not sure if they do that.
	Okay, I'm telling you for a fact.
	If you're interesting enough, if you're enthusiastic enough, if you're engaging enough, they won't ask you, well, why haven't you sent your resume?
	They say that so they can get off the phone with you.
	Something I can somewhat understand, right?
	Because you are waiting for other people to respond positively to you.
	They're not going to!
	I wanted to be a philosopher.
	I wanted to make a difference in the world.
	Working from home.
	Doing stuff I care about.
	Do you know how many other people outside my family and friends gave a shit about what I wanted?
	Not one.
	Not one person.
	Not one person out there in the world who didn't already know and love me gave one tiny little shit about what I wanted to do in the world.
	So how Am I at a quarter of a billion views and downloads?
	How has this happened?
	Well, you did a good show, and you kept doing it.
	I kept doing better and better and better shows.
	Yeah, I upgraded my equipment, and yeah, I got better mics and better cameras and all of that, and I worked with Mike, which is a real privilege.
	But you just keep surprising people and exciting people and being funny and engaging and entertaining and insightful, right?
	I can't not look.
	That's where you have to be.
	I can't not look.
	You need to read Malcolm Gladwell's book called Blink.
	I know he's got a few questionable research methodologies and so 10,000 hours, but Blink is very important because it shows how quickly people peg you for who you are at the moment.
	I'm not saying who you are forever.
	They have played, garbled up five second or three second slices of a professor talking and asked people, do you think he's a good or bad professor?
	They don't even know what he's saying.
	It's all blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	And they found that people can tell in a few seconds of a garbled vocal pattern whether the teacher is a popular or not popular teacher or professor.
	Thank you.
	They've known that and they do that because they say, well do you think this guy's good or bad?
	And then they match it with the student evaluations from people who've actually taken the whole course and boom!
	People get it within a few seconds of a garbled text.
	They've played doctors talking to patients, all garbled.
	They can figure out which doctors are going to get sued in just a few seconds of garbled stuff.
	Blink.
	People will judge you instantaneously and usually correctly.
	Go back and listen to my first podcast.
	Not the one where I'm reading, The Stateless Society from 2005, but the one I did when I think I was like, oh, I'm at show 183 and I can't believe it.
	There's a positive lilt and energy and positivity in that, which I still have.
	I'm more free now, more spontaneous, even, right?
	I wasn't just phoning radio stations saying, I'd really like a job on the radio doing something.
	Do you have anything?
	What are people going to say to that?
	Yes, that sounds boring.
	Just, yeah, send me your resume, click, right?
	Moving on.
	It says, this is something Mad Magazine, when I was a kid, it's something I used to read.
	And there's this, I mentioned this before, there's this hippie guy on a couch, and his dad comes in looking like my three sons' dad, or Monsieur Le Beaver, but he's sitting on the couch doing nothing and his father says, why don't you go out and get a job or something?
	He's like, okay, fine, man.
	I'll go.
	And the guy goes out, you know, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, ratty beard, ratty hairdo, flies coming off his smell.
	And he's leaning up on a counter in a store saying, you don't need like any summer help or anything, do you?
	And, you know, he's back on the couch in the next frame.
	The father's like, what happened?
	Oh, I tried, man.
	You can't say I didn't try.
	So, you need to stand out from the crowd.
	You need to Wow people.
	You need to excite people.
	You need to stop waiting for life to happen to you or for someone to provide you some sort of energy.
	Like some reverse vampire is going to cough up some plasma in your heart and turn it into a ball of electricity.
	You need to wake up and recognize that your life is slipping you by.
	You're going to do the do-si-do step march to death just like the rest of us, just like everyone.
	Stop waiting, because you're really an angry person, I think.
	Entitlement always comes with anger.
	Don't you feel that something should have happened by now?
	In your life?
	Well...
	Should have happened?
	Is that a trick question?
	No, it's not a trick question.
	How much debt are you in?
	I'm in no debt.
	Do you have a master's?
	Yes.
	Yeah, you have a master's, but you did it debt-free.
	How's that?
	I'm European.
	Oh, so the state pays for everything.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Which is why you think, oh, I'll just go on welfare, right?
	Are you native European?
	Yes.
	I'm telling you what is necessary.
	And the more that you want out of life, the more you have to provide to life.
	You know, if all you want is to be a newspaper carrier, then you don't have to provide that much.
	You don't have to make people very enthusiastic because there's not a lot of other people who want to do that job for long.
	Yeah, well, maybe that's my problem that I'm That I actually don't want that much.
	You don't want that much, but you want a PhD?
	Are you kidding me?
	I don't understand.
	Well, it was advertised to me as if it was very easy to get.
	Oh, so it was easy to get into a doctoral program, right?
	Yes.
	And then, what would you do Let's say that you spend the five years or seven years or whatever it would take for you to get your doctorate, what would you then do with that?
	Well, the idea is that you then start a research group.
	What do you mean?
	Where?
	You get the PhD so that you have the official title that makes people give you grants so that you can start a lab of your own and So, you're going to get more money from the government?
	Is that the plan?
	Oh, God.
	More money from the government?
	That's your plan?
	More money from hardworking taxpayers?
	More money from people who have to get up early and work their fingers to the bone so that you can dick around with science?
	Like, more money from the government?
	That's really the plan?
	Are you going to make anything in your society or are you just going to hoover things up that other people are creating, like money?
	I don't know.
	Do you think that you'll even be able to get a grant if all of this happens?
	Do you think you'll have the charisma and energy and inspiration to get the grant?
	Or is this going to be just a whole series of job interviews and you're not even getting a grant?
	No one's going to give you a grant.
	You have to go and earn that grant.
	You have to go and make people enthusiastic for what you're doing.
	Then maybe, maybe you can have a grant.
	But no one's just going to walk up to you and say, oh, you have a PhD.
	Here's $100,000.
	Off you go and start a research group.
	No, probably not.
	No, definitely not.
	So you will have taken society's precious resources, you would have squandered them on something that has no future, you'll be in your mid to late 30s with no job experience and no future.
	What do you think of that?
	Sound like fun?
	Not really.
	Are you going to do a single goddamn thing about that?
	I'm wasting my breath here, aren't I? I mean, you're not going to change.
	You don't even seem that interested in what I have to say.
	And, you know, my time is short and there are people who want to talk, so if you don't have anything else to add, I'll move on.
	Sorry for wasting your time.
	No, no.
	Trust me.
	It was not a waste of my time at all.
	It was a waste of your time, but that was going to happen either way.
	But I guarantee you there are people out there who are watching and listening to this who just shit themselves out of panic and terror, and they will be in motion because you're not.
	So I appreciate the service you have given to humanity, and let's move on to the next caller.
	Bye-bye.
	All right.
	Well, up next we have Samuel.
	Samuel wrote...
	Wait, wait!
	Greatest caller ever.
	Let me just...
	Hang on.
	I just need to pry off my neck.
	Jugular.
	Okay.
	I think I'm alright.
	Go ahead.
	If only he pretended to be a water buffalo while he was pretending to be a woman and doing sex chats, then he would have been successful.
	That's clear.
	At least the migrants get their legs moving.
	It takes some work to move to a different country to get welfare benefits.
	Sure does.
	Sure does.
	It takes a lot of effort to commit crimes.
	You know, you actually gotta go out there and move and do stuff.
	That's right.
	Alright, up next we have Samuel.
	He wrote in and said,"...I am a Hispanic slash white slash cis slash male American, not that any of that matters aside from American, and have experienced prejudice and dishonesty from the left firsthand." For example, I recently applied at a non-profit bicycle co-op on the less favorable side of town and was denied employment for reasons being that I am male,
	despite spending more time at the shop and demonstrating a superior work ethic to the two employees who were ultimately hired.
	Both women!
	I was told they were hired because they quote-unquote need more females in the shop.
	One major question comes to mind.
	Does my barring of employment breach the non-aggression principle?
	If so, aren't they just exercising the right to choose how to operate their business?
	If not, why does it feel like it does?
	That's from Samuel.
	Oh, Sammy boy.
	How you doing, Sam?
	Hey, Stefan.
	I'm doing well.
	How are you?
	I'm alright.
	How's your energy for the call?
	Help me!
	Help you!
	You were just listening to the last guy, right?
	That was so frustrating, but anyway.
	And yet strangely liberating at the same time.
	I actually have two friends in my room with me right now, and we were all cringing pretty hard throughout the whole thing.
	Yeah, okay.
	Well, yeah.
	Anyway.
	Well, hello.
	Hello.
	Hello, friends.
	How's it going?
	Why do you want to work in a co-op with lefties?
	Honestly, they have a pretty good cause.
	So they accept donations from people who don't want to do anything with the bicycles that they have.
	And then turn it over and sell it for extremely cheap.
	To anyone.
	And I'm kind of a...
	So they clean them up and tidy them up and fix the tires and trains and shit like that.
	And they actually teach people how to fix bikes too, which is pretty cool.
	Giving people...
	Yeah, it's a catch and release for them.
	Rather than just giving them one.
	I used to do that with my friends, garbage picking bikes with nine different colors.
	Okay.
	Nice.
	Alright, so...
	So that's the gig, right?
	But why do you want to work at a place with a bunch of lefties?
	I know, I know.
	Maybe I'm a little bit more tolerant than I should be, but...
	A little bit more what?
	Tolerant than I should be, but...
	I don't know.
	That's all I do for a living, is I bicycle.
	I do bicycle delivery, and I actually just started my own LLC. It's actually the first bicycle-only messenger service So yeah, pretty exciting.
	I'm just passionate about bikes.
	It's what I love to do.
	And enjoy helping people out, I guess.
	I have a bike-related question.
	Cool.
	So, fail videos.
	Now, I understand why there are a lot of bikes in fail videos.
