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April 14, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:32:38

3650 Help! I’m Dating a Social Justice Warrior! – Call In Show – April 12th, 2017

Question 1: [1:55] – “There are three types of true things which should replace True: Events, Axioms, and Necessities. From this, I have constructed a philosophical methodology for an approach to reason and evidence. Unfortunately, it hinges on being able to establish the validity of using axioms, a point which I am sure will be assailed despite it being true of every belief system.”“There exists a poisonous idea that only things proven can be held to be unequivocally true. It completely ignores the purpose of pursuing truth, and often ruins discussions. The power of words to influence thought is very powerful, and very dangerous. We see it constantly with the left redefining everything in a manner shockingly close to 1984’s Newspeak. I believe it began with undermining the populace’s understanding of Truth, because from there flows all further knowledge and critical thinking. Or, more terrifyingly, perhaps it was never understood by the populace at all. As such, I propose fleeing the sinking ship that is the word ‘True’; it has too much baggage, too many preconceptions, and frankly is too general a term. It has become a weapon of ignorance and that’s double-plus-ungood.”Question 2: [33:29] – My fiancée is a leftist woman living in Vancouver currently enrolled in teaching school and I am a conservative labor working man living in Ohio. I have managed to make a small break through to her delusional liberal beliefs but can’t quite manage a major breakthrough. What advice could you give those of us who are struggling to bring our loved ones out of the cave of ignorance and into the light?”Question 3: [1:58:06] – “In our current times, I find the misinformation and corrupted definitions to be the most destructive for every society. I currently focus on the historic methods of communications. How can we reach every layer of society with the same accurate message, without altering it's content. I find it extremely difficult today, that is why I go back in time and revisit old methods. Regarding this matter, the upcoming field of discussion is ‘Old Religions and Atheism.’”“What did we gain with Atheism and what did we lose by abandoning the Old Religions? As an Atheist, I deliver a package of statements, and I would like to get them attacked by every possible way by a very experienced rational thinking critic. I start with three ‘common places’ which are not used very often any more. These are direct translations, I really hope I did it right: 1. There is no human being without a belief. 2. Belief defines the foundations of your personality. 3. Belief drives you to go forward. Before I discard any of these statements from the table, I need them to be invalidated properly. If they cannot be invalidated, I would like to discuss them in more depth.”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate

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Time	Text
	Hello, hello everybody.
	It's Stefan Molleney from Free Domain Radio.
	I hope you're doing well.
	Please, please don't forget to drop by freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
	That's freedomainradio.com slash donate.
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	So, the first was a fellow who called in who'd worked out a methodology for evaluating truth.
	Now, things got a little off kilter fairly early, but I think it was very, very instructive on how difficult it is to build a system of thought if you're not really dug into first principles.
	So, I hope you'll find that really helpful.
	I know I did.
	The second caller, well, we had a fairly lengthy chat.
	His girlfriend is super hot.
	A 10, he says.
	And I wonder if it may have influenced her hotness, may have influenced his decision to get engaged to her and to get married to her.
	her.
	She seems to be, well, just a little bit on the left, you'll see, in the call.
	And I really want to know what you guys think.
	Again, you know, I don't tell people what to do, but I really want to know what you guys think.
	So, you know, let us know what you think he should do.
	I have my opinions, but I'm curious what yours are as well.
	And the third caller wanted to know, as a society, or as societies in the West as a whole, what did we gain from atheism, and what did we lose?
	by abandoning the old religions.
	It's a great, great question.
	So, without any further ado, of course, other than don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux, and use the affiliate link at fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
	Here we go, my friends.
	Here we go.
	Alright, up first today we have Dan.
	Dan wrote in and said, There are three types of true things which should replace quote-unquote true.
	Axioms, events, and necessities.
	From this I have constructed a philosophical methodology for an approach to reason and evidence.
	Unfortunately, it hinges on being able to establish the validity of using axioms, a point which I'm sure will be assailed despite it being true of every belief system.
	There exists a poisonous idea that only things proven a priori can be held unequivocally true.
	It completely ignores the purpose of pursuing truth and often ruins discussions.
	The power of words to influence thought is very powerful and very dangerous.
	We see it constantly, with the left redefining everything in a manner shockingly close to 1984's Newspeak.
	I believe it began with undermining the populace's understanding of truth because from there flows all further knowledge and critical thinking.
	Or, more terrifyingly, perhaps it was never understood by the populace at all.
	As such, I propose fleeing the sinking ship that is the word quote-unquote true.
	It is too much baggage, too many preconceptions, and frankly, is too general a term.
	It has become a weapon of ignorance, and that's double plus, ungood.
	That's from Dan, and he has an entire syllogism written out.
	So, welcome to the show, Dan.
	So, I'm wondering if you can tell me what problem it is in philosophy as a whole that you're trying to solve with this.
	Or society, I guess, as well.
	I think I can say it is conversing with people who aren't good at philosophy.
	Okay, so you want to make things more easily comprehensible to people who just aren't very good at philosophy or don't understand it very well.
	I've had a lot of encounters with people who the Dunning-Kruger effectively is they know enough about philosophy to use some terms and think they know a lot more than they do and discussions don't get far with them.
	Right.
	Okay, and so what principles or arguments are you trying to establish in the minds of others by taking this approach?
	What needs to be fixed or changed in the way they think?
	Well, I think you would agree that a lot of people don't understand some of their own assumptions with how they think about things.
	I don't think they even understand that they are assumptions.
	Agreed.
	It's just what is, you know?
	It's like whenever you come across these, the period people, right?
	Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh!
	Period!
	It's like, well, no, no, see, that's just the beginning, right?
	Sorry, and is it ethics in particular?
	Is it metaphysics, epistemology, politics?
	What is it that you are trying to solve by taking...
	Like, you know, when I wrote universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics, I wanted to be able to...
	Help people understand ethics without requiring gods for reinforcement or governments for enforcement, I suppose.
	So that's sort of the problem that I was trying to solve.
	So I guess, why are you spending time on this?
	I'm certainly not saying it's a bad idea, but I want to sort of figure out how will you know if you've succeeded in your goal?
	So I want to be able to explain to people a method of Understanding how to come to a conclusion, basically, and when you've actually concluded something and what's predicated for that conclusion.
	Okay.
	Does that make sense?
	No, I understand that.
	I'm asking for the larger purpose of what it is that you're trying to achieve.
	I'm trying to achieve deeper conversations with the people in my life with this, because I will get into political discussions, well, mostly political discussions, really, and there's this massive disconnect with, like, I'll be trying to say, what is it that proves such and such?
	Why do you believe that?
	And I'll be responsible for my feels.
	You don't understand.
	You're a white male.
	Or Huffington Post.
	Right, right.
	Right.
	Okay.
	And in order to solve what problem in society, other than, you know, having better conversations, I assume you're having arguments about ethics or politics because you want to achieve what?
	What is your end goal?
	So I started listening to your show because I agree with things you say and there's big problems in society of people pursuing things that don't work and they don't understand why things work and there are just bad ideas going on.
	Because people don't understand how to evaluate whether it's a good idea or not, whether it's working.
	Right.
	Not to nitpick, but I hope you didn't like what I had to say because you agreed with it, but because I made good arguments just to be annoyingly nitpicky.
	And so what is the end goal of the society that you want to create, right?
	So Plato had his end goal.
	Other people had their end goals.
	I certainly have put forward, you know, stateless society, non-initiation of force, peaceful parenting, and all that kind of stuff as my ideal society.
	The fruits of the labor of philosophy, so to speak, And so what is your ideal society that you have arrived at through the reasoning process you're undergoing?
	A more utilitarian perspective on society, basically, where basically the scientific method is very much related to what I worked out here, and it works really good, and it just kind of doesn't get applied to things where emotions come in.
	So, a society where people actually are understanding the ramifications and that, you know, you gotta defer gratification because, like, helping a person now does not help them later will cause more suffering, where we're doing a lot of things where that is the case.
	Okay, so you said, was it utilitarian?
	That's your sort of approach to society?
	Yes.
	So what principles, I guess you've worked on moral principles, what moral principles lie at the foundation of the society?
	Like for me, the non-initiation of force, non-aggression principle is kind of foundational.
	And what is it for you that is foundational to the system or the society that you want?
	So I agree with non-initiation of force, but I am a very simplistic approach.
	The objective is to increase total happiness, or rather the proportion of it.
	Just through the idea that, you know, if it's making you happy, you should be allowed to do that.
	You have your own pursuit of happiness.
	You should not be causing undue suffering because of short-term gains and things.
	Right.
	So happiness, of course, is not always win-win, right?
	Some people become happy at the expense of other people.
	And happiness is a negotiation.
	Happiness is a subjective metric.
	So it's kind of tough to organize society around a subjective metric.
	I'm going to be really happy if I get a million dollars.
	Can you go around and get a dollar from a million people and hand it to me?
	I mean, my happiness is going to be a million-fold.
	Their happiness is only minus one dollar, so the amount of happiness you'll be reducing in society is vastly less than the amount of happiness you'll be creating in me by giving me the million dollars.
	I understand this happiness metric is really, really challenging to organize society around.
	So, tough question to answer.
	I apologize.
	I apologize.
	Thank you.
	So I'm very much a stickler for sticking to your word with things.
	If everyone does what they're saying to you and they are allowed to fend for themselves, the idea that people are responsible for themselves.
	And as long as you all play by the same rules and you pick the best rules to help the most people, Then everything should work out.
	Sure.
	So it's not really happiness that is the metric, it's the pursuit of happiness or the freedom for self-responsibility, self-motivation, that everyone who, you know, does not initiate force against others or defraud them and so on is free to pursue their bliss and some will succeed and some will fail and some will get hit by a bus.
	So it's not really happiness, it's freedom as far as I understand it and equality before the law or equality before the rules, that's key for you.
	Yes, with the belief that allowing that pursuit will actually create the happiness and equality and flourishment.
	I'm not sure what flourishment is, but I assume that just general well-being.
	You said it would create equality.
	What does that mean?
	So in my head, if you're allowed to pursue your own agenda and you're responsible for yourself and you're not beholden to others and such, then it is your capacity that determines your if you're allowed to pursue your own agenda and you're responsible That is the level playing field.
	Oh, so equality of opportunity.
	not equality of outcome.
	Okay, just important to figure out.
	So happiness, you can say that certainly some people will be happier as a whole, some people will be unhappier, but freedom is the essential ingredient.
	Is that fair to say?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Just because when you start talking about happiness, it says, well, you know, I want to produce a system that's going to make the most people happy.
	Now, of course, I generally think that freedom produces more happiness in the long run, but it also produces unhappiness, right?
	I mean, and I sort of hate to put it this way, but I think it's important to reflect on this, that when you have freedom, economic freedom in particular, but when you have freedom as a whole, You get inequality of outcome.
	And inequality of outcome is a great sting to vanity.
	Now, I personally don't mind vanity being stung pretty heavily because I think it's kind of a toxic ingredient in our mental makeup.
	It's...
	You know, thinking you can do really great things, you could say it's vanity until you've achieved them, in which case it's simply a resume.
	But there is...
	An unhappiness that comes out of inequality, resentment, jealousy, and so on.
	So that, you know, when people do really, really well, and other people don't, then the people who don't can sometimes be resentful.
	Now, it can help if people understand IQ and all that kind of stuff, and the bell curve, then it can make people less frustrated by that, because then they're less susceptible, right?
	Understanding IQ, like one of the reasons I talk about it so much, is it's the inoculation against resentment.
	And, you know, like, if you look at a great singer in a band, well, they have the look usually, they certainly have the voice, they have the presence, they have all of that, and they took the risk.
	So that's why they're up there singing and you're in the audience dancing along or whatever.
	And because you can clearly hear the quality of their voice, the quality of their songs, the quality of their...
	Presentation or the showmanship or something, then it's not usually too baffling as to why you're listening to them and they're not listening to you.
	But with intelligence and money and other things, it's a challenge.
	The other thing too, of course, is that you can't tax a good singer's voice and share his vocal qualities around with the general audience.
	You can tax the money that he makes with his voice and you can transfer it around like you can't take Celine Dion's voice and apply it To somebody who sounds like a cat in a blender, but you can take the money that Celine Dion earns with her voice and then share that around so we can hear and participate in the singer's voice.
	And we're happy that the singer has made his songs because they give us great pleasure.
	And we don't usually resent the singer.
	When we enjoy the singer, we enjoy the band.
	We don't usually resent it.
	But with intelligence and money-making, it's quite another matter.
	Mostly because the biological and environmental bases of IQ have been suppressed.
	And so it's very easy to just say, well, people are lucky.
	And people are just...
	Exploiting others, and that's how we explain the mystery of wealth.
	And, like, if you thought every singer sounded exactly the same, then it wouldn't make any sense why Pavarotti made a lot more than some guy humming away in his shower.
	But, you know, because everyone can clearly hear the difference in vocal qualities, it's a little tougher to see.
	I sort of wish in a way...
	That people's foreheads were as big as their IQ. Because then what would happen is, you'd look at, you know, somebody who made a lot of money, and, you know, usually it's because, partly, at least because they're very intelligent, you'd say, because you can hear the singer's voice, it sounds good, right?
	But you can't see the smart guy's intelligence.
	The brain is kind of the same size, except for that Ma fellow in China who really appears to be the wall of China.
	Sorry, we couldn't finish it because we needed the remainder of the material, so finish that Ma guy's head.
	But...
	Yeah, it just would be kind of cool if you could have a visual representation of someone's intelligence that matched our audio appreciation of the quality of someone singing so that it would make sense why some people make more money than others.
	And also, of course, as you know, when it comes to happiness, moving from a state of illusion, which is the vast majority of the population, but moving from a state of illusion to a state of truth is really, really, really painful.
	It's really painful.
	I was just, Mike Cernovich the other day was mentioning that part of what caused him to sort of wake up was insomnia.
	And the same thing was true for me.
	Just, I guess, my waspy sense of things are awry finally broke through and prevented me from sleeping until I damn well woke up.
	And I really didn't want the process and avoided it as felt like a sort of demonic possession of truth.
	That's sort of Oh no!
	The feels and the facts are erupting within me and I can't stop them.
