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April 21, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:50:18
3659 Making My Ovaries Scream - Call In Show - April 19th, 2017
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Please, please, please, before we start, don't forget, please, my friends, don't forget to go past freedomainradio.com slash donate to help us out, to help us do what we so desperately need to do in the world and what the world so desperately needs us to do for you, for the future, for us, for everyone.
freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Now, tonight, a near-perfect lineup of callers.
The first caller is a quadriplegic, and the story of how he acquired his injury is truly tragic and horrifyingly instructive, and he wants to know how can he break out of dependence on state power, on state resources, and start to build his own life.
We talked about that.
The second caller wanted to talk about free speech and its value and the barriers that stand in the way to free speech and also the argument, well, you can have your free speech, but that doesn't mean that you are free of the consequences of free speech.
And we had a great conversation about that.
I think it's very, very instructive and illustrative.
Now, the third caller is an entrepreneur who doesn't want to be too pushy, doesn't want to impose his will on others and really get them excited about what he's doing.
And we talked about some of the basic reasons for that.
It's really, really important to let go of this idea of being pushy because that's something kind of, well, you know what?
Listen to the conversation and you'll know what we're talking about.
The fourth caller wanted to take me to task for contradictory statements he believed I made.
In the Against the Gods book and in Proofs for God, Destroyed by a Philosophical Atheist, a video I made some years back, we had a very good debate, very honest, very robust, good thrust and parry, and I hope that you find it engaging, entertaining, and educational.
And the fifth caller wanted to explore female vanity.
And of course I said no, because to say anything negative about women is to be a woman hater.
Nonetheless, she insisted that we continue, and being the deferential white knight that I am, I agreed.
And we talked about female vanity, its effects on culture, and particularly in education.
It's a great caller, great, great set of ideas.
So, yes, here we go.
freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
Use our affiliate link fdrurl.com forward slash Amazon.
But most importantly, listen, listen, listen.
Alright, up first today we have Jesse.
Jesse wrote in and said, I'm a 27-year-old quadriplegic man living in the United States.
My question is, how can I move forward in life with the restrictions I have, i.e.
my injury, and other elements like government that tend to push one's life back into the hole that one has almost appeared from?
I'm very fearful of moving forward, i.e.
getting any kind of job or career, for me to just fail or worst, fall.
How can I move past this fear in a direction that would most likely give me the chance for success?
And what would be causing this fear?
That's from Jesse.
Oh, hey, Jesse.
How you doing?
Hey, Steph.
Doing all right.
Doing all right.
So, yeah, before we get into the what you could do, which I hope to be of help, do you mind saying what happened?
Yeah, um...
About 60 years ago, short thing, I kind of got in a fight with a guy on a balcony when I was in Florida on vacation.
And I ended on the wrong side of the balcony and I fell four stories and suffered a spinal cord injury in my neck.
Wow.
So, yeah.
Did you land on a car?
I mean, I'm trying to think.
Four stories.
What's that?
Like, that's over 30 feet, right?
I mean...
Yeah, it's 48 is what I felt.
48 feet?
Did you land on a car or something?
No, I landed on wood, actually.
And then, yeah, right next to it was like a bunch of sand.
So I like...
I don't know if it's like an apartment building that we were staying in, like a condo complex, and that's how I fell.
So it was on the backside.
We were in the bay, if that makes any difference.
Did the guy you got into a fight with, was he trying to throw you over?
Was it like a complete accident?
Yeah.
I don't know, really, because when I hit my head, I had a lot of amnesia.
But some people, like, everything got misconstrued.
I believe some of it was, some people said I jumped, others said that, oh, you got in a fight, but it was only me and him that were out there, and, like, nobody else saw us.
And that's the bad thing.
So I only, he's like, you jumped off, and I was like, no, I can't.
I completely remember, you know, at least part of me, we were getting into a confrontation, and I don't know, it was like my word against a bunch of other people, so...
I guess you don't even remember what the fight was about, right?
Kind of.
I mean, everybody was drinking a little bit down there, but it was...
I don't know, like, I went on the balcony and we left alone, and...
My girlfriend at the time was giving me a lot of pressure and so I like pushed her away like not hard like by the hips I pushed her away and and she was she got all upset about that went inside and this guy came out and was like you know you don't need to be hitting girls and everything and I go you know I didn't hit her or anything like that I was like just you know leave me alone and that's when one thing happened another like he shoved me and and I hit like the Slightened glass door.
I remember I hit it and then like I pushed him back and they hit me in the mouth and then like after that it gets a little fuzzy.
Do you think that your girlfriend went in and said that guy on the balcony was pushing me or was she crying and people say what's wrong?
I mean did she kind of fuel this guy to come out and get all tough?
Yeah, I don't See, that part I don't remember.
I know she was crying when she ran away, because we were definitely in a heated argument.
And she ran inside, and this guy, he's a police officer, and he's a pretty big guy.
I mean, I'm a pretty big guy.
I was 6'2", about 190 pounds at the time.
And he came all out with his chest puffed out, and like...
Pointing his finger at me and stuff.
At least that's the way I remember it.
How long had you been going out with the girl?
Oh, almost two years at that time.
What was the relationship like as a whole, looking back?
Looking back, I really, like, overlooked a lot of red flags with her.
Like, she was a very selfish person.
And it's like, I should have listened to other people People like my parents and my wife are like, no, you need to get away from that stuff.
You need to get away from that stuff.
I'm saying your parents and who?
Just my parents.
My parents and a good friend.
Right.
Right.
I mean...
Relationships matter.
And I'm sorry to pull you back through all of this sort of stuff, but, you know, relationships matter.
You never know when something crazy is going to happen in a relationship.
Like, you know, you get into some misunderstanding, she calls the cops and says, you know, he hit me, or she goes into some party and, you know, pumps up some guy's white knight psychosis or whatever, and then he comes out and, you know...
It really matters who you're in a relationship with, is what I keep trying to say over and over again on this show.
And, you know, I'm guessing you, you know.
Yeah, I made a lot of mistakes with that because it gets a lot worse down the road.
And I didn't see it until, like, you know, at least I got out of it.
Because when I needed somebody the most, you know, injury when I fell, I was in the hospital.
I was in the hospital in ICU for seven weeks.
But she was adamantly telling me I fell from the first time I remember it.
She was like, no, you fell.
What about this stuff I remember?
And she was like, no, you fell.
The people we went down there with was her cousin and her cousin's fiance.
And so her cousin's fiance is the one I got in a fight with.
Her cousin's fiance.
That was the guy you got in a fight with.
Yes, yes.
So this guy had reason to not...
I mean, you weren't just some random stranger, right?
So he had some reason to not escalate things with you, right?
Well, yeah.
I mean, I knew him before.
I mean, I was an aggressive guy.
I don't remember...
And, like, from what I remember, like, I know we weren't completely, like, wasted or anything like that, especially when it came to alcohol.
And it's like, I just, like, let me put some more context, like, later on in the situation, because you wanted to talk more about the relationship.
of.
Because later on when I needed her most, I stayed in ICU at the hospital for seven weeks, and then they moved me up to a place called Shepherd's.
And I stayed there for about two to three months, and she ended up breaking up with me there.
But while I was in Shepherds, she was also cheating on me.
Sorry, while you were in the hospital?
Yeah, while I was in the hospital.
And that's where I have a lot of angst because, you know, I actually thought she was somebody of this inner circle, right?
I thought she was more than that, but I was definitely overlooking red flags.
And I don't know why.
And I think that's part of the reason why I have this fear, of why I have this fear of me.
Like, I know it's a stupid thing to say, but it's of me falling again, of me going backwards.
That's the fear I was trying to describe Mike in my emails about going forward.
The fear, you know.
Yeah, so that's putting more context in her position.
Did she cheat on you before you got the injury?
No, not that I know of at all.
Were you out of her sight for more than eight minutes?
I shouldn't say.
I mean, we were pretty close, but me and her weren't like that.
I mean, I don't think she was like that.
Like I said, not that I know of.
Plus, I used to be a very confident guy.
I used to be a very strong guy.
I used to run marathons and I was always in shape and everything.
I think that had really a lot to do with it.
What do you mean?
About why she liked me because I don't know if it was It definitely wasn't the other part.
I think it was mainly a physical attraction for her that I think about back on it now.
And it's like two years is a long time for just a physical relationship.
And it's like...
It's like, well, why didn't she come forward?
That's one thing.
Anyways, you probably have a question.
Wait, when you say, why didn't she come forward, what do you mean?
Like, why didn't she come forward with her feelings?
Like, if she didn't feel this way...
Why did we stay together so long?
When I was at Shepard's, when she was breaking up with me, we were in that breakup phase where nobody really knows what's going on.
She settled it on Facebook, which was horrible.
What do you mean?
She broke up with you on Facebook?
Yeah, pretty much.
That's how I definitely knew.
It was a breakup.
You know how you get signals like, oh, it's possibly going to happen or it's possibly not?
I knew definitely because it happened on Facebook.
She came the next weekend to see me because she was like an hour away where I was staying at the hospital.
She She said, all the reasons she gave us, oh, I lost love in you.
And I go, what's that mean?
Do you mean it's because I'm quadriplegic now?
It's because I've fallen.
And she couldn't say that.
She couldn't say that at all.
She couldn't say the truth.
And I don't know.
It ended kind of on a hard note that day.
Right.
Right.
Well, I mean, as to why...
She may have stuck with you for that long, Jesse, my guess is that you were the highest-status guy around.
Tallest, fittest, most handsome, highest-status guy around.
And hypergamy demands that women stick with the highest-status guy unless they can monkey-branch up to someone else.
Maybe so.
Maybe so.
Have you ever heard or seen of her since?
No, we tried talking a little bit after, like when I came home and stuff.
But it just always ended in having an argument or something.
It didn't work out at all.
And I haven't talked to her really in six years, almost.
How did you find out she was cheating on you when you were in the hospital?
Well, my dad...
He was actually out and around town and she was hanging out with this other guy and one of her friends and they were like kissing at a Chick-fil-A. And dad's like, I didn't want to tell you this.
And yeah, so that's how I found out about that.
Was she kissing another guy in front of your dad?
Did he happen to see her by accident or what?
He was walking in the Chick-fil-A as it was happening.
And then she noticed him and it's like he said her demeanor completely changed.
Now, okay, I appreciate that backstory and I'm obviously immensely sorry about all of this.
You have no reason to be sorry.
You're not a part of any of it.
Yeah, but I can feel sorry without guilt.
I'm sorry for slavery too, but it doesn't mean I feel guilty about it.
So, what's happening with your life in terms of, like, getting things going, moving forward, saying, this is what I've got, where am I going from here?
You've talked about sort of limitations from the government, and what are the barriers that are in the way, or how is it hard to move forward?
Because, you know, I can't get out of where I live, and so I basically stay at home all the time.
And so I would have to have a job from home.
And I tried to, because I'm on Social Security right now, and I'm living with my parents.
My parents helped me out a lot.
So I tried to go to the government.
I tried to use Social Security assistance to get me a job and everything.
And, of course, knowing the government, the programs work famously.
I went to one, and I went through the interview process, and they said, well, you're not quite qualified enough to work For any of these companies, try out this service in the government.
And so I went and did through their intern program and they sent me back to the first company.
So, and I'm like, what are they going to give me the runaround again?
I did it again and the exact same thing happened.
And I guess it was because I didn't have any qualifications because I'm so young, but I don't That's what I had problems with the government.
And every time I turn in a resume, I don't have enough experience.
Or at least what some people have got back and told me.
Most people just don't respond.
I know people aren't supposed to ask about that stuff.
But recently I've been trying to learn somewhat coding, like Python coding, because I can voice text that on the computer, which I think I can get somewhere.
But what I'm worried about is if I get a job somewhere and it's just over my limit, I'm...
I'm one cold away from being in the hospital a week or two because I'm so compromised.
And it's like if I can't find a good, steady job, I'm in that limbo of transition where it's really hard for me to get out of, if that makes sense.
Yeah, it does.
Now, I'm sort of thinking about the Christopher Reeve situation.
He was an actor, I guess, in the, what, 70s or 80s?
He was in Superman and a couple of other things.
And he had a terrible fall from a horse.
He was a horse jumper.
And I think he got tangled up.
When the horse stopped, he went over the top.
He got tangled up in the reins, couldn't brace his fall, went down on his head.
And he had it.
Same kind of situation, is that right?
right?
Where it's just like head and like neck and above that you can control with.
And he had huge problems, right?
I mean, bed sores and all this kind of stuff that was very rough for him.
And I'm just sort of trying to get it in my mind.
Is that a similar situation to where you're at in terms of being compromised?
Yeah.
I don't, I don't know how you're good with anatomy, but it's like just my biceps is the only thing I have function in my arms.
So I have a function of somewhat of some of my shoulders, just biceps, no triceps and any below the elbow, and then pretty much chest down, I'm completely paralyzed.
Right, okay.
So, yeah, that's where I'm in.
Is there any shift in, I mean, I'm sure you think about this every day, but is there any shift in what you can do?
Is it changing at all?
Is it getting better or worse?
Or is it staying about the same?
It's staying about the same.
One thing, luckily, I didn't have any brain damage, but yeah, it's staying.
I'll be the way until some kind of technology or stem cell or something else perseveres.
Yeah, there's no treatment options for you at the moment, right?
No.
Right.
Right.
And...
You were saying, so right now, of course, because you're on disability, how are your healthcare costs paid for?
I have Medicare, too.
I mean, they help out a lot.
I mean, they pay for a lot of it, but I try to stay as healthy as possible, so I don't go in the hospital.
I go to a cold until it's like I have to go.
If I can kick it, I will try to kick it.
But it's like...
I have to take all kinds of medicines too, of course.
I don't know if you're gonna go that way, but...
Yeah, that's how I'm...
So I'm technically not paying for it at all.
I mean, insurance.
Now, but if you go get a job, does the healthcare stuff, I guess it changes, right?
I mean, would you have to then get...
I mean, how would the healthcare be paid if you got a job?
Yeah, I would probably have to get some kind of private insurance, and you know how it is in that category.
Especially for me, I'm high risk.
And they would probably cut me out of Medicaid, or they'd do something probably like an 80-20 or something like that.
I don't know if I would be able to stay on it.
I was going to try to contact an expert because those laws have changed so much in the past couple of years.
It's hard for me to get in contact with anybody that knows anything about what's going on because the prices on my medicines will change every month.
It's because of what has gone through in the government recently with Obamacare and all this other crap.
I don't exactly know, Steph.
I don't I don't know.
I wish I did.
I wish I could give you a good answer there.
Now, what about something like...
I'm just going to spitball here, right?
So Jesse, forgive me if I say anything that's completely useless, but I'll just spitball here about some possible solutions.
So you're learning coding, right?
Yeah.
Now, what if you end up, let's say you develop some app, right?
You learn Unity or you get some game going or whatever app that you could start to sell for a couple of bucks and let's say it starts to generate some income for you.
What does that do to your benefits and your healthcare options?
Well, so if I make over a certain amount one month, I think it's, like, $1,100.
If I'm taking more money than $1,100, they can completely get rid of part of my disability.
Like, they give me half or whatever.
And then, like I said, I don't know exactly what would happen with Medicare and medicine costs.
But, say, like, I can better describe it in my mom's case, because my...
My mom, she has stage 4 breast cancer.
And if she has to stay under what is called 200% poverty level, and her medicine per month costs like $10,000 for 21 pills.
And if she makes over a certain amount, it automatically goes away.
And see, I don't know if mine's like that because mine is...
I don't...
Like I said, I have to talk to Alex.
Expert about that.
Maybe I'm confused on your question.
No, no.
I mean, I'm just...
The option of trying to go and get a job is going to be a challenge, right?
Because as you say, it's tough for you to get out of the house.
And so you need to find something to do at home.
And when it comes to working from home, my experience has been like it's much easier...
To have your own projects than it is to work for somebody else if you're limited in this kind of way, which you are, obviously, or at least there's significant impediments.
So if you could get something going in the coding area for yourself, you know, if you could build an app or even if you could partner with other people, or you could build the app and then, you know, partner with someone who might be able to market and sell it or whatever, then that is going to give you more control because right now, waiting for someone to hire you It feels like forever, right?
And given the best predictor of future situations is relevant past situations, it doesn't appear to be anything imminent in the hiring arena.
So in my experience, if you can't get the job you want, then make the job you want.
Now, you do have the option to...
I mean, it's not wrong for you.
It won't do you any harm to code, right?
If you try and build something...
Some game that you like, or some genre that you like, you can build something.