	I know this because I had a bike and was very happy.
	Well, I still do, in fact.
	But when I was younger, I had a bike.
	And was very happy that there weren't a lot of cameras around for some of the crazy stupid shit I did on a bike.
	But anyway, although I had a friend way crazier than me.
	He'd literally just bike off walls onto concrete.
	He actually ended up dying in a motorcycle accident, beheaded.
	Oh, gosh.
	Oh, I know.
	This is years after I knew him, but he was committed to two-wheeled mayhem, and it kind of overcommitted back in terms of correction.
	Okay, so fail videos.
	I don't understand something.
	Okay.
	Okay, people build these stupid ramps.
	Okay, maybe you've done it, too.
	So I'm sorry if this sounds...
	No, no, you're good.
	You're good.
	Okay, people build these ramps.
	That are ridiculous.
	You know, it's like, hey, I've got some inner tubes from...
	Paper towels and I propped it up with half a brick and I've got a piece of plywood that looks about, I don't know, an eighth of an inch thick.
	I'm sure this can take my full weight and propel me into the sky.
	Okay, so that's just human stupidity.
	I mean, I get that.
	This is just like, I didn't pay attention in physics, so now the world is going to punch me until I learn something about physics.
	But what is the deal when people actually make it off these ramps and they come down And the entire fork, like the front fork, like the whole thing, it just kind of falls apart.
	I've never figured that one out.
	Hmm.
	Like the wheel comes off, the handlebars come off, the whole front of the bike.
	Is it just like it shears in the middle, in the pipe, in the front?
	No.
	That has something to do with just poor steel, it sounds like.
	Or maybe just things are really loose.
	Yeah, if your fork's loose too, yeah, if your bearings aren't completely sealed in or it's not completely tightened, I'm sure that could...
	Cause a little bit of damage.
	I've seen quite a few ovalized stems, which is where if you don't have it tightened after a while of turning, it makes a little oval when there should be just a hole for the fork to go down through.
	Okay, okay.
	So they just basically, they're not maintaining their bikes.
	Please, God, people, maintain your bikes.
	Yeah, well, exactly.
	Hence, come to this company that I wanted to work for.
	Yeah, no, listen, I mean, every spring, take my bike down to the bike shop.
	Please save me.
	From all the terrible things I see on videos.
	I just wanted to check.
	I'll do that.
	Make sure your bike is in good shape before you bike at all, let alone do all this crazy stuff.
	So you went to go and apply for this job, but now it's kind of good that you didn't because now you've started your own thing, right?
	Yeah.
	So they're helping you.
	I'm hopeful.
	Do you think the ladies are going to start their own LLC and be there competing with you?
	Probably not, no.
	So they're helping you.
	They're hoovering up people who otherwise might be incentivized to compete with you, not counting the last caller, and they are rejecting you, which has you free, to go and do your own thing.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, valid point.
	I mean, listen...
	If people had liked, if Canadian publishers had liked, or any publishers had liked my novel writing, I wouldn't be doing this.
	I'm liberated to do much better good in the world than merely writing novels, right?
	So, from that standpoint, they've done you a favor.
	From the others, from the second standpoint, I don't know.
	Working around bicycle pumps with a bunch of lefty women.
	I mean, isn't that just an invitation to an eventual charge of sexual harassment?
	The way that he was pumping up that inner tube and looking at me, and he licked his lips.
	I feel violated.
	Lord's sakes, call someone!
	So, it's not bad when crazy people say, you can't work here.
	Now, they may have...
	I don't know, you know, don't...
	I wouldn't guess the legalities of it, but I know that there are some places you get grants if you hire particular people or you may have negative repercussions if you're not diverse enough, either through gender or through race or whatever.
	Or if you're too diverse, like if you're, say, Google and you hire too many Asians, you're in big trouble.
	This is library!
	Anyway, have you seen that video?
	No, I haven't.
	Oh, you've got to.
	Look it up.
	This is Library is like ultimate heroic boss thing, right?
	So a bunch of social justice warriors, I think some women, some blacks or whatever.
	And you don't know where they are, right?
	And they've got a giant megaphone.
	And they're like, who's got the power?
	We've got the power.
	Who fights the power?
	We fight the power.
	It's really loud, right?
	You think what they're at a mall or something like that, right?
	Yeah.
	And then this, like, he weighs like 90 pounds, dripping wet, right?
	And this Chinese guy, I think he's Chinese, I don't know, right?
	He comes up, he's like, hey, hey, hey!
	This is library.
	And it pans around, and they're in a library, making all of this noise, useless, garbage, chanty noise.
	Now, to be fair, this may have been their first time inside a library, maybe they weren't aware of the protocol.
	But if that just doesn't explain so much about life, and, and, do you know what the worst thing is?
	The worst thing is, is these social justice warrior lefty people, when this guy's like, hey, hey, this is library, just turns and walks off, total boss move, total boss move, you gotta look it up.
	At the end of it, you know, the social justice warriors say, go back to Beijing, man.
	Oh!
	Oh my gosh.
	Oh, you know what?
	Follow him to where he's going, and do whatever the hell he's doing, and you'll succeed.
	But they won't.
	I just, I love this guy, you know, it's like, this is library!
	It's brilliant.
	The first time I saw it, I was like, jaw dropped, because it totally took me, I'm sorry, spoiler and all that, but it's, you gotta look it up.
	It's total boss.
	Total boss.
	Oh, that's so awesome.
	Um...
	So, yeah, they've done you a favor.
	Now, they may, in a sense, have to hire women or minorities.
	Like, they may be, not have to, but they may be incentivized in one form or another to do this.
	Because I don't want to sound overly sexist, but when I had my bike gang when I was 12, terrorists of the neighborhood we were, because we biked around, and then we'd bike around some more.
	Terrifying stuff.
	We looked at you.
	And what?
	And looked at you.
	That's right.
	We'd bike to the mall.
	We're not there to shop.
	We're not there to work.
	We're just there.
	But anyway, so how many girls do you think were in the bike gang of excellence?
	This, zero.
	That's right.
	I don't think we would have known what to do if a girl had come by.
	And, you know, this was like This is even more of a sausage fest than Dungeons& Dragons, which was, you know, end-to-end sausage fest.
	In my experience, well, actually, in your experience, is it more the boys or the girls who like disassembling mechanical things and learning how they work and putting them back together in new and exciting ways?
	Definitely.
	Definitely the boys.
	Yeah.
	It's a new thing, right?
	I mean, it's why we have this crazy little thing called civilization, right?
	I mean, we like to break things apart.
	We like to build things newer and better and so on.
	So, do you think that the bike store owner, if he was just going on quality, would be more likely to hire you, who I assume has been doing this stuff since you first pulled apart your scooter when you were four, or the girls who, you know, statistically wouldn't have been doing that?
	Right.
	So, you're working for someone who's hiring people who aren't as good.
	Right.
	Right.
	I mean, that's just a red flag right there, right?
	Right.
	And another thing is, and I don't want to skew too far away from what my fear is and the root of why I'm asking the question.
	No, let's stay on topic like the failed video, so go ahead.
	Right.
	So it's kind of just this mentality.
	Specifically with learning about bikes, Comparing them to, let's say, learning how to fix an automobile, learning how to fix a bike is pretty easy, I guess, for lack of a question.
	Especially cars these days.
	I once dated an engineer woman who was like, oh, I used to love fixing my own cars, until the new cars came along.
	It's like, forget it, you've got to be a computer scientist to figure out this crap.
	Right, exactly.
	I always hear about my grandfather used to talk about how he could stand in his trucks where the engine sat.
	We're kind of all day long.
	It was simple.
	But anyway, so bikes are really easy to learn how to do.
	And so I guess training someone to do that isn't particularly difficult, nor does it take a lot of time.
	I'd say you could sufficiently, like for example, there's a program in Colorado you can go for 26 days and learn how to build wheels, build the bike, Everything else to do with bikes, you learn it in 26 days.
	It's a highly esteemed program.
	The name escapes me right now, which is embarrassing.
	Specifically with this job, I'm being a little bit nitpicky, I would say.
	You mean because it's not that hard to train people to do this kind of stuff?
	Right, exactly.
	I don't think that it's so much of an issue for me that they're hiring people with less experience.
	But more towards like, and I believe that you've said this before, that there's this third wave feminism being like a man-hating mentality and kind of like work towards almost a detriment to men so that, you know, you can equalize damage.
	But do you know anything about the women who were hired?
	I do, yeah.
	I know them both personally.
	And are they bike people?
	Are they tinker people?
	Are they...
	Tinker people, that sounds like the gayest occupation person.
	Tinker bell person, to be precise.
	Well, bikes have bells, that works.
	But no, are they, like, compared to you, I mean, all modesty aside, I mean, you sound like you would be the guy for the job, right?
	Yeah.
	Oh, definitely.
	And I, you know, I've known the people.
	Why did the girls, why did the, why did the, sorry to interrupt you, why did the women take the job?
	Why wouldn't they say, no, hire this guy?
	I mean, he's been a bike guy since he was knee-high to a grasshopper.
	Why would you hire me?
	Hire this guy.
	Probably just because they're slightly less passive than the last caller.
	No, I don't think that's it.
	No, no, listen, I don't think that's it.
	Are they friends of yours?
	Yeah, more acquaintances.
	And I actually didn't know.
	Okay, but...
	Who they were until after I got interviewed.
	Why would they take the job knowing that you're much better qualified?
	Right.
	Knowing that there was some other reason, some sexist reason, why they were hired.
	They got female advantage unfairly, unjustly, inappropriately, unearned.
	Yeah.
	So why would they take the job if the only reason they're hired...
	Is for sexism of some kind or another.
	Right.
	Female preference.
	Preference for females.
	Why would they take the job?