	And it's a very painful and unpleasant process to wake up from the hypersleep of history.
	And it's painful.
	So when you say, well, you know, there's going to be an increase in happiness, I don't know.
	I mean...
	So I agree that the process of learning that you're living a lot of lies and a lot of bad notions is a very hard process for a lot of people.
	But once you come to accept that, it's better.
	Because happiness is kind of a function of expectations.
	If you wake up every morning expecting to win the lottery, you're always going to be depressed.
	But if you wake up Because you're a starving kid in Africa and all of a sudden you're being fed, you're going to be really happy just to be fed.
	So if people have an understanding of themselves and they're able to reach where they can expect themselves to reach or maybe a little fast, hopefully, that should level out to acceptance and happiness.
	Does that make sense?
	Now, what about, so, what would change in terms of the legal structure of society as it stood?
	Let's talk about something that I've talked about a number of times in the past, the welfare state, right?
	So, in a situation of equality before the law, and I assume property rights and so on, what happens to the welfare state?
	So, there's, like, the welfare state as it should have been, and the welfare state as it is.
	Like, the From what I was taught in Fantastic American Public Education, it was intended to just help people between jobs to get them back on their feet, which is basically how private charity used to work.
	You used to help your neighbor.
	Wait, so you're including unemployment insurance there too, right?
	Yeah.
	That's how it's always basically presented is, oh, you're just helping them get out of poverty.
	You're pushing them out.
	Which, if it actually worked that way, would be fine.
	Yeah, I will help the person next to me.
	But that's not how it has played out historically.
	Okay, I'm a little confused now.
	So you're saying that the welfare state in certain circumstances or in certain situations can be fine, but I'm not sure how that's equality before the law.
	Because with the welfare state, as opposed to charity, right, private charity, voluntary charity, personal charity, or institutional, but at least voluntary.
	When you have the welfare state, the government has the power and the obligation to use coercion to take money from one group and give it to other groups, namely from the productive to give it to the unproductive or the people who are consuming far more resources usually than they're producing.
	So how is that equality before the law?
	I'm trying to understand like relative or equality of opportunity.
	So imagine if the welfare worked like insurance.
	Where it was everyone's paying in and oh, this guy ended up poor because stock market crashed, yada yada.
	And then he gets back out like he got sick and get healthy.
	That would be equality.
	That's a fair way for things to work, but it's not how it works out.
	It's, you know, old money continues, paying in the majority of income tax.
	First of all, not everyone pays into insurance, right?
	If you have to pay into insurance, that's called compulsory, and that's Obamacare, right?
	So with insurance, you can choose to pay into insurance, or you can choose to take the risks or save the money and so on.
	So are you talking about a government program or private charity or an insurance against poverty kind of situation, like a private organization?
	So, I guess in my head it's more of a, it functions like a private but it would be a government function.
	But, like, let's pretend government works well.
	But no, it's not a question of whether it works well or not.
	It's a question of, do you have equality before the law?
	Because if you have need, and the government can use force to compel other people's resources to flow your way, Then some people have the property rights, which is I get to keep the money the government has given to me that it's stolen from you, and other people don't have property rights in that their property is violated in order to, quote, provide charity, which is basically just buying votes.
	So how is there equality before the law if some people get to keep their property and other people have to lose their property?
	So while it's compulsory, there is What I'm trying to get is there's an expectation that those people that are getting the resources do not continue to get the resources that they become the people paying in.
	Let me try and throw an analogy at you.
	Funding public schools.
	If you have a school with 100 kids and those kids grow up and they have to pay for the next generation or you don't have public education.
	The guy who ended up good and smart and made a lot of money is the only one able to pay for that to get the next generation to keep the system moving.
	Sorry.
	I think I meandered a bit on that.
	Are you saying that there's a hundred kids in school, but only one of them makes enough money to pay for the taxes for the next generation to go to school?
	That's pretty close to how the wealth distribution in America has gotten.
	So that's bad, right?
	Well, I would agree that the wealth distribution is pretty bad, but...
	You have me tongue-tied.
	And this is what happens when you don't start from the ground up, right?
	And this is what happens.
	You're complaining that other people have their feels, but you have your feels.
	If you want to be philosophical, my friend, you must start by clearing away everything, total whiteboard, as blank as the space behind me.
	You must start with nothing.
	Nothing is true.
	Nothing is valid.
	This is...
	Descartes' approach.
	Like, imagine if I throw away absolutely everything that I believe.
	That's philosophy.
	That's science, too, by the way.
	But that's philosophy.
	You start with a completely blank slate.
	And then you say, okay, well, what is reality?
	Okay, what is knowledge?
	What is truth?
	What is virtue?
	And you build things up from the ground up.
	Now, I don't know where you've started from, but it sure as hell isn't the beginning.
	And this is why you're getting confused.
	Because you have these vague principles like, you know, I want people to be happy, and there should be equality, and people should be helped, and it's all just a mishmash.
	It's a bunch of confused, frankly, no disrespect, but it's real.
	It's a bunch of confused nonsense.
	And this is why it took me, what...
	10 to 12 minutes to get you into a state of complete confusion about some basic questions of coercion versus voluntarism.
	I say this not out of disrespect, but out of respect.
	If I didn't think you were capable of grasping philosophy, I wouldn't be saying this, right?
	But you have to start with nothing.
	And you also have to recognize, you know, there are some basic things that power corrupts and so on.
	And if you give the government the power to move money around, it will very quickly start moving money around in return for votes.
	And if you give people the opportunity to get something now rather than later, they'll usually take something now unless there's a big cost.
	And therefore, government will spend stuff now while borrowing and printing and all that so that the bill gets kicked down the road.
	These are all just basic realities.
	People want something for nothing, and there's nothing wrong with that.
	That's perfectly fine, right?
	It's why we have cool things like telephones, because people were too lazy to walk across town.
	I mean, laziness is the root of technology and automation and all kinds of cool things.
	It's why we have a remote control, rather than when I was a kid, you had to get up and change the channel by hand, I'm telling you.
	That's before people got fat, because they apparently got Velcroed to their sofas on football season.
	But this is the basic issue when you don't start with a blank slate.
	When you don't start with getting rid of everything.
	Now, this doesn't mean everyone has to do that.
	It doesn't mean everyone has to go total blank slate building things.
	Because, you know, that takes a lot of intelligence, a lot of curiosity, a lot of creativity, a lot of integrity, and a lot of hard work.
	Just like not everyone has to know how to build a cell phone, you know, design a cell phone or whatever.
	And so if you want to get into the game called philosophy...
	Then you gotta have very clear answers, right?
	Because I'm sort of asking, like I was sort of playing The average person asking you, the wise guy, about philosophy.
	And, you know, it didn't take long at all for me to be confused.
	And it didn't take long for you to be confused at all.
	And that just means you haven't dug deep enough to erase everything you think you know in that Socratic method where you think you know something, but it turns out you really don't.
	You just have to dig deeper, cast aside more of your history, your culture, your reasoning, your personality, and so on, like the reasoning you think is true.
	And you have to just get to that rock bottom place where you can start building your castle on rock rather than on sand.
	Okay.
	So, sitting there listening to think about it, those answers have a couple of things muddled together.
	One of them is the fact that Our society as it is now still has the layover effects of hardcore inequality.
	Mostly from wealth.
	Wait a second.
	What are you doing?
	What are you doing?
	You're just going on like I didn't say anything.
	I always find that kind of baffling.
	I mean, I always find that kind of bad.
	Like, I just gave you a big speech.
	You gave me a couple of arguments that fell apart very quickly, and you became very confused.
	And I gave you the reason why.
	And now you're moving on like I just didn't say anything.
	It's like, hello, is this thing on?
	Hello, can you hear me?
	Can you hear me?
	Or am I deep in space?
	And I always find this kind of...
	You probably have a complaint that people don't listen to philosophy.
	Well, man, I just gave you two barrels worth of philosophy, and you didn't listen to a thing.
	My apologies.
	And you want to just go on constructing things, right?
	And making statements and observations.
	But I'm telling you, you haven't done the groundwork.
	You haven't done the from the root up, from sense data, to perception, to the validity of the senses, to our capacity to reason, to what is reason for, how is it valid.
	I mean, you've got to build.
	From the ground up.
	And that way you'll have answers.
	Like someone comes to me and says, well, what does equality before the law mean?
	Well, that no one has any rights over anyone else.
	Now, unfortunately that, or fortunately I guess in the long run, that leads to a place with no government.
	Because government is having...
	People in government have rights that nobody else has, right?
	The right to initiate force against others.
	Sorry, not allowed by philosophy.
	Gotta go in the long run, right?
	What about the welfare state?
	Well, is it coercive?
	Is it the initiation of the use of force?
	No welfare state.
	It is the initiation of the use of force.
	So if you go really from the ground up and have validated things back to front, then you have the answers.
	And that's what people need.
	If people come to ask you for answers...
	And you say, well, in an ideal world, the welfare state could work, but there are problems with how it's implemented and this and that and the other.
	Then you're actually not talking about any principles at all.
	You're talking about what you prefer, what is easy to get away with, what is part of our cultural or economic momentum of the way things are.
	But no principles, no actual truths, certainly no moral truths where you say, no, I can't have a welfare state.
	It's the initiation of force, and that's wrong.
	So, you are very much in favor of the non-initiation of force, so I have two questions for you.
	How are you supposed to handle military when, basically, you get a bunch of people that want to be philosophical, and you say, everyone follows these rules, you don't have government, we're all equal, and the people next to you get together and attack.
	Like, you need a military, which requires a government to run it, doesn't it?
	Why does a military require a government?
	I guess I am mixing up definitions, essentially.
	You would need a body to run the military to protect the people in that society, because if you don't have some kind of authoritative body, then you will get conquered.
	Oh you mean like the way that that Europe is currently doing very well because it has governments and a military or the way that America is doing really well and doesn't have any debt or anything like that because it has a government and a military and the way that ancient Rome did really really well because it had a government and a military because you see if you don't have those things things are really bad or if you find other ways of organizing them things are really bad right?
	Why do you need a government to have a military, right?
	You can look at Eric Prince.
	He's been on this show.
	He was the former CEO of Blackwater and they did things ridiculously more efficiently because they were free market driven than the government did.
	So why do you need a government to have a military and they're not enormous dangers that have been repeated throughout history?
	That the government fails to protect.
	I mean, look at Europe.
	They're not paying, most countries are not paying the 2% of GDP that they're supposed to pay to be in NATO. What they're doing is they're not bothering to have any military, but instead they're putting all the money into these massive migrant-attracting welfare schemes that are significantly...
	So I ask again, why do you absolutely need a government?
	I agree, you need some sort of martial force, for sure.
	That's very helpful.
	And I've gone into this in my free book, Practical Anarchy, available at freedomainradio.com slash free.
	But again, you're just talking about consequentialism.
	And consequentialism is not philosophy.
	Well, you need this, and therefore you've got to have taxes.
	This is not an argument.
	It's certainly not a principled argument.
	All you're doing is saying, bad things will happen if you don't submit to this agent of force.
	Bad things will happen if you don't submit to this agent of force.
	Which is exactly the same as, go to church or you'll be demonically possessed.
	You can invent all the negative consequences that you want.
	And then say, well, this is why people have to submit to a coercive authority.
	Well...
	All the coercive authorities throughout history that had the power of taxation in the military, I mean, prior to the current ones, right?
	All by definition, all prior societies that had states and the military and the power of taxation have crumbled into dust.
	And then everyone comes up and says, well, you need this.
	It's like, have you read history?
	It's a disaster all the time.
	Do you need some sort of military capacity to defend yourself from aggressors in the world?
	Absolutely.
	Is the only way it can possibly be done with some self-destructive, centralized, coercive agency and a government-run and government-controlled and force-funded military?
	Well, of course not.
	Of course not.
	In the past, governments used to grow all the grains.
	That doesn't mean that if you didn't want government to grow the grains, you wanted everyone to starve to death.
	So your proposal would be like a private company forming a military and then signing a contract with the group of people calling themselves a country?
	Or are you just saying that there exists a military system to defend the philosophical nation?
	I'm not sure what you're asking me.
	Alright, I'll drop away from the consequentialism.
	Because it just kind of gets into a A quagmire of sorts.
	Not really.
	Not really.
	And what you need to do is you need to go and read my books.
	I'm not going to give you a live audiobook.
	If you're interested in this stuff, go read the books.
	And there's lots of people who've done work on how to voluntarily have an army without taxation and estate.
	And it's actually been done in history, but it would be certainly done a lot better in a free society.
	So go to freedomainradio.com slash free and have a look at the books.
	But I'm not going to go through all the arguments here.
	That's kind of why I wrote the books.
	But thanks for your call, and I appreciate it.
	And let's move on to the next caller.
	Okay, up next we have Adam.
	Adam wrote into the show and said, My fiancé is a leftist woman living in Vancouver, BC, currently enrolled in a teaching school, and I am a conservative labor working man living in Ohio.
	I've managed to make a small breakthrough to her delusional liberal beliefs, but can't quite manage a major breakthrough.
	What advice could you give to those of us who are struggling to bring our loved ones out of the cave of ignorance and into the light?
	That's from Adam.
	Hey Adam, how you doing?
	Good, how are you?
	You had me at Vancouver.
	When you said Vancouver, you didn't have to say leftist.
	I kind of got the connection from there.
	How long have you guys been going out?
	Coming up on three years now.
	Three years?
	Long distance?
	Yep.
	Three years long distance.
	Why?
	I don't know.
	We met at my...
	No, no.
	That's not a good answer, man.
	That's not a good answer.
	Well, what I'm getting at here is when we met three years ago at my brother's wedding and I was in a current relationship at the time and when we met we just hit it off and we started...
	Talking on Skype, I ended up ending my other relationship and we end up seeing each other.
	We travel back and forth between here and there.
	How old are you?
	29.
	What's the plan here?
	We are getting married in December or January, whenever the visa goes through.
	Oh, she's going to you?
	Yeah.
	And I assume that her teaching certificate is transferable and all?
	Yes.
	And has she looked into the job market?
	I mean, how's that looking these days?
	Yeah, we have.
	I actually have a couple connections of people that are in education.
	And so we got some good, how do you say, prospects for her to get a job.
	Right.