It doesn't do you any harm to build something because that's not income, right?
Right.
So you could really try and build something cool.
For me doing what I'm doing, it's not a direct parallel, but, you know, having a dip in income when you try and do something of your own, like I took a 75% pay cut to start Free Domain Radio from where I was as a software executive, so having an income dip is fine if it's something you care about and something you love.
Obviously not to the point where you can't get essential medicine.
That isn't something that I was facing.
So, but I would definitely, what I would do is I would say, okay, What are my odds of trying to get a job?
Let's say 10% chance to get a job.
Okay, then what I would do is I'd say, okay, I'm in a 10-hour workday, so I'm going to spend, if it's 10%, one hour a day.
I'm going to spend one hour a day trying to get a job, and I'm going to spend nine hours a day trying to build something cool using coding.
And that would be my particular focus.
Maybe you need to look for work more based on whatever regulations there are.
So obviously, run all of this past somebody who knows what they're talking about.
But I would make it a...
A project of mine to build something using coding.
And if it wasn't necessarily...
You can do things to sort of audition your abilities.
Let's just say video game designer, right?
So you can use another video game environment to build levels, right?
So back in the day, there were people who built Doom levels, Unreal Tournament levels, Quake levels, and I don't know what's going on now as far as that stuff goes, but I know that there are buildy tools that you can use to build levels.
You can build them on...
These motorcycle games, what's it called?
Tribes or something like that?
Anyway, so you could start by building levels to get a sense of the physics and to get a sense of what people liked and how playable they were, and that wouldn't cost you anything because, well, I guess you'd buy the game and with it comes the level designer.
You can do mods for...
Skyrim for sure.
I'm sure you can do mods for other games as well.
And you can sort of practice getting into sort of attaching yourself to a larger game environment and see how popular they are and see how well you can build them and how well you can document them.
And you can do all of that while continuing.
So that's really building your skill set.
But you're still getting the benefits that are keeping you alive.
And then at some point, maybe you can build something that you think might be marketable.
And then, of course, you would, you know, check with all the people who would have the relevant information about how it would affect your benefits.
But either try and work to sell it yourself or work with someone you might be able to meet to help you sell it.
And...
If you are building something, if you're in motion, things tend to happen.
If you're not in motion, nothing tends to happen, if that makes any sense.
Like, I have a lot of opportunities with what I do.
You know, I get lots of invites for media gigs, speaking gigs, and all that kind of stuff.
Because I'm already in motion, stuff's happening.
And therefore, I'm going to meet people.
Therefore, I have something to talk to them about, something to offer them, something that could be mutually beneficial.
And I tell you this, Jesse, I mean, let's just say I'm going to just use the gaming genre because the only really programming genre I'm really familiar with is environmental modeling and stuff like that, which I did for my entrepreneurial career.
Well, I guess no other things too, but I'm just going to use gaming because I know that there's Unity out there and you can use that to build games in a way that's far easier than it used to be.
But can you imagine?
So let's say you build something pretty cool.
You are going to have an unbelievable amount of free marketing.
Because if you build something cool and you know that you think you can make a go of it and you're willing to detach yourself from dependence on state subsidies and supports, then what you would do is you would...
Contact the media and say, you know, I'm a quadriplegic.
I've built this really cool game.
And you would get write-up after write-up after write-up.
Your game would be featured prominently.
I'm sure the Apple Store would say, this is a cool thing that was built because society as a whole wants you to succeed.
I mean, nobody likes to sort of think of you sitting there unable to move forward in life because of this terrible incident.
And so you would get an unbelievable amount of Of free publicity.
Well, it's not really free.
You're getting it because being a quadriplegic, so it comes at a high cost.
But nonetheless, you might as well get that kind of marketing and advertising for free.
And then, you know, if you're in motion, you've built something, it's being sold, even if it's not making much money, people have read about you.
And there will be people who care about what your situation is, who you can't find because it's just resumes and blind resumes.
And they hear about you, they call you up and they say, hey man, you know, my brother died of this and I really, you know, in his memory, let's find some way to work.
Who knows, right?
So build something, get the free publicity that you're building something and being an example of people who want to find a way ahead in life despite incredible obstacles and then you're visible.
Now, once you're visible in life and once you're in motion in life, the most amazing things can happen.
I mean, the people I've met through this show are spectacular.
I never would have met them if I wasn't doing the show.
I mean, Mike, who I work with, I mean, the people that I've had on the show, interviewees and friends I've developed through the show, families I've met through the show.
Now, kids hang out and all that.
I mean, it's a wonderful thing.
You've got to be in motion.
You've got to be visible.
Once you're visible, the most amazing things can happen.
People will find you, you can find people, things can work forward, but you're going to have to build something first, have it available, and then use your disability as an extra ability in getting the word out.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, I thought about building an app one time, but I've never thought about using my injury in that way.
Oh, please do.
Listen, the injury sucks like a vacuum, but at least you can give it some legs, so to speak, when it comes to getting the word out there for whatever project you're doing.
Because...
Lots of people know people who've got these kinds of disabilities and everybody wants people like yourself and others to be able to do well.
It would be an incredibly encouraging story.
Plus, it would be very, very inspiring for other people who are facing significant limitations in physical mobility and so on.
So you could be a very powerful example and encouragement for lots of people.
If you have these particular things about you that can help you move your goals forward, use them.
Use them.
I think you would get a lot of very, very sympathetic and positive press about whatever it was that you were building and doing.
And from there, the sky could be the limit.
Yeah, whether it was that or...
I've thought about writing too, but thanks for that.
That was a good look.
And it's something I didn't even think of.
So it's about using my entry in that way.
And certainly writing would not be a bad way to start and to build contacts and so on.
If you start to write, let's say you're blogging about what your life, what your thoughts, what your experiences are, don't be afraid to market.
You know, marketing is very, very important.
Sales, we're going to have another conversation with this listener later in the call-in show tonight.
It's very, very important.
You know, I've said this before, but when I first started doing this show, I spent more time marketing than podcasting.
And that's when I was working full-time in the software field.
So, you know, I think Mike Cernovich says, you know, like, you spend 10% creating and 90% marketing.
Getting the word out there.
Lots of people build stuff.
Like, when I first started writing books, the number of people who said to me, oh, I finished a book, I just never really did anything with it.
We had a doctor recently call in who'd finished a book and didn't really know what to do with it in terms of getting the word out much.
And the number of people, oh, I've half finished a book, I just, you know, got it.
It's like, the world belongs to people who get the word out there.
Simply creating something is not nearly enough.
I mean, think of how much money movie studios spend on marketing a movie.
They can spend enormous amounts of sums marketing a movie.
And it's very, very common in these kinds of situations to build something just gives you the possibility of success.
Everything else depends on actually getting the word out.
People can't get at what they don't even know exists.
So, I mean, I remember back in the day, I'd sit there on message boards and say, oh, you know, this is a message board that might be interesting.
And I'd join the message board chat for a bit and say, you know, maybe you'd want to check this out.
And I sent endless emails out to people I knew.
And I was just trying to get the word out there.
And having a great podcast is fine, but if people don't know about it, it's indistinguishable from a crappy one.
So, yeah, but don't be afraid to shoot that flare up into the sky so people can find you, and you do have a unique story to tell.
And if you're in the media, you're always looking for a unique story to tell, and what you have, you know, I mean, a significant disability, you have a sharp mind, you have a creative goal, you can build something, and if you build it, people will really, really work together.
With you to try and get the word out because everybody wants to see you do well.
And it's not exploiting anyone.
It's not using your disability.
It's simply telling a basic fact that you have a different kind of life than the one you anticipated, but you have a lot to offer the world as well.
Okay.
So basically what your advice would be getting started with that motivation is like starts...
Small, something easy, and just grind, right?
Like you said in one video, you said to this guy, it's time to panic.
And I don't know, should I start panicking about my future?
No, I don't know about panic for you as yet, Jesse.
I wouldn't necessarily want you to be motivated by panic.
But I'm telling you, if you're listening to this show, I mean, my estimation of the users is almost universally very high.
You know, possible flat earthers accepted.
And so you have a lot to offer the world in terms of your intellect.
If I were a religious man, I would say God spared your mind for a reason, right?
Yeah.
And you can break a lot of stereotypes.
I mean, there are other people out there in your situation who are giving up hope.
You're not.
So whatever you build is going to have a larger message To the world than what you build, right?
It's going to have a message about potential possibility, ambition, a rejection of limitations, and that's a powerful message to bring to the world as a whole.
So I would say build something.
You start building something.
Give yourself, okay, you know, I'm just, if I were in your situation, I'd say, okay, I'm not up on the latest coding techniques for games, so I'm going to start by building levels, and I'm going to work to build fantastic levels.
For whatever game it is that you care about or like.
Do you play video games at all?
Not much anymore.
Right.
But yeah, I know.
I used to play Oblivion before Skyrim.
Okay, so Skyrim, you can build amazing add-ons.
For Skyrim, like you can build friendly dragons, you can have your own home, you can build complete additions and monsters and armor and weapons and all this kind of cool stuff.
So you can build amazing stuff for Skyrim.
And I would just say, okay, why, you know, why would I do it?
Well, I'm doing it as part of a stepping stone to a life of self-sufficiency and a life of visibility.
I mean, you might find someone you can fall in love with through this process.
You might find someone you can be business partners with through this process.
You might find someone who's an amazing friend through this process.
You might find someone in a similar situation who you may be able to share and inspire each other with.
You don't know.
So I would give myself a mission and say, okay, I'm going to learn, and it's going to be frustrating as hell to begin with, and apathy and lethargy are always beckoning.
The couch is always beckoning.
Trust me, I had that feeling today.
I had a...
I had a little pasta for lunch, and I may have curbed it up a little too much.
So middle of the afternoon, I'm like, ooh, Steph bought a little nappy.
And I wanted to record something about the Bill O'Reilly thing.
And I'm like, couch, camera, couch, camera.
The couch is always calling.
And it promises sweet oblivion for a little while.
Sometimes it restores your energy and sometimes the couch is just one big giant soul vampire that sucks the life out of you for the rest of the day.
Fortunately, it didn't happen to me today.
So you just build something and finish something and then build something else and finish something else.
You know, like how do you build a house?
Well, first you start with a giant hole in the ground.
You dig down to go up and then you put in brick by brick, right?
So you've got to give yourself the brick by brick.
You've got to give yourself the smaller goals that you can build up to with the goal of economic self-sufficiency, using the publicity of your injury to get the word out there, to get whatever it is you're building out there, to get your personality out there so people can find you And work with you.
So it's not just a matter of you constantly, you know, firing arrows of resumes over a wall and waiting passively for something to come back.
You've got to start building things yourselves.
I got you.
And thanks.
Thanks so much for that.
I don't want to take up too much of your time.
Because you got a few callers today.
Will you keep us posted about what you're doing?
And if there's anything we can do, Jesse, to help get the word out about what it is you're doing, will you let us know?
Yeah, definitely.
I'll send you an email in a couple of weeks to tell you how I've been going.
Excellent.
I'm looking forward to seeing what you build, and thanks so much for the call.
All right.
Thank you.
All right.
Take care.
Bye.
Up next, we have William.
William wrote in and said, While debating the virtues of free speech, I've stumbled into the counter-argument, quote, The strawman argument, rather than my opponent offering an actual rebuttal, implying that if you say something they don't like, they will destroy you with it.
For me, this is a fallacy argument because the consequences of not exercising free speech have much greater ramifications to society as a whole by suppressing the free exchange of ideas that doesn't encourage meaningful debate and thus it tries to steer the argument into self-censorship.
What would be a good counterargument to mob rule through language policing where consequences are weaponized to silence the free debate of ideas?
That's from William.
Hey William, how are you doing?
Well, I'm barely staying out of trouble, so...
Well, that's not a good idea.
No, you can stay out of trouble.
You can run away from trouble, but trouble always has faster legs.
First of all, This is beautifully written.
I hope that you write.
You know, consequences are weaponized to silence the free debate of ideas.
That's beautiful stuff.
And I just wanted to compliment you on your language there.
So I can understand why free speech would be important to you.
In other words, free swordplay is important to a great swordsman.
So great, great, great language skills.
Thank you so much.
I actually am a writer, and that's one of the big things I was concerned about, because I'm concerned about some of the things that I want to say and express and ideas.
And ultimately, there's so much dissent out there to try to shut down ideas that do not fall into, well, let's say, certain ideologies.
So ultimately, that's when I keep running into this issue.
And I was actually with a publisher, I had a deal, and I was looking at my situation, and I was discussing with some of my peers within the publishing group that I was in, and I mentioned that I was a free speech advocate.
Well, this very argument was the reason I walked away from that contract.
Because ultimately, I could recognize that I was dealing with the social justice warrior mentality who wanted to suppress my ability to speak.
And so ultimately, I just could not allow myself to remain in that situation.
So I got out.
Right.
Okay.
So as a writer, I'm going to start with a story.
It's an allegory.
Which may be helpful to, I know you get this, but to illuminate other people.
Imagine, my friends, a town.
Nobody's allowed to leave that town.
Nobody's allowed to enter that town.
And in that town, there is a mayor.
And the mayor runs all the schools.
And the way that the people are raised in this town is they are told that the word flubar exists.
We'll steal their soul and damn them to an eternity in hell in their afterlife.
Just that word, Flubar.
It's the Voldemort of this town.
It is...
Like Allahu Akbar on CNN. It is the phrase that dare not speak its name.
And in this town, nobody is allowed to utter that word.
And if you are to utter this word, or if you are to hear this word, the only way that you can recover your doomed soul by hearing the word flubar is to beat up the person who says the word flubar.
That's the only way you can prevent the evil spell from stealing your soul and damning it to the afterlife for all eternity in a lake of fire and a wailing and a gnashing of teeth and, as the old joke goes, what if you have no teeth?
Teeth shall be provided!
So let us suppose there is this town where everyone is terrified of the word flubar and the moment they hear the word flubar they attack whoever says it so that they can recover their own soul.
And let us say I send you, William, into that town!
And the town has free speech.
Are you going to want to use the word flubar?
No.
Why not?
You have free speech.
There are consequences, of course.
And those consequences are entirely irrational and hostile and destructive because of miseducation.
Government control of education inevitably leads to declines in freedom of speech.
So I agree.
Doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
It does not mean freedom from consequences.
So freedom of speech, one of the limitations, is you cannot directly advocate violence against someone or a group.
You can't initiate sequences that lead to rioting.
You can't encourage or incite to riot.
I mean, lots of limitations.
So sure, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
However...
Let us take the word flubar in this analogy and substitute it for the word racist or something like that, right?
Well, because people have been so programmed into viewing certain questions, certain perspectives, certain patterns of thought as racist or sexist or homophobic or whatever it is, right?
Then people react in a hostile manner not because...
They understand the arguments, not because they understand the perspectives, but because of a Pavlovian response that has been programmed into their amygdala to view with superstitious terror the formation of certain syllables that go against a leftist narrative, right?
So, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, sure, but governments and the media and the leftists and the communists and the globalists have so programmed the population.
That when they are told certain perspectives or hear certain things, they go into a feral, frothing at the mouth, like pitchfork and torch-hunting Shrek kind of mob mentality.
That's been programmed into them.
That is a severe limitation on freedom of speech.
A thoughtless, angry, easily triggered mob is not freedom of speech.
And you can say, well, technically, you can say, sure you can.
Sure you can.
Technically, you're free to wave a red flag in front of a bull.
Well, you wave that red flag, it has consequences.
Right.
Except we're talking about human beings, right, not bulls.
And so, if people are taught how to think critically, if people are exposed to particular information...
Then they can rationally and objectively judge the content of another person's speech.
If, however, certain words are burned into people's brains like a brand and they're traumatized and they're triggered and they react, hostile, vicious, attack, destruction, trawling, then that is not an environment conducive to...
Freedom of speech, right?
So on this show, we've talked about human biodiversity, race and IQ differences, and all those ethnicity differences and so on, both cultural and biological, potentially.
Now, people who have talked about this kind of information have been...
Very thoroughly attacked, you know, when they have sort of...
Like the guy who was Watson and Crick, right?
James Watson, half of the discoverer of DNA, running a cancer institute.
And, you know, as a cancer survivor, let's just say I'm not indifferent to finding a cure for cancer.
Be A-OK. You interfere with somebody who's working to cure cancer?
You are not my friend.
And he talked about some of the challenges that sub-Saharan Africa might face in terms of human progress because the IQ doesn't appear to be exactly the same as, let's say, Japan.
And, you know, attacked and hounded and the same thing has happened to other people and so on.
Well, why?
