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March 16, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:40:03

3620 The Shadow P3n!s - Call In Show - March 15th, 2017

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	Hello, everybody.
	Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Hey, have you ever been subject to the soul plague called jealousy?
	Great song by Queen, by the way.
	But we had a caller who really was suffering under jealousy when his girlfriend would step out, go to nightclubs and hang around guy friends and all that.
	Kind of drove him a little crazy.
	And did we stay shallow?
	Hell no.
	We went deep, baby.
	So deep that philosophy got jealous of our conversation.
	And I think you'll find it really, really important to listen to, to find out sometimes where the source of our emotions come from.
	Now, the second caller, a fine gentleman named Bob, who has called in before on, you know, palindrome call-in night, and he had an immigration plan that he wanted to share with the world, and also, by the by, as a black man, to complain about being called a racist on a...
	Repeated basis.
	Don't worry, white people.
	It's not just you who's suffering from this.
	It's anyone who opposes the leftist plan.
	So we had a great conversation about racism and immigration and all kinds of wonderful stuff.
	Now the third caller...
	Is calling from the army and he wants to know what is the morality of breaking commitments?
	And it's a great question.
	Are you obligated?
	Is it a moral question with regards to your commitments and your promises and your contracts?
	Great set of questions.
	And the fourth caller wanted to know when I last prayed.
	And...
	I think the answer will surprise you.
	It might be just a little bit later than you think.
	And we had a great conversation about the value of prayer, even for the non-religious, perhaps even especially for the non-religious if they have no other form of examining their own mind.
	Great set of callers.
	I love the variety.
	I love the variety.
	I love you all.
	Please, please, please show a little sugar in return.
	I really, really need your help at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
	And last but not least, don't forget to use our affiliate link at fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
	Alright, up first today we have Alexander.
	Alexander wrote in and said, After my last breakup, I went through therapy and felt I had the jealousy under control, but I'm now in a new relationship and I see the old patterns emerging.
	To what extent is this something I should be eradicating, or is jealousy over these types of issues natural for men, with the real problem being their acceptance in modern society?
	That's from Alexander.
	Hey Alexander, how are you doing tonight?
	Hi Steph, I'm very well, how are you?
	All right.
	What do you mean when you say their acceptance in modern society?
	You mean the acceptance of women having male friends and going out to nightclubs?
	Yeah, that sort of thing.
	Yeah.
	Why is your girlfriend going out to nightclubs without you?
	Well, we go sometimes together.
	It's just...
	I mean, she goes with her friends sometimes, or she might go.
	I mean, one of our first dates was to the nightclub.
	It's something we do quite often.
	It's just, you know, when I'm not there, I'm wondering if she's safe and all this sort of thing.
	No, no, no, no.
	Don't weasel out on me, brother.
	Don't say to me you're wondering if she's safe.
	That would be fear, not jealousy, right?
	What you're wondering is if she's flirting with other men, right?
	Partly, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Okay, because your question was around jealousy, right?
	No, you're right.
	You caught me there.
	Yeah, let's just be frank, man.
	You're anonymous.
	Let's just cut to the chase, you know?
	Let's just cut to the chase.
	So you're concerned that she's going to be flirting with other men and that she might end up doing sexy time stuff with other men, right?
	Or be attracted to another man.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Either or.
	Is she more attractive than you are?
	No, I'd say we're probably around the same.
	Does she think that you're the best man for her?
	Yes, the majority of.
	That's a long pause.
	That's fine.
	I mean, I appreciate the thoughtfulness, but...
	So does she think you're the best man for her?
	Well, it's not something that she's said, but I don't think it's something that is normally said.
	I was thinking about in terms of her actions and what they sort of explain.
	But I would say that, yeah, she is generally of that thought.
	Well, okay, so because we need to know whether or not your emotions have empirical evidence for them.
	Because if they do, then you're not crazy.
	And if they don't, then it's a little nutty, right?
	Right, that's correct.
	How much money do you make?
	You don't have to give me details, just roughly.
	For my age, a good amount.
	Good amount of money, and where are you both on a sort of 1 to 10 scale of attractiveness?
	I'd say I'm probably 6.5, and she's probably verging on a 7.
	All right.
	Is it due to weight issues or are there other things that are unappealing or less appealing?
	No, I used to be overweight and I probably have some insecurities that are hanging on from that.
	So maybe I'm more than a 6.5, maybe, but I don't see myself as an attractive guy, like a really attractive guy.
	I mean, I'm confident and I don't ever worry about my looks or anything, but there's probably some hangovers from when I was a Right.
	Right.
	For me, and this is about you, but I'm just going to give you, it's easier sometimes to see it from somebody else's perspective.
	Do you know, I hear that there are other shows out there on the internet.
	Have you heard anything about this?
	Maybe.
	Yeah, I mean, I keep getting the feeling that there are other people trying to get my listeners' attention on the internet.
	I don't know if it's...
	And some of it involves even more nudity than this channel offers.
	And so I'm fairly aware that there are tons and tons of other shows out there.
	And more and more every day, right?
	I mean...
	When I first started this like 10 years ago, there was like me and two other people on iTunes.
	Right now, there's like so much choice out there.
	And, you know, I have a wonderful set of listeners.
	But, you know, we get threats all the time.
	Oh, yeah, you did this, I'm going to cancel.
	You did this, I'm going to cancel.
	You know, they're all of that, right?
	So, I don't...
	I don't care.
	Maybe I should.
	But I don't care.
	You know, people go watch other people's shows.
	I've done shows where I help other people get set up in their shows.
	I regularly recommend other people's shows.
	Like, go enjoy other people's shows.
	Why can I do that?
	Because you're confident in what you offer.
	Yeah, because...
	We're doing the best.
	We have the best show.
	We have the best show.
	I genuinely believe that.
	So yes, go play the feel.
	Go turn it up.
	Go slut it around with all these other people's shows.
	You'll come back.
	You'll come back to me.
	You'll come crawling back.
	No, I'm just kidding, right?
	But no, I mean, go enjoy other people's shows because there's no better show.
	You know, there are other shows that have individual aspects that are better, no question.
	You know, other shows, higher production values, believe it or not, than me in a white background.
	Come on, I'm an animated movie when it comes to it anyway.
	I'm like three degrees of separation from a Looney Tunes character.
	But...
	There are other shows that have, you know, more pointed jokes.
	There are other shows that, I don't know, whatever, right?
	But when it comes to the whole package, nah.
	You know, and also, why do I not have a set?
	You know, well, A, I like to stand.
	And B, I'm interesting enough.
	You know, like, let's get these people just like, this show's nine minutes long.
	You should get to the point sooner.
	It's like...
	I don't think I should be managing your ADHD. That may be something you want to look into with someone else.
	And it's not like I'm immune to feedback.
	You know, people make suggestions and I'll listen to it and so on.
	But this is the best show.
	And, you know, if I thought that was a better show, I'd go work for them.
	So if you have confidence that you're the best...
	Person.
	You know, or as the old Grace Jones song goes, you know, I'm not perfect, but I'm perfect for you.
	If you're confident that you're the best fit, that you're the best person for your girlfriend, then you should feel confident.
	You know the old thing, if you love someone, set them free.
	If they come back to you, they're yours.
	If they don't, they never were.
	Your concern is that there's some shadow penis out there you can't compete with.
	It's a good term, shadow penis.
	It's always following, like a giant inchworm on a white wall.
	Following, following, attempting to bow a constrictor and pull away the vital eggs of our future.
	The shadow penis.
	It knows.
	It follows.
	It haunts our very dreams.
	It is the deep state versus the shadow penis.
	It is the new Marvel comic that should be made but never will be.
	Well, that's made it ten times more terrifying now.
	No, but it is, right?
	Listen, there are guys out there circling your woman.
	Of course.
	There are, you know, sleazebags out there who are just like, yeah, she's, you know, she's cute.
	She's, you know, I don't care.
	She's got a boyfriend.
	This is why there used to be chastity bells.
	I'm not saying there should be, but this is why they used to be there, right?
	But, oh no, the shadow penis is definitely out there, and it's definitely making the moves.
	There used to be a show called The Puppetry of the Penis.
	I don't know exactly what it was about, but I'm pretty sure that people made shadow puppets with their own penises.
	For me, that would be a pretty challenging show.
	I can only do Florida life-size.
	That's about it.
	But...
	No, the shadow penis anaconda girlfriend grabbing deep monsters, they're out there and they want to grab your women for sure.
	And what do you do?
	Well, I guess culturally there are two approaches.
	One, you could set up a system wherein they're covered from head to toe and not allowed to leave their house without a male relative present.
	That's one way to deal with insecurity of the shadow penis.
	The other is just be great.
	Just be great.
	Be great for her.
	Keep her happy in bed.
	Keep her happy in conversation.
	Keep her engaged.
	Keep her entertained.
	Be such a great boyfriend that now she's got to worry about you with the shadow vagina.
	I see.
	I guess I do my best to be the best.
	I guess the problem is that not all women, but I guess a lot of women don't always realize Situations they put themselves in.
	So things like nightclubs and male friends who, as you said, are probably more shadow penis than friend.
	Wait, hang on.
	So your solution to your insecurity is to take away the moral agency of your girlfriend?
	Does she not understand that men want to have sex with women?
	Does she not know what about 95% of the internet is for?
	I don't understand.
	What does that mean?
	She doesn't know that men are...
	I guess, mate.
	Pound dogs?
	I mean, I guess my point is that when I... When I look for a partner, I'd rather look for somebody who does have that ability to recognise that all the blokes going to salsa classes aren't really interested in learning how to dance.
	And if I were with someone who didn't realise that, then I would, aside from any feeling of fear of the shadow penis, it would be, am I really going to be with a girl who can't realise that these classes Yeah, let me just sort of drop a bomb on you here, Alexander.
	Female protestations that they just have no idea what men are like are entirely false.
	They are entirely, completely and totally false.
	Look, you're a woman, let's say, and you grow up in a society where there's constant sexualization of women, more so of women than of men.
	Every ad she looks at, which is supposed to appeal to a man, has a half-naked woman on it, right?
	All of the people who are in the swimsuit editions of various magazines are all, like, you know, stunningly attractive, genetically improbable mutants, right?
	I mean...
	There's a whole industry of how to make women look other than they actually look, right?
	I mean, it's basically, there's an entire industry devoted to turning women into Picasso paintings of male lust stimulation, right?
	I mean, it's not like women say, oh, you know what would be really great?
	If I could just walk around for eight hours...
	On tiny little leaning towers of pieces I call high heels.
	I mean, it's ridiculous, right?
	You know what would be excellent?
	If I had to get up an hour earlier to apply enough foundation to create a stucco wall on my face and then put in weird Annie Lennox singing Freddie Mercury raccoon eyes on myself and then put myself into a tight skirt where, like, it's a tight pencil skirt to the point where, like...
	If there's some sort of Japanese-style natural disaster, in about an hour, I can make it about eight and a half feet before being eaten by some Godzilla.
	Ooh, you know what would be excellent, too?
	Stockings!
	Because nothing spells comfort like an extra layer of polyester skin.
	Ooh, you know what else would be excellent?
	Really tight push-up bras so that I can turn my tits into a shelf for people to rest their drinks on.
	And you just go on and on, right?
	Ooh, you know what else would be excellent?
	tiny spears through my ears so that I can hang bits of ore from the sides of my head.
	I mean all lunatic, right?
	So look at the mall.
	What is the mall devoted to?
	The mall is devoted into sexualizing women.
	Women, the wall is devoted into, you know, as one woman said, she was a model, and she said, oh, yeah, high heels.
	They turned my ass.
	They put my ass up on a shelf for everyone to see.
	And this is all completely well-known.
	This idea that women, oh, I just didn't know that men just found women that sexy.
	It's like, oh, come on.
	I mean, that's just completely ridiculous.
	So, there's no woman...
	Who has an IQ more than about 75 or so.
	I'm just spitballing here.
	There's no woman out there who doesn't know that men primarily are interested in sex.
	And there's no woman out there who doesn't know that at least in Western culture, it's the woman's job to say yes or no to the endless office that men have for sex.
	That is the basic reality.
	I mean, have you ever been to like a rural post office?
	Yeah.
	So, you know, I don't know where you're from, but in rural post offices, they have these mailboxes.
	Like, so for people who don't want the mail delivered straight to their house or whatever, they have these mailboxes.
	And there's like a thousand of them in a tiny room.
	And, you know, I used to play this game with my daughter called, you know, let's find 672.
	And it's like, who could find it first kind of thing, right?
	And that is a woman's choice, right?
	The woman's choice is it's like a rural mailbox full of penises and money.
	And, you know, generally they come hand in hand.
	Or I guess if the penis is too much in hand, then it's not in the mailbox.
	But you get the idea.
	Hey, mailbox, that kind of works.
	Mail looking for a box.
	Anyway, so this is the choice, that women have these, I've got this master key that opens up a thousand lockboxes of male penises with money.
	That is a woman's choice.
	And so when women are like, well, my husband just turned out to be this bad person.
	It's like, nope.
	You know, unless you're like Helen Keller or And nobody around is a fetishist.
	You really don't have...
	I mean, you have choices.
	Women have choices.
	So men propose and women dispose.
	Men offer up sexuality and women choose their boyfriends.
	When you met your girlfriend Alexander, who asked who out?
	She asked me out actually.
	She did.
	How interesting.
	And so what did she say?
	She said, I've got tickets to this.
	It was a nightclub, actually, because her friend couldn't make it.
	She said, I've got two tickets to him to join me.
	And it was a date date?
	Like, you knew it was a date?
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	Okay, and did she say date, or that was just kind of assumed?
	It was just assumed, yeah.
	And of the women you've gone out with, what proportion ask you out?
	She was probably the only one, at least for the first date.
	And then what happened?
	After the first date or at the date?
	Sorry, after the first date with her.
	It was great.
	We went out.
	We stayed out till four or five.
	Went to our separate homes.
	You went to what?
	Went back to our separate homes rather than going back and just having sex.
	It wasn't one of those kind of dates.
	Wait, one of those kind of dates where you're not complete sluts and manwhores and you don't just bump up at least the very first time you go out on a date?
	I don't know, I'm old enough where that is not a date you have to differentiate.
	Well, sorry.
	Yeah, I guess, I mean, second date, I think I asked and then it was a fairly reciprocal thing.
	It wasn't always one of us asking the other one.
	And how many dates till you had sex?
	Actually quite a lot.
	Well, for me and for people of my generation, maybe.
	I think around 10.
	Yeah, I think the three-month rule is good, but that's a topic for another time.
	And how many birds, how many girls have you gone out with over the years?
	Well, we've gone on a date, but I don't mean like being boyfriend, like a date, a first date.