	Now, what are her...
	Give me the top couple of delusional liberal beliefs that she has.
	Oh, man.
	All right.
	Well, naturally, she has Trump derangement syndrome.
	How bad?
	What are we talking?
	Toxoplasmosis levels, or what do we got?
	I mean, it's to the point of...
	Well, I actually made a breakthrough with her.
	I told her to go look for some stuff herself, and she did, and she found what I was talking about.
	But it's pretty bad.
	No matter what information I give her...
	She goes back to school every day.
	And they have things up in Vancouver like the poison of white men.
	The poison of white...
	Oh, so white men are poisonous.
	Right, yeah.
	It's basically like talks that people give at the university in auditoriums and whatnot.
	And I assume that you are a white man?
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, you know, there is a lot of racism in society these days, just not what people think.
	And what does she think of these talks about toxic or poisonous white masculinity?
	She sees it as more innocent than what I see it as.
	She disagrees with it, I assume.
	Not entirely.
	Oh, man.
	And that's where I'm having a problem.
	She sympathizes with them.
	She what?
	She sympathizes with this.
	Her thing is, it's the same echo chamber, as you said, where they say, well, as a white man, you need to take a step back and let other people talk, basically.
	Well, hang on, hang on.
	Is your girlfriend black?
	No, she's Asian.
	She's Asian, like East Asian, like Chinese, Japanese, that kind of thing?
	Filipino.
	Filipino, okay.
	So she says, as a white man, you need to stand back and let other people talk.
	She didn't say it as direct as that, but yeah, that's what I was getting from.
	And that set me off, and I went on a tangent on her.
	Well, sure.
	I mean, if I'm saying, you know, Group X is poison and they get upset and I say, no, no, no, you need to let me talk.
	It's like, first of all, they don't have to let me talk.
	Certainly shouldn't be getting taxpayers to fund this kind of toxic ideology.
	But no, I mean, the idea that if you interrupt someone who's insulting you, you're just being repressive.
	It's like, no, no, that's not how freedom works.
	That's not how reality works.
	Certainly not how adults should work.
	So I guess you're getting a preview of your marriage.
	It would seem that way, but there's just, there's so much more to our relationship than just, you know, politics and everything.
	And I know that these are big issues that I do need to worry about because it has to do with morals and philosophy.
	And that's why I'm...
	No, it has to do with love.
	First and foremost, Adam, it has to do with love.
	Okay.
	If someone had a talk about someone I loved calling them poison...
	That's a love test.
	Do you understand?
	Right.
	If I'm just gonna...
	I love this person.
	Don't you dare talk about someone I love this way.
	You calling my fiancé poison?
	The hell's the matter with you people?
	Crazies?
	How racist?
	How bigoted?
	How vile?
	How toxic?
	Yes, there's poison in the room, but it ain't on the PowerPoint.
	Right?
	Right.
	Right.
	It's a love test.
	It's not an abstract virtue test.
	She's willing to go and give money and time and moral authority to groups calling you toxic and poison.
	And when you complain about it, she basically says, shut up, Whitey.
	Thank you.
	Well, in all fairness, after she said that and I gave her my opinion on it, she didn't seem too supportive of it anymore.
	It's almost like she's very easily swayed towards the left, but when I give her points, she can't argue.
	She just kind of backs off.
	And what are the other liberal beliefs?
	We've got Trump derangement syndrome.
	We've got sympathy for anti-white racism.
	What else?
	She told me she wanted to do genderless raising, and I told her I wanted to marry her.
	You're trolling me, man.
	Come on, Adam.
	Seriously.
	Adam?
	No.
	No, no.
	Seriously.
	Come on.
	You're not telling me this.
	You're screwing with me, right?
	Nope.
	Genderless raising?
	Yep.
	Okay.
	I'm ready.
	I'm strapped in, man.
	Go for it.
	Tell me more.
	All right.
	So, when she said that she wanted to do the genderless raising, neutral colors, and all these ridiculous things, I basically told her that...
	It wouldn't work out between us if that's really what she wanted to do because it was ridiculous to me.
	She said, well, how?
	She's obviously Vancouver leftist.
	They are anti-nuclear family.
	I basically explained it to her like this.
	If I have a son, I'm going to teach my son and give my son the things that I had that I enjoyed.
	Because that's what I know and that's what I want him to be exposed to.
	Well, you're going to listen to your children.
	And male and female brains are different.
	And male and female bodies are different.
	I can't believe the things I have to say.
	Not to you, but on this show.
	You know, if your son is into typically boy things, then give him typically boy things.
	If your girl is into typically boy things, give her typically boy things, right?
	I mean, you're not going to imprint them on them, right?
	I mean, if your girl wants to go and do guy things with you, great, you know, fine, no problem with that.
	You understand?
	Like...
	It's not gender.
	It's nothing to do with ideology.
	It is to do with you listen to your children.
	And in general, the girls will want to do girly things and the boys will want to do boy things.
	And there's tons of exceptions.
	Nothing wrong with any of that.
	But if your boy wants to do boy things...
	Is your wife going to say, no, he has to play with dolls.
	No, he has to go and do ballet.
	No, he can't have a toy gun.
	No, like, is it going to be like that?
	Is it going to be like little sexless Stalin camp?
	Well, I don't think that she would force the kid to do, like, you know, the opposite.
	I think when she says this stuff, it's more like, don't give, don't do the whole pink...
	For girls and the blue for boys and all this crap.
	Where she wants to let the kid eventually make up their own mind.
	And I try to explain to her, when the child's an infant, you can't force the kid to make its own mind up.
	You need to help the kid.
	Right.
	When you started dating her, who paid for dates?
	We share everything.
	I mean, we never actually went out on a traditional date, like, let's go to dinner or whatever, because we were traveling so far between each other.
	So when she comes here, we kind of share, but I usually pay for most things.
	And when I go there, we share things.
	She usually pays for more.
	And why does she...
	I mean, long-distance relationships are expensive.
	And how is she affording all of this?
	Um...
	You know what?
	I'm not really sure how we're all really affording it.
	We've had really good deals.
	We really do.
	We do really good budgeting.
	We spent 100 days in South America, and we didn't spend very much money at all.
	Wait, you don't know where her money comes from?
	Oh, I know.
	I mean, she's doing...
	She tutors, but...
	So, I mean, we make enough money to get by, but we don't make a killing or anything.
	We're just really good at budgeting our money.
	So, she's paying for teacher's college and for a long-distance relationship in 100 days in South America by tutoring?
	Yes.
	She also acquired some money when she was younger through, like, her sister.
	Her sister passed.
	Oh, her sister died and she got her sister's money?
	I think, but I don't want to say that for a 100% fact.
	Are her parents still together?
	Yes.
	And what do her parents think of her beliefs?
	You know, her parents don't talk about that kind of stuff very much.
	There is a kind of a...
	I don't want to say like a language barrier because we get along very well.
	I mean, our parents get along very well and they're very supportive of our relationship.
	But there's a connection between the whole long distance thing where I don't get to talk to them very much.
	What do they think of this?
	What do they think?
	I mean, they're going to be grandparents.
	I assume they're going to have some role.
	Do you guys want to have kids?
	Is that right?
	She wants to adopt, but we've decided otherwise that we're going to...
	God, she's a cliche.
	She wants to adopt because there are kids in the third world.
	You haven't heard the best part.
	She wants to adopt kids of all races.
	Sure.
	Yeah.
	I mean, there's no leftist cliche that this woman would shock me with at this point.
	Right.
	So she wants to adopt kids of all races and not have any kids of her own.
	Is that right?
	Right.
	I think we've pretty much changed our mind on that for the most part.
	I really want kids.
	I really, really, really want kids.
	I think that...
	And you want your kids?
	Right, yeah.
	Okay, yeah, because you're saying...
	Again, that sounds rough.
	There are lots of reasons why people will adopt, and adoption can be a wonderful thing.
	But I think we're kind of built to have our own.
	I mean, it's a backup, but it's not...
	Anyway, go on.
	But, I mean, she's 29 as well, and she is...
	So we're getting up there.
	By the time she moves down here...
	She'll be 30 when we are married for two months.
	And so we got to get kind of a move on if we want to have our own kids.
	Would she stay home with the kids?
	I was actually looking to be a stay-at-home dad.
	Oh, you'll stay home with the kids.
	So she'll go to work as a teacher and you will be a stay-at-home dad?
	That's what we're hoping for at this point.
	Wait, that sounds...
	I mean, she has agreed to that plan?
	Oh, yeah.
	She would want to do that if money dictates it.
	Depends on where we are with our jobs at the time.
	And how will she handle the breastfeeding?
	She'll get a pump in the toilet kind of thing?
	I was assuming there was the whole bag pump thing.
	All right.
	Okay.
	All right.
	So anything else that you want to share about the situation and her beliefs?
	Well, a couple things that she's kind of laid back on from her original ideas that I've kind of talked to her about and she's changed her ideas on.
	One was the genderless raising.
	Another one was adoption.
	She's open to having kids now, so...
	But the other one was gun control.
	I own firearms, and obviously, I mean, she doesn't want guns, obviously, but I've talked her into allowing that one to slide by, I guess.
	She's still not happy about it, but she understands why I want to keep my right.
	But the...
	Let's see, she's...
	This is probably the one I have the biggest trouble with.
	She's not a feminist, which is surprising, but she is a heavy feminist sympathizer.
	And what does feminism mean in this context?
	Feminist, she thinks that The feminazis are a thing that doesn't exist and feminists are people that are for equal rights.
	She doesn't see the evil side of third wave feminism.
	She only sees the first wave idea of feminism.
	She thinks that's what feminism is still.
	No matter how many times I try to say it.
	What rights or rules does she feel that women don't have access to that men have access to?
	Oh, she's 100% on board with the wage gap falsity.
	Oh, she thinks that the only reason there's a wage gap is because evil patriots just love paying women less money and nobody has ever thought of bidding them up because they're so economically valuable.
	Correct.
	Okay.
	And...
	Why doesn't she accept...
	I mean, I assume you sat down, you've gone through the numbers.
	We've got a great presentation on the myth of the wage gap.
	And Dr.
	Warren Farrell has got a whole book on this.
	So what happens when you give her those crazy little things we call facts?
	What happens?
	She always moves the goalposts.
	Every time.
	Every single time we have an argument or a debate...
	She always moves the goalpost to something else.
	Well, then why is it this?
	Why is it?
	Why is it?
	It keeps moving.
	It keeps moving.
	And to the point where she gets frustrated, throws her head up and says, oh, the world is just screwed up and I don't know what to do about it.
	So not really much one for facts, reason and evidence, right?
	Right.
	Right.
	And see, the thing is, she ends up...
	And there's certain situations where I can see that when I tell her something, I can see the light.
	I see it hit her, and sometimes she changes her mind.
	But then there's other times where I give her just basic facts, and it's like completely over your head, out the window, I don't want to hear it type deal.
	Wait, she reacts emotionally?
	No, not...
	I'm saying it's over her head.
	I'll say I'll give her a fact.
	Kind of like your last caller when you told him some philosophy and then he just continued like he didn't say anything.
	Right.
	It's weird, right?
	Right, yeah.
	And so when I tell her...
	So sometimes she reacts in a negative way where she doesn't even...
	It's like I didn't say anything at all.
	And other times she reacts in a very positive way where she understands what I said and she accepts my arguments.
	So I can see that she's like...
	When she accepts your arguments, Adam, does she...
	Do you have to relitigate every day or does she like, no, no, no, we did that one already and she accepts it and it doesn't come up again in terms of conflict?
	Let's see.
	For instance, like the genderless raising one, that one is done.
	That's over and done with.
	I've convinced her on that one.
	And But when it comes to other things, it's like I have to dictate every day.
	Trump derangement syndrome is so heavily ingrained in her.
	Because she keeps watching CNN and MSNBC. She just keeps watching it.
	And I don't know what to do about it.
	I can't compete against CNN and UBC. What do your parents think of this relationship and her perspectives?
	Oh, man.
	Ugh.
	My parents are Democrats, so they sympathize.
	So your mom's a Democrat, and you're going to marry a lefty.
	Yeah.
	Paging Dr.
	F. Paging Dr.
	F. So your parents are Democrats, and what do they think of your multiracial, genderless potential, adopting a rainbow coalition of kids?
	What do they think of all this?
	My mom was a nurse for 35 years and she just loves people in general and she's his biggest sweetheart.
	So she just can't wait for grandkids.
	It doesn't matter.
	And your father?
	He just kind of hums and shakes his head and he's just kind of a quiet guy.
	He's excited for everything and he really loves my fiance very much.
	My whole family loves her.
	And I think mainly because she likes baseball.
	That's why he likes her.
	She likes baseball.
	No, seriously.
	I mean, I know that's kind of like a joke, but...
	Because you're...
	Well, we'll get to this in a sec.
	You're playing with fire.
	There's risks in what you're doing.
	Right.
	But your dad's fine with it because she likes baseball?
	No, no, no.
	My dad...
	We all get along very well.
	And...
	Except for when it comes to politics.
	My brother and I versus my parents.
	And it can be a bloodbath, especially because my mom has the worst case of Trump derangement syndrome I've ever seen.
	How bad is hers?
	What does it look like?
	Screaming.
	Screaming, yelling, ranting.
	Wait, I thought you said she was a total sweetheart who loved everybody.
	Oh, that's the propaganda.
	Now we get to the facts.
	Okay.
	No, I understand.
	So, screaming?
	What is she screaming?
	What does she say?
	She just basically, you tell her something about, you know, the media spins everything that Trump says, and like the truth about Donald Trump, the series you did.
	You say anything from there, and she goes, oh, yeah.
	Well, he just hates women.
	It's like, well, here's the facts.
	Well, he just, he just grabbed them by the pussy and she just has no concept of you tell her something and what bounces back to you is just something you heard on CNN. Doesn't she love you, Adam?
	I've, I've actually had a, uh, I had a kind of a blow up on them where I told them that I would never forgive them for voting for I'm voting for Hillary because I couldn't get drafted until I'm 45.
	Sorry, I want to get back to that in a sec.
	I just don't want to lose my question.