	Why wouldn't they have the goddamn pride to say, no, you don't hire me over somebody more qualified just because I'm a woman.
	That's insulting.
	Right.
	I'll compete on my own.
	Thank you very much.
	Yeah, I mean, passivity.
	What?
	I think it's just passivity.
	No.
	Overlooking that factor.
	No, no, no.
	Oh, such a white knight.
	Do-do-do-do!
	I'm going to come in and save ladies from their own choices, but they don't have a choice in just being passive.
	Where is my trusty steed?
	Oh dear, it stepped on my nigger gonads.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I'm not trying to give him leeway or anything like that.
	And I do think that there's this weird mentality that's being like...
	Entitlement.
	Right.
	Right.
	I mean, I don't know if this is affirmative action, so this is a general rant, right?
	Right.
	But it sounds like, if I'm going by what you're saying, that whoever the shop owner is chose a less qualified person over a more qualified person because vagina trumps penis, right?
	Right.
	Well, don't do that.
	I'm just saying this to employers, and you'll have this choice, right, when you become your business owner and you grow and all.
	Right.
	You'll be hiring.
	Hire the most competent person.
	Color of their skin.
	Innie, outie, when it comes to squishy bits, it doesn't matter.
	Hire the most competent person.
	Anything else is an insult.
	Anything less is an insult to everyone involved.
	Hire the most competent person, for God's sakes.
	This shouldn't even need to be said.
	If the most competent person is a black guy, hire the black guy.
	If the most competent person is a woman, hire the most competent person.
	Because this bullshit affirmative action-y kind of, let's make all the numbers match to the outcomes, is so insulting to everyone.
	And it provokes racism and it provokes sexism.
	Because women who say, oh, I know I'm not the most qualified person, I know I'm not the most suitable person, I know I'm not the most valuable person, but I'll take the job anyway, are saying, I want an unfair advantage.
	Now, why do people want an unfair advantage?
	Because they can't compete.
	Every time a woman or a minority or anyone, anytime you take a job because of an unfair advantage, you are reaffirming That you can't compete in the eyes of everyone around you and everyone who hears of it.
	Eric Holder said...
	God, he's creepy.
	Eric Holder said, affirmative action has barely even begun.
	Really?
	Really.
	Because I think it was a pretty temporary measure.
	Never going to be quotas.
	Don't worry about that.
	Oh yeah, okay, so it's going to be quotas.
	What's it, 52 years?
	50 years?
	Half a century?
	It's barely begun?
	What are we talking, half a millennia here?
	4,000 years?
	What the hell are we talking about here?
	Until we evolve into beings of pure light and dimension?
	Is that, like, then?
	Holy crap.
	I mean, seven years ago, I got $300 because I'm a quarter Mexican.
	So, I mean...
	Really?
	Yeah.
	How?
	How?
	Because, you know, I'm Mexican.
	I deserve it because I'm Mexican, man.
	Duh.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Well, when you say duh in that way, that actually is an argument.
	Yeah, okay.
	And the argument is, Steph, you white bastard.
	Why the hell are you?
	Okay.
	Now I get that.
	But no, so people who make those kinds of decisions, you don't want to get involved in people who don't hire the best.
	You don't want to get involved with people who don't hire the best.
	And so this is a bullet that is dodged.
	And people who will take jobs that they know they're less qualified for because they feel entitled to those jobs, they're going to be shitty workers.
	I guarantee it.
	And if you did get a job with these women, how do you think the workload would distribute there, my friend?
	Oh, I'll be right back.
	I just got to make a quick phone call.
	I'm going to check something on Yelp.
	I'll be back in a sec.
	Oh, I'm a little hungry.
	Oh, I actually have to go to the washroom.
	Can I, you know, I've got a heavy flow.
	I don't think I can squat.
	I mean, come on.
	I mean, this is not all women.
	I mean, women can be fantastically competent.
	But women who are entitled and who will take a job that they're less qualified for because they just feel they deserve it and don't care.
	They don't care about the quality of the business, right?
	If you want to work somewhere, you've got to be dedicated to the quality of that business.
	And if you're going to take a job and you're less competent, anyway, I'm sort of repeating myself.
	Yeah, that's all right.
	No, dodge a bullet.
	Businesses are free to hire whoever the hell they want in a free society, right?
	I mean, I don't mean with all this affirmative action, all this kind of stuff, right?
	But if they don't want to hire you and they want to hire women, that's fine.
	They can go ahead and do that, right?
	That's fine.
	I mean, it's not a violation of the non-aggression principle to not hire you.
	Yeah.
	Just like nobody's raping you if they don't go out with you, right?
	Right.
	But there are all of these signs around that make it a really, really good thing to avoid people who are making those kinds of decisions.
	And I say this with a quarter century of entrepreneurial experience.
	Let me roll the treacle of my slow-moving middle-aged wisdom down the bicycle ramp to your waiting arm.
	Sorry, that all fell apart.
	I like the ramp.
	The...
	The decisions that people make in business, if they're making bad decisions, if they're making dumb decisions, if they're making counterproductive decisions, don't work with them.
	If they want to hire less competent people for reasons of political correctness or for reasons of whatever, whatever, whatever, great, let them go hire the less competent people.
	You get to go off and have a great life.
	That is a very big and very telling decision that has a lot to do with where their business is going to end up in the long run, and you don't want to be along for that ride.
	I'm telling you, it doesn't go anyplace good.
	I say this with some significant bitter experience in this area.
	And this is...
	This idea, like, I'm a big fan of economic ostracism.
	I mean, this is the foundation of, you know, every anarchy, practical anarchy, and a lot of the conversations I've had over the years.
	Big fan of economic ostracism.
	I love the fact that we can say no to people, and we can economically ostracize, or personally ostracize people who are bad, in one way or another, directly or indirectly.
	I love the economic ostracism because if that's not allowed, we always end up escalating to violence.
	Ostracism is the way the society deals with problems without having to use violence.
	So the fact that you're being ostracized for being a competent male, yeah, okay.
	I mean, it's dumb on their part, I would say.
	There may be other incentives that are there for them.
	But I'm perfectly fine with it and you should be relieved at the outcome, I think.
	Mm-hmm.
	Thank you.
	You'd have just wasted your time working for someone else.
	You can figure out the business stuff, I'm sure, pretty quickly.
	You'd have just wasted your time working for someone else and getting involved in their business and caring about something you don't have any fundamental control over because it's not your business.
	Much better to have your own business.
	Right.
	Ultimately, yeah, that's where it came to.
	I just want to work for myself.
	Anyway, they helped me out for sure.
	It's just, yeah, again, it's this mentality that I'm Sort of raising eyebrows at, for lack of a better metaphor there.
	Oh, you should.
	Yeah, you should.
	And you should be aware.
	But learn the lesson of this not great business person for when you get to hire.
	Just hire the very best people that you can find, the people that you like the most.
	And you can ask for the resume of the last caller, and I'm sure we'll forward it to you.
	All right, I'm going to move on to the next caller, but let me know how it goes with your business.
	I'm always curious how things shake out and if there's anything else we can do to help, but please let us know.
	Awesome, will do.
	Yeah, I'll throw Michael an email.
	I appreciate it.
	Thanks.
	All right, take care.
	Bye, everyone.
	Bye.
	Goodbye.
	Okay, up next we have Connor.
	Connor wrote in and said, what is the relation between tragedy and intimacy?
	In a shallow culture, is it necessary for something traumatic to happen in order for people to connect?
	That is from Connor.
	Hello, Connor, how are you doing?
	You're doing it quietly.
	Hey, Steph, how are you?
	I'm well.
	I'm well, thanks.
	I'm well.
	What brought this question about?
	It's an interesting one.
	Well, before we get into that, I just wanted to give my thanks to you and Mike for the work that you guys do.
	Oh, thank you very much.
	Yeah, I was just sort of reflecting on this today.
	I've been listening for almost exactly four years.
	I was one of the disillusioned Ron Paul people that stumbled onto your videos.
	And it's just been, yeah, it's been quite a ride sort of making positive changes in my life and also sort of seeing how your thoughts and ideas have changed with what's it's been quite a ride sort of making positive changes in my life and also sort Your thoughts and ideas have changed with what's going on in the world today.
	Good.
	Glad to hear it.
	What brought this question up for you?
	Well, there's sort of two...
	Relationships in my life in particular.
	One is a friend, long-time friend, probably at least 10 years, who recently, basically he had some kind of psychotic episode and was arrested and He eventually escaped the charges without doing any kind of significant prison time,
	but it has sort of come to light that he I don't know if he's been officially diagnosed, but he has kind of paranoid delusions.
	That was a really awful thing, but I think Through that process, he and I became much more close.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but do you have any insight or ideas regarding his history or how he may have ended up with these challenges in his mind?
	No.
	Yeah, well we've talked quite a bit about that.
	There's definitely some childhood issues.
	I don't really know where the science is at, but I'm convinced that some part of it is genetic.
	But there's definitely, I think, some major issues with his parents.
	He described to me that just on a handful of occasions, his father had kind of violent outbursts.
	What do you mean?
	What did he mean by that?
	Yeah, I don't remember specifically, but something like Uh, he was picking on his brother, or his brother...
	Wait a minute.
	You got really close?
	Hang on, you got really close.
	And I'm, you know, talked about violence, but you don't really remember what kind of violence it was, or...?
	Well, I think that what he described was, uh, choking...
	I think he witnessed his father choking his brother out.
	Something like that.
	Choking out?
	You mean to full unconsciousness?
	No, no, I'm sorry.
	Um...
	Yeah, you know, I didn't ask for details, but...
	Okay, so you got closer to this guy through some of his difficulties, right?
	Some of his challenges.
	Well, so for example, the story that I was telling you, this was probably a long time ago that he told me, and I didn't really push the issue or I didn't ask more questions.