	Do you mean just dates or casual sex, or how do you mean?
	Wait, you've gone on casual sex with no dates?
	Yeah.
	And what's this, like, women you meet at a nightclub?
	Mostly on dating apps.
	So you just meet these girls in these dating apps and you just go over and you have sex and you never see them again?
	Yeah, not loads.
	Not as much as some of my friends, but that definitely happens.
	Wow.
	Oh, West.
	Oh, West.
	All right.
	So, um...
	The, um...
	But how many girls have you asked out on dates, let's say?
	Forget the STD sperm-jacking potential going on with the apps or whatever.
	Dates, probably in my life, probably 10.
	Okay, so 9 times out of 10 or whatever you end up asking the girl out, right?
	So, in general, that's the way it works, right?
	Sure.
	Right.
	Now, when you grew up as a child, did you have any examples in your life, Alexander, of female infidelity or female wandering eye?
	Not until I was 18.
	So I don't know if that counts.
	So your mother and your father were happily married and monogamous and had fidelity and so on?
	Yeah, yeah, one of them did.
	Then they divorced.
	Wait, one of them did?
	What do you mean?
	One of my parents was unfaithful, and then they divorced.
	And how old were you?
	Was that what happened when you were 18?
	Yeah, I found out when I was 18, but I think it had been going on probably a couple of years before that.
	How long have you listened to this show for, Alexander?
	Only probably less than six months, I'd say.
	Do you think that...
	Well, who was it who was unfaithful?
	It was my mother.
	Right.
	Do you think that may have anything to do with your fear of female infidelity?
	I did think about that.
	Good, good.
	Okay.
	But I can remember having a fear of female infidelity in my first relationship when I was I was only 15, 16, and I remember the exact same feelings then.
	Whether they've amplified since then, maybe.
	Well, Alexander, once a cheater, always a cheater.
	Your mother was caught or confessed when you were 18, right?
	Yeah.
	Do you think there were any indications, no matter how subtle, no matter how unconscious, no matter how oblique, how corner of the eye there might have been, indications that you might have picked up on as a child that your mother had a tendency towards infidelity?
	I don't...
	Honestly, no.
	It was an absolutely terrible marriage.
	I was 18 because she waited until...
	I'd left for university before they divorced.
	So they'd been a terrible marriage for, well, probably all of my life.
	But I definitely picked up on her unhappiness and her lack of love to him and her lack of attention and devotion and whatnot.
	I don't think I picked up on any signs of...
	Infidelity, simply because they didn't really have any friends.
	I never saw them interacting with anyone else.
	But all of the other signs, I guess I did see.
	Wow.
	So you've got to listen back to this at some point, Alexander.
	You are what is known as a white knight.
	Do you know what that means?
	Yeah, so-so.
	When you described your parents' bad marriage, you described your mom as the perfect victim.
	Did she contribute in any way to the bad aspects of the marriage, by chance?
	It's a bit of a chicken or egg situation.
	I know my dad was never, was often unkind and mean to her, but whether that was because he just wasn't happy with...
	Did you ever see your mother being unkind to your father?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Do you view that as merely reactive, or was that ever proactive?
	It was reactive, but it was over the top, so she would be unnecessarily spiteful, I think.
	But you said reactive, so she was always reacting to your father's meanness?
	It was always self-defense, although it may have been over the top?
	Yeah, I'd say so.
	So she's a victim?
	Probably not entirely, but partly, yeah, big time.
	Do you think that's true?
	Is that accurate?
	Well, she was a victim of the way that my dad treated her in the same way that I was a victim of the way that my dad treated me and that my brother was, because he was...
	No!
	No!
	Not even close!
	Not even in the same dimension, let alone the same galaxy.
	What is the difference between your mother's relationship with your father and your father's relationship with you?
	Theirs is obviously romantic and sexual.
	Good, yes.
	Happy to hear that distinction.
	What else?
	I don't know.
	Oh, good job, feminists.
	You have just programmed these young men in ways that I can't even imagine.
	I can't even imagine.
	Alright, Alexander.
	He's a man and she's a woman.
	No!
	No!
	No, no, no.
	Alright, alright.
	Did you choose your relationship with your father?
	No.
	Did your mother choose her relationship with your father?
	She did.
	Ah!
	There we go!
	Look at that!
	Ding, ding, ding!
	She has agency!
	And you know what's funny?
	You know what's funny?
	You are holding to this position.
	And listen, I sympathize.
	I'm not trying to, you know, be mean or talk down to you.
	I sympathize because this is the programming.
	Women are victims.
	Which allows them to be vicious bullies sometimes.
	Not talking about your mom, just in general, right?
	But right after I said, women have choice.
	Women have choice.
	Women have choice.
	Right?
	Remember the whole rural mailbox analogy of the shadow penis with the money and the luck?
	And right after I say, women have choice.
	Women have choice.
	You can't process that your mother had a choice in choosing your father, which you never had.
	Right?
	Who taught you that your mother was a victim?
	My mother, I guess.
	Wow.
	Why do you think your mother taught you that she was a victim?
	Well, it does obviously benefit her.
	And harms you, but we'll get to that in a second.
	What was your mother's motivation for teaching you?
	That she was a helpless flower floating on the turbulent seas of the testosterone-laced aggression of your father, which somehow she had an arranged marriage she couldn't escape.
	There was no choice.
	She just had to try and manage this mysterious, brutal animal she was locked in a cage with against her will.
	Wait.
	What is in her benefit to give you that narrative?
	Well, it excuses her of any blame or wrongdoing or anything like that, and keeps her a free pass, I guess.
	Right.
	She gets to be a victim, she gets sympathy, and nobody judges her.
	Nobody criticizes her, right?
	What harm does it do to you to have the perspective that women are helpless victims?
	You already answered this, by the way, but you don't know it.
	Um...
	Well, I guess it would make me see the man as the aggressor and the wrongdoer.
	Right.
	Because when I said, your girlfriend goes to clubs, and you said, yes, because my concern is that things will just happen to her, that she just won't understand the situation that she's in.
	These predatory male shadow penises are just going to slip themselves up her nose, strangle her brain, and drag them away to some cave of masculine predation, right?
	Because your mother is willing to say, okay, listen...
	In order to get myself off the hook for any wrongs I might have done, I am going to implant in you, Alexandra, the idea that women are victims.
	Now, the fact that this screws you up in your relationship with your girlfriend doesn't really matter to me.
	What matters to me is I get off the hook and I am not held accountable for the mistakes and the wrongdoings and the brutalities that I may have enacted.
	Right?
	It not only benefits her, but it harms you, Alexandra.
	It's not just that she saves herself.
	It's not like she's stuck in quicksand and she gets out by pulling a vine and you watch.
	No.
	She gets herself out of the quicksand by pushing you into it and standing on your head and saying, well, no, no.
	Females have no agency.
	Good.
	I'm off the hook.
	Sorry about the rest of your life, Alexander, where you've got to look at women as leaves in the wind.
	You're paranoid that they have no choice, no action.
	I'm sorry about the kind of woman this is going to program you to want to be with.
	Sorry about that.
	But hey, mama needs to wear white, so you get to wear fog.
	I mean, to play slightly devil's advocate, I mean, for every time that my mother said it was my dad's fault that things were going wrong, My dad would say that it was my mother's fault that things were going wrong.
	And I guess I believed my mother more because she would, I guess, tell me more.
	And society, right?
	I mean, there's this weird thing where feminism has grown from the assassination of female agency to the stripping of female agency.
	Right, so your mother repeats it more and is backed up by everyone and everything, right?
	Yeah.
	I just had a conversation with Dr.
	Duke Pesta about King Lear.
	Watch that play.
	Watch that play.
	See the agency that women are granted in that play for both good and evil.
	Shakespeare is very even-handed in his assassination of moral responsibility to the genders, which is why he's so desperately needed now, which is why they're trying to keep him out of education these days.
	Can't have any Lady Macbeths, because that's more like a matriarchy.
	Can't have any Goneril's and Regan's in King Lear.
	All Cordelia's, all victims.
	Can't have shows that give women clear moral agency.
	If they do bad, they do bad out of love.
	They do bad out of wanting to protect their children.
	They do bad out of dedication to some misguided ideal that they can't possibly know.
	They do the best they can with the knowledge they had.
	They strip moral agency, strip moral agency, strip moral agency.
	It's the most sexist, vicious, undermining ideology to strip women of female agency, of moral agency.
	I fight against this because my daughter's gonna grow up and go out in the world.
	I don't want her to go out in the world where people strip her moral choices from her.
	And call her a victim everywhere she goes.
	That is insidious.
	That is corrosive.
	That can undermine even the staunchest female soul.
	So you believed your mother because she was more insistent about it, more invested in it.
	And you didn't believe your father because society won't back him up.
	to back up your mum all the time, right?
	Did your father have an affair?
	No.
	No, no.
	No, I never saw him interact.
	I don't think I ever saw him interact with another woman, to be honest.
	If you were to ask your mother why she chose your father to marry, what would she say?
	Maybe you have.
	Probably his sense of...
	I think his sense of humour, I think, is the thing that she liked.
	Right.
	Would she have noticed any dysfunction before she married him?
	Yeah, I'd say so.
	When they met, he was traveling the world with rock bands and he was a bit of an alcoholic.
	Wait, he was a roadie?
	Yeah.
	She married a roadie who turned out to be dysfunctional?
	Oh no!
	Next thing you know, she's going to date a celebrity and find out that they're a smidge narcissistic.
	Who could guess these things?
	Who could know?
	Yeah.
	She married a roadie and she was the opposite of a roadie.
	She's sort of an Irish Catholic girl.
	So she knew what she was getting into, I think.
	Was your father a Catholic?
	No, he wasn't.
	He wasn't religious at all.
	So, didn't she betray her religion and its commandments?
	I think by that point, the Catholicism had waned.
	I'm guessing so.
	I'm guessing so.
	Backstage passers will do that.
	You know, going backspace to, you know, lick the sweat off Stephen Tyler's youthful abs probably have a little bit more to do with exciting female reaction than, I don't know, papal edicts.
	I'm just going out on a limb here, but...
	I think you're right.
	I think it was probably because she went to a convent school with some, you know, she's taught and raised by abusive nuns.
	Oh, wait a minute.
	Look at that.
	You just gave me another excuse for your mother's behavior.
	Look at that.
	Oh, you see?
	Now it's the nuns.
	It's the nuns who made her do what she did.
	All we are is blowing in the wind.
	We've got little eggs blowing in the wind.
	The tits are giant saucers that blow in the wind.
	You understand, right?
	This is the knee-jerk reaction that we all have.
	We're all programmed to have.
	We cough up excuses for women like cats cough up furballs after a particularly delicious self-licking session.
	I mean, I... In fairness, I meant that that was the reason why the Catholicism had waned.
	Right.
	It was the nun's fault.
	I don't care.
	It's not like, well, my mother made a choice to abandon religion.
	My mother made a choice to do something against her religious edicts.
	But it wasn't my mother's choice.
	It was her blind reaction to the actions of the nuns.
	She didn't make any choices.
	She didn't evaluate anything.
	She's just like a pinball, just bouncing around like a tumbleweed being blown around by the winds, right?
	Maybe not.
	That's kind of sexist, right?
	Let me ask you this.
	Do you view your father as having moral agency?
	Did he make any choices that he's responsible for?
	Yes, absolutely.
	Good.
	Okay, so we have one parent who has moral responsibility and accountability and one parent who kind of doesn't.
	And then you wonder why you're jealous.
	Do you understand?
	I do.
	Why?
	Tell me why.
	Tell me the connection.
	Well, I'm assuming that whenever my girlfriend goes out to a nightclub that she's just there, just like a leaf blowing through a Down the street that anything that happens to her happens to her and it's not her fault.
	Well, yeah, because, you know, she's reacting to her environment.
	And so if she's in an environment where there may be sexually assertive males, something's going to happen because she just doesn't make choices.
	Things just happen to her.
	She just reacts to things.
	Yeah.
	So you can't trust her because she doesn't exist.
	You can't trust her because she's not there.
	You can't rely on her because she has no willpower, no moral conscience, no choice, no autonomy, no authority.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	So just like a kitten in a windstorm, you know?
	Maybe she'll land at a good place, maybe she won't.
	I mean, where do you draw the line there?
	I mean, if she's got no...
	No, she does.
	I'm saying you think she does.
	No, no, okay.
	Okay, go ahead.
	No, I agree.
	So if she's got complete agency and she should be able to go to these places and anything that happens is her decision, I mean, that's fine.
	I can get on board with that.
	But say, for example, it wasn't a nightclub she was going to.
	It was a, I guess it was a nightclub, but everyone there Was naked and everyone there was literally just having sex.
	I mean, if she went there and had sex, it was her decision and she can choose not to.
	But I don't think anyone would be comfortable with their girlfriend saying, I'm off to a sex party.
	I'm just going to watch and have a nice glass of wine.
	So where does the line go?
	Does she want to go to sex orgy places?
	No.
	Of course.
	But then she would be making the choice to say, I want to go to a sex orgy place, in which case she's saying, I no longer want a monogamous relationship.
	I want to go and bang 17 other linebackers, and it'd be really great if you had a sandwich out for me when I got home.
	Cuck.
	I'm saying if she went there just to watch, she said, I just want to go there and watch.
	I'm not going to do anything.
	Yeah.
	She wanted to go there and watch people having sex, if she did that.
	Well, yeah, it's just a hypothetical.
	Yeah, no, I understand.
	Well, you know, I would say it is absolutely your choice to go.
	If, you know, I don't like it, I think it's gross, I think it's weird, I think it's wrong.
	But if you want to go and watch people who don't have porn standards of physical attractiveness, right?
	I mean, if you just want to go and watch random people, that's like going to karaoke and thinking you're going to get a concert.
	Like, I mean, who knows what horrible, squidgy man-mountains and flesh-land-whale...
	Jelly beast monsters are going to be bumping uglies in some squalid, underlit pit or overlit.
	God help you.
	Oh no!
	Hairy moles bouncing up and down.
	Oh no!
	Oh no!
	It's facts spilling all over the place.
	Oh look, there's a guy in a knee brace who's crying.
	It's like, I don't want to see any of that stuff.
	If you're going to do it, at least let the professionals filter some people out for you.
	You know, go to iTunes for your music.
	Don't just go and listen to your local karaoke club and think you're going to come out with anything other than bleeding eyeballs.
	So, because people think, oh yeah, Bono, how tough can it be?
	And then they find out that it's really tough for the audience if it's tough for you.
	So, no, I would say, and give all the reasons as to why, you know, it's that old song, if you're looking for trouble...
	Better get it for me, right?
	I mean, if you want to, you know, do something kinky sexually, then, you know, how about we discuss it and figure out if I can manage it as your boyfriend or whatever, right?