	Regarding love, and I want to make this clear to the other people who are going to end up listening to this, you know, four or five of us around this stitch and bitch knitting circle of reality, but the reason I'm saying this is that If your parents love you,
	and if your parents raised you, obviously they did, and they love you, which is the claim, generally, then if you love something, they should try as very best as they can to understand what it is that you love about that thing, right?
	There are passions my daughter has that are generally incomprehensible to me.
	And that's fine.
	Look, there are passions I have that are incomprehensible to her, but we work to try and understand what draws each other to various topics and various ideas and various preferences, right?
	Right.
	And this is something that's important for people to understand as a whole.
	If people love you, if they claim to love you, they can't hate something you love.
	They cannot hate something you love.
	They can be confused by it, they can have reservations, they can have questions, they can have opposition, but they just can't hate something you love.
	I mean, I assume that not being drafted, having some economic freedom, perhaps limiting destructive waves of immigration coming into America, I assume, going out on a limb here, Adam, that these things are very important to you.
	Yes.
	And more than just abstract, as you say, it's about your future.
	It's about your taxes.
	It's about the kind of schools your kids are going to grow in.
	It's about whether someone you love is driving across a bridge and it goddamn well collapses because all the money's being wasted on foreign wars, right?
	So this is all very important to you.
	I don't quite understand what it means to say, Adam, I love you.
	And I hate this Trump fellow that you're addicted to.
	I mean, this is important for you, right?
	Right.
	And visceral.
	And it has significant effects on your life, right?
	Does your father work in the free market or more in the government?
	He is...
	He works free market.
	Right.
	Right.
	So...
	When the Trump stuff comes up...
	And your mother...
	As you put it, is screaming that Trump hates what I guess hates disabled people, hates women, hates minorities, whatever it is, right?
	Just he's a bigger sexist or a racist, whatever she's heard, right?
	Does she understand that if she's saying he's evil or immoral or bad, that your preference for him puts you in that camp as well?
	I've never made that argument to her.
	But it's true, right?
	Yeah.
	If I say, X is the KKK, and you're like, I can get behind that, right?
	Then clearly, we have a huge moral divide.
	And how either she and as the sculptor who sculpted you to a large degree.
	She had a lot to do with how you grew up, with how your ethics developed, how your morals developed, how your empathy developed and so on.
	Right.
	So is she saying, well, Trump is a bad guy.
	You like Trump.
	Therefore, you're kind of in the orbit of badness.
	So, wow, I must have really done something wrong in raising you that you'd end up being caught up by this, you know, popsicle orange con man.
	Right.
	And I say this because I had the same thing with Ayn Rand.
	You know, before there was Trump derangement syndrome, lo, verily, like a flickering dragon fire.
	"'Fighting fire over the horizon, lo, there was embedded in the seams and rocks of society the Ayn Rand derangement syndrome.'" Where people would have all these opinions about Ayn Rand.
	Had they ever read her books?
	No.
	Had they ever understood her arguments?
	No.
	No.
	They had only heard other people talk about her and give their impression of her.
	Did they have a clue what was being built from the ground up?
	Had they even skimmed through John Galt's speech?
	Had they skimmed through the virtue of selfishness or capitalism, the unknown ideal or the romantic manifesto?
	Did they have a clue where the woman had come from, what she struggled to get through, how she became one of the world's greatest writers in a language she didn't even grow up with and didn't even start learning?
	Until she was older.
	No.
	Were there any specific rebuttals to the arguments that she put forward in her books?
	No.
	They had just been told that she was mean and selfish and nasty and...
	And that's, see, that's who she was.
	Just mean and nasty and she hated the poor and she wanted people to die in the street and dogs to eat dogs for no reason.
	Madness.
	And of course, you know, it's a cliche, right?
	Because in Ayn Rand's books, she's got the second-handers, right?
	The social metaphysicians, the people who say, well, I don't ask myself what is true.
	I ask myself what people think is true.
	I don't ask myself what is right.
	I ask myself what is approved of.
	The shadows cast by demons is the heart of most people's personalities.
	And so in condemning Ayn Rand, they were condemning the light that showed the hollowness within them.
	Right?
	They were damning the x-ray machine that stood before them and showed they had no bones, no spine whatsoever.
	Nothing to stand for, nothing to live for, nothing to fight for, nothing to respect, nothing to treasure or value or love or defend.
	That they were nothing in skin.
	Right?
	Empty-headed little whirlwinds of socially confused and highly adaptive nothingness.
	So of course they're going to find opposition to Ayn Rand within their empty hearts.
	Sure, the emptiest demons hate the meatiest exorcists.
	That's natural.
	And so when I found myself passionately and intellectually powerfully drawn to Ayn Rand...
	A giant light went up around me.
	You know, you shoot these flares up over the jungle or over the waters to see what is around you.
	And before I was blind, then I saw.
	I was blind and then I saw.
	The light was turned on.
	Not just the light of philosophy.
	That's powerful enough.
	But it's the light that shows you the shapes and the soulnesses all around you.
	And people rolled their eyes.
	And people scorned.
	And people mocked.
	And people derided.
	And people insulted.
	And people portrayed it as small and nothing and petty and silly and you'll outgrow it and it's just a fetish.
	She's not even considered a great philosopher.
	Derrida has never mentioned her at all.
	And sadly for me that was a choice.
	That was a choice, because nobody cared about me enough to find out what I cared about with Ayn Rand.
	Why did it matter to me?
	Why was it important?
	What were the facts, the reasons, and the arguments that drove my passion for philosophy as a whole, but Ayn Rand as the gateway drug to even deeper things?
	Nobody wanted to know.
	They just condemned and derided it.
	That's horrifyingly revelatory, Adam.
	Because it shows whether you're real to people or not.
	Do they care about you?
	Or do they care about something else?
	I don't know.
	I've never found...
	Let me see if I can put this the right way.
	You know how they say, well, you don't put ideology before people.
	You don't put mere ideas before people.
	And I understand where that comes from.
	And that's a whole other topic or question.
	But...
	With your parents, there's something in their minds that is eclipsing who you, Adam, and your brother actually are.
	What you care about, why you care about it, why it's important to you.
	There's something that is in the way of them grasping who you are What motivates you?
	What you're passionate about and why?
	And I want everyone to understand out there because I can feel people's spider-crawliness of revulsion and reaction coming up to this particular topic.
	I understand.
	I mean, we've got to put our miner's helmets on and be brave and resolute in the exploration of these tunnels.
	Because I am not saying at all At all.
	That to love someone, you must agree with everything they believe.
	Please, this narcissism of tiny differences that people constantly display.
	Oh, it's so boring.
	Well, I don't agree with everything that Habab says.
	It's like, of course, who cares?
	It's just a stupid thing to say.
	I don't agree with everything I said yesterday, necessarily.
	I don't agree with half the things I believed 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, or even I don't believe that Santa Claus exists anymore, though I did for a little while when I was younger.
	I mean, of course, it's a way of pretend independence, of pretending that you have some sort of critical thought.
	Well, I don't agree with everything that Steph says, but ho ho ho.
	It's not an agreement.
	Just making up things you disagree with is not the same as having an identity or even a brain.
	So it's not about agreeing.
	With everything that someone you love loves.
	But it's about damn well getting down and doing the fun and dirty work of figuring out why they care so much about what they care about.
	Why does it matter?
	Because either we care about things for good reasons or bad reasons.
	Either we care about things for good reasons or bad reasons.
	But if we only care about them alone, in isolation, or, even worse, in the face of constant and withering scorn and attack for what we care about, we will never know the true reasons why we care about things.
	Like, let's say I'm really, really into watching sports.
	I care about it so much.
	And people sit down, and it's not like you've just got to sit down and watch sports with someone.
	That's not figuring anyone out.
	For your mom to go with you to a Trump rally and just sit there, you know, with that, you know, shitting a spiky watermelon through a boob kind of look, that's not what I'm talking about.
	Go and really try and understand and talk about it with you and try and understand the energy and talk to the people and try and figure out what's going on, what movement is going on, what is understood there that your mom or whoever is not understanding.
	It's not just about passively participating in whatever the passion is.
	It's about really trying to understand it.
	Maybe I care about...
	And I just, I get up and I watch sports and I'm, maybe it's because I'm not really achieving much in my own life.
	And maybe I want thrill or fantasy by proxy.
	I want to watch people.
	Maybe I'm gaining weight.
	Maybe I'm getting old and I'm disturbed and unsettled by the limitations of my own body.
	Like just the other day, I mean, I was a very good runner when I was younger.
	I was fast as a blur.
	The other day, I was running with my daughter, and she's very fast.
	And I was like, wait a minute.
	I'm doing a dad run.
	You know that just kind of lurching forward a little bit?
	Like, you're always running like you've got your wallet in your back, and you're jingling your change in your front khakis.
	It's like, just shuffling along like I'm being blown, like a scarecrow being slowly blown down the street.
	It's like, no, no, no.
	I'm too young.
	I'm only 50.
	And I put on the gas, and I didn't pull anything, which is good.
	But it's like, no, no, no.
	I still can run like I'm young.
	I can't run like a...
	Old man lurching up a hill towards a bus that's leaving.
	I just can't do it.
	So maybe I like watching, if I'm into sports, like I like watching, you know, the young healthy athletes in their prime because I'm avoiding maybe my own mortality or my own physical limitations that are growing or, you know, maybe I'm really into sports because I don't have anything to say to the people around me.
	So I turn on the TV and go beta, phase out.
	Nothing.
	Flatline, baby.
	Can't talk.
	Busy watching sports, right?
	There could be so many reasons why I'd be really into watching sports.
	I personally can't think of a good one, but maybe that's just my limitation.
	Maybe I just need to spend more time around people who are watching sports.
	I prefer the doing rather than the watching myself, but whatever, right?
	Or this could be movies or video games.
	Why do you care so much about this video game?
	Why are you really into this video game?
	It doesn't mean you've got to sit down and play with the person, just watch them and understand and really get into what they're doing.
	Maybe there are problems, maybe there's anxieties, and maybe video games, particularly intense video games, I'm thinking like the first-person shooters and so on, or even the strategy games, the Witcher 3s and the Shadows of Mordor and the Skyrims and so on.
	It takes you out of yourself.
	You cease to exist because you're in another world, another body, another world.
	Challenge.
	And you don't have to define your own challenges.
	They're handed to you.
	Video games, in a lot of ways, are extensions of school because you kind of don't exist and your assignments are all handed to you.
	But maybe there are good reasons.
	I like those games too, so maybe there are good reasons.
	I've only really played Skyrim, but maybe there are good reasons to like this.
	But get in and understand.
	Why people care about.
	Because if it's a good thing to care about, then maybe that caring about will become infectious to you, right?
	Maybe if there's a really great reason, right?
	Like, I mean, I love to work out.
	And, you know, if somebody's like, okay, well, why do you...
	I like to work.
	I like to feel solid.
	I like to feel strong.
	I have to stretch any day.
	Sorry, I have to stretch every day anyway, because I have tendons.
	I had lumbago when I was a kid, so I have tendons about as short as a Ritalin-deprived kid's attention span in government schools on a sleepy Sunday.
	So I have to stretch, and I like to be strong, and I like to feel that I am able to withstand the blows and travails of life.
	And I also, you know, as a father, I also want to Stay healthy and fit so I can roughhouse and do all those kinds of fun things and still sneak my way through these somewhat tortuous play centers from time to time.
	So those are all the reasons that I like to do it.
	I want to stay fit and healthy and be attractive for my wife and all that kind of stuff.
	So people could come in and find out why I do it, like why I'm spending three hours a week or more working out and, you know, crunches and weights and bike machines and all this kind of crap.
	Also, I love to play sports, especially when you get older.
	You've got to maintain a high level of fitness.
	You know, when you're 18, you can roll off the couch and just play an hour of tennis, but you've got to be a little bit more tuned when you get older to do that kind of stuff.
	So maybe somebody could get interested in me working out.
	Maybe they could end up working out themselves if it's a good thing.
	And I think it's a good thing to do.
	But if it's a bad thing, if you're distracting yourself, if you're self-erasing, somebody getting in there into the trenches with you and figuring out why you care about what you care about and what's going on for you.
	Well, maybe that can liberate you from your distraction and your dissociation and put you on a path to something more positive.
	Maybe you can stop watching sports and start working out a little bit more.
	Or maybe you can stop watching sports so much and start talking with your family more.
	Or maybe stop watching sports or playing video games and define some more of your own ambitious goals and work harder to achieve them.
	Intimacy with passion is Either transfers good passions or nullifies destructive passions.
	But the intimacy is all.
	Maybe your addiction to Trump is a terrible thing.
	I'm just hypothetical, right?
	In which case, just screaming at you that it's a terrible thing...
	Is not what works.
	I'm sure your mother didn't scream at somebody who had bad ideas in the hospital.
	Just scream at them, right?
	I mean, there's something else going on.
	The way that you would liberate someone from bad ideas is get down in the trenches with them, figure out what's going on, and find what drives them.
	If you love them, right?
	If you love that person.
	I mean, I'm saying average stranger, whatever.
	And so this is what I mean when I talk about getting to know people.
	There was a great capacity for people in my life when I was younger getting to know me.
	Getting to know me.
	Through my passion for Ayn Rand, through my passion for philosophy, through my passion for economic self-knowledge, all the things that I really care about that have morphed into what I do now.
	It could have been a great capacity.
	But very few people took that opportunity.
	And that's what I mean when I say...
	Adam, does your mother and does your father love you?
	Because if they're just screaming at you for something that you love, I can't, at least in that particular instance, I can't see the connection.
	So sorry for that long speech.
	I hope that makes sense.
	No, it does.
	I mean, my father, he's a lot more open-minded about these things.
	He likes to hear them.
	He's a He's a very good listener, and he's very good at arguing with me.
	He'll give me his side, I'll give him his side.
	It's a very level playing field with us.
	And he's always very open to watch some videos.
	I got him to watch some videos, do some research.
	If I find some article that I want him to read, I print it off and give it to him.
	But he's maybe been a generation, about to retire.
	And when I told them, you know, basically, you guys kind of screwed me on my college and my debts and everything.
	What do you mean?
	When it comes to, like, the baby boomer generation with the whole, like, you have to go to college.
	You have to go into this.
	Or you won't succeed.
	You won't succeed.
	You won't succeed.