	I might have said, I'm sorry that happened to you, but I didn't defend him the way I should have.
	Go ahead.
	You said there were a couple of people in your life.
	Oh, yeah.
	Well, also, my brother suffered a tragedy, and since then we've been able to talk about more of our history, which contains some significant problems, some challenges.
	Do you mean with each other or from your parents?
	Both.
	Right, right, okay.
	So, I mean, I think honesty brings, I mean, this is sort of a cliche, and it's not barely even worth mentioning, but I will nonetheless.
	But honesty brings people closer together, right?
	And if tragedy is what is necessary to bring honesty, then that will be the effect.
	People live life a lot of times like in this slow motion jello dissociative state where they're just kind of going through habits, right?
	Not to pick on the earlier caller, but the earlier caller.
	So there's this kind of repetition and this hypnosis of sameness.
	And what happens is people end up kind of trapped in doing the same thing over and over again because new things provoke new experiences which provoke rage and shame and guilt for having been paralyzed or procrastinating for so long if that's what people have been doing.
	So sometimes it can take a shock to jolt people out of the self-hypnosis of the everyday.
	The dissociation, the boredom.
	This occurs when people are not connected to themselves or connected to others.
	They live in this spaced out interstellar isolation.
	Now, tragedy can shock you out of that.
	I mean, to take a sort of silly example, I mean, I don't know if you've ever had this, most people have, you know, you're driving along and you're just kind of spaced out and daydreaming or whatever it is.
	You're still driving well, but you know, you're just not really present or doing much.
	And then some car goes by and they've made the mistake or it's not you, but suddenly you're like, whoa, I'm in the now now, right?
	Right, yeah.
	Or even if you just hear a horn.
	Little annoys me more in life than people who unnecessarily use car horns.
	Hey, you're about to die!
	No, no, no, the guy ahead of me was just going too slow.
	Oh, thanks!
	That was great!
	Good use of the horn.
	Right.
	So, we can be shocked into this kind of stuff, into being present, into being aware, into being vivid.
	And tragedy can do that.
	It can center people.
	Tragedy is a little foretaste of death, right?
	Yes.
	This is why people who wish to remain detached for themselves must avoid tragedy, because tragedy, in general, reminds us that we're going to die.
	Gonna die.
	And when we're gonna die, we remember that we're not gonna have forever to make mistakes.
	We're not gonna have forever to have conversations with people.
	Either we're gonna die, or they're gonna die, or we're both gonna die.
	But at some point, everyone in your life will never Be available for a conversation.
	Everyone, every single person who's in your life will be dead and in the ground and no longer ever, ever available again to have a conversation with.
	Ever.
	And that is really surprising for people.
	You know, when we're young and we live in this blur of infinity and eternity and all of that, it is really startling for people when this happens.
	And so the tragedy Can be this reminder of that, of how fleeting all of this stuff really is.
	Now, this can work two ways, right?
	I mean, it can say, oh gosh, you know, I'm really going to need to connect with people.
	I'm really going to need to have chance with people.
	And I'm really going to need to break through to people because I'm going to die.
	I'm going to die.
	Or they're going to die or someone's going to die.
	And that can happen.
	Or it can also happen where you say, well, you know, I've been trying this for years.
	Nothing's happening.
	I'm moving on because I'm not going to waste more time trying to connect to people where there's no connection possible or imminent or achievable by any methodology that I've been able to come up with.
	So I think tragedy in the little death scenario, in tragedy is a little tiny difference.
	Dressed rehearsal for the final tragedy that is not a tragedy for very long because after you're dead, tragedy becomes impossible because you're dead.
	So I think that tragedy can bring people closer together but tragedy can also release them from relationships that are never going to work out anyway.
	Right.
	Yeah, that makes sense and it just makes me feel really sad.
	Why is that?
	Not like you shouldn't.
	Sure.
	I don't know.
	I think it's the sense of all the missed opportunities maybe that I've had and that other people have had.
	That's a very generic responsibility.
	What do you mean?
	I think that I... Have been, like for example, with my friend that I was telling you about, I think that I have been cowardly as far as not confronting people with the truth as often as I could.
	Yeah, and there's things about his childhood that you don't know about that are very important to him, right?
	Yes.
	When I think about I'm no psychologist, but when I think about people having psychotic breaks and stuff, I think about what enormous pressure they must have been under in childhood.
	That they would, in a sense, pull a mind muscle to that degree.
	How much unreality was forced upon them, force-fed upon them as children.
	That's where I go.
	I don't know if it's factual or not, but that's right.
	Sorry, go on.
	A lot of times, people who've had abusive childhoods, dysfunctional childhoods, we're shamed for it.
	You know that, right?
	You've had some dysfunction in your own childhood as well.
	You're shamed for it.
	Because people don't want to hear.
	Right.
	They don't want to hear about it.
	They don't want to hear about it.
	And you're forced to carry these bodies, carry these ghosts alone, right?
	Right.
	The worst part for me of an abusive childhood is the isolation.
	And then when you're an adult and people don't want to hear about it, I'm not saying you've got to 24-7 dump it on them or anything, but you know what it's like.
	The topic comes up and people just, they back away, they edge away, right?
	This big compassionate society we live in that cares so much about victims.
	And the left says, we care about the victims.
	Bullshit.
	I was a victim of my whole damn childhood.
	Nobody wanted to hear about it.
	Mm-hmm.
	When I got older, even as a child, nobody wanted to hear about it.
	Relatives, friends, friends, parents, no one wanted to hear about it.
	Whenever the topic would come up or the abuse would be visible to people, nobody said anything.
	You fart in the middle of a formal dinner and everyone just pretends they didn't hear anything.
	That's what it's like.
	You're an inappropriate bodily function.
	In a civilized world when you are the victim of these kinds of abuses as a child.
	And when you have a terrible truth to tell, the truth of your history, the truth of your experience, you're always putting out feelers to see if there's going to be any listening place for it because you don't want to tell it and further be traumatized.
	People rejecting you because abuse has a lot to do with feeling rejected and you don't want to do it again.
	So, if you have a friend who's had a difficult childhood, ask them.
	Ask them.
	It's not their fault.
	It wasn't my fault.
	I was just born where I was born.
	No choice about it.
	I did everything I could to make it better, but ask.
	It's amazing what a relief and release it is for people To just listen to the difficulties that you had that weren't of your own making.
	To the evils you've suffered.
	Evil isolates.
	And it isolates in the moment and it isolates afterwards because people don't want to hear about evil.
	They don't want to hear about victims.
	Real victims.
	Children.
	So you can do a lot to help people by just listening.
	To what they've experienced.
	It undoes the isolation that evil has woven around them, the biosphere that it's embedded them into, the amber that has flowed over them.
	It brings them back to humanity, to common cause, to sympathy, to connection.
	So that would be my suggestion.
	Cool.
	Well, thanks, Steph.
	Yeah, I really appreciate that, and I'm just feeling kind of Kind of flustered.
	Well, maybe go make some calls.
	Yeah, maybe I should.
	All right.
	Thanks, man.
	I appreciate the question.
	Yeah, thank you.
	And we must move on to the next caller.
	All right.
	Alright, up next we have Nariman.
	He wrote in and said, There is a core truth to reality, which is that it is infinitely definable.
	The realization of this truth, I think, leads to a set of self-evident principles about reality that have the potential to reshape the narrative of why we exist, what it all means, and how we go about interacting, manifesting, and reconciling our personal perspectives with the broader reality we all interact in.
	With that said, what besides cognitive dissonance is to blame for people ignoring, avoiding, and or rejecting reality?
	I want to believe that we are all capable of accepting reality as our definitions of it are refined, changed, and discovered, but I feel like too many people accept narratives as opposed to questioning them.
	Do they not see the danger in blindly accepting what, at least possibly, could be misrepresentations of what is real?
	That's from Nariman.
	Yeah, I'm doing well.
	I'm doing well.
	How are you doing?
	Great.
	I'm doing really well.
	Thank you.
	I know that was quite a mouthful, Michael.
	Good job there.
	So that's a lot of words.
	It is.
	It is.
	It's a lot of words.
	Can you boil it down for an old fellow?
	I can.
	You know, this is something I've been thinking about for a long time.
	I think it might serve me well by kind of explaining how I came about that whole mouthful and I'm doing well.
	How are you doing?
	I guess the personal connection that I have to it, because I know a lot of times with callers you try and reach that, like, why are you actually calling me?
	Because it doesn't sound like your questions accurately represent that, you know?
	I was born a Muslim, okay?
	My dad was Islamic.
	He moved to America in the late 70s, right before the Islamic Revolution.
	The Iranian, right?
	The Iranian Revolution, yeah, excuse me.
	And so, you know, by default, I was kind of a Muslim.
	I prayed next to him.
	He was very open-minded.
	He was the kind of Islamic person that would have, you know, long conversations with my grandma about Jesus and how great of a dude he was and stuff like that.
	So he wasn't your typical, as you might consider, like, Islamic extremist.
	You know, in a lot of awkward.
	The Persian and Zoroastrian influences in Iran kind of got scraped away fairly significantly.
	The Iran prior to I don't want to get into a whole history, but Iran prior to the CIA coming and helping out in the 50s and 60s was a different kettle of fish, and a lot of people, of course, are judging Islam as a whole by what happened after massive amounts of foreign intervention, and that's an important element.
	I really appreciate you clarifying that, pointing that difference out, or that distinction, I should say.
	Because it is real.
	People should go look up, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I urge people, and I've done this before, go look up pictures of women in skirts going to university in Kabul in Afghanistan, or look at people in Tehran, young people in bikinis on the beach, and look at, this is...
	Yeah, that is an important aspect of the region and of the belief system to really process and understand.