	I mean, have a conversation with me, because if you want to go out and be sexually titillated by other people having sex right there in front of you, plus you may sit down or touch something, and God knows, imagine if you bring one of those weird...
	Sort of fine body fluid, blue light things, you know, like the bones.
	Oh, there's a spot of blood between the floorboards.
	It's like, imagine waving that.
	It'd be like setting fire to the sun.
	My eyes, they burn from fluids of unholiness.
	And so why would she want to do that?
	Because she's sexually turned on by watching other people.
	So then is she, what, she going to come home and have sex with you while thinking about other people?
	So, you know, I'd make the case.
	And she still has full moral agency.
	And I'd say, you have full moral agency.
	I'm making the case.
	I am not your jailer.
	I am not your owner.
	You can go off and make that.
	But let me tell you, when you come back, your key won't work anymore.
	Because you have moral agency to go out and watch ugly people have sex with each other, which, frankly, I think a sane person would pay to not see.
	But let's say you can go and do that.
	Well, you have moral agency, honey, and so do I. And you have the moral agency to go watch other people, you know, slam their distorted sticky bits into each other, and I have the moral agency to make a phone call and change the fucking locks.
	So that's essentially...
	I mean, that's one place you can draw the line at sex parties, which is something that I don't have to worry about.
	It was just a hypothetical.
	Or do you?
	No, I'm just kidding.
	Sorry.
	Just messing with your paranoia.
	Sorry.
	Go on.
	Your jealousy.
	Go on.
	That's all good.
	So, I assume you would draw the line there, but would it be too much of a stretch to draw the line at nightclubs?
	I mean, if you think about the views that people...
	Women go to nightclubs so that men will drool over them.
	Okay, so that's somewhere that you would draw the line as well, then?
	Yeah.
	I want to go dancing.
	No, you don't.
	No, you want men to look at you with lust in their eyes, because that's an endorphin hit for women, right?
	Yeah.
	So if that's where you draw the line, then I would have...
	If I draw the line there, then that would be...
	I would have had to break up with every single of my last girlfriend's.
	And I would probably never have had a girlfriend in my entire life.
	Oh, no, no, no, no.
	Oh, my goodness.
	Oh, the slippery slope argument.
	Look, if the slippery slope leads down to a Polanski-style orgy of human hideousness, I think it's okay to get off that slippery slope.
	But your argument, Alexander, is, well, my girlfriends all want to go and do quasi-sexual stuff without me, and so if I won't go out with women like that, Then there are no other women in the universe that I could possibly go out with.
	Bullshit.
	You're just kind of in the underworld, right?
	I mean, you're kind of in the underworld of dysfunctional people, perhaps, right?
	But just you raise your standards, right?
	And you say, no, I don't want to be interested in someone like that.
	Do you think Margaret Thatcher was doing that in her youth?
	I mean, come on.
	I mean, you get all of this, right?
	Sure, you won't get to go out with the kind of women you've been going out with, but that's probably a good thing because those women are helping to...
	Keep jealousy aflame, right?
	Yeah, no, that's a fair point.
	I guess I've got to start going back to church.
	You know, there's infinitely worse places to look than church.
	That's not a bad place to chat with women.
	And I know my history, and I've talked about this stuff before, but if I had to choose between average Christian woman and average atheist woman, I'm all up in that cross-cleavage, frankly.
	Yeah.
	No, I'm all down for that.
	So I guess the circle that we've come around to, I mean, we started talking about how I'm crazy for being jealous about her going to nightclubs.
	I know, I never said that.
	Oh, no, no, no, no.
	I never said that.
	If you want to have that part of the conversation, you can have that with yourself.
	I never called you crazy.
	Not crazy, but...
	No, I never even said you were wrong.
	I never said you were dysfunctional at all in that way.
	Okay.
	We looked at some causality that if your mother...
	Chose a bad husband and then blamed him like she never made that choice, and then screwed another man outside the marriage and then basically said, well, it's because I was unhappy because your father made me do it.
	Like, if she's acting and then pretending like she's not making any choices, then that's going to strip women of responsibility, female agency, from your mind, and therefore you're going to expect things to just happen to your girlfriend rather than having them look at them and make choices, right?
	So, let's be clear, it's always amazing to me when people sort of say back what they've heard from the conversation, but that's not what I said.
	Well, we're also saying that the reason that I perhaps get jealous is that I'm not confident that I'm the best man that she's meeting.
	Sure, but that's not crazy either, and that's not a dysfunction, right?
	Because you can always up your game about that, right?
	But if you accept your woman going into...
	Okay, let me ask you this.
	How old is she?
	Twenty-three.
	23.
	Are you guys committed?
	Like, is it a monogamous relationship?
	Are you looking for a future together?
	Are you looking to get married at some point?
	Do you want kids?
	I mean, where are you in the arc of the relationship?
	Very monogamous, definitely.
	It's fairly early days, but we're...
	How long have you been going now?
	Around three months.
	So you're monogamous, and have you talked...
	Anything about your future and what you want out of the relationship in the long run?
	Not yet, but I'd say that's probably only a month or so off.
	Why would you wait for four months to find out if you want the same things out of a relationship?
	Because I'm confident that if I tell her what I want, she would be impressed enough that she would probably want it to.
	And what do you want?
	Nothing.
	Out of the ordinary, just that I would be very confident in saying that I would want a family and a bunch of kids.
	Right.
	And so you think she'd want that too, right?
	Yeah, I think she'd want it with me, yeah.
	Right.
	Not a lot of nightclubbing when you become a parent.
	Just wanted to point that out.
	Sure.
	Yeah, I mean, if I were in your shoes, I mean, I don't tell people what to do because it's sort of pointless, but...
	Do you know if she wants kids, by the way?
	I don't.
	I haven't asked her.
	I would do.
	It's only what you want.
	Yeah.
	I guess it's a bit weird to ask early on.
	No, no.
	No, it's not weird to ask early on.
	It's efficient.
	Could be both.
	No, it's not.
	Listen, if you're interested in the woman, then you have conversations about your future so you don't waste time and get your heart broken.
	Because let's say that she says, well, God, I don't ever want to have kids or I don't ever want to get married or whatever, right?
	No.
	You know, why is a date less important than a job interview?
	You know, when I go to job interviews, so when I went to job interviews in the past, people are like, well, where do you see yourself in five years or ten years, right?
	It's a reasonable question to ask in a job interview.
	Why is the mother of your child or the potential partner for your entire life, why is that less important?
	Like, why can't you say on a first date, well, where do you see yourself in five years or ten years?
	Where do you want out of life?
	Jesus, that to me is the first date material questions.
	What the hell else are you going to talk about?
	The weather?
	That's already happened.
	Well, I think the...
	I guess you've got...
	My view is that you've got to find the right time, and if you do it too early...
	Then you're going to, I guess, scare them off a bit.
	Or if you leave it too late, then you've obviously wasted too much time.
	And what do you mean you scare them off?
	Like if you say, at some point I'd like to get married, that sort of my life goal is to be married and be a father, why would that scare a woman off?
	I think the- Knock them aside.
	Knock them aside.
	Knock them aside.
	Oh, you're not going to be good for being the mother to my children because you lack self-knowledge.
	Well, you're not going to be good because you want to have a career full-time forever and never, ever take any time off for children.
	Well, you're not going to be good because you're too old or you're not going to be good because whatever, right?
	It's just getting rid of the people.
	It's like in sales.
	You have to go through, like in high-level sales, you can go through 500 people to find the person who's going to say yes, right?
	And so, with dating, it's just eliminate, eliminate, eliminate.
	I eliminated a woman because she wore glasses when she didn't have to.
	She just thought they made her look cool or look smarter.
	And I'm like, eh, done.
	I am not going to tie my kite to the star of crazy, hey, I'm going to wear glasses when I don't need to.
	It's like, yeah, absolutely.
	I'm going to put a fucking cast on my leg because I think it makes my ass look sexy.
	Come on, give me a break.
	It's just getting rid of, dumping, getting rid of, dumping.
	You know, like, I had a long-distance relationship with a girl.
	And she said, after we broke up, we had some disagreement about phone bills or something like that.
	And she's like, well, my father says you have to do this.
	And I'm like, yeah, okay, here's the money, A. And B, oh, I'm really glad that, you know, we're not dating when you've got to get daddy into your fights.
	It's like, oh, my God.
	I mean, it's so sad.
	I broke up with a woman because she...
	She would have performance anxieties during exams, right?
	She was studying a pretty demanding discipline.
	And I broke up with her because she's like, you know, I find exams really, really stressful.
	It's like, well, then why are you in this field?
	Well, you know, I like the field.
	Well, I said, you know that after you graduate, there's going to be like actually real-world exams called does your bridge stand or does whatever it is you're doing, you're building or whatever it is.
	And she's like, well, you know, that'll be then, this is now.
	And it's like, eh, right?
	Sorry, can't do it, right?
	I mean, it's just, it's discard, discard, discard.
	You know, you're trying to find that needle in a haystack.
	The important thing is to keep throwing away the straw.
	And so for me, it's like, well, you know, she might be scared off.
	It's like, well, what does she think dates are for?
	Dates are for making babies in the long run or not.
	That's the whole reason we have penises and vaginas.
	It's the whole reason women wear makeup.
	And it's 99% of the reason why men go out and make money and build things is to attract eggs.
	So, it's sort of weird, you know?
	It's like in a first job interview, if you say, you know, if this works out, I might really like working here.
	Whoa!
	Whoa!
	You just scared the shit out of me!
	What?
	Why am I here at the job interview if not to try and get a fucking job?
	No!
	It's too soon!
	Let's have job interviews for four months and then tell me whether you're interested in working here.
	Are you fucking kidding me?
	Well, I guess in defence, if I may, you're right to say that marriage, maybe not marriage, but having kids is the ultimate aim of dating.
	But if you use the job interview analogy, you could say that becoming CEO of a company is the ultimate aim of working somewhere.
	But I don't think I mean, it would be, I guess, inappropriate for you to say in a job interview that, yeah, I want this job because, you know, I want to run this bloody place.
	No, but that's not a good analogy because that would be like saying, well, I really want to get married and then be lord and master and ultimate dictator within my own home and you will answer to me, woman.
	Of course.
	I mean, you know, any woman with any integrity is going to run screaming from such a...
	Well, let's just say Middle Eastern style of approach to marriage.
	Because if someone's hiring you and you say, I can't wait to be your boss and order you around, sure, of course, right?
	I understand that.
	But if you do want to end up running the company and they say, where do you see yourself in five years?
	And you say, well, I'm very ambitious and I want to move up the ladder and do well and prove myself and contribute enough value to get more responsibility.
	And of course you should say that.
	Because if you have a boss who doesn't want somebody who's ambitious, you shouldn't go work for that person.
	You know, like we did this show about don't go to college, right?
	And I apologize to the people I have intimated in the heat of the moment that Trades people were less intelligent.
	It's not the case.
	Trades people are fantastic.
	I apologize for that.
	I just wanted to mention that.
	A few people pointed that out.
	It's perfectly fair.
	Anyway, but in that, people are like, well, a lot of employers want a college degree.
	And it's like, yeah, because those employers are stupid.
	Because they're old school.
	They want the college degree to evaluate the person rather than them being able to evaluate the person.
	They want some piece of paper to evaluate someone's intelligence because they can't evaluate someone's intelligence.
	And why can't they evaluate someone's intelligence?
	Because they're not that intelligent themselves.
	Or maybe they're intelligent but not creative or not critical thinkers.
	Don't work for those people.
	Anyone who says, I need you to have wasted four years of your life getting into debt so I have to pay you more in order to get a degree which does very little to verify your intelligence, anyone who says that that's a necessity for you to work for them, you don't want to work for them.
	And if any woman runs screaming because you say, I want to get married and have kids someday, good.
	Good.
	Good.
	You just saved yourself a whole lot of time and heartache.
	And you're keeping yourself free for the woman who's right for you.
	You never know when this woman is going to blow past, right?
	You never know when this woman is going to blow past who is the perfect woman for you.
	I got a job at a trading company.
	Through that job in a trading company, I met a friend.
	That friend said, I'm joining a volleyball league.
	I said, I love volleyball.
	Actually, if I spent the rest of my life playing beach volleyball, I totally would.
	When I went to play volleyball, I met my wife.
	Now, if I'd been dating some woman, which wasn't going to go anywhere, where we hadn't talked about anything, I wouldn't have met my wife.
	I mean, I'd have met her, but I'd be in a relationship, and I don't...
	two-time, right?
	I don't...
	So while you're wasting time treading water, not asking the basic questions, your wife might have come and gone in the tunnel of time.
	Ooh, you know, like a phase shift of the ambulance going past.
	Gone.
	Never to return.
	She passes by.
	She passes by.
	Be ready to catch, like the catcher in the rye.
	Be ready to catch the woman of your dreams.
	The readiness is all.
	You don't know when she's going to come.
	You don't know when she's going to blow past.
	You need to be ready, which means get people out of the way so you can focus on her.
	I think you're absolutely right.
	And I think this weekend I'm going to go back to church and go join a volleyball league.
	Excellent.
	Sounds like you've got the right idea.
	Thanks so much for the call, Alexander.
	I wish you the very best, and let's move on.
	Thank you.
	Right up next we have Bob.
	Bob wrote in and said, As a black guy, this is very strange because it's technically against the liberal rules.
	However, I've started to see myself become increasingly xenophobic for lack of a better word.
	This is what I want for an immigration plan if I had President Donald Trump's ear: 1. Immediate expulsion of illegal immigrants.
	2. End of birthright citizenship.
	3. Revocation of citizenship to those born to illegal parents.
	4. Change of immigration to Japanese system, merit-based immigration, and strict work visa rules.
	Five, mandatory oath of allegiance, immigration oath, to receive the right to vote and government benefits.
	I feel like at worst the immigrants want to annihilate us, and at best they want to change our culture by coming here and changing our lives slowly.
	Someone asked me what composition I would like for the United States, and I immediately answered, 80% white, 20% black, and make space for 1% other.
	Have I gone too far?
	Has moving to Texas made me...
	That's from Bob.
	I'm sure there are a lot of people in Texas who would really like to know what the end of that sentence is.
	Can you hear me?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Good to chat with you again, Bob.
	How are you doing?
	Absolutely.
	Oh, I have to tell you that I heard the coolest two words today a moment ago.
	Cross cleavage.
	Oh, yes.
	Virtue and boobs.
	That's what keeps us going in life.
	So, how did you end up being called a racist?
	What was the circumstance?
	Well, the first circumstance was when someone unbelievably...
	Learned that I intended to vote for Trump.
	And I told him that there's an immigration problem and we need a major fix to it.