Because the left wants to weaponize race differences and the best way to do that is to ascribe all differences to prejudice on the part of white people so that they can be weaponized, minorities can be weaponized and used to attack society and create lots of conflict and so on.
And so, okay, fine.
So it's free speech.
Doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
But are the consequences rational?
Are the consequences something that has been baked into people's minds?
By free debate in the market.
Because when you take children and you capture them, and you capture them extraordinarily early in a lot of Western countries, particularly in America, you capture them early, you get them into day-care, you get them into pre-K, you get them into kindergarten, you get them into grade school, and you program, and you program, and you program, and you push, and you mold, and you form, and you bake certain ideas and reactions into their minds.
You program them To react in a hysterically hostile way to the mere presentation of certain facts and realities.
You weaponize the population against certain ideas and perspectives.
And then you say, well, you know, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
That's kind of an asshole position.
It's fine if there's a free market of ideas, but there's no free market of ideas when the government controls education.
And I'm not just talking about primary school or junior high or high school.
All the way through, all the way through, government controls education.
Post-secondary education, for the most part.
Very few exceptions.
State schools, government subsidies, government controls, government control over requirements for PhDs, government control over contracts regarding academics and so on.
So the government controls and programs and helps people program, and this is why this leftist infiltration has happened so massively.
So there is no free market of ideas in the West at the moment, and there has not been for many, many, many a decade.
So I have no problem with people who say freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, as long as people recognize we damn well don't have freedom of speech right now.
What we have is freedom of speech on paper, but what we don't have is freedom of speech in reality, because people are so programmed to react in viciously hostile ways to particular arguments and ideas that That those arguments and ideas can't be evaluated in a rational context, can't be proposed and debated and understood in a rational context.
It is bigotry that you face.
It's bigotry that is limiting our discussions.
Irrational hatred, programmed hatred, and the leftists in the government have programmed the population to view certain ideas in such a hostile way that free speech has become next to impossible.
And we know this because, I mean, there are people who've been studying IQ and ethnicity who've dropped it as a result of hysterical pressure.
Now, how is that hysterical pressure able to be brought upon these people?
Well, it's because there's a general agreement in society That it's somehow evil to talk about these facts, which, you know, are hugely important.
It wouldn't be that important to study ethnic differences in intelligence if there wasn't such a push for a multicultural society, but given that there is, there's going to be differences and we need to understand why.
If it's all racism, that's one thing.
If there's some biological component, we kind of need to know that, otherwise we're going to make disastrous decisions, right?
I mean, just for one example, just after he left office, President Obama commuted the sentences of way north of a thousand criminals, a lot of whom were violent black and Hispanic criminals.
Why?
Because he said, well, it's unfair and it's unjust that there's so many blacks and Hispanics in prison.
So he commuted the sentences of these guys.
They walked free!
Now, the recidivism rate, the repeat criminality rate, 70-80% for certain types of violent crimes, probably even higher, except some people just don't get caught or whatever it is.
And so, because he has this belief that the only reason that there's different numbers of particular ethnicities in the criminal justice system is because of inherent bigotry or racism within the criminal justice system, which studies have shown is not the case.
We're normalized by IQ, normalized by priors, normalized by single motherhood, all the differences.
They're all very fair.
It's not biased within the American justice system.
And when you compare conviction rates for criminals with The reported rates of victimization from people who were just surveyed or interviewed, what was the race of whoever robbed you, and it matches up almost identically with police reports and so on.
So there's no systemic discrimination.
There are just the differences in culture, in IQ, in family structure, and so on.
But he thinks that it's because of racism, and so he's going to set a whole bunch of people free.
Now, some of those people, a lot of those people, are most likely to go and commit violent crimes against other people.
So people are going to get killed, people are going to get raped, people are going to get robbed, people are going to get beaten up, people are going to get strangled and stabbed and shot, because information is withheld and suppressed and attacked.
There is no free marketplace of ideas when the government controls education because people get so programmed in pro-state narratives that it's not fair.
It's not fair.
To have the ability to program children for 12 years plus straight In your particular form of...
And then say, well, there's a free speech, free market of ideas, freedom from consequences.
No, no, no.
It is not an even playing field when the government programs the kids.
The government doesn't teach the kids how to think for the most part.
It just programs them in emotional reactions and hostility towards, you know, whatever is the intellectual enemy du jour or enemy de decade, it seems to be these days.
So I just wanted to sort of give that perspective.
That when people talk about free speech in the West without talking about the stranglehold that governments have on virtually all forms of education outside of conversations like this, I just think that they don't really understand what free speech means.
It's sort of like if you raise a kid in a walled compound and you say, everything outside this walled compound is full of radioactive unicorn zombies that will...
Eat your brain with their serrated tongues.
It's radioactive.
It's horrifying.
Mel Gibson is out there with a six-pack.
Look out!
And then you say, well, you know, anyone's free to leave and go and do whatever they want.
It's like, are you not noticing the propaganda that the kids have been subjected to?
That there's just some magical abstract free speech outside of all of this propaganda?
Well...
There isn't.
I'm hoping that we can widen our capacity to discuss things rationally, but we do run up against these significant walls of programming.
And this is the challenge of people like you and I and other people who are trying to talk about free speech, is that the government is jamming blue pills down the throat of kids a lot faster than we can offer them red pills.
And that...
incoming propaganda bots is really, really tough.
They get infected a lot faster than we can cure them.
So I just wanted to give you that idea about consequences.
What do you think, Will?
I'm actually in full agreement with that.
I mean that's the whole thing of – I guess you could say it's what my argument is because one of the things I put into my argument was talking about virtue.
And I can remember you and Cernovich actually speaking about this the other day where you talked about courage being one of our highest virtues.
Well, I can't think of anything more courageous than the capacity to speak the truth in the face of opposition.
So it's not a situation where I don't look at my circumstances and think, wait, I've got consequences to my speech?
Of course I know I have consequences to my speech.
I mean we have this situation where we live in a causation – you have causality.
We live in this universe where there's cause and effect.
Every action we take is going to lead to a result, and essentially that's what a consequence is, right?
In its most benign form, consequence – Essentially becomes the result of an action taken.
Well, in this case, it'd be an action of free speech.
So I definitely agree when you said that this was rather an asshole argument simply because instead of addressing the arguments like, for example, if I am speaking about courage and virtue and speaking the truth, ultimately, when someone poses this rebuttal, They're trying to appeal to the consequences instead of appealing to my argument or to my point directly.
Now, of course, we have to be able to keep, continue pushing, like you talked about before, how we needed to widen our capacity to open the conversation.
Well, we can't do that by being silent, right?
I mean, somebody has to be kind of putting their hands in there and squeezing, trying to make that hole bigger to where we can open up that dialogue.
Ultimately, that's what I'm wanting to go back to on this is because really, just as you always say, not addressing my point and like if I'm presenting an argument and someone says, well, what about the consequences?
Well, sure, I've already assessed the consequences of what I'm going to say.
I'm not going to walk up to my boss and tell him he's a stupid head because especially if he's temperamental, I might get fired for that.
Obviously, I've considered the consequences of that already.
So someone reminding me of consequences doesn't necessarily – they're not doing it for my benefit.
They're not saying, well, I want you to be careful.
I don't want you to get in trouble by saying something that's going to get you in trouble.
Ultimately, that's why I said I see it as a veiled threat.
But anyway, that's what I needed to unpack on this.
I really do think that it's more important for us to focus on the virtue and say the truth and have the courage to do that versus allowing people to put us in this box and say, well, there's consequences to saying something unpopular.
Well, and yeah, and the argument that free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences is generally made by the left because they're In control of the consequences, you know, as an abstract movement through control of education.
So, you know, if the right was beating up leftist speakers, right, like Ann Coulter was supposed to speak in California, and it's on again, it's off again, fear of security concerns and so on.
And you can say, well, you know, Lauren Southern and others, we're going to have a free speech rally together at Berkeley and, well, you know, there were riots and there's, you know, moldy locks and punches being thrown and all this kind of stuff.
Well, they're free to do it.
It's like the consequences tend to be negative towards non-leftists from leftists.
So they, of course, don't want to talk about the injustice of the aggressive consequences that are heaped upon right-wing or at least non-leftist people as well.
And there are people who, you know...
Seem to be a little bit surprised at some of the negative consequences that accrue their way.
And I think that's just important to understand as well, that there is this stranglehold of propaganda that the left has over just about everyone in society, and they are hobbled, they're crippled, they're not able to think rationally, objectively about many topics, the most important topics.
They're not really allowed to...
To think about them in any kind of curious way.
They're not allowed to explore.
They're told the conclusion.
Why is there an income disparity?
Exploitation!
Why do racists do differently?
Racism!
Why do women make less?
Sexism!
Patriarchy!
They're not allowed to explore and look at the data.
They are conclusions.
And I hate this phrase because it's so overused, but conclusions are just jammed down their throats.
And anyone who questions those conclusions is attacked as a thought criminal.
And that's not freedom of speech.
And until we understand at least how much effect...
This has.
I mean, if it didn't have any effect, they wouldn't be so interested in controlling what children are exposed to when they're growing up.
But it has a huge effect.
And freedom of speech, you know, there's de facto and de jure, right?
De jure is, you know, well, legally, yeah, haha.
But what actually happens on the ground, you know?
I mean, legally, you're allowed to have a rally for free speech at Berkeley, although...
You know, you may end up not being able to do it if Ann Coulter's thing is pulled because of security concerns, which means that threats of violence are shutting down your rights.
And Richard Spencer apparently just won the right to give a speech where people was banned because, you know, First Amendment and all of that.
So, sure, yeah, the consequences may be pretty horrendous and pretty negative, and that is an inhibition on free speech.
And if the left cared at all about free speech, they should be violently punished.
Let me rephrase that.
Not physically violently.
They should be strongly condemning the use of violence to deprive people of their rights of free speech.
But in general, they don't because the left has rarely found a fist it doesn't like if it's pointed in the right direction.
I can completely agree with everything you said.
I do have a confession to make.
When I initially, I guess you can say, emailed my question in, I didn't have any idea what the argument would be or how to go about this.
And I was like, I'll just email this question, and I'll sit back and just let Stefan impart all of his wisdom onto me and let him do all the work and help me understand what I need to do about this situation.
So when Michael said, hey, congratulations.
We have a disagreement.
This will be a great conversation.
I was like, I am not getting caught with my pants down.
I'm going to do my research here.
I'm going to make sure that I have my arguments lined up.
I'm not fully convinced.
That weighing consequence is necessarily a good reason to remain silent because, I mean, when we look at society as a whole, even – I mean, I'm going to go back here for just one second and talk about what the consequences is of not saying something.
I remember reading a book in high school, A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt.
And I remember a scene in it because I had to act it out in a little play at my school.
And I remember it said, the maximum of the law is that silence gives consent.
Therefore, if you must construe with my silence the tokens, you must construe that I have consented, not that I have denied.
So, ultimately, when we remain silent, and we have these illogical arguments being put forth by the right, and they're pushing back on us, and they're trying to say, forget your principle.
Let's move towards a more hedonistic society, and you're all racist and everything else.
Well, by us remaining silent...
The maximum of the law as we understand it in de facto as we use it today is that silence gives consent.
This is one of the reasons why whenever you're in a debate with someone online, somebody is always trying to get that last word because ultimately the last person not to say anything, a lot of people simply assume victory.
Ah, they conceded my point.
And so when I look at consequences, I mean, we have consequences for everything.
In my research, I was looking at it, 450 people a year die just getting out of bed in the morning.
You know, they fall, hit their head, or what have you.
I mean, two to five people each year die from balloons.
Does that mean that we should look at those consequences and say, oh, don't play with balloons, I might die?
Yes, the risk is very, very low.
Now, I mean, of course, in a situation like Berkeley, obviously, you're going to be in a much...
Higher risk factor, and you need to be more careful, and you need to be organized, and you need to be prepared to face some consequences, which is one of the reasons I was so glad to see the pushback from the conservatives on the Berkeley Council driving out the Antifa, driving – whose streets are streets?
Well, in the end, the good guys won that day.
And it was also unnecessary.
I mean, I think it was in Texas.
There was another speech and some people, I don't know who they were, but they showed up masked and all of that stuff.
And the police said, no, you can't have a mask on.
And they just went home.
And it was all done.
All done.
And it's so easy to solve these things.
Just enforce the damn law.
But, you know, I can't believe I'm an anarchist saying to the state, enforce the damn law.
But it certainly would solve a lot of problems.
Exactly.
I mean, and I think one of the things the unmasking does, right, is it kind of puts a face to the people behind the action.
And people, when they know that they are assessing their risk, they're like, oh, everybody can see my face.
My family can see my face.
So they're immediately in a position to essentially… They're reassessing their risk at that point because the risk is obviously different from them from the moment that they're masked to the point that they're unmasked.
And that's what I wanted to get into with the consequences argument because ultimately when someone says that to you, when someone says you have the freedom of speech but you're not free from the consequences, well, if I'm… I've already thought about this argument to be courageous, and I know it's courageous to speak the truth, and I consider that a virtue.
Why are you suggesting that I haven't thought this through?
I mean, on this very basic premise, I mean, at best, they're thinking I'm naive and I'm not aware.
Oh, if I do this, then bad things can happen to me, right?
But on the worst, it's actually a veiled threat.
And so the reason why...
Sorry, I lost my train of thought there for a second.
So ultimately, that's what they do.
Whenever they ask you to, or when they pose to you that you should consider the consequences when they're trying to appeal to the consequences argument on that, they're causing you to reassess your risk here.
What am I saying?
And if you constantly put someone to a position, and I think this is why so many people have gotten so afraid of saying anything, it's because they're constantly being asked to reassess their risk.
If you're constantly having to navigate this landmine of political correctness and everything, oh, did I say the wrong thing here?
Did I say the wrong thing there?
Well, constantly evaluating those risks as you're trying to navigate this minefield is going to create stress.
And eventually, that stress is going to literally, you know, it can drive you into almost post-traumatic stress disorder syndrome.
I mean, it can really cause mental issues.
It can cause a breakdown in our health and our bodies, lack of sleep, eating habits.
It can change our moods, all of these different things.
So when someone says to us that we should evaluate the consequences, I don't feel that they're doing...
I feel like they're doing it ultimately to try to shut you up, to say, okay...
Well, watch what you're going to say or there's going to be trouble ahead, right?
They're not doing it for my benefit.
They're not doing it for your benefit.
They're doing it so that they have no one that will stand up against that narrative.
And ultimately, that's what I'm saying is, yes, they do...
They do push us on the consequences.
They want us to recognize that there will be repercussions.
If it's not from the government, you know, I mean, it's going to be from them, right?
So I just don't – I'm just not convinced that that's enough to say that's not worth having virtue.
That's not worth speaking truth.
No, I get all of that.
No, I understand that.
But, I mean, there's a fundamental imbalance there.
Which needs to be understood that there are people dependent on taxpayers and there are the taxpayers, right?
The producers and the looters, as Ayn Rand used to say, there are people who pay their taxes, people who receive the fruits of those taxes.
Now, the left is generally keen on big government and the left is generally hostile to people having jobs and people getting married and all of that.
For obvious reasons, that if people have jobs, then they're paying taxes, which means that they're going to vote for smaller government, which is against the leftist's desire to take money from producers and hand it out for votes from consumers, right?
From people who are going to take the profits of that ill-gotten gain.
And, you know, why is the left so hostile to marriage?
Because...
When there's marriage, usually one person is working and one person is raising the kids, and therefore you have two people interested in lower taxes.
Also, if you have marriage, then you have kids, and if you have kids, then you are more concerned about the future of society, because your kids are going to have to grow up and live there.
You think more long-term.
You care about what the world is going to look like in 50 years, even though I'll be dead.
In 50 years, probably quite a bit before then, I'll be dead.
But my daughter will still be alive and her children and all that.
So you care more.
And so you're willing to push back more against things.
And why is the left so keen on abortion?
Because abortion reduces consequences of wanton sexual appetites and the exercise thereof.
And If a woman gets pregnant and actually has to deal with having the kid or giving it up for adoption or whatever it is, then she's going to need a man if there's no welfare state.
And so, you know, the pro-welfare state, pro-abortion, these are all things to make for broken families, single moms who vote left reliably and so on.
So they're all just about growing the environment or fertilizing the environment for more dependence on the state, which is why they promote, you know, anti-white male hatred and Because white males produce most of the taxes that they need to consume.
So white males must be taught to hate themselves and taught to think that they live in a world of incessant danger and never stand up for themselves, never have any in-group preferences whatsoever because then they're harder to pillage because they can organize and get together and push back against these toxic narratives that are so against white males and so on.