	Right, I mean, even growing up, not to go too far tangent here, but, you know, growing up, speaking with people who used to live there, you know, they'd tell me stories, you know, would be listening to American radio and some mullet would come over with a big old beard and rip the tape out and scold them and, you know, and I know a lot of dudes, you know, when they were over there, they were Boot-legging liquor and smoking cigarettes and smoking hash and stuff like that, all under the watchful eye of the authorities.
	Or excuse me, not under the watchful eye, I should say.
	But yeah, that distinction is just really there.
	It was a liberal culture and so on and so forth.
	And he was kind of a, not a progenitor, but an inheritor of that.
	That legacy.
	So yes, that kind of free-mindedness trickled down.
	And of course, when the more extremist elements took over, the moderates got out there as fast as humanly possible.
	And of course, thus...
	I mean, as I've said before, one of the great influences of my youth was a friend of mine's father who was Iranian.
	Cool.
	And a brilliant guy, a warm-hearted guy, a great guy.
	And he'd always tell you, no, no, no, no.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Very big distinction there.
	Big distinction.
	I have a lot of Austrian, Irish, Western European in me, so it's kind of a turbulent environment.
	Let's not talk about my ancestors in the Middle East, because then I'm going to demand reparations.
	But anyway.
	Exactly.
	So, no, I mean, it's important to understand that...
	What's left behind in a lot of these countries is a tiny slice of what was there before that has expanded to fill a void often created by Western intervention.
	This is not to say that it doesn't explain everything and it doesn't excuse everything, but this is just an important part of the region's history that people aren't particularly aware of, which I think is pretty tragic in a lot of ways.
	And I appreciate that, again, that you made that distinction.
	So when he was here, he was the kind of American, after he got his citizenship, that would say, hey, who are you voting for?
	And people are like, what are you talking about?
	And he would say, you know, the dog catchers, right?
	And they're like, what?
	So he was extremely proud to be an American and to be able to vote.
	I mean, he actually spent, he was a bartender for a while, and he ended up bartending, I believe it was for Jimmy Carter.
	Sorry, Muslim bartender.
	I know, right?
	Well, he did drink.
	And that's the thing, you know, not extremist.
	I would say...
	No, no, I think we got that.
	I think we got that.
	We got that.
	All right.
	So, you know, but definitely religious, but vowed never to go back to Iran.
	Super furious about the whole situation there.
	But growing up, so he...
	Okay, let's get back to it here.
	He passed away when I was five.
	Yeah, it's made for an interesting life, as I'm sure you'll see here.
	So he passed away when I was five and I had a lot of support in my life.
	And in those early years, you know, people would approach me and say things like, oh, well, your dad, you know, he was a great man.
	He was a super great man.
	And and he's with God now.
	There are a lot of religious people in my life, Christians, Muslims, etc.
	And so, you know, being a young kid, hearing, okay, on one hand, God is everything.
	God is all these things, right?
	And then, okay, your dad is dead.
	He's with God now.
	And then I guess I kind of merged those two.
	I synthesized them in my mind.
	So I kind of had a Jesus complex for a little while.
	I'd say a good portion.
	Wait, I'm missing the thread for that last one.
	You just lost me in the sequence of thoughts.
	Okay.
	So, you know, people...
	Your dad is with God.
	Right, and God is everywhere.
	So, if my dad is with God, and God is all things, and God is everywhere, my dad is, in a way, if you will, part of God.
	So, I guess there was no distinction in my mind between the two.
	So, anytime I... No, but where does the Jesus thing come in from?
	So, the Jesus thing, I guess, would come in that I felt like, okay, well, I have something special.
	I'm here for a purpose.
	Of course, this is something that everybody feels, I would venture to guess.
	They have a purpose.
	They are special.
	They are going to do things.
	They are going to change the world.
	Let me continue just to kind of put that into perspective and why I would feel that way.
	I spent kind of a semi-religious life.
	My grandma was very Catholic, so I spent a lot of time with her because my mom was a single mom.
	And my grandma was my caretaker, fortunately.
	So your father being a Muslim married your mom?
	He was a Catholic, yeah.
	Right, okay.
	And he became a bartender.
	He became a bartender, exactly.
	Very liberal, very liberal morally, very conservative, I would say, politically and religiously, as strange as that dichotomy might be.
	No, no, I'm there, but go ahead.
	Very libertine, you know.
	So being with her, going to church, I just started to go to church just to be with her, just to kind of make some other friends outside of, because I like people.
	I like discussing things.
	I've always have.
	I heard you mention the other day how you sought out adult companionship, interesting conversations, and you spoke about a A gentleman in the back of a car, I'm sure you would call that conversation.
	I was a hunter of the big brains.
	Right, right.
	A physicist, my God!
	Engineer!
	I would stalk these people.
	Absolutely.
	I would too.
	And so, you know, just as another aside, I would go approach people.
	You know calculus?
	Can you explain it to me?
	Of course no one ever could.
	It's lines and areas under curves and stuff.
	Anyway, so I went to church with her.
	Grew up a bit.
	I became engaged to a girl for a while who didn't work out with, but I would go to temple with her.
	I've always been interested in religion.
	I'm not going to sit here and proselytize, but it occurred to me as I was driving down the road one day.
	Wait, sorry, when you say go to temple, do you mean she was Jewish?
	She was Jewish, yes.
	That's a synagogue.
	Yeah, okay, got it.
	So I kind of went backwards.
	You're kind of like just building up a whole compendium of the world's religions right here in this call, right now.
	Just backing up my whole way.
	And then I went through my Hail Satan phase.
	Well, you know, so many words I guess you could...
	No, but definitely I've...
	I've studied the mystery schools.
	I've studied the deeper, you know, the Kabbalah and the, I met a lot, the Sufism and, you know, Zoroastrianism.
	The Kabbalah, which has helped Madonna get all of her mental clarity and cohesiveness and coherence in her speeches.
	The hypocrisy.
	So, yeah, we're touching on some points here that I think are relevant.
	So I'm driving down the road and I realized to myself, I realized that, man, I lie about shit.
	Like, constantly to people.
	I lie about movies I've seen.
	I lie about things I've done.
	You know, I've aggrandized myself in ways.
	Maybe lying isn't always the best term.
	You know, hyperbolizing on my accomplishments, if you will.
	Exaggerating things that I do, but maybe not as well as I would, you know, let on.
	And then, of course, part of that is a relatively human trait to kind of, as a survival mechanism, I would, you know, guess.
	But, you know, part of it, never really maliciously, but just in the hopes of fitting in, just in the hopes of all the stuff.
	Being a little more impressive than maybe you feel at the time.
	Fudging your resume, stuff like that, you know?
	Not that I actually have ever done that.
	Hang on, but when you started, you were talking about lying all the time, or lying to a lot.
	Enough to feel guilty about it.
	Enough to think to myself, God, What did I tell that person?
	Oh man, I almost messed that one up.
	I almost revealed myself there.
	And so it occurred to me, what benefit does this have to constantly do this, to feel this dissociation with who I actually am and how I actually interact with the world around me?
	I thought, man, people, people, really.
	And again, as another aside, I apologize for all these tangents, but I worked at a reality show for a while.
	Oh, listen, can I tell you something?
	After you put in that question, if there weren't going to be tangents, I would have been shocked beyond words.
	So please, I'm braced.
	I've got my tangent helmet on.
	I'm strapped in.
	So go for it.
	When I heard I was sixth, I thought, damn.
	And then I thought, no, actually, that's probably setting me up for success here.
	No, listen, if I don't have the energy for a caller, I'll really try not to do it because I know everyone's waiting and I want to be as available to you as to the first caller.
	So if I hadn't had the energy, I would have said no.
	But go ahead.
	So, yeah, people lie.
	They ignore reality.
	They pretend it's different than it actually is.
	They will do anything they can to avoid reality.
	But reality always wins, at least as far as I've seen it.
	You know, it may get buried for millennia at some points, but eventually technology catches up.
	Something happens, some watershed moment where the truth is revealed.
	Reality exposes itself.
	And I, you know, maybe tie it back to the whole good versus evil struggle.
	But I feel like I discovered at that instant the fundamental nature of I believe, of the universe, which is that, man, in all of this, all these lying people, all this stuff, I guess the thought occurred to me simultaneously, I should say, that reality is infinitely definable.
	People have so many different perspectives of reality.
	And, you know, how do you weed the truth from the not-truth?
	There has to be some kind of scientific method to philosophically approach the foundations of our interactions with the world that we live in, you know, and I would argue That reality, for lack of a better term, in English, God is the best word in English, I would argue, that represents the concept of reality, or rather, vice versa, I guess.
	Reality is the best word in English that represents to me the concept of what God actually is.
	And so that's kind of what led me here.
	I feel, you know, it's an important message to me, because I feel like it touches on philosophy.
	I feel like it touches on mathematics, and there's a A point to be made there.
	I'd like to discuss, you know, hopefully, physics, you know, religion.
	I feel like if people could look at the Bible and replace the word reality every time they saw God, maybe things might make a little bit more sense.
	And maybe they might start to question the things that are in those books and go, is this really read?
	Because this is, what the hell is this?
	What kind of crap am I reading right now?
	You know, does that make sense?
	The argument makes sense.
	I couldn't really express in words how much I disagree with the argument, but the argument certainly makes sense.
	That the sum total...
	It depends what you mean by reality.
	And the definition of terms is obviously where we need to start, otherwise we'll never get anywhere.
	So if you're going to say...
	That reality includes the sum total of people's perceptions of reality or beliefs about reality, then you're closer to defining reality as God.
	But if you're going to define reality as sort of empirically verifiable, objective...
	You know, exists independent of sense data, exists independent of human consciousness and so on, then you can't wedge God anywhere legitimately into the description of reality.