	I said it a little more explicitly.
	And he was a black guy.
	And he looked at me with a dumbfounded face and said, you're a racist.
	And I said, I immediately laughed a little and said, you know, Mexican is not a race, Muslim is not a race, etc., etc.
	We've been through this probably repeatedly for the last bunch of months.
	The second time is when I come—there's an immigration—wow, this is going to be funny.
	There's an immigration court in a building of my primary client down here in Houston.
	So one of the floors actually has an immigration court, and the rest of the building is a major, major corporation.
	I don't really want to say.
	And one day, it just looked like a homeless shelter, and none of them speak English, and they're wandering the halls, and I went and complained to the building about it, and I talked to an Indian guy about it at the company, and he said, man, why are you such a racist?
	And I And I laughed and I said, man, you have a caste system in your country.
	You have actual slavery.
	Yeah, why are you so racist that you don't want to live in India?
	Why do you want to be around the white people so much?
	So to wrap up, well, there's one more thing I have to say, so I'll try to rush this.
	With the Indian guy, I eventually went to him and wrote the name of the four castes.
	And I said, which one are you?
	And he looked at me with this face of dread, like, whoa, whoa, why are you talking about this?
	Why are you talking about this?
	And eventually he picked the top one, of course.
	And I said, oh, you're royalty in your country.
	Hey, wait a second.
	Indians make the highest average in our country, so you're royalty in my country, too.
	So, kind of in jest, obviously.
	But, um...
	And my...
	My best friend, I'm in my 30s, but my best friend's actually a 70-something-year-old guy because we share deeply two passions of music, opera, classical music, and literature.
	We really love poetry.
	He used to be an English professor.
	Anyway, he called me alt-right a few days ago, and he yelled at me.
	He was mad at me about Giving guns, wanting to give guns to crazy people.
	And he made me think, wait, what's going on here?
	Have I become xenophobic or whatever?
	I am unable to find the exact right word.
	I'm sure you might have some, you might help me.
	And that's about it.
	Right.
	Did you really be able to patch things up with your elderly friend?
	Um, maybe.
	I sent him an email and I begged him to consider that he lives in a very...
	He's rich.
	He's really rich.
	Like, he has millions and millions of bucks.
	He lives in a very rich community, completely insulated from any of the things that he wants to...
	Well, not exactly.
	I mean, somebody does the gardening and cleans the pools and...
	Well, actually, there's a little truth there.
	But I say, you know, I live in Texas.
	They send the Syrians here.
	There's a crapload of them here.
	And of course, as far as Latin American immigration goes, this is clearly the front line.
	And I said, you know, please consider that we have majorly different lives and you are a victim of your own success.
	You're completely insulated from these things.
	Minus the gardeners.
	Right.
	It's a benefit, right?
	It's a benefit to the rich.
	If you're rich, having a constant flow of low-rent immigration, of third-world immigration, is really good for you in a lot of ways.
	Because it drives down the wages of the people you pay.
	So I can understand why rich people are pro...
	I mean, you have to be pretty damn cold to the poor people in your own country.
	Because, you know, fuck them, right?
	But if you're getting this constant flow of low-skilled labor coming in, it's great for your net cash flow.
	You know, obviously...
	In terms of welfare and healthcare costs and all of it, it's disastrous in the abstract in the long run, but most people don't think that way, right?
	So, yeah, I mean, the fact that rich people, certainly if you're rich and on the left, or if you're interested in political power and you're on the left, yeah, you want these people to come in because they're going to vote 80% plus for leftist policy.
	So, absolutely.
	But, even if you're on the right, it's really, really great for your labor costs.
	It's the same thing with the H-1B visas, right?
	Like, if you can get these tech serfs to come in who are kind of tied to their job, and you can underpay them relative to American workers, at least in the short run, it's fantastic.
	Now, in the long run, they produce spaghetti code and bring down your entire organization because nothing can be maintained and nothing can be comprehended.
	But...
	In the short run, you get to lower your overhead, you get to pump up your stock price, and because there's so much money being forced into the stock market by government, you get to make a killing.
	So, yeah, I mean, the rich on the left and the right, very, very keen on this kind of flooding in of immigration, and the illegal immigration is fine for them, too, because it takes out the bottom of the market and everyone falls down a level.
	Well, I must...
	Comment on your video about particularly the tech industry and the flood of H-1B visas.
	I knew it was bad, but I did not know it was the unbelievable flood that it is.
	The numbers were pretty startling after I saw that and looked it up for myself.
	Oh, yeah.
	There's all the people who are like, oh, yeah, you've got to get into tech.
	Tech is the future.
	Learn how to code.
	It's like, okay, yeah, well, then just bring this conveyor belt of low-rent programmers in and displace American workers.
	And, oh, it's wretched.
	I mean, you're going to see, man, you want to see a big fight coming up.
	I was just chatting about this with a friend the other day.
	You want to see a big fight coming up?
	When Trump starts to take on the H-1B visa thing, the tech companies are going to go mental.
	They are going to go mental.
	About this.
	Because let me tell you, if you're a manager and you're managing serfs, you suck as a manager.
	Like, any decent manager does not want to be managing people who can't quit their jobs and who are underpaid and they, you know, don't follow the culture and they're only there for the money and they, you know, I mean, you don't want to manage people like that.
	You want to manage people who are creative and they're by choice and can leave at any time because that means that you're managing creative, positive people who are probably brilliant and wonderful.
	And that's where the challenging management is.
	And so the tech companies, all the good managers have left the tech companies and you've got these dismal slave drivers holding whip over these indentured servants.
	And so it's not just the price.
	All the managers are desperate to To keep H1B visas going, because if they have to start managing a voluntary workforce, their suckiness as managers is going to be very, very quickly revealed.
	And that's going to roll all the way up to the top.
	The entire culture of tech companies has adapted itself significantly.
	To these chained, galley-slave coders.
	And the culture that will have to change, it's like asking the Democrat Party to reinvent itself.
	You know, I think tech companies are going to fight this to the death.
	They're going to use every weapon they possibly can to try and prevent this from happening.
	And I understand the economic incentives and all of that.
	I mean, I still think it's a fight well worth having.
	But, boy, you ain't seen nothing until you've seen, when you start touching, tech management incompetence and greed for indentured servants.
	Boy, they're just going to hit back with everything they got.
	I mean, they'll be filtering, they'll be censoring, I believe.
	They'll be just doing massive amounts of stuff to try and keep all of this information from the public.
	It's no accident that you haven't heard that much about this, because you've got like, what, six companies in control of the vast majority of the American media, and these six companies are all dependent on tech labor, and so of course they want to keep this information basically away from the taxpayers, because...
	They get to hire these cheap workers, and then they get to socialize the cost of unemployment insurance to everyone else.
	Well, I've seen it firsthand really badly.
	I mean, this company, which shall not be named, has We'll call it Voldemort.
	We'll call this company Voldemort.
	It has 70% and...
	Wait, 70% foreign worker program?
	70% Indians.
	Let's just say Indians.
	They're about 70% Indian.
	I can't really explain this to people because they think I'm racist or whatever word they want to use, but...
	When you're in conversations with people who are speaking a very different version of English, your processor is now running at 60% instead of 20% because you have to actually pay attention harder and think harder just to understand this person.
	And then other people are talking too, and it's just so much different.
	I don't think I can explain this very well to people.
	What do you think?
	I don't know if you've had experience in that situation.
	Oh, yeah, no, very much.
	Very much.
	When you have people who come from similar backgrounds, and this is not race, right, but fundamentally, when you come from similar backgrounds, similar cultural references, similar idioms, right, I mean, language is very, very complicated, and we really take it for granted.
	How much gets communicated by people who've grown up, not just with the same language, but all the same cultural references and all of the same jokes and all of the same, well, when I say this, I mean this, you know, all that.
	When that gets thrown out the wayside, massive inefficiencies can occur.
	And the other thing that's true in my particular experience, and I don't know how general this is, maybe other people can let us know, but there are certain cultures that are very deferential to authority.
	And certain aspects of the Indian culture can be that way inclined.
	They don't tend to challenge management if they think that, you know, this is the orders, okay, I'll go do it, right?
	And that is a huge problem as well.
	You want people who've grown up in a culture that is more comfortable challenging authority because that way management gets challenged as well.
	Like I mentioned this before, but I had a great creative team of coders who did some fantastic, fantastic work.
	And they were more than willing to make fun of me and push back when they thought I was making a bad decision or making a mistake or didn't have complete information on it.
	They're the ones who taught me that S&L joke.
	They called me the fruity English bastard because there's some S&L, I think, said in a live joke.
	James Bond goes in and says, oh, I'd like a martini shake or not stirred, but the olive just on one side, blah, blah, blah.
	It's like, yeah, fine, you fruity English bastard.
	And I liked that.
	I welcomed that.
	I, you know, I welcomed that with my daughter.
	I welcomed that, you know, with people in my life, you know, to push back.
	You know, I'm far from omniscient, ridiculously far from making right decisions all the time.
	So you need that kind of pushback.
	And when you have...
	Managers who don't get that kind of pushback from their employees.
	I remember having conversations with people in the business world where I would say, you know, I think we should go and do something.
	I think you should go and do something.
	And they go off and do it.
	And it turns out that it was the wrong thing to do.
	And then they say, well, I knew it was the wrong thing to do.
	And I said, well, why the hell didn't you tell me?
	And they said, hey, you're the boss.
	That is disastrous, especially for software, where prevention is so much better than cure.
	And so if you have cultures that come into your country which have a deferential relationship to authority, and Indian cultures have that to some degree.
	It can happen in other cultures as well.
	You end up, as a manager, lacking critical 360-degree feedback about your decision-making.
	And this, I think, is one of the reasons why so many software projects fail, is the programmers on the ground are crabbing and bitching about what's going on, but they don't get together and bring it to the attention of management.
	And what happens is when you have a bunch of deferential people in your workforce, competent managers don't want to manage them.
	Because nobody – I don't want to feel like a slave driver.
	I don't want to feel like I just – when I say jump, you say how high.
	I don't want to be – what is your major malfunction, son?
	I don't want to be that guy who just hands out orders.
	I want it to be a conversation where the programmers have specific knowledge.
	I have a big picture vision, but we need to work together to make it happen.
	Managers who are comfortable with just having, you know, I program you, you program the computer, and neither you nor the computer talks back to me.
	I mean, that's terrible and a disaster.
	And it's one of the reasons why sort of European-style Western capitalism has been so innovative in the tech industry and why some of the Japanese and sort of the East Asian companies tend to be a bit more photocopy and a little less innovative because you need that 360 pushback where managers and employees put their heads together and willing to challenge each other.
	So it's the language as well as the culture.
	Deference to authority breeds inefficiency and execution.
	Okay, yeah, this is a really important conversation.
	And I started to have it with a person who...
	That I met as soon as I moved to Houston about two years ago.
	And he just outright won't work with Indians.
	He just won't do it.
	And I didn't understand him at first.
	Not at all.
	And I mocked him.
	He's a great guy.
	I love him.
	I mocked him for a while and then I started to see.
	And he also talked about this.
	Now I don't think I've ever heard you talk about this.
	But he also talks about how they have a culture of cheating.
	And I've seen this firsthand.
	In the more public sense, there's been some pictures that have been circulating of Indian parents climbing school walls to hand answers to their students.
	And apparently, this is a more widespread phenomenon, particularly in India, that they simply cheat their way through things.
	And they even sued a university, because the university installed new anti-cheating measures, and they said, quote, it's our birthright to cheat.
	And so, due to all of this, and then working in this kind of environment, it really...
	It really changed, really opened my eyes.
	Do you know anything about that?
	Well, I've certainly heard of that.
	And I have known cultures where rules are vague suggestions you conform to in public, but you have no fundamental respect for the rules.
	And if you look at India, you have...
	I mean, the Indians that you see in the West...
	And I get this question all the time.
	It shows up in comments all the time.
	So I might as well address it here.
	The Indians that you show up in the West are the smartest.
	Because they can't stand living in a country with an average IQ of 81.
	Right?
	So they're desperate to get to the West.
	And I understand that.
	But the problem is, of course, that in India, because you have a low average IQ... Whether genetic or environmental, it's a combination of both, but still nobody knows how to change it.
	But because you have that low average IQ, you have a corrupt society.
	And because you have a corrupt society, nobody respects the rules.
	And because nobody respects the rules, cheating is not cheating.
	We call it cheating.
	They call it being smart within the system.
	It's game theory.
	Well, it becomes game theory in that situation.
	Right.
	Well, let's get back to...
	Hang on, so let me just back it up with a little slice of fact here.
	Okay.
	Right, so 168 countries.
	India is 76th out of 168 in corruption perceptions index.
	And that is pretty significant.
	More than 62% of Indians as of 2005 had first-hand experience of paying bribes or influence peddling to get jobs done in public.
	In 2008, almost 40% of Indians had first-hand experience of paying bribes or using contacts to get jobs done in public offices.
	And that is part of the culture, like it or not.
	That is part of the culture.
	And you can't just snap your fingers like the plane touches down in America and you get the entire history of American cultural experience and American philosophy and pragmatism and all that kind of stuff, all the stuff that's been developed.
	You don't just...
	Any more than...
	Like, if you went to fly to India, how long would it take for you to feel relatively comfortable bribing a public official?
	I'm going to guess never.
	Never would you feel comfortable doing that.
	It would be gross.
	It would be, you know...
	It doesn't just transfer.
	And...
	That is—and this is—it's not—again, it's not just a racial thing as well.
	I mean, Russia is pretty bad that way because they had 70 years of communism, and before that they had the Tsar and serfdom and so on.
	So they haven't developed.
	Even though it's a relatively high IQ, although how much of the IQ is— I think?
	But it's not a country that has developed a lot of respect for social rules.
	How could they have?
	I mean, they had czarism, and then they had communism, and then they had, you know, the oligarchism that is going on at the moment, right?
	The oligarchs running the crony capitalism and all of that.
	How could they?
	I mean, the institutions aren't worthy of respect.
	How could they have developed that respect?
	Which is why so many Russian immigrants are involved, particularly in fraud cases.
	It's actually even worse, in a way, because they're smarter, and therefore they get more involved in fraud than street crime, which is more a subtle decay of things.
	Sorry, you were about to say something earlier.
	Okay, so...
	So the underlying question is this.
	Okay, so I'm very self-critical.
	I... I've been this way for quite a while.
	And I always like to ask myself, what would the identifiers be if I'm wrong?
	Wrong about what?
	About the situation where I'm a racist, I'm an alt-right, I'm xenophobic.
	And I'll give you a perfect example.
	Really what ticked him off was the second travel ban.
	And He said to me, he said, now people can't come from Syria.
	And I said, for good, Jesus, they have a home.