And the reason for all of this is that the left is better at making negative consequences happen for two reasons.
Number one, Much greater motivation.
If 100% of your income comes from the government, whereas you're only paying 30% of your income to the government, well, you have at least three times the incentive, right, to keep government growing, to keep the taxes flowing.
So you have a much greater incentive to do that.
And so your incentive is much higher.
You also have way more time.
Way more time.
Because you're not working.
Often you don't have a family.
And even if you do have a family, I mean, welfare moms speak to their children less than working moms do, even though welfare moms are generally home all day.
They don't really interact with their kids.
Their kids are just like crops.
Farmers don't go out and talk to their watermelons, generally.
They're just crops for tax money for a lot of these women.
And...
So you have a much greater incentive to grow the state and you have much more time to organize to do it because you're not busy working or really interacting with kids if you even have any.
So it's not just that, oh, there's this basic problem of the state.
It's a basic imbalance of incentives.
I don't think there's any way to solve it, which is why I remain in the long run a voluntarist, somebody who is like, state, the society is the only way.
You can't solve this problem.
In the short run, you can't.
Like I was listening to the...
There's hostility on the left because job numbers are up under Trump.
More and more people are getting jobs under Trump.
And the left doesn't like it because the more people who have jobs, the less excuse they have for income redistribution and the more people they have who want taxes to be lowered.
And if taxes are lowered, the left has less money to hand out for free votes.
So these consequences accrue because...
People dependent on the state desperately need the state to stay or grow and have lots of time to organize and everyone else has less incentive.
It's like the old example of the sugar industry.
Like sugar industry benefits from all these tariffs and they get millions and millions and millions of dollars every year from the tariffs that keep out foreign sugar, thus keeping the price of American sugar high.
Whereas every individual American maybe pays 10 bucks a year or 5 bucks a year or a buck a year in extra costs.
So it's not really worth organizing against it because it's so low, but it's totally worth organizing for it because you get millions and millions and millions of dollars if you lobby for tax tariffs, tariffs on sugar, whereas what's your incentive to lobby against it?
I mean, it doesn't exist fundamentally on a cost-benefit analysis basis.
And it's the same thing with the size of the state as a whole.
So the left, knowing the way the situation has been set up, that's why they're so feral.
That's why they're so aggressive.
That's why they're so hysterical.
That's why they're so committed.
Because they're, I think in their minds, a lot of them, like they're fighting for their lives.
Like, if I can't get these subsidies, if I don't get this subsidy, if I don't get this welfare, if I don't get this money, I'm going to die.
Right?
So, you know, I mean, a rat thinks it's 30 feet tall when it's cornered.
It has no choice.
And I think that imbalance of incentives is another thing that's really limiting free speech.
The left has so much more incentive to limit free speech than the non-leftists have to push back and expand it.
And that, again, is another one of these imbalance of incentives things that's a challenge.
Anyway, thanks a lot for the call.
You're welcome back anytime.
Great set of questions.
I hope that the conversation was helpful to you, but I am going to move on to the next caller, given that we have quite a number of helicopters circling the deck.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Alright, up next we have Gabriel.
Gabriel wrote in and said, I'm a young man in my 20s and am currently developing a real estate project in South America.
It's my first development, and it's been a hell of a ride thus far, but now we're entering a phase of the project where I find myself having to push my limits even more than before.
The time has come for a serious marketing and sales push, and even though I enjoy it overall, I think I might be getting in my own way.
I'm a mellow, polite Canadian, so the pushy salesman thing doesn't come naturally to me.
So far, we've been able to employ a more relaxed and organic approach, but it's crunch time, and I think I have to grow beyond my comfort zone yet again.
As an experienced entrepreneur, How did you get results in this area without becoming pushy or dishonest?
I value my credibility and reputation as an honest and genuine person, so I would hate to become that guy that's just trying to sell you something.
That's from Gabriel.
Hey, not bad.
How are you?
I am well, thank you.
I am well, thank you.
Pushy!
Pushy, tell me what that means to you.
It's kind of a pejorative.
People who have energy.
And focus and want to get things done and want your attention are often called pushy.
I may have in fact received that sobriquet myself one or two times in the history of my existence.
So what does it mean to you when you use the term pushy?
I guess it's just assertiveness that's taken a little too far to the point where you start rubbing people the wrong way.
Okay, so I know it's a negative and you're just saying, okay, it's a negative.
Pushing people the wrong way, rubbing people the wrong way, sorry, that doesn't really answer my – that's just another negative statement without any definition.
It's bad because it's bad?
It's bad because it rubs people the wrong way?
What does that mean?
How do you know when it's too far?
That's a good question.
Sorry, I hate to be rude and ask a question and then immediately ask another question.
But just for context, so the people who wanted to end, like Wilberforce and the people who wanted to end slavery in the 19th century, should they have been less pushy?
Should they have not ruffled as many feathers?
Should they not have rubbed people the wrong way?
Should they have waited for another couple of generations?
What do you mean?
So yeah, I guess in like a slavery, life and death kind of thing, it would definitely be worth going that extra mile and risk, you know, alienating people and having people pissed off at you because it's such a serious thing.
But, you know, if it's just for a job and sales and things like that, I guess it's not as desperate.
Okay, so that brings me to my next question.
Why are you involved in something that is not important to you?
At least that important.
No, this is an important thing.
If you recoil from being pushy, it's probably because you're not doing something important enough.
And that doesn't mean what you're doing is not important.
It means you haven't thought about it in the right way to make it important.
That's interesting.
I hadn't thought about it that way.
Well, you said if it's important enough, then you can be abrasive, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
I guess no job would fit into the same category of importance to me that something like abolishing slavery would.
Okay, so then why are you doing what you're doing rather than something that you can get behind and not care about being pushy?
Now, I'm not saying you need to change what you're doing.
I think there's a way that we can get you there, but that's my sort of thing.
Why are you blaming pushy people for caring enough about what they do because you don't care enough to be pushy?
What's wrong?
Well, they're committed.
They really care about what they're doing.
It's really important to them.
So I'm just going to call them pushy because what I'm doing isn't important enough to me.
No, I guess I was just wondering if, like, in your experience, you had come up with ways or developed methods of getting the same results and being assertive without coming off as being salesman-y, if that is a word.
All right, so now I have to ask you what the hell you mean by salesman-y.
What does that mean?
Of course, of course.
I guess I have people in mind when I say that, because I've met people that just come off that way.
The minute they open their mouth, you know they're going to try to sell you something.
They've just kind of developed a reputation for always being involved in some scheme or venture or something like that, and they're always trying to get you involved in that kind of thing.
I don't know.
I want to remain sincere and genuine so that my intentions don't become suspect.
Can you give me an example of someone you've met that you felt was salesman-y and why you felt that way?
I guess I had very limited interactions with him, and the only times I encountered him were in those circumstances.
He was indeed trying to sell stuff.
And then he kind of stuck in my mind, and I started seeing people like him all over the place.
It's that used car salesman kind of thing, right?
Where he's all smiles and friendly and stuff.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
What's wrong with it?
Because it's a cliche, right?
What the hell is wrong with a used car salesman?
Nothing at all.
No, you put that forward as a pejorative, right?
What is the problem with a used car salesman?
Objectively, nothing.
Does he want to sell you a car?
Of course he wants to sell you a car, but you're only there because you want to buy a car.
Probably.
So what's wrong with him really working to sell you a car?
If he succeeds in selling you a car that works for you, he's saved you a lot of time.
He may have saved you some money and he's helped serve your needs of wanting to have a car.
Sure.
Yeah, and that's a good point in terms of how to think about the job or the transaction or the process in terms of trying to help somebody achieve an outcome that they want, which obviously as a salesman is the outcome that I want too.
I guess it's just more of like a question of tactics or methods.
Well, again, so, I mean, if tactics and methods, if I were a used car salesman, I wouldn't be selling cars.
And nobody buys a car.
I mean, Jay Leno and, you know, Jeff.
Nobody buys a car.
What are they buying?
They're buying mobility.
They're buying freedom.
They're buying access to a job.
They're buying, I can get a date, meet the woman of my dreams, drive her someplace and start a family, right?
I mean, you're not selling a piece of machinery.
You're selling freedom.
You're selling sexual vitality.
You're selling labor opportunity.
You're selling entry to the middle class.
You're selling coolness.
It's not just about a car.
It has to be something bigger that you care about.
And there are people who will damn well benefit from buying something, but are too fraidy cat to make the commitment.
And they need some encouragement.
They need something that's really going to help.
them get what they want.
And there's nothing wrong with being pushy if the person appreciates it over time.
That's a great point.
And I think as you're talking and I'm thinking about it, I think the context is a huge factor there.
When I think of people in situations that I felt were out of place or pushy or rubbing the wrong waist, so to speak, I'm not going to be a It was because the context wasn't suitable.
Like, if I was walking onto a used car lot and there was a salesman there and he started trying to sell me, I mean, that would be great because that's why I'm there.
But I wouldn't want to be meeting that guy at a party or something and then see him and then know, oh, here he comes.
He's going to try to sell me a car at this party.
Has that ever happened in your life?
I've encountered situations like that, yes.
Okay, give me an example.
I just want to know emotionally where this stuff is coming from.
So what has happened in your life where you're at a party and somebody says, I got a real beautiful gremlin for you right out back?
You mean what was the situation like?
Yeah, yeah.
I tend to frequent a lot of libertarian-type events and things like that.
There are a few key characters that tend to do that.
They just try to recruit people into multi-level marketing programs and stuff like that.
I don't know.
I guess, yeah, those are the main reference points that come to mind for me.
And what's wrong with multi-level marketing?
Again, assuming that it's an honest company with reasonable products and reasonable prices or whatever, right?
What's wrong with multi-level marketing?
Yeah, I think it's just the context.
I think in the right place and time, it's great.
If I'm looking for something like that, then it's perfect.
But out in a social situation or something like that, I don't know.
And how many times has this happened in your life where people have tried to sell you stuff in a social context?
Honestly, not very often.
Like, maybe three times, maximum.
Okay.
So you understand you have no empirical basis for being very upset about it, right?
Oh, no.
I'm definitely not upset.
I'm just wary and I'm trying to think of ways...
Three times in your whole life.
Okay.
Yeah.
And was it harassing you?
Were they following you to your car?
Were they hanging on to your leg?
I mean, what do you mean?
Like, what happened?
Now that I think of, like, further back, when I was a teenager, I had a couple of uncles that were into, like, Amway kind of stuff.
And I think I was exposed to more of that and not really paying attention.
Like, I think there was stuff like that going on in the background, in the home and stuff like that, but I wasn't really, like, focused on it.
Because I was a kid, right?
Okay, so you heard your uncles trying to sell some this sort of Amway stuff, right?
Yeah, and I think my mom got into it too for a little while.
Right, and what was her experience with that?
As far as I know, it was overall positive.
I wasn't really involved and I didn't see much going on, but I think she was happy with it.
So the fact that your uncles got her into something that she was happy about means that she actually benefited from them not taking no for an answer up front?
Yeah, they were separate programs in separate situations.
No, no, no.
I understand all that.
But she benefited from your uncles not taking no for an answer.
If she said no initially, right?
I believe they both benefited in their own separate cases, yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
So, we have a net positive that didn't affect you, but you have a negative view of it.
I mean, they were trying to sell your mom on the idea, and it ended up being a good idea for her.
And so, what's the problem?
Honestly, there is none.
Okay, I'm not trying to corner you.
Your experience might have netted you.
Sorry?
So, I'm not trying to...
I'm not trying to sort of corner you, and I'm not trying to say that you're wrong.
I'm trying to understand if you were like...
Okay, let me give you a little story here.
So many years ago, when I was just starting out of the business world, I ended up installing a network and setting up systems for a guy and his business.
Yeah.
And there were the usual...
This is back in the day.
There were the usual technical problems.
There were two kinds of networks, and they'd put the wrong little toggles on the network card, and I couldn't get it to work.
Anyway, so I ended up working really late there.
They ended up...
I stayed over at the guy's place.
Nice guy.
I stayed over at the guy's place.
And then the next...
I didn't have a car.
I was just a kid, right?
And...
The next day he had to go to a conference and he didn't have time to drop me home.
It was a long way.
So I went with him to the conference and then they were all heading out to dinner and they brought me along.
I wasn't exactly kidnapped but I didn't have any way to get home.
I just didn't have any way to get home.
I've totally been there.
And, you know, it was fine.
And, you know, I actually ended up meeting the guy much later in my business career.
Anyway, but it was just like, I can't get out of here.
I feel like I'm in a Sopranos thing.
I may also put me in the trunk.
But so those kinds of situations, you kind of feel out of control.
But, you know, that was fine.
I mean, I couldn't really get upset because I chose not to have a car.
You know, so if not having a car means I've got to spend one day, you know, reading capitalism, the unknown ideal at a conference, And then if they bought me dinner, it's not really the end of the world.
I get the not having a car, right?
So that's kind of like being in other people's control, so to speak, but sort of the result of personal choices of mine.
So my question is, where do you get this negative view of pushiness?
Because you're not alone in this.
And this is one of the reasons why I really wanted to dive deep into this one, because a lot of people get This pushiness is a bad thing.
And even the word pushiness has a physical component to it that doesn't actually exist.
If you actually get pushed a lot by a salesman, that's assault.
You know what I mean?
It's a physicalization.
You know, like earlier, and I said, I hate this phrase, although, you know, you're just taking your ideas and you're jamming them down my throat.
It's like, no, no, just making sounds with my breathing hole and you choosing to stick around and listen.
So even this sort of pushiness has a physical component to it.
And it's really, really important to understand where it comes from, this idea of why it's negative to be pushy.
Because if you're not pushy, first of all, if you define something as negative, you're going to avoid it.
You have this, I don't want to be too pushy.
I don't want to be in people's faces.
I don't want to upset people too much.
I don't want to rub people the wrong way.
And again, these are all physical things.
In people's faces.
You're not actually in people's faces.
You're not actually rubbing them the wrong way.
This is not like a rub and tug with a sandpaper glove.
You're rubbing people.
I guess if you're into that, maybe it's the right way.
But it's a very physicalization of...
Somebody's insistence.
And if you're defining it as a negative, then you're kind of stuck.
Because if you want to be an entrepreneur, guess what?
You got to be pushy.
You got to be pushy.
I mean, I've told this story before.
Steve Jobs.
Some guy was working on some update to the Apple II, and he's like, you've got to come and work with me on the new Mac.
And he's like, well, you know, I need to finish to the end of the week, blah, blah, blah, and I've got to do this, that, I've got a project meeting, I've got to write a status report.
And Steve Jobs just unplugged his computer, picked it up, and carried it over to the Mac area.
He says, no, no, no, you're working with me on the Mac, right?
I don't want to hear any of this other bullshit, right?
And now that pushy, yeah, it's pushy as hell.
It's kind of rude.
But, you know, he's the boss and that's what he wanted.
And I'm sure the guy was happier in the long run working on the map than on the stinky old Apple II. Although I do remember seeing an Apple II down at the Eaton Center in an old computer store.
It's probably long gone now.
The company's long gone now.
And there was a rotating...
Picture, a line drawing, a line vector of a space shuttle.
And I just remember, I think that was about the coolest thing I'd ever seen.
Also, strangely enough, I remember probably around the same time, decades ago, seeing a flight simulator at the Ontario Science Museum and thinking that was one of the coolest things.
It was probably like 19 computers lashed together because it had a 30-second frame rate for a flight simulator, whereas the line drawing flight simulator I had on the Atari 800 had a one frame a second.
Don't turn!
Too quickly.
It was like basically the visual equivalent of listening to William Shatner give a speech.
But anyway, so my question is, why would you put yourself in a situation where you have to be pushy, so to speak, but you've defined pushy as negative?
And where did this idea come from?
It's not empirical, right?
It's not empirical to your life.
Right, absolutely.
I think it probably just has a lot to do with the language that I was raised with.
Those are the words that were used by the people around me when speaking about this kind of thing.
Which people around you?
Who exactly?
Oh, family, teachers, you know, the classic authority figures that we grew up with.
You mean...
Quite a few of them were, I suppose, yeah.
I'm not sure what the ratio would have been.
How do you think I knew that?
I'm psychic.
Yeah, that too, of course.
The pushy stuff generally comes from women, right?
To be fair, a lot of them were men too.
I grew up on a farm in a very small farming community kind of thing, and all the guys were kind of like that.
I suppose farmers don't really have to sell much in Canada because the wheat board just buys everything.