	I was beat over the head with it.
	So I went to college.
	Well...
	I didn't graduate, we'll put it that way.
	And now my, you know, I'm just now climbing out of debt and I haven't been in school in 10 years.
	Wow, I'm sorry to hear that.
	What did you take?
	I was in, went in for graphic design, then I transferred to audio video production.
	So...
	And what happened with your, I don't mean to rake over old wounds, Adam, but what happened with the course of the college and graduation?
	Basically, it was just, I went in there, I figured out that they were making me take classes that I had already passed in grade school.
	They were putting me through algebra in my second year of college.
	Algebra?
	Yeah.
	What does that have to do with AV production?
	Right, exactly.
	It's all these prereqs that are...
	And I just found it ridiculous.
	And then I'm taking these intro to computing and how to transfer...
	From PC to Mac.
	I mean, these classes, they're just like so...
	I couldn't believe that I had to take them.
	Well, yeah, there aren't enough good teachers around for all of the government money that's being showered on students, right?
	I mean, so, yeah, they're like, well, yeah, people will come to college.
	Let's go make up some courses.
	We don't have any good teachers.
	Well, let's just teach whatever they know.
	Right.
	I'm sorry about that.
	And did your parents, when you were going through this process, I guess in your late teens, early 20s, when you were going through this process, I assume that, I mean, you took on a lot of debt.
	And did you talk to your parents about your reservations?
	Yeah, they were very accepting.
	Actually, my dad said, if it's not for you, get out.
	And that's when I was like, all right, So that's when I broke out.
	But he really pushed me into it.
	And then when he found out how poorly I was doing and how much I hated it, he was like, well, if it's not for you, get out.
	Go get an electrician job or something.
	So that's what I'm saying.
	He's more of a person that is not so crazy when it comes to the politics and everything.
	How long were you in for?
	I was in for...
	Almost four years.
	What?
	When did you first start to hit it?
	My second year, I realized graphic design was going to be a terrible thing.
	So I went to a different school and took audio video production.
	And I tried to push through the first time.
	And it didn't work.
	So I left and I came back.
	I was like, well, maybe I could just get it pushed through again.
	And finally, I cut the cable.
	I was like, I'm never going back again.
	So I had a series of in-and-outs until I finally realized that, well, half of it was a scam.
	And what did your father say during this four-year process?
	And if you don't mind me asking, you don't have to answer any of this.
	Just give me a rough gauge of how much in debt you ended up.
	I wasn't as bad as other people, but I was getting up there to $20,000, so...
	Right.
	My cousin was close to 100,000.
	Yeah.
	Ouch.
	She graduated with a liberal arts degree.
	What, she did 20, she did close to 100k and it was four years of a liberal arts degree?
	Yep.
	Five years.
	Because you can't graduate in a four-year degree anymore.
	What, you can't do four years anymore?
	I mean, they say it's a four-year thing, but I mean...
	But realistically, with all the prereqs and all this other stuff that you have to take, it's almost impossible to do a four-year degree in four years.
	Wow.
	It really is quite a tax farm, isn't it?
	Yeah, it's ridiculous.
	So both my brothers have degrees in criminal justice, both of them five years.
	Did they get any jobs in the field?
	Yep.
	Yeah, one did.
	And the other one is now in college again.
	He's going to be a nurse.
	Ugh!
	Oh, God.
	Yep.
	He went to the police force and then realized how big of a mistake it was.
	And your friend with the liberal arts degree, where did she end up working?
	Oh, that's my cousin.
	She's unemployed.
	She lives in California.
	She lives in San Francisco with her husband.
	Oh, she got on the dude train.
	Okay, that's how she's getting by.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Wow, that's brutal.
	I'm so sorry.
	I'm so sorry.
	But how did you end up with four years?
	I mean, you've got parents, right?
	Your brain, as a man, your brain doesn't finally mature physically until, you know, your mid-20s, right?
	So you were getting into massive, well, significant amounts of debt.
	Over a four-year period, were your parents sitting down with you every week and saying, okay, is it getting better?
	What's our decision point here?
	When do you break out?
	What are your alternatives?
	Obviously, I got government assistance and all that stuff.
	I went on payment plans and they said, if you're not going to get a degree, get out.
	Stop wasting money.
	And that's eventually, but at the same time, I was still getting fed the thing like, well, if you don't get a degree, you're never going to succeed in life.
	That whole spiel, I mean, that was ingrained in me from as far back as I can remember.
	Like, not going to college wasn't an option.
	Right.
	At all.
	Right.
	I'm sorry about all of that, Adam.
	I mean, not to get your parents off the hook, I mean, but college used to mean a lot more than it does now.
	When it was more of a meritocracy, right?
	Then it became...
	It used to mean more than it does now.
	So in your parents' day, it probably meant more than it...
	I'm sure it did mean more than it does now.
	But...
	Yeah, the amount of basically bullshit prerequisites that you have to take and non-core competency classes you have to take is pretty ridiculous, right?
	Right, yeah.
	Algebra, Jesus.
	Yeah, algebra, my second year of college.
	I know, you can do AV design, but algebra, if you can't do that, I don't want you here.
	Madness.
	I ended up just self-teaching myself all the stuff, and I'm trying to get a job anywhere in that department without a degree.
	It's like suicide.
	It's almost impossible.
	Right.
	Wow.
	Okay.
	Well, I'm sorry about all of that.
	So...
	What does your brother think of your fiancé?
	Uh...
	I mean, he...
	We all get along.
	We're all really good friends.
	His wife and my fiancé are cousins.
	That's how we met.
	So his wife is Filipino as well?
	Yes.
	Right.
	And is his wife a lefty?
	No.
	No, she's on our side.
	I can't think of a better way to put it.
	Okay, so what does your sister-in-law think of your fiancé?
	She's not happy with a lot of the things that she says or puts up on various social media networks or whatever.
	But the feeling is mutual when it goes back that direction.
	So the woman who's known her the longest out of all of you, her cousin, doesn't like her.
	Well, I mean, we all like each other.
	We all love each other.
	We're very good friends.
	It's just we don't agree at all when it comes to politics.
	It's not just politics, man.
	It's not just politics.
	It's about passion.
	It's about what you care about.
	It's about what your values are.
	You know, saying, well, we just disagree on politics, like, that's not important.
	Politics is the tip of the iceberg, and there's a whole bunch of other stuff that comes up.
	So, for instance, it's like saying, well, we disagree on science, or we disagree on logic.
	It's like, no.
	When you get into a relationship with someone, particularly marriage, where you're going to unite in mind, body, and spirit, and finances, and biology, and make kids, and hopefully be together for the rest of your life, you have to have a methodology for resolving your disputes, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	And you have to agree on the methodology for resolving your disputes.
	You and your fiancé are going to disagree.
	And there are times when you're going to disagree a lot.
	The question is, how do you resolve those disagreements?
	Now, you're on vacation or you're in a long-distance relationship.
	Those are not realistic marriage recreation scenarios, you understand, right?
	Right, yeah, yeah.
	So, how are you going to resolve disagreements with your fiancé?
	In other words, when she agrees with certain arguments that you make, does she just kind of fold and give up and crumble and submit?
	That's not agreement.
	That's self-erasure.
	Fine.
	We'll do it your way.
	Oh, no, no.
	That's just sowing the seeds of something even worse down the hall and around the corner.
	So how do you resolve your disagreements?
	You guys disagree about Trump.
	You disagree about political freedom.
	You disagree about economics.
	You disagree about the patriarchy.
	You disagree about gender.
	You disagree about race.
	She's pro-people who call you toxic.
	How are you going to resolve your disagreements when you disagree on so much already?
	What methodology are you going to use?
	You've been trying, I hope, Adam, listening to this show, you've been trying to resolve your disagreements based on reason and evidence, right?
	Right.
	It doesn't work very well.
	I'm not saying it never works, but the fact that it only works sometimes is almost even worse, right?
	Well, recently I've been finding success in...
	With the whole feminism thing, a YouTuber, Shuanhead, I'm not sure if you're familiar, but I find out that Humer, she likes this girl, and Humer, and she kind of always, she has this wave gap button that she hits, and it debunks the wage gap.
	It's kind of a funny thing or whatever, but I found out through this comedy that she's actually starting to get some of the things that I've been trying to tell her the whole time.
	Oh, Adam.
	Oh, Adam.
	I'm not sure if it's...
	Oh, Adam.
	Oh, Adam.
	Adam, Adam.
	Why does she respect an anonymous YouTuber more than you?
	Maybe I'm misreading this, but I feel like she doesn't like to be preached to, and that's why she always turns...
	That's a nothing statement.
	That means nothing.
	Right.
	That means nothing.
	I could say that.
	You could say that about anyone who's saying anything.
	Well, I don't like to be preached to.
	What does that mean?
	Is it a good argument or is it a bad argument?
	Are there facts, reason, and evidence behind it?
	Or is it a mere bland assertion?
	But saying you don't like to be preached to is not an argument.
	Why does she listen and respect an anonymous YouTuber's opinion or arguments more than yours, who may be the father of her children?
	I don't know, maybe...
	I would hate to put the blame on myself, but maybe it is the way that I'm delivering it.
	Maybe she understands the way she's putting it.
	She's choosing you, you understand?
	Right.
	So, if you have a terrible way of delivering that which you care about, she shouldn't be with you.
	Do you understand?
	No, you don't.
	You're not processing it yet.
	You can't blame yourself because she chose you.
	Listen, if you were stuck next to her in an airplane and she had a bad reaction to what you're saying, well, she didn't choose to be with you.
	She just got stuck next to you in an airplane, right?
	Right.
	But if she's been with you for three years and gone on vacation with you and so on, there's no possibility that it can be because you're off-putting in communicating what you care about most passionately and deeply in many ways.
	Don't blame yourself.
	That is a cop-out.
	If you're in a relationship and you're going to get married, for God's sakes, if you're in a relationship, do never, ever denigrate your personality fundamentally.
	Never, ever do that.
	That is a cuck-out, that is a cop-out, that is a fold-out.
	And I guarantee you, that's your dad with your mom.
	We'll get back to that in a sec.
	Because if your dad is calm and thoughtful and reasonable, why the hell is he letting his wife scream at you?
	That's bullshit.
	That's cowardly.
	But we'll get back to that.
	Don't ever say, the reason people who claim to love me aren't listening to my views is I'm doing something wrong.
	Fuck that Catholic shit, you know?
	Fuck that original sin stuff.
	Fuck it.
	If they love you, and I assume she loves you, Then never, ever, ever say or give her the excuse of not having to be rational because of some mysterious, negative, orbiting, unpleasant ghost that floats around your head like the rings of Saturn.
	They're toxic.
	They're radioactive.
	They shoot off electricity and pixie farts.
	And that's why they're not listening to reason and evidence.
	Never, ever, ever, ever do that.
	Because that's disrespecting both of you.
	Well, Adam, you see, you're just such an unpleasant person and such a difficult person and such a negative person.
	Well, you're just really off-putting when you put your treasured ideas across.
	You're negative, you're destructive, you're hostile, you're bleh, right?
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Why the hell would she be with you if you were like that?
	And you sure as hell aren't like that with me.
	Why would she be with you if you were like that?
	Never, ever give people the out of saying, well, it must be my presentation.
	No.
	Reason and evidence.
	Fuck the presentation style.
	What matters is, will they listen to reason and evidence?
	The devil himself can walk up to me and say that two and two is four.
	I have to evaluate the argument and I can't say, ew, smells like sulfur.
	I'm going to reject everything.
	No, no, no.
	No.
	Somebody's with you.
	They love you.
	They trust you.
	They respect you.
	Never, ever, if you respect them, give them the out.
	And the reason you're giving her the out of maybe I put it forward in the wrong way is that you are desperate to not find out if she respects reason and evidence.
	And so you're taking on the burden yourself rather than find out the facts, which tells me you know the facts about whether she will listen to reason and evidence.
	Yeah, I definitely know that she is...
	She does not listen to reason evidence very often.
	Excellent.
	I can't wait for her to become a teacher!
	Right.
	Is she going to pour this stuff into the minds of helpless, dependent, impressionable children?
	I got a story about that.
	Please do.
	Please do tell.
	So, my brother and I were on Discord.
	We were talking, and she came in, and she's talking about Discord.
	It's a voice chat system.
	Sorry.
	No problem.
	I'm old.
	So, we were talking on there.
	She comes in, and she decided that she wanted to give us her presentation for her class the next day.
	And we said, okay, go ahead and let us hear it.
	And she started it out with Hi, everybody.
	First of all, let's give thanks that we're here on the Musqueam tribe's land of some sort, I guess, with the whole natives thing in Canada.
	So she began with that, and then she went on to say something about bringing in Gender appropriation into the classroom, like it's the school's job.
	What?
	Gender appropriation?
	Like, yeah, what was it called?
	Gender acceptance to the students.
	And making all these...
	Making it the school's obligation to teach kids that you don't have to be this certain sex to like this certain sex.
	And how old were these kids?
	I think, let's see, like 12, 11.
	Wow, she must have posted a lot about intolerance of homosexuality in Saudi Arabia.
	She must have posted a lot about homosexuals being thrown off buildings in various countries around the world.
	She must have posted a lot about hostility towards homosexuals in Africa.
	Has she?
	No.
	No.
	Right.
	Right.
	Not really a very consistent approach to the problem, would you say?
	No, and I've brought certain things up like that when it comes to other places in the world, and it's like it doesn't hit home.
	No, you see, picking on white guys, that's safe, right?
	That's LARPing as a moral hero.
	Ooh, I'm going to pick on white guys!
	Bawk, bawk, bawk, bawk, bawk!
	Oh yeah, because white guys are just so mean.
	We're going to fight with you.
	Oh boy!
	Oh, it's so sad.
	Oh man, and picking on white guys, it's about the most cowardly moralizing that can be conceived of.
	We fight tooth and nail about this stuff.
	Sorry?
	We fight tooth and nail about this stuff.
	stuff like I can't let her get away with saying stuff like that to me without me saying you're wrong like I can't I just can't stop myself from saying you're wrong stop and you're gonna help so show it's in I'm not talking about this gender stuff but if she's got these sort of lefty beliefs this hostility towards white males who she's marrying right or Or she's sympathetic towards this hostility towards white male.
	do you think it's fair to help get her a job teaching kids?