	It's called Syria.
	Well, or they have, you know, ridiculous numbers of other Muslim countries that they can go to.
	Yes, well, yes, that are much closer.
	That's monoculture.
	If you're a Muslim and you want a monoculture country to go to, which is an Islamic country, you have many, many countries to choose from.
	What options do people in the West have?
	Yes, absolutely.
	Well, I honestly think we have none.
	Maybe Switzerland.
	Maybe Iceland.
	Yay!
	We get the iceberg!
	Woohoo!
	I've never been happier.
	Sure, we built civilization, but let's retreat to the glacier.
	Because that sounds fair.
	Well, actually, honestly, that seems to be what's going to happen.
	But I digress for a moment.
	So...
	And he said, well, what if Microsoft wants to hire a Syrian programmer?
	And, you know, he's a great programmer.
	He lives in Syria.
	Now he can't come here.
	And my immediate answer was, why the hell aren't we hiring an American programmer?
	Yeah.
	And he hung up on me.
	Right.
	He hung up on me.
	So...
	Tell me, now, without mocking him...
	Oh, come on!
	No, no, no.
	Okay, fine.
	Not to be nice to him, but to try as best you can to really understand that mindset, because I'm really doubting myself.
	Have I become the country rube that everyone in New York and Chicago thinks that all of the white people are down here?
	Well, the fact that he hung up on you is one indication that you're right.
	You know, when my daughter was younger, if she said two and two make five, I didn't just stalk out of the room because I couldn't answer her.
	Right?
	That's it.
	I'm leaving.
	I have no other recourse because we don't have five grapes I can point out the facts with, right?
	Right.
	But no, listen, I mean, bring someone in from Syria.
	Bring someone in from Syria versus hiring somebody from within America.
	Well...
	What if the person from Syria, do they speak English?
	Okay, let's say they don't speak English or speak Arabic or whatever.
	Okay, so that's a challenge.
	The person from Syria, if they're going to integrate, is going to have to learn English.
	Now, I'm going to assume that learning English for somebody from Syria is about as challenging as learning Arabic for somebody from New York, right?
	In other words, they don't even use the same letters.
	Yes, very difficult.
	It's really difficult.
	Learning German is bad enough.
	4,000 irregular verbs in Portuguese according to Breakfast at Tiffany's.
	But at least it's the same.
	At least I can read the words for the most part.
	And I guess they get that heavy metal umlaut that they use from time to time.
	But I remember going from Morocco To China.
	I went to Morocco for Y2K. I wanted to do something exotic and fun and it was an interesting trip.
	And I went straight from there to a business trip to China.
	So I went from like Arabic to Mandarin.
	I had like a month.
	I couldn't read a damn thing.
	I had no idea what's going on.
	And I really, really got beaten at ping pong, which is not easy.
	I'm a good ping pong player.
	But it's tough.
	So how on earth could it be efficient?
	The guy's got to fly over.
	He's, I mean, got to be interviewed.
	He's got to fly over.
	He's got to learn the language.
	He's got to learn the culture.
	He's got to learn how things work.
	He's got to, right?
	I mean, that's complicated.
	I mean, just...
	Imagine me going to Syria or someplace where they speak mostly Arabic and trying to rent a room.
	I mean, it's ridiculous.
	How could that possibly be efficient?
	How could that possibly be efficient?
	And people say, well, you know, in the absence of a big giant state with borders and so on, it's the welfare state.
	It's all this H-1B stuff.
	It's all of these subsidies that make it work.
	Cross-cultural stuff is ridiculously inefficient, economically speaking.
	Imagine you're trying to build a house.
	You've got six guys.
	They all speak different languages.
	How on earth are you going to get it done?
	You'll have to hire more interpreters and deal with more mistranslations than you actually have workers.
	It's not going to work.
	So cross-cultural stuff needs massive amounts of government subsidies to even be remotely...
	This is why the welfare state and multiculturalism have to go hand in hand.
	And corporate welfare and H-1B visas and all this other bullshit.
	They all have to go hand in hand.
	Obamacare all has to go hand in hand with multiculturalism because multiculturalism is a huge net loss in society.
	And I don't mean multiculturalism like, well, there's a little Italy, and then there's a little Greece, and then, you know, over the generations, everyone...
	Like, I'm not talking about that.
	I'm talking about, like, real, cross-culture multiculturalism.
	It doesn't work economically, which is why it can't happen until you get massive government subsidies.
	It's no accident, Bob, why not?
	The welfare state coincided with the 1965 Immigration Act, sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy.
	That the welfare state and a dedication to bringing in third-world immigrants into America had to occur at the same time.
	Because you could open the floodgates wide to third-world immigration if there's no welfare state.
	It won't work.
	It won't happen.
	Robert Putnam has talked about this.
	People want neighborhoods with like-minded people around.
	Like-minded people around.
	And fundamentally, it has nothing to do with race.
	I think we've talked about this before.
	If you moved in next door to me, fantastic.
	You know, if some Russian oligarchical weirdo moved in next to me, he could be as white as the sun, I still would rather you be there, because we'd have so much more in common, right?
	And so, it is ridiculously inefficient.
	Robert Putnam has talked about this many, many times, how inefficient and how community-destroying multiculturalism is.
	Why don't kids go and play outside anymore?
	Because nobody knows who's out there.
	Nobody knows whose values are there.
	Like if you were in Little Italy and your kids went out to play, everyone's got the same religion.
	Everyone's got the same values.
	They can all discipline each other's kids.
	Nobody's going to get offended.
	Nobody's going to get thought of as racist.
	It's too complicated.
	Going over to some Somali's house and trying to figure out how it all works, you know, oh God, forget it.
	I'll just stay home, something that's nice on TV. This is why people cocoon.
	It's so destructive to society that unless you are subsidizing it like crazy, it's never, ever going to work in any voluntary way.
	Just for those who don't know, right?
	Well, I'd like to say something about that particular thing about people not going outside.
	So, I think it was Richard Spencer who talked, well, maybe not him, but someone like him who said that People are basically, young people are basically in two camps, born before 1980 and born after 1980.
	And the ones born before 1980 know what it means to go outside and play.
	And the ones after, obviously the year could be moved slightly based on region.
	But because I'm a very old millennial or a super-duper young whatever-the-hell Generation Xer, I remember a time where Seeing a person in a burka would have freaked everybody out.
	Where everybody in the mall, in the restaurant would have gone, what the hell is that?
	And so, not only do we not do that now, but we can't do that now.
	We are immediately ousted by everyone with a voice.
	And when I say with a voice, I mean Hollywood, I mean, not really the government right now, for the last more than eight years it was.
	And so when I see all of these things, I talk about it, and when I talk about it, I'm quote-unquote racist.
	What do you think about that?
	What's the upside?
	What's the benefit to the local population?
	I mean, I understand the benefit to the politicians.
	I understand the benefit to the people from the third world.
	I understand all of those benefits, of course.
	Otherwise, it wouldn't be happening.
	What's the benefit to the local population?
	I mean, it's the old question, what's wrong with having babies?
	Well, you know, we just have this underpopulation.
	We need all this workers.
	Bullshit.
	Bullshit.
	What's wrong with just having babies?
	I'm not talking about white babies.
	Just people, have some babies.
	You know, people who've been sort of in the West for generations.
	Have some sex.
	Have some babies.
	I want to go back to my five-point immigration plan, and I want to ask you, what is too far?
	Okay, so immediate expulsion of illegal immigrants.
	That's not an immigration plan.
	That's the law.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, I mean, if you say, well, I need this big plan to deal with all these people who are setting up their tents on my front lawn.
	It's like, no, it's called property rights.
	That's trespassing.
	We already have a solution for that.
	It's called the law.
	So I don't think that's end of birthright citizenship.
	Birthright citizenship is not in the Constitution and America is one of the very few countries in the world which even considered this kind of thing.
	It was just jammed in there by a Supreme Court judge in a footnote.
	It's ridiculous.
	It's ridiculous.
	You don't get to keep the fruits of a crime.
	You don't.
	You know, like if someone robs a bank and then gives the money to his friend...
	His friend has to give the money back.
	You understand?
	You don't have to keep the fruits of a crime.
	So if you're in a country illegally and you have a child, the idea that that child gets citizenship is mad.
	It's completely rewarding people for committing crimes.
	Hey, it'd be great.
	I'm going to go pay you $50,000 to steal a car.
	Well, yeah, there'll be a few people who won't do it, but there'll be a whole lot of people who will.
	And so giving people citizenship in America, which is one of the great prizes and treasures in the world for committing a legal action, is completely mental.
	Well, to give you a real-world scenario here...
	It's not even the law!
	I want to know if this is assholey or not.
	So whenever I see a pregnant immigrant now, I see...
	This is going to sound so bad.
	I don't get to say this.
	I see a thief.
	I see someone stealing citizenship or stealing benefits from the country.
	That's what I see now.
	And so in our office, they're full of Indians.
	And they went around and they asked everyone to give $10 to one for a baby shower.
	And she's pregnant.
	And in my mind, I'm thinking, she needs to go back to India and have that baby.
	She's clearly doing something here.
	And I didn't give the money to them.
	And I think they knew.
	I think...
	They didn't know exactly how I felt, but I think they knew.
	Now, please tell me what level of assholery is that?
	Well, no, let me...
	Look, you and I, Bob, would both like to live in a world where we could be genuinely happy for somebody else having a baby.
	I'd like to live in that world.
	But in order for me to live in that world, one of two things needs to happen.
	Either groups need to start acting the same in aggregate, right?
	Or...
	I need to stop being forced to pay for other people's babies.
	Let me ask you this, if it was a Japanese woman who was pregnant, how would you feel?
	Well, oh god, that's a bad answer.
	I would feel less bad because they're not here in mass stealing citizenship.
	Well, no, and also people from Japan have, you know, they're called the model immigrants, right?
	They're the perfect immigrants, so to speak.
	They have the lowest crime rates.
	They have the lowest welfare usage.
	They have the highest incomes, the most wealth aggregation.
	They create a huge amount of jobs.
	I mean, they're a net positive.
	Well, not only that, but they're a particular outlier in Asia.
	They are basically a Western country in Asia.
	I don't really understand it very well.
	They're just very high IQ. Right.
	I mean, it's a 103, 104, 105 IQ on average, and I assume that the people who come to the West are even higher.
	So nobody's sitting there saying, I mean, where are all the people?
	Like, Ann Coulter's book, Adios, America, has Spanish in the title, not Japanese, right?
	Absolutely.
	Because until groups start acting the same...
	Don't judge people negatively for judging them accurately.
	Do you know what I mean?
	Yes, but you do see the clear...
	Ah, not the clear.
	If you were very nearsighted or you didn't see deep at all, you can see that that sounds like a problem immediately, right?
	What do you mean?
	I mean, political correctness has this bizarre environmentalist belief that everyone is exactly the same and therefore perceiving any differences between groups is discriminatory.
	But the reality is there are differences between groups.
	I've gone over them.
	Most people don't have the facts.
	And then you enter into this weird solipsistic universe where people say, yes, there are differences between groups, but that's only because people perceive those differences between groups.
	Right.
	And I point them to an NBA game every time.
	Yeah, or, you know, look at the 100-meter race.
	You know, not a whole lot of pygmies and white people in there, right?
	It's all these guys from like four square miles in Kenya.
	I have to say something about that in particular because my friend, we argued about that and he truly believes to his core that That everyone is the same.
	And so I sent him an email, and it took me a while to do this, and I sent a picture of every person who won the 100-meter dash in the last...
	Well, the last 20.
	And all of them are not...
	Not only are 95% of them black, there's one white, but the year he won was the year everyone boycotted the Olympics because of the South after apartheid.
	That's pretty funny.
	And not only did he...
	Did he win?
	But he won by the slowest time of all of those people, and he got caught using drugs.
	So, you know, I ask, please explain this.
	If everyone's the same, please explain this to me.
	But anyway.
	Well, and nobody's sitting there saying, well, you know, the problem is we just don't have enough Japanese men in the 100-meter dash, so we need affirmative action to put them halfway up the field so that they can compete.
	Right.
	Well, exactly.
	Because it's not anti-white, right?
	Yes, that's right.
	Because the only race that isn't multiculturalism or is multicultural is white.
	Well, and the funny thing is, too, if people wanted multiculturalism, then they should want countries to remain the same.
	Because if countries all blend together, you don't have multiculturalism anymore.
	That's an interesting way to look at it.
	However, if they import them all here and the people don't blend together, you do have multiculturalism, but we call that war or conflict.
	Well, and given the birth rates among different groups, it's not a stable multiculturalism.
	It's going to end up a monoculture one way or the other.
	All right, well, let's wrap up this.
	All right, so revocation of—so, yeah, birthright citizenship is not the law.
	It's just something that's kind of become something that's accepted.
	And, yeah, birthright citizenship, to me, makes no sense.
	No sense at all.
	Revocation of citizenship to those born to illegal parents?
	That's a challenge.
	I understand the sentiment.
	Trump can't even put travel bans on countries that can't even vet people coming into America from a list developed by Obama.
	Like, you understand?
	I mean, you could basically, you could put a house plant on that plane and claim it's from Scotland, and Trump couldn't stop the house plant from coming into America.
	It almost feels that way, right?
	Look, I have a centipede.
	He's an American.
	Okay, fine.
	Because I wrote the word America on a piece of toilet paper and crayon.
	So, I mean, the idea that he can't even get that travel ban, the idea of the revocation of citizenship to those born to illegal parents, that's tough.
	You know, that smacks of retroactive laws.
	That's like, that is a big challenge.
	Well, I have a challenge for you here.
	I think that if we don't do that, then all of those children are going to murder us in the vote in 8 years, 16, 12 years, 16 years.
	Well, at least what you could do is bring the sort of chain migration thing.
	You could look at that.
	You know, the chain migration where, like, so the anchor baby then starts bringing in more and more relatives and sponsors more and more relatives.
	That becomes a challenge, right?
	Like, it was just like an hour ago Trump's new executive order was blocked because, you know, the president has complete control over immigration unless judges say otherwise.
	So revocation of citizenship to those born to illegal parents, that's a challenge.
	I understand the idea.
	And certainly, since it was never law, you could maybe make the case that it was mistakenly applied or, you know, if the bank made – to take a ridiculous extreme – Then, if the bank mistakenly puts $1,000 in my account, a month later they can take it back, right?
	So if it was sort of mistakenly done, right, if birthright citizenship is invalid, then children of illegals would not be citizens.
	Could you do this if they already have citizenship?
	You could say, well, it was a mistake, and I mean, that would be a challenge.
	And we're just talking about the practicalities, the ethics of it, maybe a whole other thing.
	Change of immigration to a Japanese system?