Farmers don't really have to be salesmen, so they kind of speak ill of sales type people.
Oh, yes.
Okay.
So for those who don't know, right, there's a wheat board.
Is it still there in Canada?
I know that there was some talk about getting rid of it.
I don't think so.
I haven't had my finger on the pulse of all that much lately.
So the government buys all the wheat from the farmers, then resells it at preferred prices or whatever, and it's a way of propping up farmers because government policy is stupid and there are too many trade barriers.
Anyway, so they also used to take a lot of wheat and dump it on the great Satan enemy of the Soviet Union back in the day.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a dairy board.
They drive up all the prices of these things.
And the farmers like it because it gives them stability.
But sure, yeah.
I mean, it's just that a lot of us who weren't farmers felt that the wheat board and the milk board were kind of pushy, you know, because they're just taking our tax money to give to the farmers.
That's kind of pushy.
I guess if you're on the receiving end of all of that money and don't have to deal with the free market, then you can complain about people being pushy while you get your pillage from the population at gunpoint government money.
Oh, yes.
They're so pushy.
Rifle, rifle, rifle, blood money, blood money.
It bothers me when people use the state to get money and then complain that people in the free market are pushy.
At least they're not pushing with the force of law and the force of jail.
I remember this from back in the day, the farmers who tried to sell...
They're wheat outside the wheat board.
Because, you know, when the wheat board would pay you more, everybody was thrilled.
But when the wheat board would pay you less, they'd try and – some of the farmers would try and black market sell it elsewhere.
They got into huge amounts of crap, right?
Yeah.
So, okay.
So they – It's much pushier to want a government solution to your problem of pricing than it is to sell on the free market.
So I find that a little precious.
I remember working once.
I worked for a non-profit.
I don't know if they got their money from the government, but they probably did.
And a guy came in.
He wanted to sell something.
He came into these little offices.
He wanted to sell something.
And they just, they treated him with such contempt, you know, get out of here, salesman, so pushy, you know, it's like, guy's just trying to make a buck.
You can put a no-soliciting sign on the door.
He won't come in, but you left it open and he came in and he wanted to sell you something.
It's fine.
He's just another human being trying to make a buck, trying to put a roof over his head.
But they were just so contemptuous, so contemptuous.
I'm actually now convinced in hindsight they did get their money from the government because it takes a certain amount of state addiction to be that contemptuous of free market interactions.
Right.
So, okay, so you grew up in a non-free market environment where people viewed salespeople as pushy, and they didn't have to be pushy because they had a guaranteed price for their wheat, right?
That's true, yeah.
Right.
Interesting.
And they found the pushiness of the free market was vastly, vastly less preferable to them or negative to them relative to the coercive price of the goods that they were selling to the wheat board, right?
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Interesting.
Interesting.
Huh.
Yeah, I hadn't thought about that.
Well, you know, it's like Marx couldn't get a job at the post office or the railway office because his handwriting was so bad and, you know, might as well have lived in his mother's basement.
Certainly had a neckbeard and never worked an honest day in his life and is the foundation for a lot of modern leftism.
Funny how that all works.
Yeah.
And...
So pushy, pushy.
People who have trouble saying no will try to get other people to stop trying to get them to say yes.
And the way they do that is not firmly saying no, but casting aspersions on those who ask them to say yes to something.
Rather than just saying no and being honest and being assertive, they try to sort of poison the well, so to speak, by saying that pushiness is a negative trait.
Pushiness is a negative trait, without really defining what pushiness is.
And of course, if people are concerned, because, you know, pushiness is like imposing your will on others, against their will, I suppose, although in a free market environment you can just...
First of all, you generally have to walk into a sales situation.
Like what you say, you know, like I've never...
Nobody's ever tried to sell me a used car on a bus.
You know, just...
You have to walk into a sales situation.
And then you have to stay in a sales situation.
And of course, the salesman wants to sell you whatever you've come in for because that's kind of the implicit contract that you're at least open.
Like if you go and test drive...
spend an hour or two chatting with the salesman, there's kind of an implied contract there, which is that you might buy a car.
Of course, of course, right?
Otherwise, it's like, you know, going out with a woman three times, spending 150 bucks on dinner and entertainment, and then she tells you about her boyfriend.
You know, come on, there's an implied contract that you're single when you're going on dates.
And so there is, you know, and people who go and test drive and they have no intention of buying a car, it's kind of like a soft theft because you're actually preventing the salesman from selling because you're putting yourself in an environment where the salesman can't sell anything because you're not going to buy anything and he's not selling to someone else who could.
So it's funny to me, when people talk about pushiness, they're always talking about used car salesmen.
You've got to walk on the lot and you've got to start interacting.
You know, I've been on used car lots, and if I say I'm just looking, they don't bother me.
But if I start asking questions and I start kicking tires and slamming doors and unchecking odometers and so on, then I'm signaling that I am a more motivated buyer, so of course they're going to invest time in me.
So it's funny to me how people talk about pushiness in sales, but they don't talk about pushiness in government programs, which you can't avoid, which you're forced to pay for, which, you know what I mean?
Like, that's pushy.
Some guy wanted to sell you a lot, that's not pushy.
But government programs, I mean, when you grew up, did anyone ever say, man, this wheat board...
It's really pushy.
You know, I mean, they tell us what price we've got to sell at.
They force taxpayers to subsidize the difference if the market is lower.
I mean, it's really pushy.
That's terrible.
No, no.
Not coercive government programs, but a guy trying to sell you a car.
That's somehow mistaken.
It's pushy.
It's kind of nutty, right?
Yeah, and actually, my family, I think, knew better.
Like, they did acknowledge that.
But it was always in, like, hushed tones and kind of swept under the rug.
Like, oh, yes, it's forced and it's wrong.
There's got to be a better way.
But that's just how it is.
Right.
So when it was coercive and involuntary, it's just how it is and you accept it.
But if you put yourself into a voluntary situation where someone's trying to sell you something, that's pushy.
And tell me what is the difference between pushy and assertive?
Nothing.
Okay.
That was a shorter part of the conversation that I was thinking it was going to be.
Good.
No, it's good to, like, hash it out with somebody else who's been there and can catch things, because not everyone has that background and that experience and that perspective, you know?
So, what you're selling.
What are you selling?
When it comes to motivation, what are you selling?
I mean, I'm selling peace, reason, love, freedom, happiness, and the salvation of Western civilization.
So I can't be too pushy.
Like I can't be.
You understand?
For me, the stakes are so high with what I do.
That I can't be too pushy.
You know, when I'm out there saying, I really need you to share these videos, I really need you to talk to the people around you, I really need you to put your relationships on the line, French people to save your culture, I really would like you to donate to the show so we have the resources to do what we need and get everything we need to get done things well.
I don't know what the hell that sentence was.
Reassemble that as you will to make it make more sense.
But I really mean it.
Like for me, if the stakes are high enough, There's no such thing as too pushy.
If some blind guy is about to walk into traffic, is there such a thing as being too physically assertive to restrain him from walking into traffic?
No.
No.
So, my question is, you're developing a real estate project in South America.
What are you selling?
I guess freedom, security, peace of mind, that kind of stuff.
Why should people live in your project rather than someone else's?
The idea is that it's being built specifically for entrepreneurs.
So we're attracting like-minded people who are all productive and contributors and all kind of on the same page philosophically.
So there's that feeling of actually belonging to the community and actually having neighbors that understand you and have your back and aren't out trying to screw you over.
I believe this is not the first time such a thing has been attempted in Central or South America.
It's definitely not.
So you're looking for people who can live among like-minded people, who can make contacts that can help them build businesses and employ people and put food on the table and allow them to raise their children.
You're building an environment for friendship, for love, for families, for children, for the future, for jobs.
I mean, it's a very, very big thing.
It's not just a box with a roof on top, right?
It's a community of like-minded people who can nourish each other by, By having similar viewpoints and rational viewpoints, I'm going to assume, right?
And so what you're building is a recharging station, an oasis in a desert of collectivism and a place for people to connect and to grow the joy of friendships and relationships and maybe even families, right?
Absolutely.
So if that's what you have to offer, can you be too pushy?
Will people be happy if they buy, if they can afford to, and if they have a need for it, will they be happy to buy what you have to sell?
They have been so far, yeah.
All right.
So what's wrong with being pushy?
Assertive.
Let me tell you what assertiveness is.
Assertiveness is respect.
Assertiveness is boundaries.
So I can say to people, please, please, please donate to this show.
And I'm going to be very frank about what I want and why I want it.
That's called not managing your feelings, but treating you as an independent human being with your own mind.
I'm not going to force anyone.
I'm not going to scream at people.
I'm not going to abuse people.
I'm going to state very clearly what I want and why, and why I think it's important, why I think the other people should, why I think people should donate at freedomaderadio.com slash donate.
Because that's treating them as independent agents who can just turn me off and say no.
They can say no.
Yeah, and by being forward and assertive like that, you're also saving them time, which shows respect for that too, right?
What do you mean?
Rather than putting on a song and dance routine and trying to woo somebody carefully or whatever, just being forthright and quick.
If you're in the market for this, then I can help you.
If not, then have a great day, you know?
Well, and I also know that people will be happier if they donate.
I've made that case before.
Our unconscious follows our resource allocation.
And if you allocate resources towards philosophy...
Then philosophy will start to become real for you.
You'll start to live philosophy when you support philosophy.
And that doesn't have to be money.
Again, it can be talking about it with other people, liking, sharing, subscribing, taking the risk of posting controversial videos wherever you can and all that.
I mean, whatever you invest, right?
If you only talk about investing in something, it doesn't mean anything.
You're unconscious.
You're deep self.
Does not get activated by words.
It gets activated by deeds.
Like if you talk about food, you don't gain a single calorie.
In fact, you're losing calories by talking about them because your body only cares about empiricism.
It doesn't care about mere abstracts.
You can't quench your thirst with the idea of water or by yelling the word water over and over again for your throat will get drier.
It's the same thing, right?
If people invest in philosophy, then they're unconscious, their body, their physicality.
We'll actually start to take it seriously.
If it's just talk, it doesn't matter.
They don't care.
You won't get the backup if you're full integrity, if you're only talking.
Once you start to invest resources, your body goes, wait, what?
Wait, we're doing this?
We're actually doing this.
We're committing to this.
Okay, everybody.
Plans have changed.
It's not just words.
We're actually doing stuff.
And that's what changes.
And that creates a very exciting life and has the potential for great, great happiness.
People who claim that they love philosophy but, you know, won't even kick in 10 or 20 bucks a month to support it.
Just talk, right?
Just talk.
I mean, I'm all in, for God's sakes.
There's no going back to my old life.
I'm all in.
I'm not turning around.
So other people should get behind it as well.
And they'll be happier for it.
And they'll really understand the true power of philosophy when they get behind it and invest in it.
So I'm selling a lot, you know, the potential for integrity, happiness, and public too, right?
I mean, if you're out there on a first date and you say, oh, I'm really into philosophy, it's not going to sound real unless you're invested in it somehow, unless you've got some skin in the game.
You know, I really, really care about starving children.
Oh, really?
Do you ever give any money to starving children?
No!
I mean, you're just going to look like an idiot.
And you're going to feel like an idiot.
And deep down, you're going to know that it's hypocritical and ridiculous to claim that you love something but not put anything into it.
So, when it comes to assertiveness...
I am I and you are you.
I have absolutely every right from my own studio, from my own channel, from fdrpodcast.com or youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio or wherever the hell you're, the torrents, wherever you're picking this stuff, I have the absolute complete and total right to look you deep in the eyeball and tell you what I want.
And you have the absolute right to go click and turn me off.
I'm not going to inhibit my communication for your potential anxiety.
Because that would not be treating you with respect.
That would be allowing your inhibitions and anxieties to infect and suppress me.
That's giving reality and power to your insecurities, which I will not do.
I do not live and take the risks that I take in order to feed and enable and fuel other people's insecurities.
I'm going to speak honestly what I want.
You can say yes, you can say no, but I am not going to inhibit what I say and how I say it and what I ask for because it might make you anxious.
Because that will make your anxiety stronger.
Because your anxiety will then look Kilroy-like over the walls of your personality and will say, I can lay waste to the actions of people around us.
I can signal distress and get people to change their course.
I can spray anxiety into the stratosphere and get people to curl up and stop being assertive.
I have power!
I can control things.
I rule the universe.
It only strengthens your anxiety if I bend my will to your anxiety.
I will not do it because I want what's best for you.
And what's best for you is for you to manage your own anxiety rather than me try and manage your anxiety.
And people are putting all this stuff out there.
Oh, you're pushy.
You're rubbing people the wrong way.
What they're trying to do is that this is a desperate attempt at demonic possession by universal anxiety.
It's a demand that you inhibit who you are and what you do and what you say and how you express yourself, that you self-censor, that you self-crush, that you don't ask clearly for what you want because other people might feel nervous.
It is an attempt for that nervousness to leap like an electric shock across the intervening space between two souls and in fact irradiate and electrocute your potential.
It is a way of staying small.
In the company of smallness, it is an infection of insignificance and a desperate desire that someone else doesn't have to grow up and damn well learn how to say no to assertive people, which is fine.
An assertive people is fine with you saying no.
An assertive person is actually relieved when you say no for the very reason that you pointed out earlier, Gabriel, which is that it saves time.
It saves time.
If you're not going to buy the car, just say you're not going to buy the car.
The salesman will be like, okay, we'll wander around.
Thank you.
Now I'm going to go sell to someone else.
So I don't like ever fueling other people's insecurities.
Giving other people's insecurities play over me is surrendering to the puppet master of nothingness.
It is disrespectful to the other person.
It's disrespectful for everything that I'm fighting for.
And it's disrespectful to myself, most importantly, disrespectful.
To philosophy and reality, which is that it is not your job to manage other people's feelings.
It's not their job to manage your feelings.
We speak honestly, though the skies fall and people faint.
Oh man, it's funny because it was your show that helped me to stop managing the feelings of family members and friends and girlfriends and stuff.
And I thought I had that problem solved, you know?
But now I realize that customers are one other group that maybe I hadn't quite made that connection with, you know?
Yeah.
Cool.
Don't let other people's fears diminish you.
That just feeds the beast in the world of avoidance.
I know.
Right.
Well, thank you very much for your time.
I do my best not to self-censor, because if I self-censor, I'm insulting everyone and everything in the environment.
Very good.
Thank you.
All right.
Go sell.
Thank you for your call.
I appreciate that.
And let's move on to the next caller.
Alright, up next we have Raidwald.
He wrote in and said, If absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, then how can the claim that, quote, If we define self-contradiction as, quote, And I grant that life, which is not the result of evolution, does not exist, then how does it follow from this that such life is therefore a self-contradiction?
Acts and not acts does not naturally follow from acts does not exist.
That's from Raidwald, and he has a bunch of quotations and syllogisms from shows that we've done, and he can read those throughout the context of the show.
But welcome to the show, Raidwald.
So, life which is not the result of evolution does not exist.
Now, you've got some proofs for me, but you wanted to sort of examine the logic of that as a whole, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, in all of your arguments against the gods...
Obviously, the focus is to point out self-contradictions, right?
That's your strategy for disproving God.
It's not a strategy for disproving God.
Self-contradictions disprove themselves.
Strategy is not...
The correct, like if I say my goal is to answer the math test accurately, would you say that's your strategy for getting an A? It's like, nope, that's how you get an A. It's not a strategy for, it just is what it is, right?
Yeah, I apologize.
I didn't, I have no negative connotation to strategy, so method.
The, yes, I just wanted to put, I'm sorry, and I'm going to be annoying about language just because I really want to be precise when we're going to go into this level of detail.
Absolutely.
And in fact, that's where I would like to start.
Sure.
Since, is method preferred to strategy?
Your method for disproving God is to point out...
You know, it's a method for, if God is a self-contradictory concept, then God is disproven by definition.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Okay, so...
It's extraordinarily important to your case, and therefore to my counter case, that we nail down the concept of self-contradiction.
So I guess I'd like to start off by just making sure that the definition I provided is to your liking, or that you can accept it.
A proposition which cannot be true without simultaneously being false.
So, like...
Yeah, okay.
So, I mean, just the simplest example is square circle, right?
Pick one, right?
If it's a circle, it can't be a square.
If it's a square, it can't be a circle.
So if we say something is a square circle, it can't be a square circle without simultaneously not being a square circle because it's impossible for there to be such a thing as a square circle.
Is that a fair way to put it?
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess in that particular case, you've got two things which cannot simultaneously be true, right?
If you define a square as a polygon with four sides of equal length and a circle as a polygon in which all points are equidistant from the center.