	Well...
	That's one of the big...
	That was a really big concern.
	That's what actually got me right into you because I'm worried about that.
	But at the same time...
	Not enough!
	I need, we need money.
	And I'm not saying that, by any means, I'm not saying like, well, I need money, so just screw the kids in the school.
	But I feel like we could, I don't know, I could change her mind on a lot of these situations, if I could get her out of the Toxic environment that she lives in.
	Oh, so she can't think for herself, and she doesn't respect you enough, and she doesn't respect reason and evidence, but if you get her away from certain people, then of course she'll never find them again online, and she'll never be exposed to CNN or MSNBC after she gets married to you, and she'll never end up with any friends in a book club who might be leftists, so you can just completely isolate her from the outside world.
	I mean, you understand, that's not practical.
	You've had three years.
	You have had three years.
	And you don't get married to someone hoping they're fundamentally going to change their values.
	You know, you don't need me to tell you that, right?
	Right.
	Why does your dad let your mom scream at you and your brother?
	What does he say when she's doing that?
	No, he stops here and says, everybody needs to calm down.
	Oh, everybody.
	Is it your mom who's screaming, or are you guys?
	It kind of goes back and forth, so all of us.
	Okay, but she's the mom.
	She's the older, she's the authority, she's the wiser, and she obviously thinks that she's more moral than you in this area, right?
	Right.
	And did this happen when you were growing up, that you got yelled at by your mom or your dad?
	Oh, no, we're talking about a month ago.
	No, no, but when you were growing up as general.
	Oh, no, they were very non-aggressive.
	They never hit, they never yelled.
	I mean, it was very rare.
	I think I saw my dad get mad once and throw something when he was in the basement away from us.
	That was the only time I've ever seen them get, like, excessively emotional.
	If a man is going to get angry, it's going to be one of two places.
	A, the garage, and B, the basement, because that's where the tools are.
	So that's just the way it works.
	Right.
	Okay, good.
	Well, I'm glad that he does that.
	I appreciate that.
	And I withdraw what I said earlier as an unjust statement.
	I'm surprised, which is good.
	Good to be surprised by these things.
	Adam?
	You and your fiancé are not going to meet in these values, in my opinion.
	She also is on her best behavior at the moment because there's a lead-up to a wedding and she knows that you may have some reservations about value compatibility.
	Once she's got the ring and all of the legal rights and powers that that confers to her, she will have less incentive to play nice.
	you You understand?
	You have no way of enforcing whether she's going to have your kids.
	You have no way of enforcing whether she's going to grow, let your kids grow up the way that you want them to grow up relative to this genderless parenting and so on.
	You understand?
	You have no way of enforcing these things.
	And once she's married, in America, the balance of power shifts enormously to her.
	She basically can say to you, do what I say or I'll take half your stuff.
	I'm not saying she would.
	I'm not saying she would.
	I'm just saying that right now, you are in a position of negotiating strength that you sure as hell won't be once that last echo of I do rolls down the family court system.
	I just, you know, I'm not gonna tell you what to do.
	I can't possibly tell you what to do.
	I just want to give you the logic tree here, right?
	She's not ever going to be more conciliatory or accepting than she is now.
	And I say this because she doesn't seem to have a lot of internalized values, but she's kind of like in any way the wind blows kind of thing, right?
	Which you sort of get to some degree, which is why you think somehow she's married and taken out of the school, but she's going to go into another school, right?
	Yeah.
	And she's going to be a teacher, and she's going to have other teachers, all who went through the same school that she went to, or the same type of school, or the same kind of education.
	Teachers College is rampantly lefty.
	Right?
	Extremely.
	So she's going to be surrounded by people who've had the same kind of education, right?
	And they're going to be talking to her.
	And she's going to come in and she's going to complain about you and then they're going to say...
	I can't believe he would...
	All out of your control.
	If she's susceptible to social influences and she's susceptible to lefty social influences and she's going to work in a school...
	That's a risk factor, I would say.
	Yeah, extremely.
	How long has her cousin not liked her politics?
	As long as I have...
	I honestly don't think she ever even talked about politics prior to the Trump explosion.
	So, her first introduction to politics was the media screaming at her, look, America's hiring a xenophobic, sexist bigot.
	You know, there are lots of women who like Trump, right?
	Yeah.
	Why can't you get a woman who likes Trump?
	Since that indicates a lot more than Trump, right?
	But the value set, the...
	The way you look at the world, the way you handle personal responsibility, responsiveness to reason and evidence and so on, and a love of guns, a lot of times.
	What's wrong with a nice Trump party?
	There's nothing wrong with a nice Trump party.
	I mean...
	For you, I mean, I don't mean abstractly.
	Right, right, right, for me.
	There's nothing wrong with...
	I mean...
	And I could do that.
	But I really feel that our relationship, and regardless of what I've already told you here, there's a lot more to our relationship than just this kind of stuff.
	And I understand that is, like you said, a risk factor.
	But there's more to it, our relationship, than meets the politics, I guess you want to say.
	Okay, well tell me the things that you love about her then.
	Okay, for instance, let's see, what was that?
	You said...
	In one of your videos, relationship, red flag, should I stay or should I go?
	You said if somebody is a statist, I would assume it would be like the conversations you would have would go on for a long time if they actually cared about what you were talking about.
	And we do.
	We have these long conversations.
	And when we're having these conversations, I feel that she's trying to instill some sort of moral on me to make me a better person.
	So I get this inclination that she cares about me to the point of even though I feel that she's wrong, she will fight me tooth and nail to show me the way she thinks is right.
	You know what I mean?
	Well, but she doesn't have the reason and evidence, right?
	Right.
	So she's trying to indoctrinate you.
	Right.
	So I don't know that you care about someone by trying to indoctrinate them.
	You know, I ask you for things that you love about her.
	Not that she would like to transfer her lefty delusions to you, which I understand would make her life easier.
	Yeah.
	Let's try again.
	Okay.
	All right.
	We'll give you some ones here.
	She's always concerned about my health.
	Obviously, she's a vegetarian.
	She loves to be a vegetarian.
	She loves meat, though.
	She's obsessed with meat.
	She lives vicariously through me eating as much meat as I possibly can because that's just what I like to do.
	Our personalities, although we're opposites, we clash to make this good mold of...
	We have fun together.
	She's very funny.
	We both like to travel.
	She's very motivated.
	She's very driven.
	And I really find that as an attractive figure and a woman, when it comes to she works out, she cares about what she looks like.
	She's got two degrees.
	I know that they're not in the kind of fields that I'm too happy with, but it does show drive in a person.
	To get two degrees and work out and keep this lifestyle going.
	She's very affectionate when we're together.
	I can tell that she cares about me.
	She wants to talk to me all the time.
	My previous relationships were...
	My last relationship I have ended because I just didn't even feel like there was...
	I didn't feel like she was even there.
	I can feel this reciprocating love for one another between us, where we don't even really have to say anything at all, and we're okay with that.
	The physical part of our relationship is great.
	So when it comes to, well, are you just dating or are you engaged to her because it's a physical relationship?
	The answer is no.
	I mean, we have a relationship long distance for three years now.
	So there's got to be more to it than just physical.
	I feel like we can go day after day with talking and being around each other.
	And even though we do argue about these things, um, we never take it to the point of like, you know, uh, violent yelling and, and, and, uh, we always solve the problem, whether it's her just conceding we always solve the problem, whether it's her just conceding or her going, well, I don't know.
	I'm giving up.
	We never go to bed mad at each other, that's for sure.
	But no virtues.
	I mean, you said she's funny, she's affectionate, but she cares about your health.
	Now, I'm not trying to diminish that.
	It's nice that people care about your health, but women are kind of programmed to care about their mate's health because the mate usually is the one providing resources.
	So the fact that women worry about their man's health, I, you know, it's nice, but you didn't give me any virtues, you know, courage, integrity, you know, you know what I mean?
	Well, yeah.
	Of course she doesn't have honor because she goes to classes which insult your entire gender and your entire race and doesn't have any problem with it.
	Right.
	And when we had that conversation about that, I was very upset with her and she did apologize for it.
	I don't know if that even means anything to me to balance with you, but until she proves it, I don't know if it means anything to me because...
	You're getting married in January and you're waiting for her to prove whether she apologized for attending a lecture that's entirely racist and sexist towards you?
	I'm not waiting for it.
	I mean, she did apologize.
	And you said, sorry to interrupt, but I understood if you said that, I thought you said that you didn't know if that means anything until she proves otherwise.
	Well, I mean, to apologize, like, obviously I will, I believe her 100% that she apologized for that.
	But I don't want to just be like, oh, well, she apologized.
	She's completely and totally forgiven and she'll never do it again.
	Which I think that I honestly truly believe that she won't, but there's just always this part of me that's like, well, what if she goes to one of these other talks again?
	If she goes to one of those other talks, I want to know about it.
	Is she buying into this shit?
	If she is, I'd go as far as saying it's over.
	Is she smart?
	She's very smart.
	How do you know?
	She's very smart when it comes to grades, I should say.
	No, no, no, no.
	Listen, no.
	Grades in teacher's college don't mean anything.
	Right.
	I mean, come on.
	I mean, you can get a pulse and be pushed through teacher's college.
	That's fair.
	What else?
	That's fair.
	When it comes to, like, just...
	Okay, for instance, we were traveling.
	She...
	We were working together very well, trying to get around.
	We didn't even know...
	We didn't hardly know any Spanish, and she had a lot of really good ideas when we were just very condensensical ideas, like how to get around, where to go, how to be safe, stuff like that.
	So she's not a bumbling idiot, and she's not...
	What's the word?
	She's very quick on her feet when it comes to having problem-solving skills.
	How pretty is she?
	Uh...
	I'd say 10.
	She's a 10?
	Yes.
	And you?
	Uh...
	9.
	So there is some physical aspect to it, right?
	Yes.
	I mean, if she wasn't a 10...
	I wouldn't have even talked to her.
	I mean, let's be honest.
	Right.
	And when you say a nine, do you mean in the looks department?
	Yes.
	And what about sort of the overall package of what you can bring to a marriage as a father, as a provider?
	When it comes to like a moral standing for my child and as a father, like loving father, I would say I could bring 10 in those fields when it comes to monetarily.
	I'm not the most monetarily sound guy, so if you're looking for resources, that's why I'm on the stay-at-home dad train.
	I didn't make great decisions in my life to where I could make a bunch of money and my wife could stay at home, which is not a problem.
	I would love to be a stay-at-home dad.
	I would absolutely love to.
	I know it's going to be hard, but that's what I really would like to do.
	Right.
	And that may be, you know, if the marriage didn't work out, I'm not trying to give you a curse or anything, but if the marriage didn't work out, the fact that you didn't have an income might be a saving grace, right?
	Because she couldn't take you for half of what you've got if what you've got is great memories with your kids.
	All right.
	And what do you think about what we're talking about?
	Has anything shifted one way or the other for you since we started talking?
	Yeah, I really need to have a sit-down conversation with her about this.
	One where she isn't arguing with me about any of this stuff.
	Instead, just listening to my concerns.
	And I need to see how she's going to react to these concerns, because if she reacts in a way that, well, is red flags everywhere, then I don't think she will.
	I think that she'll say, okay, well...
	Sorry to interrupt.
	It's hard to say now because she wants to get married, right?
	Right.
	Yeah.
	So if she...
	I mean, you've had three years, right?
	And if she wanted a certain...
	If she wanted to be a certain way or treat you with a certain respect or your preferences or passions with a certain respect, then she would have done it by now if it was a value that she had somehow innately...
	So if she would do something now, it may be because of the proximity of the wedding or the potential wedding.
	But basically, you want her to be someone you want because she's pretty and nice and has an affectionate side and can be funny and all of that, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	But you understand, if you'd called me after a third date with this woman, what do you think I'd be saying?
	Run for your life.
	But you're in now, right?
	I mean, you're not in so far because you're married, but this is why you have conversations about values right away, right away, because we don't get to live forever, right?
	Right away.
	Right.
	Because now, you're kind of in.
	You've got sunk costs.
	You have not pursued other options or alternatives.
	She's got sunk costs.
	Everyone's got this expectation.
	And now it's time to get married.
	And you're kind of on a treadmill.
	Obviously not a treadmill.
	Like the moving sidewalk.
	You know, like they have at the airport.
	Just moving along.
	Expectations.
	Time has accumulated.
	Are you making a choice based on values?
	Or are you just allowing accumulated momentum?
	To move you in a certain direction.
	I never thought of it like that.
	But this is what happens, right?
	You know, sometimes we grow relationships like a boat grows barnacles, you know?
	Just time.
	Time, circumstances, and environment, right?
	How long have you been listening to the show?
	Um...
	Let's see.
	I've been listening to your show, probably.
	Honestly, I can't remember how long.
	If I had to guess that many episodes, I probably watched over 400 episodes.
	But did you meet her before you met me?
	Yes, I met her probably two years before I met you.
	So maybe a year I've been listening to her.
	I don't even think it was that long.
	I pretty much watch daily, though.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Well, I appreciate that, of course.
	I, you know, as I say, I don't tell people what to do.
	Not that there would be any good in that.
	And I think I've certainly made the risks clear.
	Right.
	Go look up.
	Okay, I'll tell you to do one thing.
	Go look up the average IQ in the Philippines.
	You don't have to do it right now.
	But...
	Look it up and be aware.
	Be aware.
	If there's genetic elements, then that may have something to do with what happens to your kids down the road.
	Be aware of that.
	And I'm going to...
	Leave it to the comments below.
	We'll put this out.
	I'm curious.
	I mean, people may have had experiences and so on.
	I think the gap is very wide.
	And I think the gap is pretty clear.
	I mean, she does sound like a nice person when not exposed to negative elements.
	That seems to be a lot positive.
	But the problem is you can't keep her from being exposed to negative elements.
	And if she does not have internalized values, is she religious?
	No.
	Was she never religious?
	I mean...
	She was raised religious, but it wasn't very serious religious, so it was kind of like a fair-weather Christian.
	Right.
	And, okay, so, yeah, if she hasn't internalized the values, then she is going to be susceptible to influences that can make your life pretty challenging.