	Merit-based immigration and strict work visa rules.
	But here's my question.
	I mean, it's a challenging question, and I'm sort of open a lot.
	Why immigration at all?
	Why?
	So that's a good question.
	Why?
	What's the big benefit?
	Well, that is actually an unexpected challenge.
	I mean, it's been stopped before.
	And when it was stopped, America went through a period of extraordinary economic growth.
	For sure, if you get rid of immigration, or you stop immigration, or you pause immigration, or whatever it is, it's going to drive up massive demand for domestic workers, thus lifting people out of welfare.
	Because it's not just the illegal immigrants who take jobs away.
	What they do is they lower the wages to the point where welfare becomes an attractive option.
	If wages rise, welfare becomes a less attractive option, so you get people off welfare onto work, which means you can actually start to deal with the deficit and maybe even the debt.
	Like, I mean, it's a radical question, and I know lots of people, you know, Ann Coulter's asked it, but why immigration at all?
	What's wrong with having babies?
	Yeah, well, that is, I can't answer that challenge.
	Obviously, that's a valid, that's a very valid question.
	We have what I think is our PR. There's a PR department of the United States that has convinced, I think, a vast majority of the country that this country does certain things, that the inscription upon the Statue of Liberty is simply the law of the country.
	Yeah, yeah, because I write a poem and suddenly it becomes the law, right?
	Exactly.
	So, no, I guess we're...
	But, you know, hotels want to take in guests until they're full.
	Parking lots want to take in cars, but every now and then I'm driving to a concert and, sorry, lot full.
	Well, I don't get to call up the guy and say, hey, man, your whole point of being a parking lot is you got to take cars.
	That's the whole business model.
	And he's like, well, yeah, unless we're full.
	In which case, we don't have that business model called put in more cars than we have.
	If I've got 20 rooms in my hotel and they're all full, I put up the full sign outside.
	Well, the whole point is you've got to take people.
	No, I'm full.
	Unless you're going to start doubling up with people, which I don't really want to do because that's kind of creepy and weird, and I could be liable for a bunch of stuff.
	Yeah, okay, but we're talking about the 19th century when America was pretty damn empty.
	Uh...
	So, the last one.
	So, the only challenge you've given me is that I haven't gone far enough.
	Well, that's what philosophy does in general.
	You think you're being risky?
	No, no.
	You ain't seen nothing yet.
	So, finally, the last one.
	And this is a particular one.
	I just thought about this recently after reading.
	I write long papers to my family about Different way to see the world.
	Because when I was 18, 17, 16, I didn't have the internet, really.
	And I didn't have any conservative ideas ever, ever broadcast to me.
	Never!
	And so I feel like it is my duty to at least give that information to the younger people in my, you know, the next generation in my family.
	Or the people around my generation.
	I'm in kind of an odd age.
	I'm younger than most of my first cousins and slightly older than all the second cousins.
	So I broadcast things like this and I do a bunch of research.
	And then I read the Oath of Allegiance, the Immigration Oath.
	I'm sure you know about it full well.
	And I think that there are too many people in this country who don't understand what allegiance even is.
	So that's why that last one exists.
	Mandatory oath of allegiance to receive right to vote and government benefits.
	And would that be something like if you break it, then you lose your residency, or what?
	I mean, what does the oath of allegiance mean?
	I mean, live long and prosper?
	Okay, I said that.
	So what does that mean in my Star Trek now?
	Well, maybe it's more of a symbolic thing, but it's not to receive citizenship, because obviously...
	If George Washington's great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson doesn't do it, we can't, obviously, where can we kick him out?
	Where can you send him?
	But to receive, you know, the full benefits of a U.S. citizen, including the right to vote.
	And I think about this because all of the people I see destroying the American flag and beating the shit out of conservatives, and these people are voting.
	I mean, these people are just anarchists.
	So anyway, so what do you think?
	Well, you know, I wouldn't be high on my list.
	You know, like I was reading about how like almost three quarters of Canadians want some test of values for immigration.
	So what?
	People lie.
	People lie.
	People can say, well, I'm really keen on immigration.
	That's a perspective, and I sort of understand it.
	And I don't mean to get all race relations on you, Bob, but the reality is, if you're keen on immigration from the third world, you're being a total asshole to the black community.
	And black community leaders have said exactly that.
	They are cheering restrictions on immigration because they know what it's going to do to wages.
	They know what it's going to do for unskilled labor.
	And they know that it's going to start lifting black people out of poverty and into the middle class.
	So that's fine.
	Oh, we don't want to be bigot.
	It's like, okay, fine, fine.
	But you're screwing the black community in America.
	And you're screwing the ambitious Hispanic community in America.
	Just be aware of that.
	Now, I personally think the black community in America, I don't think it's a stretch to say they had a bit of a sucky deal from the government for quite a long time.
	Quite a long time indeed.
	I would really like the poor communities, you know, black, white, the one Asian guy.
	I would really like the poor communities in America to have a bit of a better shot than they've had in the past.
	Certainly for the past, like since 1965, the past, you know, 52 years.
	The one Asian guy.
	You know I've said the same thing.
	No, but Okay, so you want these immigrants, but you understand you're piling more shit on the black community.
	You're undercutting the opportunities for the black community to rise up and do better.
	Which causes more welfare, more single motherhood, more family decay, more drugs, more criminality, more problems.
	Why the fuck does someone in Syria who wants to be a programmer matter more?
	Than a black community in Atlanta or Detroit or Baltimore or Ferguson.
	Don't they matter too?
	Shouldn't we take a little bit more care of them than everyone on the planet who wants a shot at a dream that they could work to recreate in their own country if they wanted?
	America's not made a monopoly on being a republic.
	They're not going to sue you if you become a republic or have a free market.
	Or privatize things?
	Go for it.
	Everyone would be thrilled.
	But why the fuck does everyone in the world matter?
	Except for the poor in your own goddamn country.
	Exactly.
	And I like to say it like this.
	The poor in the country whose family have died for the country.
	Whose family have built the country and paid taxes not to just hand the country over to insert random country's name here.
	Yeah.
	Maybe, you know, maybe I'll be a little more...
	Like, if India gets rid of the caste system, you know, then maybe we could look into that.
	But no, I... You know, the poor people in the West, the poor people who are here in America, in Canada, in Europe, they need some traction.
	They need...
	An escalator that's going to get them out of the hole that they're in.
	Welfare is keeping them in that hole.
	Lack of job opportunities is keeping them in that hole.
	And the more and more and more and more and more people who come pouring into a country who are taking from the public purse, who are driving down wages and driving up taxes.
	Well, I must say one more thing.
	I don't know if you know this, but I feel a sense of entitlement from immigrants.
	From people who are either not yet citizens or on their way to becoming citizens, they feel like they are entitled to come to the United States.
	One person said to me, after the travel ban, this is a woman, she's Pakistani, she said, why did the United States make all these people come if they're just going to send them home?
	And that's the kind of self-ownership and self-responsibility we're looking for in citizens in the West.
	That kind of moral integrity, that kind of locus of control being right in there in your heart.
	Well, you know, we were just forced and flown over, bundled up in burlap sacks and flown over.
	Oh, I've never felt warmer.
	So, well, thanks a lot, buddy.
	I want a little pushback.
	Because I'm getting too much...
	No, you just hit...
	I mean, I really think hit them with the poor and the black community and so on.
	It's like, why are you so negative towards the black community?
	Why are you supporting policies that hit the hardest?
	The poorest.
	They hit the poorest the hardest.
	That's actually where I... You're right.
	Haven't the brothers and sisters suffered enough?
	Seriously?
	Seriously?
	From slavery to Jim Crow to the welfare state to wages being driven down by illegal immigrants?
	Can we cut some poor people a fucking break?
	Yes, absolutely.
	That's the Ben Shapiro tactic.
	Use their tactics of emotion against them.
	But it's not just emotion.
	It's real.
	Yeah.
	God, can you imagine if wages go up for the poorest among us and blacks and others start to get off welfare into jobs, which means that family life becomes much more valuable, which means that marriage—I mean, as I've talked about before, black marriage integrity was greater than whites in the 1920s and 1930s during the Great Depression, for God's sakes.
	Don't tell me about poverty and bullshit like that.
	It's about lack of opportunity.
	Imagine— What the ghettos could turn into if there was this rising tide of wages because immigration from third world countries had been cut off.
	Imagine if...
	Taxes, corporate taxes could go down because it's current and everyone's taxes could go down so they could buy shit in their country and create jobs.
	So you have a cutoff in endless supply of people driving down wages at the same time as you have a stimulation in demand because you don't have to pay for all of the social programs and welfare benefits and healthcare being consumed by these immigrants.
	That's a one-two punch that is going to lift taxes.
	People out of poverty.
	Christ Almighty!
	In India, 50,000 people a month are going from poverty into the middle class.
	50,000 people a month.
	It could be even better in America.
	And immigration can be restarted when we can rein in the social programs.
	But right now, it's like paying people to be your friend.
	They're not there for you.
	They're there for your money.
	Well, thank you for your time.
	I did get something out of this.
	I'll be a little more strategic in the conversation.
	I'll stop referring to them as dregs and illegal invaders and focus on the actual effects to Americans more.
	Yeah.
	No, I mean, it shows you how the Democrats haven't changed at all.
	The Democrats...
	We're the most racist party around and democratic policies since the 1950s.
	Both welfare plus third world immigration have virtually destroyed the black community in many circumstances.
	And it's time to stop.
	I mean, they need some help and they need some wages and they need some better opportunities.
	And I'm all for that.
	So I think that's important.
	All right.
	Thanks again for your time.
	I need to call you back about your UPB. That's going to be fun.
	Yeah, I'd love to chat about it.
	So thanks, as always, Bob.
	A great conversation.
	Let's move on.
	Absolutely.
	Good day.
	Alright, up next we have Troy.
	Troy wrote in and said, What is the morality of breaking commitments or contracts?
	When is it moral-slash-ethical to break a commitment or contract?
	Is it right to leave the military early and pursue a career I have a true desire to do?
	As a young man, would this be very detrimental to do?
	Should I stay in for the remainder of my contract and then pursue it, or take the leap of faith?
	That's from Troy.
	Hey Troy, how you doing?
	I'm very well.
	How are you?
	I'm well.
	Let me sort of start off with a general argument, and then we can dip into more details, if you like.
	All right.
	The general argument is that breaking a contract is not a moral question.
	It's not a good, evil question.
	However, breaking a contract without Paying the penalties, which you've agreed to in breaking the contract, that becomes more of a moral issue, right?
	So, you know, you sign up with a cell phone company, you sign up for some two-year plan, and what they do is they bundle in the price of your cell phone, often, you know, with these two-year plans or whatever, right?
	And then what you do is, let's say that you want to keep the cell phone, and you don't want to pay for it, right?
	So let's say your cell phone costs 500 bucks, and they roll it into the plan, and you're supposed to pay it off over two years.
	Now, after a year, you decide you want to cancel, but you've only paid off $250 of the cell phone.
	If you want to keep the cell phone, you owe them $250.
	So canceling the contract, it's fine.
	It's not a moral issue.
	But if you...
	If you want to break the contract and not pay the penalties, like I used to sign a lease.
	When I was in college, I used to have this problem.
	Every summer, I'd want to come back home to make money, but I'd have signed a 12-month lease, so I'd have to find someone to sublet whatever place I had over the summer or whatever.
	So...
	If I sign a 12-month lease and I want to leave after six months, generally the penalty is three months, right?
	So you can break the contract and you pay the penalty.
	Now, if you've signed a contract and you break the contract and you don't want to pay the penalty that you've agreed to, then it sort of becomes a moral issue, if that makes sense.
	When it comes to something like a marriage contract, if you make a vow...
	If you make a verbal vow, a commitment, you know, I'm not going to have affairs and so on, right?
	I'm going to be with you in sickness and health and so on.
	That's very important.
	And that used to be reflected in the law.
	That used to be reflected in the law, but it's not anymore because responsibility is kind of out the window.
	There are moral issues when it comes to that, but when it comes to breaking a contract that you've signed with an entity, an organization, and so on, breaking the contract is perfectly valid, but you've got to Pay the penalties.
	Does that make sense?
	It does.
	Do you mind giving me some examples of the penalties pertaining to my situation?
	So you're in the military, right?
	Yes, sir.
	Now, I don't know exactly what the penalties are related to your situation.
	I certainly have talked to, and some years ago now, I did a show.
	Maybe, Mike, if you could look it up.
	I did a show with people who help Soldiers get out of the military if they don't want to be in there anymore, like if they really disagree fundamentally with what the military is doing or what the deployment is or the ethics behind the situation or whatever it is.
	And so...
	There are ways of getting out of your contract with the military that are within the rules of the military, not just going AWOL and, you know, moving to Timbuktu or something like that, which is against the law and against the rules, which I'm not advocating, of course.
	But there are ways to get yourself out of the military that are within the rules of the military.
	And there's lots of people who have talked about that.
	There are organizations that can Can help you.
	I don't know, have you read sort of what you signed in the military and what your options are?
	In terms of getting out?
	Yeah.
	Well, you already mentioned AWOL. No, by any means, I'm not going to do anything like that.
	Right, right.
	But I could fail my PT test, and that would grant me either a general or honorable discharge.
	Oh, you mean like if you gained weight or didn't exercise or whatever it was, right?
	Yes.
	Another way is, you know, something pertaining to some medical disability.
	For instance, let's say that I joined the military and I developed depression or, you know, I forgot to mention I had depression or some sort of mental illness before, you know, joining.
	If they were to find out or, you know, it was interfering with my work so, you know, severely, they would probably have to, you know, kick me out.
	Keep me in.
	Assign me to a military psychiatrist or counselor.
	They'll probably suck it up and just keep going.
	But that's another way.
	It doesn't have to be exactly mental.
	It could be a disease or some sort of medical condition that would render honorable or general.
	Yes, but these things have to be real, right?
	I mean, you can't fake them.
	Exactly.
	Right, right.
	So, I mean, those are obviously some options.
	But when it comes to the ethics, you know, you're a young man and you signed a contract.
	And if there's ways to get out of the contract, if you've changed your mind that are within the bounds of the contract...
	I think that's perfectly fine.
	You know, we're all allowed to change our minds, right?
	I mean, we're all allowed to disagree.
	I've got a show called Courage to Resist.
	I interviewed Jeff Patterson, P-A-T-E-R-S-O-N. It's show 1543 back in the...
	Later Middle Ages of the show's timeline.
	I think now we're in the Clone Wars.
	I'm not sure.
	Anyway.
	But yeah, Encourage to Resist the Freedom Aid Radio interview with Jeff Patterson.
	P-A-T-E-R-S-O-N. This is some years ago, but you can look that up.
	And they are an organization.