	In fact, God would be the anthropomorphizing of reality by saying, well, you know, we're Living creatures.
	We have a brain.
	We came from somewhere.
	We were created.
	We grew and so on.
	And that would be the same.
	Well, the universe must be something along the same lines.
	We have parents.
	Therefore, the universe has a parent.
	We are created.
	Therefore, the universe is created.
	We...
	You know, the universe...
	It exists within our own minds because our own minds can't march out of our brains, you know, spin up like a top and go off and explore the universe.
	It all has to do it through the meat magic of the hands and the eyes and the senses and all that.
	So when it comes to reality, we find ourselves very susceptible to the idea that there's a mind that That surrounds reality.
	Because reality is within our mind.
	In other words, I mean, it's objective and real out there, don't get me wrong.
	I'm not going all Cartesian like we're a brain in a tank being manipulated by a demon or anything like that.
	Yeah, no, I mean that...
	Everything that we hold about reality, we hold within our minds.
	And we test it against what's out there, and we have scientific method and math and objective ways of reason and evidence and all that.
	But it's very easy for us to think that there's a mind around reality because reality is represented in our mind.
	by senses and all that.
	So we are very susceptible to thinking that the universe is not what it actually is.
	Because we are magic meat moving through objective matter.
	And if I may...
	And the magic spills out of our brains into the world as a whole, and that becomes difficult for us to separate the magical consciousness...
	And I use this term magic, you know, just in that it's miraculous rather than it's real magic.
	But because so much of the universe is infused within our minds, the idea of the universe without our minds is very, very difficult for us to comprehend.
	And therefore, we think there's, we're more susceptible to thinking there's consciousness out there, if that makes sense.
	Absolutely.
	And I am glad that you touched on that distinction because it is relevant.
	Because there is an objective, and I would say it's a capital R reality.
	Others might, you know, from the philosophical angle, argue that it's ultimate reality, right?
	And so I guess the distinction that I make there is that there is a personal reality that's based off of your personal perceptions that you've had in, you know, the course of your life, the interactions you've made vicariously, indirectly, which, you know, aren't always true in themselves.
	But then there is a reality that exists objectively from us, and that is the specific reality that I'm talking about.
	The objective, you know, do we care that we think?
	It doesn't matter to me.
	It only matters in that, I guess I should clarify a couple of the points that I believe come as self-evident after understanding that reality is infinitely definable.
	Which is that, in reality, anything is possible.
	In other words, possibility is infinite.
	But probability is never 100%, and it's never 0%.
	And that's where I think...
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	What do you mean by everything is possible?
	Well, I think, you know...
	Or rather, how about this?
	In reality...
	I can't be in two places at once, right?
	I can't jump to the moon.
	I mean, what do you mean everything is possible?
	I would say that there is such an incredibly slim possibility that it exists, but it could happen.
	Wait, you think there's a small chance I could jump to the list?
	I'm not saying...
	I'm not a loony.
	No, no, no.
	You're putting the words out there.
	I mean, you can keep them or you can reject them, but you've got to choose one or the other.
	Are you saying there's a tiny possibility that I could jump to the list?
	I would say that it is a.0000 to the bajillionth power possibility.
	It is incredibly highly, highly, highly, more than you could imagine highly improbable that that would...
	Now, are you talking about sort of quantum physics?
	Like, I could asphyxiate in this studio if the random motion of the molecules of air all decided to go to the top inch and left a pure vacuum below.
	Yeah, in a way.
	Is that what you mean?
	A monkey could write Shakespeare just randomly hitting buttons.
	Okay, okay.
	I see.
	I understand.
	So if everything just kind of aligned in a particular...
	I don't know about the break in the gravity well with just my quads.
	Don't get me wrong.
	I do some lunges.
	Okay, so I understand what you mean by possibility that there's a lot more that's possible than people think is possible.
	So I would venture to argue that the fact that infinity exists mathematically implies, at least, and very strongly implies...
	That infinity exists in reality.
	And I think the problem with that is...
	Well, hang on.
	You're jamming a lot of metaphysics and epistemology into a few short statements.
	So, listen, dude, you've got to do something.
	I have to make a request.
	When I'm talking, if you keep saying stuff in my ear...
	It's just going to get really annoying for both of us.
	When you were talking, unless I'm going to interrupt because I don't understand something, I'll let you talk, so just let me finish my thoughts before you interrupt.
	So, infinity exists in mathematics.
	That's a very, very strong statement, right?
	And infinity exists...
	Infinity doesn't exist in the temporal universe, right?
	I mean, it's billions of light years across and all, but there's no infinity.
	It's not infinitely old.
	It's not infinitely big.
	There's no infinity even in the universe.
	We have a concept called infinity, but saying it exists because we have a concept of it, that's very platonic, right?
	I mean, this idea, everything that we conceive of is something that exists in the world.
	It's also called the ontological proof of God, which is God exists because we have a concept of God, and how could we have a concept of God if He didn't exist?
	But the idea that infinity exists because we have a concept of it in mathematics, I don't know what you mean by the word exists there.
	And I certainly don't know what you mean.
	The sideways eight.
	So what do you mean by exists?
	What is that?
	Man, I just have to say I'm really, really enjoying this discussion with you.
	This is really fun.
	No, it's good.
	So what I mean by that is, so take a perspective of Our solar system, right?
	It was all that we really experienced scientifically.
	You know, the stars, of course.
	But then we start to realize, oh crap, we're in a galaxy and there's other galaxies around us.
	And now we've reached a mantle of mathematical complexity that really resembles a set of neurons, you know, as the depth to which we can perceive and at least mathematically model the known universe.
	So I would think that, and again, this is where the argument becomes kind of physics-based.
	And the physics, not to get too far off topic here, but the physics kind of breaks down at almost the same level as a black hole.
	Because when you start talking about there's infinity, the universe is infinite, physicists get very upset about that because they say, no, no, no, dude, it's not, because you can measure how much matter is in the universe.
	My argument to that is, well, you can measure how much matter is in the known universe.
	Of course, taking into account dark matter and all that stuff, whatever the hell that is.
	But I think there is a reality that exists beyond the limits of the known universe where we come back to the anything is possible thing.
	So take this analogy for a minute, if you will.
	I guess analogy is the wrong word for it.
	Hang on, hang on.
	I'm sorry to interrupt.
	But I'm waiting for an answer to the question.
	What do you mean by exists?
	Now, analogies and black holes and stuff, for me, existence is detectable matter, energy, or the effects thereof.
	Matter, energy, or the effects thereof can be detected in some objective.
	That's existence, right?
	The door exists because you can knock it, right?
	I mean, gravity exists because you can measure its effects.
	And, you know, mass exists because you can bump into it.
	Energy exists because you can measure heat output or whatever, right?
	So, matter, energy, or its effects, can it be detected?
	So, I've got an answer there.
	Somebody says to me, what do you mean by existence?
	Well, matter, energy, the effects, right?
	Objectively measurable.
	There.
	I don't need...
	Long, hard-to-follow analogies.
	Like, that's what I'm...
	I need the discipline of what you mean by existence.
	Please, don't give me stories.
	Give me a definition.
	This is philosophy.
	This is not...
	You're right, you're right.
	Okay, give me a definition.
	So speaking of the categories of existence, right, which I believe Hegel was kind of a large proponent of with the categories of being the ontological...
	Oh, goodness, you said it earlier, I forgot.
	But, you know, does it have form?
	Does it have substance?
	Is there something, like you're saying, that is objectively viewable?
	And you're asking me to reiterate, how is infinity provable as existent?
	No, no, no, I need to.
	So, wait, do we share the definition of existence, matter, energy?
	We do, we do.
	Okay, so how does, right, we've got a category called exists, and we've got a concept called infinity.
	And you're saying that infinity is under...
	This concept called existence, which we've defined as matter, energy, or the effects thereof.
	So how do you fit infinity into this conception called existence?
	We can say an elephant exists because it's matter or it's energy, right?
	How do you get infinity into the category called existence?
	I think the potentiality plays into that.
	And possibility, again, plays into the infinity.
	Because the past and the future, or rather, the future exists as We've got a category called existence, matter, energy, or the effects thereof.
	I think infinity...
	Infinity does not fit into those categories.
	Infinity is not matter.
	Infinity is not energy.
	Infinity is not the effects thereof.
	Philosophy is so much easier than people think it is.
	It's so much simpler.
	It's just emotionally hard.
	But it's so much simpler than people think it is.
	We've got a category, matter and energy.
	That's what we mean by existence.
	We've agreed on that.
	Infinity does not fit into that category, therefore it is false to say infinity exists because, well, we can change the category or whatever and we can say, well, then all concepts exist.
	Okay, but then we have a challenge because concepts are not empirically measurable, matter and energy outside of the human mind.
	And so then we have two categories that don't fit together, both calling existence, which doesn't work.
	So we've got a category called existence.
	Infinity doesn't fit into it.
	Therefore, we can't say infinity exists.
	Now, we can say other things about infinity, or we can change the definition of existence.
	But as it stands, we can't get there.
	And you make a valid point.
	I'm not...
	There's nothing to really...
	No, no.
	You made that point.
	Okay, okay.
	Excuse me.
	It's not my point.
	We agreed on that point.
	We, together, made that point.
	But in that same vein, then, you know, how can we...
	How does a dream exist?
	You know, is it...
	Does it have substance?
	Is it to have a matter that can be measured, detected, etc.?
	No, it does not.
	Hang on, hang on.
	But it depends what you mean by the word dream.
	If you mean the subjective experience, like I'm flying over a lava field in my dream, well, no, that doesn't have objective existence.
	That's my subjective experience.
	However, the biochemical energy, the psychological or brain matter processes that produce that illusion...
	Well, those are very real and they exist.