	There is a bit of a before and after sometimes that happens with women after they get the ring, after they've got the...
	Legal power, the legal control, the legal authority, that can be a challenge.
	And especially if they have internal, internally generated standards that people are responsible for and responsible to.
	You know, I mean, my daughter now, at least once a day, says to me, Dad, that's not an argument.
	Right?
	Which is great.
	It's exactly what she should be doing.
	Because you know what?
	Sometimes I'm not making an argument.
	Right?
	I mean, that's perfectly valid.
	But she has that standard she can appeal to me in.
	And, you know, when she sits down, Dad, I just want to say one thing.
	She sits down and then she'll lay out this F. Lee Bailey case, you know, with props and evidence and exhibit A's and so on about why she should get what she wants or the way that she wants it.
	And again, that's great.
	That's wonderful.
	That's what I want from her.
	Because I have those standards.
	If she makes a good enough case, she gets her way.
	Of course, if I make a good enough case, I get my way.
	If I'm not making an argument, she doesn't have to do it.
	And so she has these standards in me that I will always honor and respect as long as I'm able.
	And that's called the transfer of internal principles, internally generated and sustained principles.
	Not this conformity stuff, which a lot of people are prone to, maybe a little bit more women than men.
	But if somebody doesn't have those internally generated principles...
	I'm not sure I ever know who they are for real, other than maybe the convenience and conformity of the moment.
	It's kind of like a jellyfish.
	It's hard to dance with.
	So those are my thoughts.
	I appreciate your call, and thank you very much for your honesty and for your trust in calling in.
	I hope that it was helpful and useful, Adam.
	And yeah, we'll throw this out on the tube of Eunice and see what people have to say, people with maybe more experience with this type of person or this type of culture.
	So yeah, thanks for calling in, but let's move on to the next caller.
	Alright, thank you very much, Stephen.
	Alright, up next we have Tibor.
	He wrote in and said,"...in our current times, I find the misinformation and corrupted definitions to be the most destructive for every society.
	I currently focus on the historical methods of communications.
	How can we reach every layer of society with the same accurate message without altering its content?
	I find it extremely difficult today, and that's why I go back in time to revisit old methods." Regarding this manner, the upcoming field of discussion is, quote, old religions and atheism, end quote.
	What did we gain with atheism, and what did we lose by abandoning old religions?
	As an atheist, I deliver a package of statements and would like to get them attacked by every possible way by a very experienced rational thinking critic.
	I start with three, quote, commonplaces, end quote, which are not used very often anymore.
	These are direct translations.
	I really hope I did it right.
	One, there is no human being without a belief.
	Two, belief defines the foundations of your personality.
	Three, belief drives you to go forward.
	Before I discard any of these statements from the table, I need them to be invalidated properly.
	If they cannot be invalidated, I would like to discuss them in more depth.
	That's from Tibor.
	Oh, hey Tibor, how are you doing tonight?
	Hi, Stefan.
	Thanks for letting me in.
	Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure.
	Feel free to discuss them in more depth.
	Okay, sorry about being a bit slow, but it's 4am here, you know, I'm in Hungary, and coffee is running out.
	So, about the three statements, I know where to start, to be honest.
	Do you know these common places?
	Is it known in the US or in Canada?
	I wouldn't say commonplaces.
	Do you mean axioms?
	Like just the things which are true that have to be accepted as true is the foundation of anything which moves forward in the realm of truth.
	I see.
	But it doesn't matter.
	We just call them arguments or whatever it is, right?
	So when you say there is no human being without a belief, you mean that to be alive with human beings is to have some sort of interpretation of reality, some sort of perspective on reality that shapes your experience and informs your actions?
	No, not really.
	I meant by that, for me, belief is an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof.
	For example, I think belief is a religion.
	Believing in a religion, belief is the same that if a researcher or a scientist goes for a new experiment and he doesn't know that he will get the fruit at the end.
	He doesn't know that he will get the result that he wanted.
	And I think belief is The current modern religions too, like socialism and many of the isms.
	I think they are just different.
	I just try to touch the elementary part of the belief itself.
	I don't know if I made myself clear at 4am here.
	So, what you're saying, if I understand this rightly, is that we all have to have some sense of meaning in our life, some reason to do one thing rather than another, some way of knowing, or believing at least, that we're succeeding at something larger than ourselves.
	And again, I'm trying to paraphrase and sort of understand What you're saying and that beliefs, the rational content of the belief is not particularly relevant, but we all are going to have some belief in something.
	Is that right?
	Yes, that's it.
	Thank you very much for the clearance.
	Okay.
	So there's no human being without a belief.
	I think that I agree with you, which is, you know, it doesn't mean that either of us is right, but I think I understand and I think that I agree with you.
	Human beings Have the unique capacity to do just about anything.
	You know, like if you're a clam, I don't know, what can you do?
	You can open and you can close.
	I mean, it's really not that much.
	It's kind of a binary choice that's going on, right?
	So if you're a clam or a muscle or a trilobite or something, you really don't have much that you can do.
	All the way sort of in terms of complexity, the human mind with free will and choice and values and all of that.
	We can do anything.
	Like I could just suddenly say, that's it.
	I'm leaving this show right now, racing upstairs, and I'm off to join a nudist call on me in Nantucket.
	Go and do that, right?
	Maybe not this time of year, but you know what I mean.
	I could just say, that's it.
	I'm going to quit and become a mime.
	And that's how I'm going to put bread and butter together.
	So, I've always wanted to be a ping pong player.
	You get the idea, right?
	So, human beings have a near infinity of choices.
	Not necessarily of possibilities, but certainly of choices.
	And so how do we figure out what we are going to do out of all of the, like, the muscle has, like, the clam has two choices.
	Open or close.
	They have two doors to go through.
	Open or close.
	Open or close.
	We have an infinity up and down all around, like this big bubble of infinite doors that we can go through.
	So how the hell do we choose what to do?
	We have to have some organizing principle that has us figure out What we do, right?
	For example, like this morning I woke up and screamed with joy, as I didn't really do.
	Philosophy!
	Ah!
	But I woke up and I was going to go on the Alex Jones show today and I did for a bit over an hour, maybe an hour and a quarter.
	And there were a bunch of topics that I needed to read up and get sort of my mind refreshed and understand a bunch of topics.
	So I did that.
	I had a little lunch.
	I did the Alex Jones show and then I did a conversation with With a lady from Sweden, Ingrid Kalkvist, and then I took a bit of a break.
	I played with my daughter for a while, and then I actually needed a little bit of a rest because I knew it was going to be a long show, so I just sort of had a rest, you know, sort of like I do this thing where I lie down, I don't really fall asleep, but I just have a really, really pleasant and very refreshing recharge, like 20 minutes.
	I'd have a cup of coffee, sit down, and then I'm up and ready to roll for the evening.
	It's a, you know, it's a Churchill thing.
	I learned this from Churchill.
	The idea that you work from first thing in the morning till last thing at night without a break or without a rest is not...
	He would nap for a long time, but I just have these little 20-minute things.
	And then had dinner with my family, which I really, really enjoyed, and then came down and I'm doing the show now.
	So this is like a brief trot through my day.
	And so these days are all informed by values, right?
	So negotiating what to chat about with Alex Jones, what I want to focus on, and then dealing with some of the topics that pop up in Alex Jones can be a bit more on the fly, which is part of the excitement of the show.
	And figuring out, you know, I spent some time this afternoon going through these questions, you know, organizing my thoughts so it's not totally off the cuff and randomized, figuring out what I wanted to talk about.
	So these are all informed by values.
	And the values kind of go up.
	Like, I want to do a good job.
	I want to honor the people who invited me onto their show.
	I want to be prepared for talking with Ingrid.
	All of these things, right?
	All with, you know, I have this particular goal, which is at the moment to try and Push back against regime changes.
	And that's part of a larger goal of making the world a better place, you know, all this kind of...
	So there's this whole pyramid hierarchy of values that is informing my day.
	If I didn't have those values at all, I don't know.
	What would I do?
	I mean, I guess I'd eat when I'm hungry, like all the animals do, and I'd rest when I'm tired, like all the animals do.
	You know, whatever.
	Whatever when I'm whatever, like all the animals do.
	But if I didn't have any particular higher values or higher virtues that I wanted to pursue, I don't know how my day would be organized other than attending to basic bodily functions.
	Does that make any sense?
	Absolutely, but I would like to add something to that, because by belief, I wanted to point to something that you don't know, that you cannot prove.
	You just believe in that, that that will work or that might be the thing that you wanted.
	For example, if you apply the non-aggression principle to the entire world, do we know, do we have a proof that that should work?
	I think we don't.
	It depends what you mean by work.
	Philosophy is not about what works, but what's right.
	Now, we hope that there's a relationship between what's right and what works, and I think in general there is.
	If you look, you know, when the non-aggression principle is more universally applied, as is in the free market, then people end up a lot better.
	Like, I mean, the non-aggression principle is far more applied in South Korea than it is in the dictatorship of North Korea.
	And South Korea has 40 times the economic output of North Korea, which gives them, of course, choices for, you know, more than cabbage and cockroaches for lunch.
	So, I don't know what you mean by does it work.
	It can be logically and consistently applied and enacted by everyone the whole world over.
	Everyone the whole world over can all simultaneously...
	Not aggress against each other at the same time.
	And so it can work in terms of...
	It can be enacted in the realm of possibility.
	I don't know what else you might mean by the word, though.
	Yeah, that's it.
	In the world of possibility.
	That's it.
	So we can have a certain knowledge about that when we reach that point.
	When we reach that state.
	Right?
	I'm sorry, could you repeat that again?
	I didn't quite follow.
	So...
	We can only be sure about this, that this will be a betterment for everyone when we reach the point when everyone adopts the non-aggression principle.
	Oh, but I don't care.
	No, I don't care what is the better for everyone.
	I don't know.
	I can't guarantee the non-aggression principle is going to be better for everyone.
	I mean, there are people who really like to use violence to get their way.
	There are people who like to use political violence or personal violence or whatever it is, you know?
	I mean, I can't guarantee that at all.
	I can only tell you that it's morally right to pursue the non-aggression principle.
	That's right.
	That's what I wanted to point out, that the belief...
	We can say that the non-aggression principle is a belief, right?
	A moral principle is a belief?
	What do you mean?
	You believe in this moral principle?
	No, I've proven the moral principle.
	Like, two and two make four is not a belief, right?
	I mean, I believe I can fly, you know, I mean, that's a crazy belief, jump out of a window.
	So we have to differentiate between beliefs that are false and beliefs that are true, which is kind of the whole point of philosophy, right?
	Yeah, I wanted to give a bit more context behind my question.
	Because I wanted to give you these three statements to invalidate them, but it seems that we are going in a different direction.
	I just don't want to use the word belief for things which are true versus things that are false.
	It's like saying that we can use the word nutritious to describe things which You can eat and things which you can't eat, right?
	So sure, there's belief, and there are beliefs that are false, and there are beliefs that are true, and that's an epistemological question that is at the foundation of philosophy.
	So sure, there is no human being without a belief, but I don't want to do the equivalence of saying that true and false beliefs can both be subsumed under the category called belief, because that's a little confusing.
	All right, I can accept that.
	I did not want to make the case about the non-lagration principle.
	I wanted to use it as an example, but I can accept that you say that it's true.
	But whether beliefs are true or false, to get to your second commonplace, whether a belief is true and false doesn't seem to have much difference on the degree to which it defines the foundations of your personality.
	Right?
	So, I mean, if someone has a belief that is false, And they believe it even more strongly than someone who has a belief that is true.
	I believe that it will, as you say, even more strongly in the person who has the false but vehement belief more clearly or more define the foundations of their personality, if that makes sense.
	Yes, absolutely.
	I mean, if I believe I'm a, just to clear it up for the audience, if I believe I'm a good person but not really that good and, you know, I just, I'm kind of wishy-washy about it, then that's going to have some effect on my personality.
	However, if I believe I'm Napoleon, 150%, that's going to have a very, very significant effect on my personality, even though one may be more valid than the other, if that makes sense.
	Yes, it does.
	So my point with these three statements is I started this engagement with communication questions.
	You know that how can we reach the people with the same content without altering its full content.
	I'm a member of the Mensa, Angerica.
	And we tried to figure out How can we reach different layers of society with the same message?
	And it looks like we cannot do this in a philosophical way for every single layer of society.
	And by layer I mean the different IQ levels.
	Right.
	Right, so you're from Hungary or Eastern Europe as a whole, which means that the word IQ doesn't make you freak out, which is good.
	It's very helpful.
	It's very tough out here in North America and Western Europe, they...
	IQ! Ah!
	Eugenics!
	Anyway, so I'm glad that we can talk about that more openly.
	Yes, we can.
	We disagree a bit about this because I'm well aware of your show for like two years.
	For example, I learned that IQ is inheritable only 54%, and the rest is culture and education.
	Well, it depends what age you're talking about.
	I mean, that is certainly true at a particular phase in life.
	When you talk to people in their, when you measure people in their 60s, it seems to be closer to 80% hereditary.
	So it's saying that IQ is one or the other.
	It's less when you're younger and becomes more when you're older.
	So I'm sure we can both, I mean, we may both be right as far as that goes.
	Yes, but the IQ's effect is more interesting to me in communication.
	Because if I want to break it down to different layers, there is a huge difference between IQ 85 and IQ 110 in understanding or receiving curriculums and building knowledge.
	For example, for me, for us, a small group, we see IQ only, the factor of short-term intelligence, which contains the short-term memory plus processing speed plus focusing ability.
	I will clear this up later if it's confusing and sorry about that, if it's not.
	No, it makes sense to me.
	Okay.
	So, the short-term memory and the focusing ability is the key factor in this, because processing speed is...
	How can I say?
	It's not that much important if you want to win a conversation or if you want to educate someone.
	My problem is that the discussion that we are having right now, it can only affect like 77 to 80 percent.
	It can affect only 20 percent of the population average.
	Most of the people just don't get it, cannot follow it.
	Or just disconnect it because he's lazy.
	He don't want to intellectually engage to that.
	Well, yeah, I mean, lazy or not, I mean, if people out there have ever played video games, sorry, just to give an analogy, it's not perfect, but I think it will help get the idea across.