	I think he represents an organization that can help people get out of I've heard stories over the years, both publicly and privately.
	About, you know, what I was promised in the recruiting station versus what I actually got in the Army.
	It's not always the most strictest up-and-up and honest transaction to get you in the military, according to some people I've talked to.
	But, you know, so there is that sort of aspect of things as well.
	But, yeah, you're a young man.
	You're allowed to change your mind.
	and if there are legal procedures by which you can get out of a contract that you've signed it's perfectly valid to do so in my opinion interesting um You said you knew people who received false information when they went to the recruiting office?
	Well, it was more like, you know, here's all the things that you can do and here's all the ways it can work out and so on.
	And, you know, when they finally got to the paperwork, if they went over it in great detail, it didn't match exactly, right?
	That was sort of what is going on.
	And, you know, often in ways that couldn't particularly be verified.
	So that's something to remember.
	I see.
	Yeah.
	Well, that was kind of my experience, but...
	What changed between what you were offered and what you got?
	Well, at the time I was 17, I, like, just to give you some context, I do not come from a very wealthy background at all.
	I do not, I was not fortunate, you know, financially at all.
	So, at the time, I kind of made a decision out of, honestly, fear and ignorance.
	Hmm.
	Ignorance that, you know, I was 17 at the time.
	I graduated high school when I was 17.
	And, you know, I wasn't sure what to do.
	You know, you got people telling you all these different things as a young person.
	You know, go to college, do this, do that.
	Never really focusing on what the actual person wants to do.
	So I kind of made a decision on ignorance, not knowing better, and fear of, you know, what do I do?
	How do I make money?
	I don't want to disappoint my parents.
	But in terms of what changed, I think just being real with myself, like being honest with myself.
	Personally, there's nothing really wrong with the military.
	If people, you know, I always say the people who joined straight out of high school and they found something that they liked, you know, and has all these benefits along with the job, amen to them.
	Like, that's fantastic.
	I'm really happy for them because they won, you know.
	But I feel as if, like, for me, this just isn't my path and that, you know, My skills and interests lie elsewhere.
	Again, I can look at the situation objectively and be like, there really is nothing quote-unquote wrong with the military, but in terms of my path and what I want to do, I don't think it's necessary for me.
	And I don't want to waste essentially most of my 20s doing something I'm not really interested in, getting along with people I don't necessarily like, and doing something I'm going to be subpar at as opposed to the best.
	So...
	Right, right, right.
	Yeah, CourageToResist.org.
	That's the group that you can check out.
	And I don't know anything fundamentally about what they do other than the interview, but it's worth having a look.
	But if you've entered into something, particularly when you were 17, if you've entered into something, you've kind of gone through to the other side and you're looking now at your experience rather than what you were thinking of.
	That is, yeah, I mean, that's to me perfectly fair and perfectly valid.
	I don't know how it would really be ethically very solid to say, well, you made a choice when you were 17 for the next 10 years of your life, you know, after you've been propagandized a lot about the military and, you know, maybe it was talked up a little more than it turned out to be, but...
	It is perfectly valid to change your mind and to find a way to remedy a decision that you've made that you have decided you don't want to support anymore.
	That's part of life.
	I mean, I've certainly changed my mind many years older than you, and I've changed my mind many times over the years as more and better information comes my way.
	So yeah, I would fully support you exploring that, and it's perfectly a moral thing to do, in my opinion.
	That's actually really good to know.
	I was not sure because, you know, I'm in the military, like you said, I'm constantly being, you know, bombarded with, you know, this is good, this is what you want, you know, being fed stuff that aren't necessarily my ideas.
	It can be really refreshing to hear that.
	I guess that did, you know, answer my question and, you know, I could definitely check out the things that you referenced, but I do want to, like, branch off and, like, have another question answered in terms of, like, let's say I do it.
	And I, you know, and I leave.
	Essentially my plan is to leave and get a job as a film PA. Which is very strange because my job, I work in military intelligence.
	And I don't get paid that much, but I guess my concern is like once I do it, like how I'd be able to Sufficiently support myself.
	Granted, there are different avenues and I'm more knowledgeable about things, you know, obviously when I was 17.
	But in terms of like taking that leap of faith, it's like, hmm, you know, could that support me?
	Will I be able to pay the bills, pay for, you know, internet, food and basic, you know, essentially basic needs?
	Or, you know, because to be frank, like my savings, it'll probably last me You know, the place I want to get probably like two months at the most.
	If not, maybe three.
	But, you know, taking a leap of faith and getting a job as a PA, you know, from NSA employee to something like that.
	I don't know, like, would that be a wise thing to do?
	What do you think your living expense, what could you crush your living expenses down to, do you think?
	I don't need much.
	I'm not a materialistic person.
	I just need food, water, internet, of course, and a place to live.
	Yeah, I mean, you can double up, right?
	You can get a room and a house.
	I mean, I've done all these kinds of things when I was, you know, in school and early on in my career when I was broke.
	So, I mean, I rented one room and a house for like $270 a month, like utilities and everything, all included.
	And so you can crush down your living expenses considerably, but a production assistant, if that's the PA that you're talking about, I mean, it should be a paid position, and you can get a paid position.
	It probably won't pay that much, but, you know, when you're young and don't have a family to support or anything like that, and I'm assuming you don't have any expensive debilitating habits or anything like that, so...
	You can live low to the ground, keep your expenses low in order to follow your dream.
	And you can of course start looking for work If you're on the track to leave, you can start looking for work ahead of time and at least get yourself some interviews.
	And from that standpoint, you should be able to get at least some sort of position relatively quickly.
	Again, I'm not very knowledgeable about the film industry.
	I've worked in it sort of very peripherally when I was younger, but...
	There are production assistants who need it all the time.
	And if you've worked in military intelligence, I'm going to assume that people think you're a smart guy, which you sound to be.
	So I'm sure you'd be a good asset that people would be able to snatch up pretty quickly.
	I'm sorry.
	I know I paused, but I guess it's really powerful to hear it and talk about it because I obviously can't talk to any of my fellow peers about this because they'll be like, you know, either they might report me or they'll be like, you're crazy.
	Do you know what I'm saying?
	But to actually hear this stuff, talk about it, it's really helping.
	Let me make this offer to you as well.
	If you're close to getting a job and you need some money, just give us a shout on this show.
	I'll cover you for a month.
	Don't worry about it.
	Are you serious?
	Yeah.
	Hey, man, I know what it's like to chase a dream.
	I was backed into a financial corner from time to time.
	I grew up dirt poor.
	I know what it's like.
	I mean, don't feel like, oh, I've got two months or I'm going to end up living under a bridge.
	You know, just give us a shout.
	We'll cover you for a month.
	Wow, that's...
	I honestly don't know what to say.
	Obviously, thank you.
	Oh, yeah, no.
	Wow, that's...
	If you've got a great future in the film industry, for God's sakes, I mean, yeah, just, you know, I'd be happy to help.
	Wow, thank you.
	You have to keep in mind, I'm not used to this.
	I'm used to...
	Well, things are not really going my way.
	But, wow, that's...
	No, listen, it's selfish for me, too, because if you're into this philosophy show, Troy, and you end up in the film industry, good.
	We have someone working on the inside, you know, in some of the most important, you know, the politics is downstream from culture stuff.
	So, you know, it's a selfish pleasure for me as well.
	If you do well, if you like this show and you do well in the film industry, fantastic.
	You know, that's good for the world.
	That's good for what it is that I want to do.
	So, yeah, you've got...
	You know, we've got your back...
	If you're close and you need some support, just let us know, alright?
	Sure thing.
	I feel as if there's really nothing else to say, but I do want to, because I don't know, I guess I'm the kind of person who likes to cover all bases, best case, worst case, likely scenario, but let's just say you have a chance that, you know, I failed my PT test, right?
	Like, I gain weight and I do it, and they are suspicious that I did it on purpose, and Or, you know, they may get me in trouble.
	They may keep me in or may, you know, face, you know, the consequences of my actions.
	My contract is for six years.
	And by the time I get out, I'll be around 27 because my birthday is like at the end of the year, so it's weird.
	But let's say worst case, you know, like something like that does end up happening.
	Is that too, I don't know, is that too late?
	Am I like screwed?
	Why be so conditioned and lose my creativity for staying in for that long?
	Essentially against my will.
	Well, I would say don't focus on that kind of disaster scenario at the moment, Troy.
	I mean, look at your options and talk to people who can help you and then figure that out.
	As far as you can do things that you don't like and still be creative.
	I mean, I got my first job when I was 10 and worked a lot of sucky jobs and didn't have a fun job until I was in my late 20s or mid to late 20s.
	And so I was still creative and so on.
	And I'm not comparing, you know, like my jobs with being in the military, but it doesn't mean that you can't be creative and can't go out and have a positive impact on the world.
	But I wouldn't worry about that so much, like sort of one step at a time.
	I think that's the key.
	Figure out what your legal options are for leaving and work on that at the moment, but sort of mulling over the worst-case scenarios.
	Trust me, I've wasted a few minutes of my life thinking about worst-case scenarios.
	It has never once been productive.
	All it does is mean you're less able to deal with whatever comes up in your life more immediately.
	I would definitely do that.
	All right.
	Let us know how it goes.
	Very best of luck to you, and I hope that you get everything that you want in life, and thanks for the call.
	I appreciate it.
	No, thank you.
	Thank you for your time.
	All right.
	Take care, man.
	You too.
	Bye.
	Right up next we have James.
	James wrote in and said, With the premise that God is readily accessible through prayer, it seems that that would be a good method for testing his existence.
	Have you had any experience with prayer, both before and after you went to university?
	If so, what was your interpretation slash analysis of the results?
	If not, would it be beneficial for an empiricist to make attempts at prayer or not?
	That's from James.
	Oh, hey James, how you doing?
	Hey, Stefan.
	It's a pleasure to be speaking with you.
	Well, thank you.
	It's a great question.
	There's a Christy Berg song called The Last Time I Cried.
	I remember the last time I had a thought about prayer.
	Would you like to hear about it?
	Sure.
	Would you like any clarity on my own question?
	I mean, I think I understand it.
	If we need clarification as we go forward, I can let you know.
	I remember the last time I thought about praying, I was 18 or so.
	And, you know, I was raised Protestant.
	I was raised in the Protestant church, and I was in the school choir, and I... All of those kinds of things.
	I went to church twice a week when I was in boarding school and went to church off and on until I left England at the age of 11, and after that, not really.
	But I was in a tent, and I was in the woods during sort of my gold panning and prospecting days.
	And I heard, in the middle of the night, a snuffling by the side of my tent.
	And man, I don't know if you've ever had this in your life.
	You know, if you're driving and you have like a near miss or something like that, I've had like two or whatever.
	Yeah.
	You know, it's like...
	Like your heart just...
	You're startled and then you sort of notice your fight or flight mechanism has kind of kicked in and you can feel the blood pulsing through your fingertips and your heart is, you know, banging a gong like T-Rex or whatever.
	And...
	In this case, it was kind of different, though, because it was just a snuffling around the outside of the tent.
	And so it wasn't like a near or miss, or it was something where I felt the fight or flight.
	I've never felt it that vividly in my life before.
	It just rose out of nothing.
	To the point where, like, I could feel my pulse in my biceps, like I was that wired, because, you know, there are some pretty big-ass bears up there, and, well, they can pretty much rip your head off if they want to.
	And, you know, I did all the right things, like I hung the food up in the tree, so I didn't have food, and you don't want the bear coming in and saying, oh, there's a A piece of flesh meat in the way of my food.
	I think I shall disassemble it so I can get to my food.
	You know, like you're the rapper and the chips are inside.
	And I just, I remember thinking, oh, Lord above, please don't let this be a bear.
	And it was like a very visceral, dear God above.
	I'll believe if there's no bear.
	You know what I mean?
	Because it's helplessness, right?
	I mean, if there is a bear...
	I mean, I had a gun and knew how to use it, of course.
	But, you know, it's dicey.
	It's dark.
	Really dark.
	You know, if it's a...
	I don't know if you've spent time away from a city, but, man, alive.
	If it's cloudy and moonless...
	Can't see a thing.
	Well, there's no difference between your eyes being open and your eyes being closed.
	In which case, a gun is not the most helpful thing in the world.
	Let me shoot the darkness and hope I hit something, right?
	Other than the noise might startle the bear or it might make it more aggressive.
	I don't know.
	And that was, I remember that very vividly.
	That was the last time where I was like, Dear Jesus, God save me from the bear!
	Yeah!
	I remember that very, very vividly.
	And then, you know, here's the thing, you know, being raised as a Christian, being raised as a Protestant, I mean, then I felt like a jerk.
	I felt like a real asshole.
	Like, oh, now you're all into Jesus.
	Oh, I get it.
	You're totally fine not being into Jesus and God until there's a bear.
	And then you're born again in a blood sweat of your own terror.
	It's dark.
	There are monsters.
	Hey, God, have you been?
	Haven't chatted in a while.
	I wonder if you could save me from the bear.
	Like, I mean, that is a douchey reason to be religious, but I had that moment, and I'll be honest about it right now.
	Well, thanks for your honesty.
	That would be some situation to start praying in, though.
	I did not sleep for days.
	Let me tell you that.
	Until I got back to something with walls, I was like, hey, what's that?
	What's that?
	What's that?
	I mean, I have no idea how our ancestors got any sleep at all, but anyway.
	Yeah.
	Did have a bear attack us once.
	Oh, you know what?
	I won't do that story now.
	You've got a better story.
	You've got a better question, so I'll do that story another time.
	I mean, I'm interested in that story, but I guess kind of like what I was thinking is that, you know, I'm a Baptist from Texas, the Bible Belt, and I've been— That's the end to Bob's question!
	I'm sorry to interrupt.
	So Bob said earlier, has moving to Texas made me a dot, dot, dot?
	Now I know.
	Baptist!
	Anyway, go on.
	I did enjoy y'all's conversation earlier.
	That was— That was good, and I could comment a lot on immigration, but I'll leave that for an—I digress.
	Okay, yeah, feel free to call back in about that.
	But anyway, so sorry, go on.
	So I am religious, and in college I did have, you know, many times when I was defending, you know, my views with, you know, atheists, agnostics, hedonists, what have you.
	And I guess, like, I always found that, you know, we would just— Go back and forth on arguments with reasoning, and it would just come to a stalemate.
	You know, it was fun, but it would just kind of come to a stalemate.
	And I remember one time, I just was kind of getting frustrated and just asked the guy, you know, well, you can...
	Test God's existence here and now.
	Have you been praying?
	Have you talked to God and stuff like that?
	And he kind of brushed that off and something to the effect of why would I want to talk to him?