	And we know that because...
	There's no dead person who dreams.
	There's no electrical energy.
	Dead people don't dream.
	We can be pretty sure of that.
	So it depends.
	The subjective experience of the dream, that does not exist in objective reality.
	But the biochemical processes that are producing the illusion, they certainly exist within reality.
	But the dream content is not an accurate representation of reality because I can't fly over lava fields in my bed.
	You can't.
	And I think the distinction that we're making here is that That there is the matter, energy, interactive, you know, relativity, all that stuff type of existential, objective, perceivable reality.
	And then there's that kind of gray area where it is subjective, but it does exist in a sense.
	It doesn't mean that it's measurable, it's quantifiable, but I would argue that, you know, a story is real.
	I personally, personally, And call me crazy, I'd love to be disproved, because I'm sure there's a proof somewhere.
	Or not, you know.
	But I'm of the mindset that Jesus was not a real person.
	I don't believe he was a real human being.
	If he was, the legend is...
	Well, if it's any consolation, Christians would agree with you.
	They wouldn't believe he was a real human being either, but the Son of God.
	They're with you on that.
	But you don't think that he was a historical figure who walked the earth in whatever incarnation, is that right?
	No, that's correct.
	But to me it doesn't matter, because the story has taken on a relevancy in my life, not to say I'm a Christian or practicing or otherwise, but the truth in the narrative, the underlying allegory, You know, they're relevant.
	There's good in the stories.
	But here's the thing.
	It may not matter to you, but it does appear to matter to a lot of people.
	And I don't mean this like it matters.
	And we talked about this with the first caller with regards to atheists and Christians, right?
	When people give up a belief in religion, they tend to substitute secular authority for divine authority.
	And secular authority is far more dangerous than divine authority.
	Certainly for rational atheists, for small or no-government atheists.
	So it does seem to matter because there are some people, a few people, and I've talked to them, who say, I don't believe in Jesus, but I like going to church and I follow the teachings of the Bible.
	And some people would say, I'm in that category.
	In fact, I had that very point earlier in the show.
	But For the majority of people, disbelieving in Jesus as either a figure who existed at all, or if he existed was not the Son of God and so on, that has very specific repercussions.
	It does matter to most people whether he existed, whether he is the Son of God.
	There are a few people who can do the double think of, well, I'll follow the beliefs even though I don't believe in the divinity.
	Right.
	But it does matter.
	It may not matter as much to you, but changing your mind about the divinity of Jesus or the existence of God seems to have pretty significant effects on most people.
	And we can see this from the data I presented before about atheism and leftism and so on.
	Well, I feel...
	And that touches on another kind of, to me, one of the self-evident, even though I'm going to have to go back and...
	Reconfigure my hypothesis and analysis here after our discussion, which we all should.
	In reality, we have an ability to manifest things.
	Through our thoughts and through our actions, we manifest things.
	We create things.
	We build.
	It's in our nature, or hopefully it's in our nature, to build and be constructive.
	Right, like the guy who says, he's one of the great carvers of the ancient world, carved a beautiful lion, and people said, how do you do that?
	He says, well, I take a big block of wood and I chip away everything that doesn't look like a lion.
	It's not that complicated.
	So you manifest something into the reality that you live in.
	And I feel like there's kind of the fundamental difference between good and evil is what's good to me is what's real.
	And so in that vein, there could be an argument that The historical knowledge of what happened at, you know, the Holocaust, for example.
	Sorry, I went to that one.
	I tried.
	I tried.
	I just had a blink.
	But, you know, the historical knowledge of what happened at the Holocaust, to me, is good.
	Because you should want to know what happened in the world.
	You know, you shouldn't put the blinders on.
	No, IQ doesn't matter.
	Race isn't anything.
	You know, just blind up.
	Put the blinders on, bro.
	But...
	But, you know, on the flip side of that, what's evil is lies about reality.
	And if you can convince enough people that a lie is the truth, guess what?
	It, in a way, becomes manifest in reality.
	And where there should be nothing, because it's a falsehood, there actually is something, because people do believe it, and they do manifest at least the I guess the intent of what the evil was, you know, like the freedom argument.
	If I was to contract with you and say, hey, Stefan, I want you to come over to my house and blow my brains out on this day.
	We're all good.
	You know, I'm of sound mind and spirit and will.
	And here's the contract.
	We're all going to agree you're going to come over and blow my brains out.
	Well, if we're both in agreement, I personally don't see anything wrong with that.
	You know, who should be able to tell you that you can't do that?
	Of course, there's, you know, you don't want to Leave people with debt and all the stuff, whatever.
	It's an illogical argument anyway.
	But on the flip side, if I was to come to you and say, hey, I want to read you some poetry and hang out with you, you know, and just have a nice, quiet night around the fire.
	And then I sneak up behind you and, you know, blow your brains out.
	Well, that's bad.
	We consider that evil.
	So I think, you know, there is a distinction in reality in terms of what we're able to To kind of tie it back to my religious perception of God being reality, synonymous with each other.
	What's good is what's real, what's evil is bad and lies about reality.
	Reality loves us so much that it lets us change it.
	I feel like reality is a really important word.
	When you realize something, when you're real with somebody, You know, the etymology of the word is even interesting in terms of, you know, go ahead.
	I hear you want to talk, and I've been talking for a while.
	You miss your dad a lot.
	I do, Stefan.
	I have a daughter.
	I have a two-year-old daughter, and I just bought my first house.
	Congratulations on the daughter.
	Good for the house, too.
	I'm the owner of forced savings, but, you know, it's a lot more stable.
	But yeah, I do miss my dad.
	I mean, you wish your dad could meet your daughter.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	But that's the thing.
	I feel like I've never been without him, man.
	As much as, you know, because the reality is all those times I'd screw up or do something that, you know, I knew wasn't the best thing to do.
	Kind of had a Tom Sawyer moment where I had a bunch of kids rip apart a fence because I got scared when I was interrupted.
	Someone said, what are you doing?
	I said, oh...
	I'm taking down this lady's fence for her.
	She wanted me to.
	And then there were eight kids there, and I thought, I gotta get the hell out of here.
	But, you know, times like that is when I would hear my dad in my mind say, I see you.
	I'm like, oh no.
	So, you know, having a dad.
	But I think, and I sympathize.
	You know, I knew a guy, he got married and his father got sick.
	And he had children right away because he wanted his children to know their father.
	But he couldn't have the kids fast enough.
	His father died.
	And never knew his grandchildren.
	Terrible.
	It's a heartbreaking story.
	Your father sounds like a pretty good guy in a lot of ways.
	He sounds like an intellectually curious and open-minded and challenging and an exciting person to be in a conversation with.
	And you may have inherited some of that too, which is a good thing.
	So I sympathize.
	I really do sympathize, but I would caution you, and I think this is in particular with relation to, I almost feel like it's your daughter who wanted you to call me the most.
	Probably.
	Because to avoid some of the heartbreak with your father, I think you have done some damage to your Reality.
	To keep your father alive in your imagination, I think you have broken down some of the objectivity of the universe.
	And that is, I think, of concern to how you might go about raising your daughter.
	I wrote, you know, many years ago, I wrote a book of poetry.
	And the title of the book of poetry was...
	The dead live in dry eyes.
	The dead live in dry eyes.
	People can't go to rest if we don't mourn them fully.
	And if we think they're always here, we can't mourn them fully.
	We can't experience the loss If we keep them with us, almost, I would say, almost selfishly, like we keep their spirits, to use the analogy, if we keep their spirits with us, we don't let them die because we can't stand the loss.
	We want to keep them haunting the universe for comfort, for security, for education, for instruction.
	Growing up without a father, Which you and I both did, although yours more for tragedy and mine more for dysfunction.
	But it is hard beyond words.
	It is the great unspoken tragedy of the world, of the Western world.
	People don't want to talk about it because we all got to defer to the single moms, right?
	And you referred to your mom as a single mom, though technically she was a widow.
	It's a slightly different category.
	But growing up without a father, It's hard to even know how bad it is to grow up without a father because you miss so much.
	It's like if somebody said to me now, like they sort of woke me up tomorrow morning and said, dude, why don't you just travel through time?
	Or why don't you just will yourself to some new place?
	I don't know why you get on an airplane or why you drive, just will yourself to some new place.
	And you'd be like, what?
	What?
	I can do that.
	And I'm like, yeah, just, you know, think of this and, you know, check your heels three times and boom, you're there.
	And you'd be like, man, I didn't even know.
	Like my whole life I'm thinking I got to drive and fly planes and take trains and buses and walk and bike and crap and I could have just willed myself places.
	Are you kidding me?
	But you didn't even know what you were missing.
	And that's what happens, I think, in particular when you become a father.
	And your daughter is now at the age where it is crucial for her to separate fact from fantasy.
	It is crucial for her to separate imagination from sense data.
	Objectivity from subjectivity.
	And this is, I think, one of the reasons why you're calling.
	Maybe it isn't, but I think it's one of the reasons.
	I'm really glad of everything you said.
	I don't feel like you've misunderstood anything, but I don't feel like I've made a...
	I don't think I made a point clear that's relevant, which is that I've come to terms with those things.
	I miss my dad, but it's not something that I think, man, my life is so hard.
	It's made me a tough guy.
	It's made me have to work.
	I screwed around.
	I had a fun life.
	I partied at punk rock.
	I played music.
	But I feel like I'm in a really...
	I'm in a good place in my life.
	I've got a nice job.
	I'm self-employed.
	I work in a small architecture firm.
	I do 3D modeling.
	I design buildings and stuff.
	But I also write music.
	I produce.
	I do all kinds of stuff.
	And I feel everything you said is relevant.
	And you made, again, extremely good points.