Yep.
Oh, I remember the rate eight math.
All right, go on.
Well, in that case, you've clearly got...
Two definitions meant to apply to the same object, which cannot both be true at the same time.
Yeah, if I said 2 and 2 make 4 and 5 at the same time, then they can't both be true, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, unless you go with Gödel's proof.
Let's not go with Gödel's proof for now.
Let's just go with nice, simple math.
I don't want to hear about any Schroden, just cats.
I don't want to hear about Gödel, Escher, and Bach.
Let's just go with nice, simple math.
Square circle is a self-contradictory And therefore, we don't have to hunt over the universe to find out if there is or isn't one because it can't exist because self-contradictory entities cannot exist.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Right.
And I guess it might make sense to point out the distinction between a self-contradiction and a paradox, which is...
A paradox would be a proposition which can't be true without also being false, but also cannot be false without being true.
So with a self-contradiction, it's just got that one-sidedness.
It can be false consistently, but it can't consistently be true.
Right.
Okay.
So that would be...
One of the steps I'm unable to follow in this particular argument that you've given forth and the immaterial consciousness argument you've given is very similar to this one.
And so I have the same issues with that, many of the same issues.
So we've got from an old video I did, Proofs for God Destroyed by a Philosophical Atheist at 11 minutes and 30 seconds.
Do you want to read that quote so we can hack at that?
Absolutely.
Let me pull that up.
Okay.
God is defined as the most complex life in existence, which did not evolve from any simpler forms of life.
However, more complex life empirically can only arise from less complex life, in the form of evolution.
Greater complexity is thus always an effect of the competition for scarce resources over time, and can only result from less complexity.
God is defined as the most complex life, but was not subject to a process of evolution over time, but rather began as complex.
Thus, God equals complexity is a contradiction.
Right, so we would understand biologically that the simplest forms of life would be the first form, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And over time, complexity is layered into, on the fight for scarce resources, certain complex forms of life are more efficient or better at eating and reproducing.
And so more complexity in a biological sense, complexity is like an inverted pyramid, right?
It starts off very simple, and then things get more complex.
And we would not generally expect to see something far more complex than Which had no precedent of something less complex, right?
So, I mean, Richard Dawkins makes this argument about eyes, right?
Because eyes are considered to be this giant miracle, and they kind of are freaky.
But anyway, so there are light-sensitive cells, which you can see, and then light-sensitive cells can evolve over time into, you know, steps towards eyes and so on.
And so we would not expect...
The eye to appear fully formed in its modern configuration prior to any antecedent simpler forms of the eye.
Is that fair to say?
Well, I would push back here and say we wouldn't expect it only because we haven't seen it yet, right?
So what I'm getting at here is this idea of Absence of proof is not proof of absence, right?
So, it seems like the only way of defending the proposition that complex life can only arise, meaning complex life that does not arise from evolution does not exist, right?
So, that's the step I'm not seeing here.
I guess, so...
To put it in a simpler question is, what empirical evidence do you have that no life, no complex life, which did not arise from evolution, exists?
Well, that's not a foundational proof for God.
This is a reason to doubt the existence of God.
This is one of very many arguments in the books and in the podcasts.
This is not what it all rests upon, just so we sort of are clear about this.
Yeah, yeah.
And I see issues with any one of the other arguments.
I'm happy to go into any of them you would like to.
Okay, so let's take the watchmaker argument, right?
Sure.
So, if you were walking in...
The woods, right?
And you found a watch.
Would you expect that the watch had been created by someone, or would you expect that the watch had assembled itself of the various components in nature in the form of a watch?
Well, the usual theist argument goes that...
Seeing that, you would not ascribe it to any kind of randomness, right?
There has to have been a watchmaker.
Right.
Now, a watch is far less complex than a human being, right?
I mean, we can make a watch.
We can make a human being, at least not directly, right?
So if we can think of the most...
I don't know what is the most complex thing.
I don't know, like the CERN Collider or some giant piece of space physics on Earth that's going to create black holes and destroy us all.
But if we look at the CERN Super Collider, Maybe there's something more complex.
I don't know.
But let's just take that as an example.
We would never imagine that the CERN supercollider would ever have been assembled by the tides and the winds, you know, in its...
In its existing state, it had to have been made.
It could not have been randomly assembled, right?
Now, you could say that over the course of 10 trillion universes, you know, it could be possible that elements would spontaneously form a CERN supercollider and so on.
And so that's what I mean when I say is it an absolute?
No.
But we would certainly not...
Really expect a CERN supercollider to simply have been assembled through the random motions of wind and gravity and rain and all that kind of stuff, right?
Sure, yeah.
But it seems to me that this is crucial for the case for a self-contradiction, right?
Wait, wait, hang on.
We're still in the middle of the argument, so I'm not sure if you want to go someplace else right now, but that's not where I'm heading.
Okay, yeah.
Okay.
Go ahead.
So, we also would not expect a CERN supercollider to be created by a culture that had not yet invented the wheel or fire.
Is that fair to say?
Absolutely.
Right.
So, we need prior technologies in order to get to more complex technologies, right?
Right.
Yeah.
We can't sort of just overleap things, right?
I mean, if you've not invented a saddle, you probably haven't invented a cell phone.
Does that make sense?
A bow and arrow.
If you haven't invented a bow and arrow, you're not likely to get ICBMs or whatever it is, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, so if the argument is, since everything in technology has an evolution, if the argument is that we can get the most complex conceivable technology with no prior technology development, in other words, that Neanderthals or Stone Age communities can build a CERN supercollider, we would say that's not possible, right?
See, here's...
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
But we would say that's not possible, right?
I would say it boggles the mind.
It's not.
Come on, man.
It's not possible.
It's not possible for Stone Age savages to create a CERN super collider when they haven't even figured out the wheel, two-story buildings, or fire.
No, I get where you're...
Where you're coming from.
I really do.
That's not an argument.
No, I know.
It's not where I'm coming from.
It's an argument.
Come on, man.
You're not going to defend this one, right?
What I'm getting at is in order to carry on with deductive logic, which, correct me if I'm wrong, is what you're going through here, right?
You're going through formal logic.
We can't accept an answer of We wouldn't believe that this is possible.
Would you believe that this is possible if I said to you that there's some aboriginal outback community with an IQ of 60 that has developed a CERN supercollider, but it hasn't figured out how to wipe their own ass with anything other than a leaf yet?
I absolutely could not believe something like that.
Okay.
You're right.
Good.
Good.
Now, but I'm drawing the distinction here between what I can say I can believe and what I can claim as an absolute, right?
Right.
So the claims of belief, I would say, certainly take a far lower standard of evidence with the burden and proof that they incur than claims of metaphysical reality.
And when we're going with the existence of a God, and particularly attempting to demonstrate that God is self-contradiction...
When you include one of the premises, something that is just kind of accepted because we haven't seen an example that breaks that premise, well, I'm not sure that gives us what we need to confidently say that a self-contradiction exists.
Does that make sense?
Somewhat.
Somewhat.
I mean, it sounds like we are in agreement that you can't have something more complex without something less complex that precedes it.
I would say that beggars belief.
Absolutely.
Right.
But again, I draw a distinction between a claim of belief and a claim of metaphysical reality.
Well, this is why this is only one of the arguments of many arguments, and this is why the podcast is not this paragraph, and the book is not the next paragraph, but it's a whole series of arguments.
Because God is literally infinitely more complex than a certain supercollider.
And we're saying that there's no prior evolution that would produce a deity whatsoever.
In other words, the most complex being in existence has come into existence or exists with no prior, less complicated organisms that lead up to it.
Which, again, is like saying that a CERN supercollider of infinite complexity has spontaneously assembled itself out of the materials of the universe, which is not...
Really possible, right?
We understand that.
Yeah, yeah.
But that introduces yet another weak point I see in this argument.
I'm sure that you probably got this God is defined as the most complex life from someone's claim, but it certainly doesn't seem to fit within at least most Christians.
And I know you didn't specifically state you were targeting the Christian God, but It seems like that's what you were doing.
Well, all-powerful, all-knowing, eternal.
I mean, these are vastly more complex than the human mind.
Infinitely more complex than the human mind.
Well, that would make the consciousness complex, right?
God is not a toe, right?
God is consciousness.
It may not be the only thing that God is, but it certainly is an aspect of the deity, right?
Yeah, well, actually, just to point this out here, I'm LDS, I'm a Mormon, and we actually believe in a material god.
So, yeah.
So, the idea that God is just a consciousness doesn't actually apply within Mormonism.
So, most of the arguments that you've made actually don't even apply to the type of God I believe in.
I just...
Well, hang on, hang on.
And I don't know much about the LDS deity, so forgive me where I go astray.
But does the LDS deity not have the characteristic of omniscience?
Sure, but it depends on how you want to define it, right?
And in fact, I'd say...
Right, because you give your argument about omniscience versus omnipotence.
You ask most Christians, can God lie or can God sin?
And most of them will tell you no, right?
Most theists, I believe, actually accept limitations on God as far as at least the most extreme understanding of omnipotence and omniscience.
But that's not my argument, though.
I mean, I could certainly—sorry to interrupt you—but I could certainly understand the argument where people say, well, God is perfectly moral and therefore God will not lie.
He has the power to lie, just as a moral man has the power to strangle a baby.
But he won't, because he's moral.
And that's the purpose of morality.
You can say, well, it limits your behavior.
It's like, well, of course, that's the whole point of morality, is to limit your behavior.
A diet is to limit your food.
And, you know, so I can understand that the concept that God won't lie does not interfere with his omnipotence.
And that's not my argument regarding the contradiction between omnipotence and omniscience.
No, no, I get that.
But what I'm saying is that your argument on that grounds actually does require a very – I don't know if I want to use the word extreme because it's a very literal taking of the ideas of all power and all – Right.
And my issue is with the omniscience and omnipotence, which is that if God knows the future, then he can't change the future without invalidating his knowledge.
If he can change the future, he can't know it for certain.
And that is the basic reality, that we are cars that can drive on a variety of roads, but we know where a train's going to go because it's on tracks, right?
So we can say with certainty where a train is going to end up, assuming it doesn't jump the tracks or whatever.
So we can say with certainty where a train is going to end up.
We can't say with certainty where a person who's out for a drive for funsies is going to end up because they have a It doesn't.
So if we say the train can go wherever it wants, but we know for certain where it's going to end up, then it can't go wherever it wants because it has to end up a certain place.
If we say that the train can go wherever it wants, then we've given the train freedom, but then we can't say we know for certain where it's going to end up.
So you can't have both.
That's a contradiction.
Well, and, you know, just again, like...
I'm fine with the idea of omnipotence taken by itself with that same extreme level is a contradiction in that, you know, can God create a rock that's so big he can't lift it kind of thing.
But I even see issues with the omniscience omnipotence.
Because let's say, let's take your train analogy.
You've got a train, you've got a railroad track.
What happens when there's a switch on the track?
Can God flip the switch and not yet know, like, hey, if I leave the switch alone, the train will end up here.
If I flip the switch, the train will end up there.
Right?
I guess bringing in perhaps the idea of alternate timelines or simply just the foreknowledge of what happens if I act and what happens if I don't act.
I'm not sure what that's clarified.
I mean, if God can switch the tracks, then God can't know for sure where the train's going to end up.
If God can't switch the tracks, then he knows where the train's going to end up, but he's limited then in his capacity to alter things.
Well, I would just say that he knows for sure where the train will end up if he does not act, and he knows for sure where it will end up if he does act.
Right, so either way, he knows for sure where the train is going to end up.
So he can't change where the train's going to end up.
He's limited in his power because he has knowledge of consequences.
Well, again, he knows the consequences of either action, and it leaves him free to take either action without changing his knowledge.
I don't follow that.
Let's go back to the train analogy.
Okay, so there's a fork in the rail.
The train is coming up on it.
God understands that without any interference on his part, It will end up in Chicago, right?
Ah!
Yes?
Okay.
Sorry.
I'm just thinking about being on a train in Chicago.
Duck!
Anyway, go on.
Well, you know what?
For that point, let's make the other destination Detroit.
Why not?
Ah!
So...
No good answer.
Now we're in the great cycle of white civilization.
Build a city, flee a city, build a city, flee a city, build a city, flee a city.
Anyway, go on.
And we're on the great, yeah, trade-offs.
All right, so God is sitting here and he understands that if he doesn't touch the switch, the train will continue on its merry way to Chicago.
And he knows that if he does flip the switch, it will go to Detroit.
God has perfect power at this point to decide which of these two alternate outcomes he wants to go for without changing his foreknowledge of how things will play out.
No.
No, he doesn't.
If he knows for sure that the train is going to end up in Chicago, then he knows which way the switch is going to go.
He has no choice.
If he has a choice about where the train ends up, then he can't know for sure where the train's going to end up.
If he knows for sure where the train's going to end up, he doesn't have a choice about the switch.
Yeah, I could see that.
That's a good point.
Well, that's fantastic.
The universe just shook because you accepted an argument.
And I don't mean this is not relative to you.
This is relative to just about everyone else I have conversations with on the planet.
So I'm actually just going to convert to your religion now because it makes you honorable in debates.
So where do I go?
Where do I sign?
What do I do?
Well, I would like to throw out an additional possibility here.
The possibility of simultaneous timelines existing at the same time, if that makes sense.
Oh, no.
We're now splitting the universe to accommodate the argument?
Hmm.
In one universe, two and two make five.
In another universe, two and two make four.
Therefore, two and two can make both five and four without contradictions.
I don't think that really works, but yeah, go for it.
This is not an attempt for me to...
Save any concept of God.
This is just an intellectual endeavor.
There's not necessarily any reason for us to believe that God interacts with time in the same way that we do.
Let's try an analogy here.
We exist at least nominally in four dimensions.
Height, width, depth.
Length, I guess.
Yeah, depth and time.
X, Y, Z, T. Exactly.
I wish that was a Scrabble word.
I've been playing Scrabble lately.
Anyway, go on.
So we've got a reasonable amount of knowledge, ability to observe, and ability to maneuver within three of those dimensions.
The winds just kind of blow us where they will on the time axis.
We have very little control or really very little cognizance of that axis.
So, in order to make this analogy a little bit more easy for us to understand, let's say you've got a two-dimensional circle, right?
And it Just kind of floats up and down on the z-axis.
Doesn't quite know where it is.
Doesn't have any control of where it ends up.
It's just floating there.
And it comes across a circle.
It comes across a sphere.
Now, for all intents and purposes, this circle will probably only be able to perceive that sphere as another circle.
Right?
It's only observing two dimensions.
And let's say, for example, that this sphere...
Since it exists in three dimensions, it's more capable of observing and manipulating three dimensions.
It can move up and down on that z-axis in ways that the circle couldn't even observe and couldn't do itself, right?
The very concept of that z-axis would completely blow the circle's mind.
Yeah, this is like the story Flatland, which was, I think, written by a mathematician, but people can look that up.
I think it's public domain now.
I'll have to look into that.
Is it a time travel thing?
Well, two-dimensional creatures and the z-axis.
Anyway, keep going.
Okay, so we could replace that sphere with a column, right?
So if we've got something like a column that exists at every possible point along that z-axis, well, again, that could be a...
Similar to a God that exists within every possible timeline, within every possible point on a T-axis.
And for us, we really can't conceive what that would be like.
And so, I don't know, there's the possibility of being able to observe what happens in any particular timeline simultaneously while not being constrained by that foreknowledge.
No, I mean, this is a fogument, which is the removal of a standard of proof, which is to say, well, there's an alternate dimension where this contradiction can be resolved.
But you may have access to that in theology.
Nobody has access to that in a rational philosophy.
Like, you can't just invent another dimension wherein the contradiction is somehow magically resolved and then think that you've added to human knowledge.
I mean, philosophy doesn't work that way.
I mean, I don't know how theology works.
I don't think that's much working of anything.
But, you know, if I say two and two make five, and I'm told that that's wrong, and I say, well, there could be an alternate dimension where two and two make five, you know, that doesn't work in mathematics.
That's not how you can resolve a problem in mathematics.
It blows up.
I can't say, well, you know, in an alternate dimension, it didn't blow up, so I'm not going to give you your money back.
You know, that's not how things work in prosaic, rational reality.
The invention of alternative dimensions or universes where contradictions are not contradictions is not how you solve.
You just don't have that luxury in philosophy to take that approach.
I wouldn't say that I've done so.
Like, first of all, time is a dimension that exists, and we acknowledge it.
I'm I'm assuming you acknowledge the existence of time, right?
I'm not sure what that question means.