	So when I was, I don't know, how old was I when Doom came out, the original Doom?
	It was quite a long time ago.
	It was in the early 90s.
	Anyway, I had a notebook computer, which I had for my graduate degree, and it was a 386.
	25 megahertz.
	No, no, not gigahertz, I think.
	25 megahertz.
	And not even a DX. It was no math coprocessor.
	It was just an SX. And monochrome screen, of course, right?
	A cozy six-minute boot-up time.
	But anyway, it was great for me for working in college.
	It cost me $1,200 with tax to get that Terribly tiny.
	60 meg hard drive?
	Anyway, it had one gig.
	Sorry, it had one meg of RAM, a 60 meg hard drive, if I remember rightly.
	Anyway, I tried running Doom on it, and I got like a frame every second or two, you know?
	And it...
	It's impossible to play a game that's fast-paced like Doom when you're getting a frame.
	And everyone's done this, you know, ooh, I wonder what this game is like on max settings.
	Here, turning the corner.
	Right?
	I mean, you simply can't play it.
	And so you can say, well, the computer is just slower than the computer with the, you know, 1080 GTX card or whatever, right?
	But it actually is...
	It's not different.
	It's not slower.
	It's impossible.
	So when it comes to, like, engaging in particular mental pursuits, it's not that somebody with a lower IQ is just slower.
	Like, it just...
	Somebody who runs and somebody who walks, well, the person who walks, it just takes them longer to get there, right?
	It's not the case.
	It's actually just too frustrating and annoying.
	It's not like if you try to play Doom on my old 38625SX... Notebook computer, it's not like it'll just take you longer to finish it.
	Like, you won't finish it.
	Because you won't bother playing.
	It's too annoying.
	The computer is too slow.
	It just doesn't work.
	And so I agree with you.
	There are Dividing lines.
	And I actually ended up having to play it in a tiny little window on the lowest resolution.
	I mean, it was crazy.
	It was like playing in a postage stamp and, you know, like Minecraft when your face is right next to the screen.
	But anyway, so when it comes to sort of intelligence, and this is me in certain areas as well.
	Like, I'm very, very bad at learning foreign languages.
	Computer languages, yes.
	I think I know 18 last time I counted.
	But...
	Other languages?
	No, I'm pretty bad at French and even worse at German.
	So, and it's just, my brain doesn't work that way.
	So for me, it's not like, well, it'll take me longer to learn a foreign language.
	I just won't.
	I'm going to go to my grave knowing English very well, a bunch of computer languages, restaurant French, picked in German, and that's it.
	So it's not like it's just slower for me to learn languages.
	I just don't learn other languages.
	It's not my particular skill.
	Other things I get, like, easy peasy and nothing but, right?
	So that is, when it comes to intelligence, the challenge then, of course, is how do you downshift?
	ideas so they can run on a 386.
	And I think it's possible.
	And that's what a lot of what I do in this show is trying to figure out how to appeal to both sides of the bell curve.
	And so that's why I do a lot of the stuff that I do.
	But I think that's a way of sort of understanding it.
	And this is what bothers me.
	Another guy called in earlier.
	It's like, okay, so you want to be a moralist or a philosopher and so on.
	You have to find ways that people can just kind of understand what you're saying.
	Explain it to me like I'm five years old.
	And I can do UPB. I've got a whole show from years ago, the ABCs of UPB. It's right there at fdrpodcast.com, about how to explain UPB to kids.
	And I went through this with my own daughter and talked about it with a couple of other kids and so on.
	And...
	You have to find ways to explain your philosophy, to explain your ideas and get your arguments across.
	To people who aren't as smart.
	And that's nothing wrong with that.
	I mean, it's perfectly valid.
	You know, if somebody was really good at language and was trying to teach me French, they'd need to be patient with me because that's not the way my brain particularly works at its highest octant.
	So I just wanted to sort of break that out for people.
	If you want to be a thinker who has an effect in the world, find ways to break it down and make it engaging and entertaining for a wide variety of people.
	Otherwise, you kind of are preaching to the polysyllabic choir.
	About your past with the programming, I had a 286 with Hercules monitor.
	I'm almost 40 years old and 50 years in the IT industry, so I know what you mean.
	My first IBM desktop was a 286, 10 MHz.
	And that's because I had an Atari 520ST, which had a floppy drive.
	A floppy drive, that's how I loaded things.
	And then I'm like, oh, I should buy, I should go and buy a, I don't know what was going on with Atari at this point, but I wanted to buy a hard drive, an external hard drive, because I had a lot of writing and floppy disks also, they failed a lot.
	And I wanted to go buy a hard drive.
	And it was crazy.
	The hard drive was like $900, which was like even more than the computer, the 520ST, which was a great computer.
	I actually ran an emulator on it a little while back just out of curiosity.
	And it still works even on a new computer.
	But I could get...
	A friend of mine was selling his...
	EGA Monitor 286 computer, and I used that one for a while.
	I actually wrote my first novel.
	No, I wrote my first novel on the 520ST. No, I wrote my first novel on Atari 800 when I was 11, but that's a different matter.
	But, yeah, I got that secondhand for $600 back in the day, which was, I got the whole thing, hard drive, monitor, keyboard, mouse, memory, and everything, for less than I would have to pay for an Atari 520 computer.
	Hard drive.
	I mean, it made no sense to me at all.
	That's when I tragically ended up having to abandon the Atari platform.
	And again, I don't know.
	If anyone knows, I'd be curious, but I don't know what Atari was doing, that everything was so crazy expensive to expand back then.
	But it's a shame, because if they had been able to move, they certainly had better computers in many ways than were going on elsewhere.
	But yeah, sorry, just geeking out for a brief moment here.
	But why don't you finish up your thought?
	No problem, I'm enjoying it.
	I used to...
	I mean, to be honest, I was watching old video game footage while talking about different things.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Okay, but back to the point.
	I'm glad that we agree almost in everything, but...
	My final point, you know, the original question, what did we gain with atheism?
	What did we lose with old religions?
	And this is what I find very frustrating, because the old religions, for example, Christianity, my original religion, had the Bible.
	And more and more examination of the Bible, it seems to me that this is a masterpiece of communication.
	Because If you have a lower IQ person, but not necessarily a lower IQ person, but an ill-treated, ill-educated person, and then by educated I mean a family background.
	Ill-educated person can be thought, not by rationality, not by philosophy, but storytelling, comedy, fairy tales.
	And if you see the exemplary speeches, the Bible...
	The Bible parables, if I said it correctly, these are just interpretations of the Ten Commandments and the Seven Sins.
	Oh yeah, now I remember my first Bible, all I did was look at the pictures.
	So if you want to communicate some but complex ideology, like Christianity, the Bible succeeds.
	That's why I wanted to understand.
	How did it work and what did we lost by stripping away people from the Bible?
	Well, it's a great question and I do sometimes wonder whether atheism was a step forward or a step backwards, but it doesn't really matter because it's happened and we have to push on.
	There is no turning back in time.
	We can't undo what we learned.
	We can't undo what we know.
	We must push on, which is why I did UPB rather than Reconvert back to Christianity and take that path.
	To me, do respect to Christians, fantastic respect to Christians.
	Maybe I'm wrong about this, but this is my particular approach that we have to go forward.
	The people who are working on intellectual pursuits, atheism and so on, they're talking a lot to each other and they're not talking a lot to society.
	And to me, if you are intellectual, if you've been paid by society, if you've taken tax money, and I know maybe there's not a lot of alternatives sometimes, but you kind of owe back.
	You owe back to society.
	You took tax money to become educated.
	You took tax money to pursue higher knowledge.
	And the people who you took the tax money from are not generally the ones directly getting the education at the same time.
	It's the people out there working and so on, and some of whom are pretty poor.
	So you kind of owe something back.
	It's not an absolute obligation.
	But I understand it's the way the system is set up.
	But I felt that there's kind of a responsibility.
	To pursue getting the knowledge back to the people.
	So when it comes to being good and encouraging people to be good, to pursue virtue, to do the uncomfortable work and the heavy lifting of being good in a society that is often run by some fairly unsavory people with some fairly unsavory goals...
	Well, when it came to explaining that in Christian terms, it was much easier, right?
	I mean, God has given you a soul, and God wants you to be with him in heaven.
	And if you only act for yourself, if you act selfishly, if you only act for material comfort, if you only act for the immediate betterment of your own earthly lusts, then that's going to lead you down a dark path to a burning hell and So you had the stick and you had the carrot and you were able to communicate this effectively to children.
	Because if a philosophy doesn't affect children, it doesn't affect anything.
	If a philosophy does not affect children, it affects nothing.
	Because...
	Well, certainly nothing for the better.
	Let me put it that way.
	Because...
	If you're not affecting children, by the time your ideas land in people's minds, it's almost always too late.
	The state and other indoctrinating agencies are producing brainwashed people far faster than they can be cured.
	Because the cure is long and time-consuming and expensive and difficult and requires high intelligence.
	But indoctrination is just boom, boom, boom, boom, stamp the falsehoods on everyone's forehead and away they go.
	So there must be something in your philosophy that affects childhood.
	It must be there.
	Otherwise, your philosophy will never achieve anything for the good, for the lasting good.
	And this is why for me, like I'm not going to go around to primary school and do philosophy lectures, but I know it's very good for kids.
	But what I can do is I can talk to people about parenting.
	And if I talk to people about parenting...
	And I change how they interact with their kids and I change how they discipline their kids or whether they discipline their kids.
	If I change the experience of the children through good arguments to the parents or the educators, then I have a philosophy which changes childhood, which means it can change the future.
	Now, religion and statism are both ideologies or idea sets that directly affect children.
	I know this because I was raised as a Christian in both government and non-government schools.
	And so I know I'm still very strongly influenced by Christianity, more so than I really thought in the past.
	And, of course, I was raised with statist ideas and statist arguments because that's what government schools do.
	And so you cannot fight ideas that affect childhood with ideas that don't affect childhood.
	You'll lose.
	Which is why libertarianism is such a challenge for people and why atheism is such a challenge in many ways for people because certainly libertarianism doesn't do much to affect childhood.
	And when I was more in libertarian circles and I began to talk to libertarians, basically we need to apply libertarianism to childhood or all is lost.
	Well, they didn't really understand it because they're just moving around adults and changing adults' minds and so on, which is fine and it's important.
	It's necessary but not sufficient to change the world.
	But if you don't have ideas that fundamentally alter the trajectory of childhood, you cannot alter the trajectory of the future because by the time most people become adults, they just keep plowing on with what they have rather than re-evaluate things from a new perspective.
	So it must alter childhood or it can't change anything.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	And you made a good point here.
	But I did not advocate for that you should go back to Christianity or anyone go back to Christianity.
	I'm trying to make a point about that there is a fact that many, many, more than half of the people cannot process philosophy.
	We just talked about it before.
	And it's even true for childhood.
	No, but children can.
	I mean, I had the very expert on this show who talked about how incredibly positive Philosophy was, the teaching of philosophy was for children.
	I mean, it rocketed them ahead.
	Several grades in reading and writing and reasoning and so on.
	Even math scores picked up.
	Children are very receptive to philosophy, which is why the corruption of the young is considered to be the primary charge against the philosopher.
	Children are incredibly receptive to ideas.
	And it sounds kind of weird, moldable, and so on, because you want to mold them to reality, truth, and reason rather than to some doctrine.
	But children are very, very open-minded to philosophical ideas, and they actually love to discuss philosophy and thoughts in my experience.
	Which is why philosophers are, it's fine, society's happy banishing them to the ivory tower.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	You all go and use your little Latin terms with each other.
	You go and just do your thing, exchange your papers, you know, we'll give you PhDs, we'll give you months off in the summer, sabbaticals, we'll give you, you don't have to work 20 hours a week, we'll pay you $150,000 or more.
	Just don't talk to the kids.
	Don't do anything that's going to affect childhood and you can have all the money and all the inconsequentiality that you want.
	But the moment that philosophers begin to alter family structures, childhood experiences, the moment that the power of philosophy reaches outside the ivory tower and begins to change not just people's adult lives, which society can survive because there's very few of them, but once it starts to change the trajectory of childhood...
	Aha, well then the philosopher must be attacked because that really threatens the power structures because it gets kids before their ideas harden while they're still receptive to new ideas and can have them focus and grow in the realm of reason rather than the realm of indoctrination.
	And for society that's so fundamentally founded on indoctrination, that is the greatest threat.
	I agree, and that's the point where I think we are not enough right now.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Well, I'm sorry to interrupt.
	I mean, it's all, I'm just, I got to finish with a rant here, so I'm going to get a little tired.
	I want to make sure that the show quality remains high.
	But stop complaining.
	Stop complaining and go make a difference.
	You know, there's not enough of us.
	It's not going to happen.
	It's not going to, just go make a difference.
	Go make a difference.
	Go make a podcast.
	Go make a book.
	Go make a movie.
	Go make a novel.
	Go anything.
	Just go and do something.
	It's a self-fulfilling prophecy to say, but there aren't enough reasonable people to change the world.
	Go make more reasonable people.
	Go talk to your friends.
	Go talk to your family.
	Go set up a speech at your local community hall.
	I mean, for heaven's sakes, especially when people call into me.
	And say, well, Steph, there just aren't enough of us.
	It's like, well, if we were all me, we sure as hell would be a lot closer to having enough of us.
	So just go out and do things to make the world a better place.
	Go put your neck on the line.
	Go put your heart on your sleeve and get out there in the marketplace of ideas and make your...
	Case.
	Stake your claim and carve out the future in the image of reason and evidence.
	So thanks for the call.
	Thanks for everyone for calling in so much.
	A great pleasure to chat with all of you.
	Please, please, please, please, please remember to go to freedomainradio.com slash donate to, I shouldn't say slash like I'm about to hit you with a scimitar, freedomainradio.com slash donate, please, to help out the show, to support us in the essential work that we're doing.
	And don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
	And don't forget, even more, if you've got some shopping to do, it costs you nothing.
	Please go to FDR... Oh, Lord.
	Ah!
	FDRURL.com forward slash Amazon.
	Yeah, I told you I was getting a little tired, but there we go.
	I managed to get it out.
	Have yourself a wonderful, wonderful day.

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