	Especially the last one, which is that it's incredibly important for people to draw a distinction between what is objectively real and what is subjectively real, for lack of a better word, which I guess you can't really say, per se, subjectively real.
	But I think, I guess the...
	You know, it was hard for me to come up with a question to ask you, really, because I tend to think of myself as a fairly smart dude, so I don't...
	I don't like to usually ask for help either.
	You know why I... You know, one of the things you said to me at the very beginning...
	You said, Steph, I tell a lot of lies.
	Oh, yes, dude.
	I did.
	I really did.
	You don't now?
	You know what?
	I... It happens on occasion.
	I'm not calling you a liar.
	Please understand.
	I'm not trying to escalate or anything.
	But when you say, I've dealt with it, but I still need my dad to exist in the universe and be there for me?
	Well, I don't anymore because I recognize that the universe is a far more expansive place and that things don't work like that magical guy sitting up in a chair with a beard.
	Things aren't magical.
	I don't believe in that stuff.
	I believe in...
	No, but you have a realm of the universe that is beyond the real.
	You have a realm of the universe where infinity exists because of mathematics.
	You have a realm of the universe beyond the sense data.
	You have a realm of the universe where the impossible exists, where the unreal is real, where non-existence is existence because you need a place for your father to be with you.
	You know, I can see the logic there, and I feel like that, you know, it's not an inaccurate logic.
	But I feel like there's a depth to what I'm really trying to get at.
	I think that to me, I guess, outwardly, inwardly, it doesn't feel relevant.
	I don't feel like I'm searching for that debt.
	I feel like I really genuinely want to know the deep structure of the universe.
	And I feel like people...
	It's really easy to let things like that, you know, like my dad dying, weigh you down and let you make excuses, let you, you know, be less than you could be because whatever.
	But why do you need the universe to be deep?
	Sorry, need is a rude word.
	I apologize for that.
	Need is a dismissive way of putting it.
	But why do you have as a position that the universe is deep and you need to know the depth of the universe?
	What if the universe is not deep?
	What if the universe is actually kind of, what if it's just matter and energy and us cool stuff doing stuff?
	You touched on, I think, full circle back to my initial, the initial thing that drew me to this whole line of thinking, which is that I believe reality is infinitely definable.
	I mean, and that is, I guess, the crux of why I think the universe in and of itself is infinite, even though we may not have the tools or the philosophical capacity or mental capacity even to contemplate or even put that into perspective that is somewhat clear.
	No, but you need the universe to have an incomprehensible element because there's an incomprehensible part to your personality for you.
	And maybe for me, too.
	I mean, I understand all this.
	Yeah, well, ask yourself, though.
	But there is something that you need this universe to be deep and infinite, and you say infinitely definable.
	I'm not even sure what that means.
	Okay, so let me clarify that.
	You know, looking at the categories of being, all the different...
	Philosophers that have contributed to the greater understanding of the categories, if you will.
	You know, each one has their own definitions of the universe, and some of them are very similar, and some of them are, you know, antithetical.
	And I think that Again, kind of expresses sort of the infinite nature, the infinite definability, excuse me, that I'm speaking...
	But what is the definition of definability?
	I don't know what that is.
	Okay, so here's a rock in my hand.
	But is it just a rock?
	Is it also a paperweight?
	Is it also a baseball for a poor kid?
	Is it something that we can look at with a microscope and analyze, get down to the subatomic level?
	Can we distill uranium from it and create...
	A power plant out of this rock.
	I mean, with the right set of circumstances, the right mentality, and the right tool set, I think that anything can be, not anything can be anything else, but anything has within it the potential to To be other things.
	To be defined as other things.
	Sure.
	I mean, you know, the old joke about the kids want to play more with the box.
	The toy came in than the box itself.
	The box becomes the toy and the toy becomes that which you discard.
	So yeah, of course, absolutely.
	There's different utilities and different ways of looking at this.
	But it is still a box.
	It's just a box being used as a toy.
	And I guess that's where the distinction needs to be drawn.
	Yes, it is still a box.
	But after a certain point, you cut it up enough, it's not a box.
	After you repurpose it to a certain point, it's not a box anymore.
	Sure, it has a history, which is good to know.
	You want to know if the house you just built is made out of boxes, right?
	Repurposed boxes.
	It's hard for me to really...
	I don't want to say get to the point, Stefan, but I think you know.
	That's what I'm implying.
	No, you have the challenge of having very strong thoughts and also strong feelings, which is not a denigration of your intellectual process.
	I have very strong feelings about things too.
	But the challenge is that you need to clear it all away and you need to start from scratch.
	You need to start from the basics.
	What is existence?
	What is reality?
	What is truth?
	Because you start kind of in the middle.
	And this is why I think there's a little bit of a muddle about stuff and why it's hard for people to follow.
	And I don't like that this isolates you, right?
	I knew this from the question, and I talked about this with Mike earlier today when we were going over the show, that I knew that you were going to come in With a hunger to be listened to, a hunger to be heard.
	And my concern with your relationship with your daughter, with your relationship with your friends, with your family and so on, that if you can start from like clear all this stuff away, start from scratch and with the discipline, you know, I'm sure you've got, you can do it yourself or you can, if you want some help, I've got a whole 17-part introduction to philosophy series right here on YouTube.
	But if you start from scratch and go clearly with the definitions, Then I think you will end up in a place where what you're most passionate about Will be easy to communicate and will connect you with those around you.
	This may be entirely my experience, so I'm not trying to say everyone else is the same, of course.
	But I have a concern that the way that you talk about these things is not connecting you to people.
	It's not opening up your heart and mind in a way that other people can fully appreciate and participate in.
	You know what?
	It totally does.
	And I'm going to tell you that this foray into...
	The podcasting for all...
	This is definitely my first real experience discussing something on the radio at length.
	That's great.
	I mean, you're doing a great job.
	Don't get me wrong.
	I'm really enjoying the conversation.
	I'm just giving you this feedback because your daughter is going to have a lot of philosophical conversations with you.
	The children are relentless philosophical machines.
	And she's going to start...
	If she hasn't started already, she's going to start in the next eight minutes.
	And it's going to go significant places.
	And...
	Children give us the challenge of And I'm very glad that I had this process.
	It's my job, right?
	I don't do what you do, so this is my job, right?
	That I had this process of clarification before.
	But your daughter's going to ask all of this stuff, and my concern is if you start talking about the infinite definability and the infinity existing in mathematics, it's going to be really tough for her.
	Let me tell you, when she says, Daddy, why is the sky blue?
	I'm going to say, well, sweetheart, because of nitrogen.
	Right?
	You know, so they're...
	I get that.
	No, but she's not going to...
	I mean, kids, that's easy for them to look up.
	Those aren't the really important questions.
	Really important questions will come.
	And if you have hazy areas of...
	Confusion or ill definition or strong emotions and passion without clarification.
	It has the purpose in my experience of, you know, like magnets.
	If their poles are right, they come together.
	if the poles are opposite, they can't.
	You can try and push them together, but they generally won't go or they won't stay.
	Children are naturally empirical.
	And if we have abstract and cloudy and hard to follow, I won't say word salads because I've used that conversation in somebody who was very different from you in many ways.
	But if children don't have this clarity of what is reality, it becomes very hard for them to connect with their parents.
	And since your daughter is getting older and is going to start having these questions, if I were you, I'd just clear the rebel away, clear the history away, clear the prior thoughts away and just say, okay, let's pretend I'm starting with a completely blank page.
	I'm a space alien.
	I've just been born.
	What would I say about reality?
	And you do have a lot invested in things like it's infinitely definable and there's fuzzy edges and there's a reality beyond reality and so on.
	Right.
	And I would say throw all of that away.
	I'm telling you.
	I'm telling you what I would do, right?
	And what I have done.
	Throw all of that away and just start to build something up with very strict definitions.
	And again, I've got the 17-part intro to philosophy series that may help in that regard.
	But start from that because that will...
	I'm...
	I think that will give you peace and clarity in this area, but also I think it will give you a great connection with your daughter because there won't be aspects of your thinking and personality that are literally incomprehensible to her.
	And I want her to know all of you, which means don't hide significant parts of yourself in another dimension she can't get to.
	And the platform here, speaking to you, I expected to have a more intellectually stimulating conversation than I'd I do immediately with my daughter and hopefully by the time we get to that point I will have refined this and become a lot more clear in my definitions because I know they're lacking and I know that there's things I'm frustrated that I didn't talk about or things that that you know I didn't necessarily express as clearly as I'd like to touch on one more point you made I actually I've found that this message
	has really it's been easy for me to discuss with people because I love people I speak languages I like Discussing things with people.
	I love people, and I generally think of myself as a good listener, but I am a bit excited.
	I do get excited, and I do interrupt sometimes.
	But I've always found people to be really receptive to this stuff, and I definitely speak to my audience.
	So, you know, as a compliment to you, I mean, I came at this really as intellectually, academically...
	I tried to be as competent as I could be in my verbiage.
	No, listen, it was great.
	And I'm glad that you're able to chat about these things.
	I'm always a bit alarmed when people are very accepting of what I have to say because I find philosophy is usually pretty startling to people when it's put forward clearly.
	But listen, I'm going to close off.
	It's been like a toasty four-hour show.
	Really appreciate the conversation.
	Really enjoyed the conversation.
	I love digging deep into the metaphysics and epistemology.
	And I don't always get to do it as often as I want when necessarily reviewing particular political events.
	But great chat.
	Thanks so much.
	Congratulations on your daughter.
	And thanks so much for your call.
	Thanks everyone so much for this wonderful conversation.
	The best in the world and the best the world will ever see because after this has this before it.
	Please remember to go to freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show to help us do this work that we do so well, I might add.
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	The aforementioned at Stefan Molyneux signing off.
	Have yourself a wonderful weekend.

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