Do I acknowledge the existence of time?
I'm wearing a watch!
I don't know.
I'm not sure what you're asking me.
Well, I'm just saying time is not- We started this show at 7 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time.
I mean, I don't know what you mean.
Do I acknowledge the existence of time?
I mean, how would I get out of bed?
How would I know I was in bed?
I mean, I don't know what that even means.
Yeah.
It's like asking me, Steph, do you acknowledge the existence of language?
And it's like, well, that's what we're using to communicate.
I don't know why you'd need to ask me that.
No, I know.
I just, in the favor of being extremely precise, right?
We're dealing in You know, nitty-gritty of philosophy here, and so we've got to be precise with the terms.
Let's put it this way.
I organize my sentences to be rational throughout time.
I don't randomly put words together and then just assume that time doesn't matter.
I arrange them in a sequence.
You speak, I speak.
So it's implicit in the conversation.
It really doesn't need to be described.
But okay, let's, yeah, time is a valid concept.
Yeah.
So I wouldn't say I invented the dimension of time.
I was creating a thought experiment about what it might be like for another being who...
No, that is...
Listen, no, you have to be honest with me here, and I'm not accusing you of dishonesty, but you're not...
If you play this back, you'll say, you know, well, there's another dimension, there's a flat circle, like there's a circle, and then there's a sphere, and the circle can't comprehend the sphere, so there's something incomprehensible, x, foggyment, and...
Of course you were inventing something.
You don't have any proof of this alternate dimension.
You don't have any proof of these parallel realities...
This is not a physical concept.
You have no way of measuring them.
You have no way of examining them or knowing what their properties are.
You're inventing a giant fog bank where you can lob your argument and pretend that it's valid when it's clearly self-contradictory, which you just admitted.
No, no, no, no.
What I was doing, again, I'm not claiming that such a dimension exists.
I know.
So why are we talking about it?
In order to rule out the possibility of such an existence, you need to...
Well, you need to control for it, right?
Well, I need to do what?
I need to somehow analyze the properties of something you say doesn't even exist?
Why would I need to do that?
I don't understand.
Why would I need to do that?
Well, just in order to create an argument around the idea of a self-contradiction, there needs to be no escape for the idea, right?
Right.
Okay.
I'm saying if there's even the slimmest possibility, right?
No.
You can't say there's no such thing as a square circle except in dimension XYZ where there is.
That's not turning a deductive argument into an inductive argument.
That's just creating an insane realm where contradictions exist and then thinking you've somehow defied the argument.
I wouldn't say that's what I'm doing.
But I don't think we're going to gain much more ground on this particular argument.
Okay.
But, okay, so do we want to go back to the complex life?
No, I think we've gone as far as we can go on that one.
Now, I certainly agree with you that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
And I have...
I talked in the past, and you may have heard it, but I'll rephrase it very briefly here, about three categories of existence.
And the first is things we know do exist.
Trees and rocks and atoms and properties of matter like gravity and so on.
So these things exist, and we know that they exist.
And we also know that the properties of matter seem to exist objectively and universally and so on.
So there's that.
And now there's things which could exist because...
They're self-contradictory.
Sorry, they're not self-contradictory.
They could exist.
I can't say, if we define a unicorn as a horse with a horn on its head, I can't say there are no unicorns in the universe.
Of course there could be.
It's not a biologically self-contradictory entity.
So there's things which we know exist.
There's things which could exist because they don't violate the laws of identity and they don't violate the laws of physics and so on.
And then there's things which cannot exist.
So in the first category, sure, they exist.
In the second category, conditional existence, we would have to We've raised the whole length and breadth of the universe to disprove the existence of unicorns, which wouldn't matter because they could have evolved by the time we get to the ass end of the universe and back, so you'd never be able to disprove the potential existence of unicorns.
Square circles we know don't exist because this is self-contradictory, a concept.
And so these three categories of existence is important.
So absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
That's very true, certainly for the second category.
But for the third category, which is self-contradictory entities, that rule does not apply.
So when we have something like a square circle, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
We don't say, well, just because we've never found a square circle doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
We can say that just because we've never found.
A horse with a horn on its head doesn't mean that such a thing doesn't exist.
Sure, that's certainly true.
It's like space aliens, you know, have we found space aliens?
Well, no.
Does that mean that they don't exist?
Well, no.
The likelihood, vast likelihood, is that in the hundred billion galaxies with the hundred billion suns apiece, I've almost, I mean, I'm a hundred percent minus one atom certain that other life exists in the universe.
So, those three categories.
Now, if a deity is in the third category, then the category...
Yeah, yeah, agreed completely.
And where I brought that up in the question was to point out that it seems like the only evidence we have for the claim that non-evolved life...
And I know we probably don't want to rehash that one, so let's go into the immaterial consciousness.
Right, the claim is, or the syllogism rather, would be that all consciousness is a result of matter.
I think effect is the word that I've used.
Consciousness is an effect of matter.
Okay, effect.
Okay, so all consciousness is an effect of matter.
No god is an effect of matter, or actually I guess it would be, yeah, that can't work as a syllogism.
But gods are immaterial and gods are defined as a consciousness.
Therefore, God is a self-contradiction because no immaterial consciousness exists.
So, yeah, the sort of gravity is a property of mass.
And therefore, to say that gravity exists without mass would be a contradiction, because gravity is a property of mass.
So we can't detach gravity from mass and have it exist in and of itself.
And it's sort of like saying there's light without a light source.
Well, there has to be a light source for there to be light, and there has to be mass for there to be gravity.
And if consciousness is an effect of matter, then immaterial consciousness would be a contradiction in terms.
Sure.
But that's a big if.
What I would push back on, and again, like I said, I don't even believe in an immaterial God, so I'm not defending my own personal deity here, but if immaterial consciousness doesn't exist, what is the evidence you would bring to support that claim that immaterial consciousness does not exist?
Well, because that which is immaterial by definition doesn't exist.
That which cannot be detected in any way, shape, or form by any instruments is identical to non-existence.
Okay, I'm not sure that that which is immaterial cannot be, because just taking the devil's advocate route of different faiths that would say that God is immaterial, well, Within the Christian world, which there are plenty of Christians that believe in an immaterial God, they also claim that He has been detected.
Right?
On multiple occasions.
And not just in the incarnation of Christ.
Right?
His voice has been heard.
He has been seen in theophanies.
So, we're not talking about a being that cannot be detected.
Well, first of all, this is a claim that is made by virtually all religions, and therefore giving precedence to one over another would not be.
If we accept that historical writings of what we would assume to be impossible events are true, then they have to be true for everyone, in which case we end up with a whole bunch of contradictory deities.
Secondly, of course, people do hear voices, right?
And often they will be prescribed inappropriate medications for those voices, right?
I mean, there are lots of people who say things are true.
There are lots of people who claim that they were robbed, and it turns out that they were just scamming insurance.
There's lots of people who claim that they were raped, and it turns out they were just making something up.
Are not enough to establish truth, particularly when the people can't be cross-examined, when things can't be reproduced because they happened thousands of years ago.
I mean, nobody can escape the basic idea that the age of miracles sort of ended when scientific measurements came along, which would not indicate that the age of miracles was anything objective, that, you know, in reality actually happened.
And so the idea that there are ancient stories of impossible things Would have us as easily believe in Mount Olympus as in any other deity in particular.
And there is no proof in ancient tales.
Which, I mean, if there were, we wouldn't need to develop the scientific method.
And once the scientific method has been developed, all of these supposed proofs have failed to materialize.
Well, I'm not going to go into...
That's an entirely different topic.
Which I actually am planning to put together a case for God...
That, yes, does occur in the days and age of science and modern times.
But focusing back on the argument itself, it's not necessary for us to accept the, let's just say Catholics for the sake of argument.
It's not necessary for us to accept Catholic claims as true in order for your argument of self-contradiction to fall.
All we have to do is recognize that That's according to your definition of materiality.
No, no.
The definition must come from that.
Hang on.
Material means detectable in some manner.
I mean, if you have a door that's closed and you try to walk through the doorway, you're going to bump your nose because the door is there.
And if the door is open or the door is missing, then you can walk through it.
The door is not materially there to bump your nose.
Therefore, you know that the doorway doesn't have a door in it.
I mean, that's the basic definition of what material means, is detectable in some fashion.
That's how we know that space is mostly empty.
So you would say then that that which is immaterial, or rather anything that is not detectable...
Sorry.
No, that's fair.
Immateriality is defined by undetectability.
Okay, so...
We know something is not there because we can't detect it as being there, right?
And so if you can detect the presence of consciousness, then it is not immaterial.
All right, so I switch things around.
Okay, if materiality is defined by being detectable, then all which is detectable is material?
Well, it depends what you mean by detectable and material insofar as does gravity exist as an atom exists?
No, gravity is an effect of matter.
So that's why I say that which exists is detectable or the effects of it are detectable.
So there's no gravity atom, at least not to my knowledge as yet.
But we know that gravity is an effect of matter, so we can detect the matter, and partly we can detect the matter through gravity, right?
They figured out black holes by figuring out all the star stuff that was being sucked into them, even though the black hole is so dense that nothing can escape even light or electromagnetic radiation, or nothing can escape it.
You just know the event horizon of stuff pouring into it.
So it's matter or the effects thereof that we can detect.
Sure.
So that branches out and includes energy and...
To be honest, my understanding of physics breaks off at Newtonian pretty sharply.
So I don't know where time fits into all that.
We don't do quantum on this show because it's nothing to do with philosophy as far as that.
Philosophy of science has something to say in it, but I'm basically a moralist.
So quantum mechanics all cancels out long before you get to the sense realm of actionable philosophy.
So we'll stay with Newtonian, maybe a little bit of Einsteinian, but we don't do quantum here.
Well, I was actually thinking on Steinian because I was thinking time, right?
And we don't need to go there.
So we know that gravity exists even though it's not matter, right?
It is an effect on matter.
It has effects on matter.
And so we can detect it.
We can observe it.
Well, again, the claim, again, we only have to accept that this is the Catholics' argument.
They've argued that God is detectable.
In his effects on the human mind, right?
Or even, again, like I said, he's been seen in visions, he's been heard.
There's ways in which God has made himself detectable to humans.
Well, but then we face the problem of saying that any subjective experience can be proof of that which is subjectively experienced.
In which case, there's no such thing as insanity, there's no such thing as psychosis, there's no such thing as delusions, and we go real places at night when we dream.
Right.
I wouldn't say that's a necessary effect at all.
All I'm saying is that, again, for a self-contradicted Dwork, you can only pull premises that are either implied by your opponent's argument or necessary for their argument to exist at all.
And while I understand, and to be honest...
I think I'm there with you in terms of materiality.
I'm perfectly fine accepting that only matter, time, energy, and the effects thereof exist.
But in order to disprove a Catholic through the use of a self-contradiction, I can't bring my own premises into the mix.
I can only use the premises they bring into the mix.
Right, and if Catholics says that God exists, then we need to define what existence is, and we need to define what God is.
And if God is not something that can be directly detected, or the effects thereof directly detected, and the question of whether gravity exists is a challenging one, because again, it depends how you define existence.
It certainly is a factor of existence, but it doesn't exist in the same way a tree does, or an atom does.
And so that is the question.
Now, you can say that God exists as its effect on human beings or its effect on the universe in the same way that gravity, quote, exists based on...
The fact that it affects matter and is generated by the existence of mass.
But, I mean, there are substantial differences in that gravity is objectively measurable, is universal, is why we're all sticking to the ground, is visible and available to everyone at all times, and is provable by everyone.
You just grab a ping-pong ball and drop it to the ground.
It's a constant factor that is everywhere, all the time, directly experienced by everyone, which is, of course, not the case with deities.
Well, a deity is an entity, right?
It's closer to the unicorn analogy than it is to a universal law of physics.
Right.
In which case, then we're back to it needs to be detectable, or at least not be a self-contradictory concept.
And if you say it's immaterial consciousness, then consciousness must be detectable.
Otherwise, I can say that this ball of air I hold in my hand is consciousness.
And it's like, well, how would you know?
It's like, it's immaterial, but it's consciousness.
It's like, well, no, but how do we know it's different from a ball of air?
I can't just say the ball of air is consciousness.
There has to be some evidence for it to be consciousness.
You know, like I can't sell you a cat and give you a little cat box and there's nothing in it.
And I say, no, no, no, no.
The cat is there.
You're going to say, no, it's not.
My kids are crying.
There's no cat in the box.
No, it's there.
It's like, it's immaterial.
But you can't have an immaterial cat.
Because then what's the difference between an immaterial cat and there being no cat in the box?
Now we're back to Shrodington now.
But you understand, right?
If it's going to be something that exists, it has to be detectable in some manner.
Sure.
And according to their own arguments, he is.
Okay.
We're going round and round here because I keep making the same case here, right?
So is there anything else you wanted to add on before we move on?
Sure.
First of all, great conversation.
I really appreciate you calling in, and I love this kind of stuff, so I hope that the audience does as well, and I hope you're enjoying it too, because it's great stuff.
Absolutely, and it's actually deeply gratifying to hear you say that.
So, yeah, so let's move to another weakness I see in this particular argument before we move on.
So let's accept for the moment that immaterial consciousness does not exist.
Well, again, we come back with a self-contradiction.
Non-existence does not necessarily mean the impossibility of existence, right?
X and not X does not necessarily follow from X does not exist.
Unless we're in a self-contradictory entity, in which case we know it doesn't exist.
Yeah, but that would kind of be a circular reasoning thing, right?
Because if you're saying, well, this is a self-contradictory entity, No.
No, because if what is proposed is a self-contradictory entity, so for instance, can you imagine any situation in which something, an entity can be both a butterfly and a whale simultaneously?
No, and I'm not trying to...
Okay, so there, that's not a circular argument.
If I say the butterfly-whale entity exists somewhere in the universe, you wouldn't have to say, well, I better go looking for such a wondrous thing, because that would violate the law of identity, right?
I mean, it's a butterfly or it's a whale.
It can't be both at the same time.
And so if it is a contradictory entity, it falls into the third category, first being that which exists, the second being that which could exist, and the third being that which cannot exist.
And so if there is a self-contradictory entity, a butterfly whale, it is not a circular argument to say such a thing cannot exist.
Absolutely.
Agreed.
What I was going at is, if I accept the premise that Immaterial consciousness does not exist, I still don't see how that necessarily means that it cannot exist.
Because immaterial is the category called doesn't exist.
Immaterial consciousness is the red herring here.
It's the detail which obscures more than it clarifies.
Because it's immaterial X does not exist.
Anything which is immaterial...
Does not exist.
And so, like, immaterial consciousness is just one of the billion, billion categories.
Immaterial butterflies do not exist.
Immaterial whales do not exist.
Immaterial anything does not exist.
Because the very definition of something not being there is the failure of it to register in any sense or any scan or any thing whatsoever.
Because that is exactly how we know something doesn't exist.
If I tell you to walk down the street, you don't try and walk through the building because the building's in the way.
You walk to where the building isn't, and that's where you walk because there's no building there.
You know that the building does not exist there.
So immaterial is the key word.
Whatever follows that is actually immaterial.
You understand?
Because immaterial X doesn't exist.
Okay.
In which case, the argument could just be construed that...
Immaterial beings do not exist, therefore God does not exist.
Which I believe, actually, Friedrich Engels posited that exact claim.
Yeah, but then he went into class exists, which is an immaterial thing, so he just took it.
He's like, well, this immaterial thing called God is in the way of the communist empire of the world, so I'm going to invent another one called class.
Anyway, so.
Yeah, it's not like I give any real respect to Engels or Marx.
No, and that we are closer than brothers, so go ahead.
Oh, yeah.
But the point is, clearly, a person who believes in an immaterial god would not agree with the premise that that which is immaterial does not exist.
Well, certainly, no, no, no.
They would.
They absolutely would.
Because if I gave them an empty box and said it was a cat, they'd say it's not a cat.
They absolutely would agree that immaterial things do not exist.
They just would make an exception for a deity.
I'm not sure that they would, right?
Go hire a Christian, go hire somebody who believes that immaterial things exist, and then hand them their pay with no money, nothing of value, and just put nothing into their hand and say, I've just paid you, and what are they going to say?
Well, they're going to say, pay me with something else.
They're going to say, you haven't paid me, there's nothing in my hand.
Say, no, no, no, it's immaterial money.
They're going to say, well, no, if it's immaterial, it's not money, it's just air, and I'm not going to consider that my pay.
You said, pay me 200 bucks to help you move, and now you've just given me nothing.
And I say, no, no, it's immaterial money.