	And anyway, I guess I came away from those kinds of encounters getting the feeling or the sense from atheists that While they, you know, hold strongly to empiricism, they're not willing to make attempts at prayer and see, you know, could there be a God?
	Could there be a potential spiritual life and such?
	And I feel that's a little inconsistent because, you know, I'm consistently revising my own, you know, view of the universe based on, you know, the natural from what I can see.
	So, yeah, Do you see that inconsistency or not, I guess?
	No, that's a good question, and let me just preface that by saying the thought struck me, what if God did answer my prayer and drove the bear away?
	Yeah, I mean, yeah.
	You know, this happened like 30 years ago, and it just struck me for the first time, you know?
	Maybe it wasn't a miracle, it was just some shuffling off with a bare ass in the darkness.
	Anyway, and normally I like a bare ass in the darkness, but...
	So, as far as the empiricism goes, I mean, I'm sure you're aware of this, but there have been a number of studies that have done regarding the efficacy of prayer with regards to a third party.
	I fully and completely believe...
	I mean, I think people who pray are getting more wisdom and knowledge and peace of mind if we want to look at it as a form of self-examination and a form of meditation and a form of rumination.
	upon important issues in life.
	I mean, even look at the simple prayer that children say at night, the prayer that I was taught to say at night, where you thank God for what you have, and you ask God to bless the people that you love, and maybe even your enemies if you're feeling particularly Christian and charitable.
	Well, how about a daily reminder of how much you have to be grateful for?
	What does that do to people's state of mind?
	Atheists don't have that in general.
	Right.
	And what about a daily reminder of how much you love people and how much you care about people to reaffirm your social bonds and your familial bonds and your friendship bonds?
	How about cultivating an attitude of gratitude?
	Does that do things for one's mental well-being?
	Yes.
	I mean, how could it not?
	I mean, it would make perfect sense.
	I also, and I've written this book called Against the Gods, where I talk about the concept of divinity as the unconscious.
	I won't sort of go into the whole argument here.
	But the unconscious is extraordinarily powerful.
	So even if there was no deity, Asking questions of yourself and being receptive to the answers would be extraordinarily helpful, I think, in terms of personal integration and integrity and having respect for the aspects of your mind, not directly accessible to your conscious mind, but which your conscious mind is built on.
	And so I do believe that people who pray are better off than people who don't self-examine in the secular sense, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	It's also a time for kind of truth-telling in a way, or like a...
	Be deep.
	Be deep about something.
	Be deep about something.
	I'm sorry to interrupt you, but this is what drives me nuts with the secularists, right, and particularly the lefties.
	It's this relentless shallowness.
	It's this relentless shallowness.
	And maybe because I just had a whole conversation about...
	I re-read and re-watched King Lear.
	What an incredibly deep play.
	And what have secularists produced that has that kind of depth?
	You know, the funny thing is that I am an atheist, but culturally...
	Christians have got it made.
	Culturally, Christians have got it down pat, and more so.
	I mean, almost all of my favorite writers are religious, with the exception of Ayn Rand.
	And the power of that, the depth of that, that prayer is thinking deeply about moral issues, it's thinking deeply about justice, it's thinking deeply about fairness.
	About revenge?
	About humility?
	About all of the big virtues that we all need to kneel before?
	And this, to me, is the power of feeling small in the face of virtue is one of the essences of philosophy.
	I feel very small relative to ideas.
	I feel very small relative to virtues.
	I feel very small relative to truth, because truth is this giant edifice that everyone carves and everyone's a part of, and I'm doing my little bit with my little chisel and this and that and the other, and I'm adding Hopefully a couple of happy faces to the giant parade of truth that we as a species are both carving and destroying on regular, repetitive, tied-in, tied-out patterns.
	But I feel tiny, tiny relative to the potentialities of truth and virtue out there.
	The humility that is the essence of Christianity, the abandonment of one's own personal ego for the sake of larger principles, and the smallness one feels in the face of Of truth, virtue, perfect divinity, omnipotence, omniscience,
	and so on, is very powerful to me, and there's nothing that I know of that is the spiritual or psychological equivalent in the secular or atheist community.
	I don't know if I'm making any sense at all, whether this is just a word selling to you, but does that make any sense?
	Right, right.
	That makes a lot of sense.
	And from what I've been exposed to, you're the only one, from the atheist point, who has that perspective for seeing that need within humanity in general.
	We need something bigger than ourselves.
	We desperately need something bigger than themselves.
	Otherwise, we fall prey to the temptation of Satan, which is the goal to try and create a heaven on earth, which always turns into hell itself.
	Right, right.
	I have a prayer story that I guess I'd like to challenge you on, if you're willing to hear that.
	Sure.
	And I say this just because, I mean, me for myself, prayer is a time for self-reflection and for trying to seek out God's will.
	And then, like you said, I believe in its healing power.
	But there's been times in my life where I believe God has spoken to me or given me a vision.
	And I'm curious what you would make of that.
	Sure.
	Let's hear one.
	So, most recently, there's been three points where it's happened.
	And most recently was last year when, at that time, I and my fiancé went to an early morning prayer service at like 6 a.m.
	in the morning.
	Sorry.
	I'll do a night service, but those early morning ones, it's like, I do not have a lot of the spirit in me at that time of day.
	Well, yeah.
	I mean, I was the same way.
	I mean, I... I mean, she's in seminary.
	My fiancee, now wife, was in seminary.
	She's very keen on going to us.
	So I was half asleep, but also praying about the future.
	God give me wisdom.
	I'm about to get married and all that.
	And being half asleep, not being terribly that pious, I suppose, even despite that, all of a sudden I had this vision of I had a pretty strong sense of a 10-year-old girl with long hair, big cheeks, and I had a suddenly sense of love within me.
	And I had the feeling, oh, that was going to be our future child.
	But then I was like, is this my thought?
	How do you discern what is from God or from you?
	I hid it in my mind for a while, but then I wrote down the image I had in a drawing.
	And then show that to my fiance a couple days later and she was interested and accepted as, you know, well maybe God did say something.
	And long story short, a couple months later we got married and a couple months later we got pregnant and it did come out to be a little baby girl and So I guess just...
	So there was some kind of validation there.
	And the question begs, you know, was that my mind, you know, just wishfully imagining for the future?
	Or was that, you know, a sign of encouragement from God?
	And I don't mean to keep on talking, but I am curious about what your take on that, something like that, might be.
	Well...
	The idea that you would have a vision, this was the woman that you wanted to marry, and the idea that you would have a vision of you having a child together is not outside the bounds of probability, right?
	And the idea that, I mean, it would seem to me quite likely in many ways that when your daughter grows up, she may actually look like the picture that you made.
	Because you know your wife's features, you know your features, you know that your daughter's going to be some combination of those and a couple of other things mixed in.
	So the idea that you would have...
	Now, if you're white and you have an Asian baby and that's what you had, okay, that would be a little bit more like, okay, that's a little out of bounds as far as probability goes.
	Well, my wife is Korean.
	Oh, is she?
	Okay.
	I don't know.
	Maybe you had an Inuit baby.
	Whatever it is, right?
	So if you had that...
	Out of bounds things, then that would be more remarkable.
	The fact that you dreamt of a child and had a child is not, to me, and even if your child ends up looking like what you anticipate, that is, I think, within the bounds of probability, which has no particular meaning with regards to how much you love your daughter or anything like that.
	And I just wanted to mention as well, like I'd said, all those things about mental health, there are studies, and I'll talk about other studies in a second, but there are studies that have been done That, you know, people who pray to...
	Now, you can't just pray to, like, Baal or, you know...
	Asmodeus or something.
	You have to pray to a loving and benevolent and protective God.
	And if you do that, then you're less likely to experience anxiety-related disorders like worry, fear, self-consciousness, social anxiety, OCD. So even people who pray but don't really expect to receive a lot of comfort or protection from God, right?
	There are certain religions where you pray, but God may listen, but he's not going to act or whatever.
	But if you pray to a loving and protective God, you do better.
	In terms of mental health in certain areas, and this is true, like regular meditation, spiritual practices, and so on, it actually thickens parts of the brain's cortex.
	It could be the reason why they tend to guard against depression, especially those at risk for the disease.
	So there are positive benefits psychologically to prayer.
	The studies where they've sort of got somebody who's sick in a hospital, they've asked Half the church to pray for one person, half the church to not pray for that person, it doesn't have any effect on the outcome.
	So prayer with regards to another person has not been validated as shifting the needle of probability at all, as far as I know it.
	And it's been a while since I've looked into that, so if people have other studies, please let me know.
	So, prayer as a form of self-knowledge, prayer as a form of self-reflection, prayer as a form of committing yourself to virtue and thinking about big and important issues in life.
	And I'll tell you, I mean, I don't know if this is the case, probably less for you because you're religious, but man, oh man, I mean, the number of people, like, I talk to them, particularly on the secular side, and I sort of ask them, okay, well, What is justice to you?
	What is truth?
	What is virtue?
	Now, if I'm talking to a Christian, I'm going to get me some answers.
	I may not agree with all of those answers.
	Hell, I may not agree with any of them.
	But there's thought behind it.
	They've ruminated.
	They've dwelt on.
	They've thought deeply about these issues, for the most part.
	And that is philosophical compared to...
	The somewhat materialistically shallow mental life of A lot of atheists.
	Like, I'm reading a book by a prominent atheist on ethics, and it's all just about consequentialism and the greatest good for the greatest number and basically Spock pseudo-philosophy and stuff, and it's not a lot of depth, not a lot of what does it mean to be good, and what are the principles by which we can ensure goodness, and what is the long-term practice of goodness, and how does suffering fit into it, and can suffering be good, and like all of the stuff which Christians have wrestled with for thousands of years.
	And come up with some very startling, original, and powerful answers.
	I try to go to the atheist philosophy side, again, exception to Ayn Rand, but the atheist philosophy side, it's pretty thin gruel to live on, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, for sure.
	Yeah, well, and I guess like I said before, when I've had conversations with atheists about the existence of God and whatnot, I guess like I just encourage them when I've had conversations with atheists about the existence of God and whatnot, I guess like I just encourage them to try praying and using that
	You don't have to go through institutionalized Christianity, which a lot of people have objections with that.
	You can try to access God on their own and I'm very curious about other people's thoughts on that.
	Well, I certainly think that Time for self-reflection, time for an examination of depth and thoughts and virtue and all of this.
	It is amazing to me just how many people skate through life on the very surface of things, becoming restless, becoming discontented, becoming frustrated, becoming alienated, becoming sort of empty vessels of nerve stimulation in the hopes of warding off The emptiness of a life unquestioned.
	There's an old statement from Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living.
	It's barely even a life.
	I mean, we are like then very intelligent lizards in search of sun and shade and food and sex, so it's not very elevated.
	And it is to me tragic just how many people go through life without thinking deeply about things.
	I mean, it's become my occupation now.
	As a sort of public philosopher, but it's because I had that for decades before that I was able to step relatively easily into this role and have these conversations.
	And I would really invite people, whether you want to call it prayer or not, to think deeply about life.
	To not skate through your days There's an old saying.
	There's an old conversation.
	I think it was in Ireland.
	When the Christian priests first came to Ireland, they spoke with the chieftains of the local tribes.
	And the Christian priest talked about The soul, life after death, heaven, hell, virtue, abstractions, goodness, the Ten Commandments, Jesus, sacrifice, loving your enemies, all of these things.
	And one of the chieftains turned to one of the priests and he said, never thought of this stuff, really.
	Now that you mention it, now that you talk about it, I can feel my mind expanding to it, but I never really thought about this stuff.
	I mean, I guess we just kind of thought that, like, we have a hut here, and there's a window on one side, and there's a window on another side, so that the breeze will blow away the smoke from our fire.
	And occasionally, like a bird will fly in one window, fly through the hut, and fly out the other window.
	And that's kind of what we thought of.
	Where does the bird come from?
	Where does the bird go to?
	We never thought of it.
	There's a bird in the house.
	It's gone.
	And that was how we looked at life, like a bird flying through a house.
	And so many people have kind of devolved back to that.
	Flash!
	Something new on Netflix!
	New video game!
	New movie!
	Ooh, let me get on Twitter!
	Let me fragment my brain into a tiny, pixelated, stained-glass non-entity of distraction.
	Can't even take a crap without a tablet.
	Hey, we've all been there.
	Come on.
	The CIA has got some ugly footage in the world, I think.
	But, you know, there has to be something before and after the window.
	Now, whether that means, you know, if you want to think before and after life and so on, but there is something before and after your life.
	Before your life, there was the culture that was erected around you that gave you life and after life.
	You die will be the effects that your life and your work has had on the world, on the minds and hearts and cultures around you.
	There is a before and after.
	If you want to call it immortality, that's one approach.
	As an atheist, I'm going to focus on immortality in my effect on the world.
	But both of these things require that we think about something more than the immediate, that we become human.
	To be human...
	It's to think in eternalities, in infinities.
	That is what it is to be human, because as far as we know, we're the only species that can grasp such concepts.
	And we think in absolutes, we think in universalities, we think in infinities.
	We extrapolate forever.
	What is physics?
	Physics describes what happens on the other side of the universe as much as it happens in front of our nose.
	15 billion light-years across.
	Physics describes what happened a hundred thousand, a million, a hundred million, a billion years ago, or more, and what will happen in the future.
	Philosophy describes eternal, immutable truths that cannot be overturned.
	Cannot be overturned.
	You can only disarm the fundamental truths of philosophy and By attempting to use a sword to take away a sword and say there's no such thing as a sword.
	You can't do it.
	And we have to understand that these eternalities, these infinities, these extrapolations, these universalizations, that is what it is to be human.
	And the degree to which our life ignores or bypasses those and is in the snuffle-nose trough-eating and rutting of the everyday life.
	That's the degree to which we aren't human.
	We are highly complex nerve bundles of self-gratification in the moment.
	And what I have grown to appreciate about religion over the years, Christianity over the years...
	Is it pulls us up from the trough.
	As philosophy is supposed to do, to pull us up from the trough of satiating the body, the everyday, the momentary, the five more minutes of peace, the appeasement, yeah?
	I'm looking at you, the Netherlands.
	It pulls us up to the eternalities that is the essence of what it is to be a human being.
	And philosophy, at least as I approach it and practice it, proselytize it, is still trying to catch up to that.
	Maybe it'll pass it one day.
	Working on it.
	But I respect a worthy and more successful competitor.
	Well, thanks a lot for the call.
	I appreciate it.
	But great set of calls tonight, and thanks so much for your time.
	Thank you.
	And congratulations on being a dad.
	Oh, thank you.
	I love it very much.
	Good.
	Take care.
	Thanks, everyone, so much for calling in to another wonderful evening conversation about philosophy and deep ideas.
	Hugely and greatly appreciated.
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