And they would tell you, no, it's nothing, it doesn't exist, you just gave me nothing.
There's no such thing as immaterial money.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not bear false witness.
So they would say this all the time.
If they pay me $10 million to build their church, right?
And I take the money and I spend it in Thailand and unsavory things.
And then they come to the empty lot and I say, I built your church.
And they'll say, no, you didn't.
There's nothing here.
And I say, no, no, no.
It's an immaterial church.
What would they say?
Oh, okay, well, then we'll move in, right?
No, they'd say you're fired.
Yeah, they'd be right, because I did not build a church.
There's no church there.
The organ music is not present.
It doesn't play.
There's no place to shelter from the rain.
There's no pews.
There's nothing.
So they would absolutely accept that immaterial things do not exist.
They would just make an exception for their preferred deity.
Or they could take the approach of examining each proposed immaterial thing individually.
In the same sense that we can say that a material unicorn does not exist, well that doesn't necessarily mean that nothing material exists, it means that that particular thing does not exist.
Well, no, but we can't say—it depends how you define a unicorn, right?
I mean, if you define a unicorn as a self-contradictory magical entity, then it can't exist.
But if it's a horse with a horn in its head, we can't say it doesn't exist, because it could.
It's not a self-contradictory entity.
It can exist somewhere in the universe, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So I'm accepting the previous definition.
So just— Instantiating this particular thing does not exist doesn't create a universal nothing of that type exists.
So we can accept that a horse with a narwhal horn on its head does not exist.
Even if it did exist, it would be material.
Well, that doesn't necessarily refute the possibility of any material existence anywhere else.
We can't say a horse with a horn on its head does not exist.
It's not a self-contradictory entity, and there could be good reasons why it would evolutionarily exist either in an unknown area in this world or in some other world.
Sure, that's why I said if we said that.
Not making a claim of non-existence here, just putting forth a hypothetical, if you will.
So, similarly, you could try to pay someone with immaterial money And they can say, well, I don't believe that this immaterial money exists.
And it's not necessarily inconsistent with a view that immaterial things can exist.
It's just that's an instance of an immaterial thing that they do not believe exists.
Immaterial things do not exist.
Immaterial X does not exist.
Otherwise, there's no difference between existence and non-existence.
If I say, does it matter if the door's open or closed when I try to walk through it?
Of course it does.
If I say it doesn't matter one bit whether the door is open or closed when I try to walk through it, that makes no sense.
Because there has to be a difference between the door being in the doorway and the door not being in the doorway.
There has to be a difference.
So saying that immaterial things can exist makes a complete mockery of the very term existence.
Because then you're saying material things exist and immaterial things exist, which means everything exists and we can't move anywhere because we're encased in everything and can't budge.
There has to be a difference between things being there and things not being there.
Does your experience of the world around you exist?
I'm not sure what you mean.
I'm not trying to be obscure, it's just that's a big question and I'm not sure in what way you're trying to figure it out.
Is experience real?
Does it exist?
Again, I'm not sure what you mean by that.
Okay.
Well, I guess I'm not sure how else to put it.
You experienced the world around you, correct?
Yes.
Is that experience real?
Are there biochemical operations occurring in my mind that facilitate my real-time experience of sense data and internal stimuli?
Absolutely.
And we know that because if it's not there, if my brain suddenly gets scooped out and replaced with a watermelon, I'm not experiencing anything.
We know that, right?
And so...
Well, actually, I'm not sure we do, right?
Wait, are you saying that a watermelon in my head could experience this conversation?
No, but I'm not ruling out that if we took your mind out of your head, that somehow your experience...
No, my brain.
Or your brain, sorry.
We take your brain out of your head, we really don't know that your experience ceases.
All we know is that our experience of your body changes drastically.
Right?
Well, I'm sure my experience, you know, if somebody lifted my brain out of my skull, my experience would probably be very brief, because I would no longer be receiving blood and glucose and all the other things that keep my brain going tickety-boo.
I would experience brain death very shortly.
Then nothing would be going on, right?
You turn the radio off and there's no music.
Certainly the experience is objectively measurable, right?
I mean, because we can hook up things to my brain and see the electrochemical activity and the cellular activity, the neural activity that's going on in my brain.
The fact that I'm magically using 349% of my brain, it's amazing.
It's a miracle!
And so we know that there's objective measures for experience.
My experience is not happening 10 feet to the right or 10 feet to the left.
It's all happening within my brain.
And to some degree, it can be measured.
The activity of it can be measured from outside.
I mean, we know when someone's dreaming based on various electrical activities within the brain.
Are they hitting REM and all that kind of stuff?
And so we know that the experience is happening.
I know I'm experiencing it.
And of course, you are relying on me experiencing it in order to have this conversation.
So, you know, does it exist?
I mean, the full aggregation of my consciousness and everything processing, everything that's occurring, you know, the lights in the studio, is the mic in the camera, you know, listening well, and do I have to pee?
I don't know.
I mean, certainly these are things that I could be experiencing.
As far as it existing, it exists in a measurable way.
That it can be evaluated by fMRIs and other kinds of scans.
And we know for sure that somebody who has no brain activity and no bodily activity, that they're dead.
And, you know, after a certain amount of time, they smell and we put them in the ground.
So they're not experiencing anything.
So, yeah, I mean, I would say that there's existence involved in my experience for sure.
Again, I would say that to conclusively say that they are not experiencing anything...
Is a bridge too far.
And let me explain some of the logic here.
Science is useful in part because it ignores non-falsifiable claims from the beginning.
It assumes them out of existence.
When you do experiments to see what parts of the brain lights up when a person is thinking of a certain thing, nobody's controlling for the possibility that there is a spirit communicating that idea to certain parts of the brain.
And that's why that part of the brain lights up.
I'm not saying that that's necessarily the case.
When you say spirit, do you mean an internal spirit like a soul or some sort of external spirit like a divine inspiration?
Just anything that is immaterial.
I'm just saying that, bring up the example that...
Gravity could be tiny elves pushing things, but science can't really evaluate that because there's no way of determining the truth or falsehood of that, and it adds a layer of complexity to something which is already explained by physical properties.
Absolutely.
And I think I'm as grateful for that as you are.
It's an assumption that makes science extraordinarily powerful when dealing with questions that are falsifiable.
Science really can't handle questions that are not falsifiable by definition.
So the point being that you can't use science to To disprove the non-falsifiable.
Because in order to use science in the first place, you had to assume non-falsifiable things out of this...
Well, there's no such thing as proof with non-falsifiable things.
There's proof.
There's not the ability to disprove.
Well, no, but there's no need for disproof.
Because the burden of proof lies on the person proposing the thesis.
Like, if I say gravity works because of tiny elves pushing things...
You know, it's 12 elves per atom and they push things, then nobody says, well, I can't disprove it, so it could be true.
They say, well, no, it's false until you prove otherwise.
And if I can't prove otherwise, then the burden of proof does not lie on the person to disprove something that is proposed.
It is the burden of proof lies on the person proposing the argument, right?
Right.
Well, actually, I would love to dive into that in just a minute, but I want to get this point through.
What I was talking about is...
I'm assuming you've got some familiarity and training in logic.
I'm not sure how far that goes.
But in basic syllogisms and in truth-functional logic, propositions can both be proven and can be disproven, right?
When you get into higher orders of logic, like a predicate logic...
Well, you gain powerful ways of symbolizing arguments.
You can literally put any argument in the world and symbolize it in a way that you can actually handle it in predicate logic.
The downside, though, is you can only ever prove things true.
You can never disprove the false.
That's the type of thing I was talking about.
There's no way to be able to completely rule something out All you can ever do is hope that at some point in the future you've actually proved it true.
As far as...
Okay, this is, I mean, I don't know, are you trying to say that the whole point of this argument is that you can't ever disprove anything?
Then why the hell are we talking?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
You're never going to buy this car.
Well, why are we...
Right?
Absolutely do not want to...
Are you calling up the biggest philosophy show in the world to say there's no such thing as disproof?
Come on.
Don't make me feel like...
Don't make me regret the conversation.
No, I'm not saying that at all.
I'm saying that using the tools of predicate logic, that's impossible.
Syllogistic and truth-functional logic, it's a perfectly valid use of the tools.
It's a perfectly possible use of the tools.
Things can absolutely be disproven, for example, by self-contradiction.
I'm just saying that So you're saying that there's a form of logic that does not allow for disproof, and there's a form of logic that allows for disproof, and these two are compatible?
Yeah, yeah.
What happens is people use syllogistic and truth-functional logic wherever they can because they're more powerful in the sense of being able to take questions that can be symbolized in the logic.
Their scope is very limited, but within that limited scope, you can either prove or disprove any proposition.
However, there are certain arguments that cannot be symbolized using either form.
Okay, give me an example of the predicate logic that does not allow for disproof.
Oh, to tell you the truth, I am a novice in logic.
I took a course in college.
You really shouldn't be putting things out there that you don't understand, because people might be listening to you.
No, I get that.
This is kind of irresponsible.
No, no.
I wouldn't be able to give you an example off the top of my head of predicate logic, but I can give you an example of an argument that cannot be symbolized in syllogistic logic.
Okay, go ahead.
Okay, so syllogistic logic deals with categories, right?
All A are B, all B are C, therefore all A are C. Well, that's deductive logic.
There's inductive reasoning as well, which is more to do with probabilities.
But yeah, all men are mortal.
Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal, right?
That's your deductive reasoning.
Sure, sure, yeah.
Conditionals cannot be shown in syllogistic logic.
So, for example, earlier on you said, well, whatever the case, you presented an argument as, if this, then this.
Cannot be handled with syllogistic logic.
For that, you need truth-functional logic.
Right?
Another example would be...
Well, no, no.
You said you were going to give me an example of something that couldn't fit into a syllogism.
Yeah, yeah.
That is something that...
Can you give me that example, please?
Yeah.
Conditionals.
Anything that's a conditional.
Well, give me an example.
Saying the word conditional, which I don't know if you mean inductive, but give me the example that you mean.
Okay, let's give this one.
This is one that gave medieval people quite a bit of trouble.
I'm having trouble reading this.
I'm having to think back all the way to my college.
No, listen, listen, listen.
It's a fascinating topic.
Hang on.
It's a fascinating topic.
And I've just finished writing a book on debates and arguments and logic.
So please call back in when you've got more information on this.
I'd love to discuss it further.
But right now, since I'm not sure what you're talking about and I'm not sure you know what you're talking about, why don't you go study it and give me a call back in so we can talk about it in more detail.
But I don't want to put stuff out there which says...
That there's two opposing but compatible forms of love.
You understand that this is not something I want to kind of leave dangling out there.
So I do want to chat again, though.
Go look it up and review what you learned in college and bring it back to me and let's chew it out some more.
But it's been a three-hour show already.
We've still got another caller or two.
So I really, really appreciate the conversation.
But let's move on to the next caller before we both end up in a quagmire we can not dig ourselves out of.
But I really appreciate the call.
Yes, thank you very much.
much.
Thank you.
All right, up next we have Diane.
Diane wrote in and said, To define vanity as I see it, self-aggrandizement and denial of other.
I believe virtually everything deficient about education can be reduced to female vanity, including removal of competition, expansion of unions, standardized testing, extra credit, attendance requirements, busy work, etc., etc.
I also believe that women are responsible for dress codes and other restrictions that all serve to either deny the existence of other, so to remove threats to their self-aggrandizement, or to self-aggrandize.
Is female vanity in part to blame for the underwhelming performance of Western schools?
If yes, which elements have contributed to the shift in performance and focus?
That's from Diane.
Diane, that's good stuff there.
Good stuff.
Do you want to break it down a little bit more for those of us?
Well, I'll start because I can give you credit completely in the fact that I started on this topic at all, really.
Wait, I've talked about female vanity before?
Yeah.
Never!
Shocker.
Never!
I'm not allowed.
Nobody would believe it ever.
Right.
No, I was listening to one of your call-in shows.
I believe it was with a Russian man.
And you were talking about how any society basically where women are given the vote ends up becoming socialist or communist or something very similar to that in a short period of time.
It's really quick.
And while my mind exploded and my ovaries screamed, it just like everything made sense.
Your ovaries screamed?
I thought I heard something.
I really did.
It was really like one of the few moments in my life where I was just like, wow, the world makes so much more sense now.
That just explains so many mysteries about women.
Women have like, in sort of modern Western democracies, like just very briefly, just think about this.
Women have like a mentally insane amount of power.
So just a couple of examples, right?
Women obviously triumph in divorce court.
Women can choose to have babies or not have babies, and the man has no choice.
If the woman chooses to have a baby, the man who didn't want to have the baby can be roped into 18 years or more of child support and so on.
In England, at least, you can't even get a genetic test to find out if the kid is yours without the woman giving permission.
Women live longer.
Women vote more and vote longer.
Women...
Just by virtue of living long, they vote more, and they vote more in general.
They have more time, because fewer women work.
Women have the government go to bat for them to make sure that they earn more than otherwise the market might produce, thus ensuring they earn less over the long run because of the inefficient allocation of resources.
Women control early childhood.
In that they're either home raising their kids or the kids are put in daycare, which is almost universally staffed by women.
Women control pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, primary school.
I mean, a lot of kids can grow up and be into their early teens before they ever really meet a male authority figure.
So women are almost virtually complete control of that.
Women control 80 to 90 percent of domestic spending.
The malls are entirely configured to appeal to the vanity of Of women.
Women get white knights rushing to their defense anytime they get upset.
Women, of course, control sexual access, which causes a large number of resources to flow their way, assuming they're not marching with vaginas on their heads and so on.
And so this is just sort of off the top of my head, like the amount of power that women have in society...
It has become truly astonishing.
I remember Dr.
Peterson, Jordan Peterson, was on the show talking about, you know, this is gynocracy, it's matriarchy.
Very, very powerful.
Women have so much innate power, particularly when they're young.
Just the sexual market value of women is extraordinarily high.
And when you combine that power with voting power, and of course, I reported on this study in Australia where men pay the significant majority of taxes and women receive massive amounts of tax money, largely from men.
You can't get away from the patriarchy.
I mean, you can enslave it through the state or you can attack it in academia or you can, I guess, invite it in from the Middle East.
You can't get away from the patriarchy because women want to have kids and that means they'll be dependent on men and that's just the way it works.
But when you take the natural deference that Western men have for women, when you take into account the natural deference that Western men have for women, I mean, you can go and look at some of the interviews of women in other cultures and...
And there's one interview I was watching where the woman was basically saying, well, if the man doesn't beat his wife, clearly he doesn't care for her very much.
Oh, shit.
Western men have for women.
Combine that with the extraordinarily high sexual market value with almost complete control of childhood with the fact that women get away with crimes or get far less sentencing for crimes than men.
The fact that women don't have to do the dangerous work of keeping society running.
Combine all of that with the power of the state.
And it has become completely unbalanced in Western society.
I mean, just recently, I did two videos, kind of like an experiment, two videos on free speech interruptions in America, right?
One was with Mike Cernovich, who was in Texas, and the other was with Lauren Southern, who was at Berkeley in UCA. Mike Cernovich was, you know, on 60 Minutes.
He's a great speaker, a very passionate guy, huge amount of experience in these kinds of things.
He's a lawyer.
Lauren, an accomplished person as well, you know, wrote a book and has had great success in the media and so on.
But I'm going to have you guess which one's got more views.
Oh gosh, obviously Lauren Southern.
Yeah, Lauren Southern.
And the Mike Surinovich one was 14 minutes and 31 seconds.
The...
Lauren Southern 1 was 20 minutes and 51 seconds.
And, you know, I mean, in the thumbnail, you know, Mike Cernovich looks, you know, as the old song goes, you know.
He looks like Mike Cernovich.
Yeah, he looks, you know, as cool as November, smooth as China silk.
And then, you know, Lauren looks, you know, very battle ready and so on.
But Lauren's video gets, you know, 200,000 views on YouTube and Mike's doesn't even crack 80.
And that's just a lot of power.
I was looking at pictures of myself when I was a teenager just the other day.
I was tidying up the basement.
And I'm going to post these.
You know, the Russians hacked my face.
You know, it's like if I were doing my videos now with the face and hair that I had when I was 17 or 18, I'd got like 50 times the views because I was a fine-looking young slab of man meat.
and So there is just so much power that women have in Western society because of deference, because of voluntary mating rituals and so on.
Combine that with the power of the state and it just goes completely haywire.
And then what happens is women can't be criticized.
And that, I am actually tying it back into the initial thing, right?
Women can't be criticized.
This female in-group preference, this solidarity, this circling of the wagons, and this idea...
That criticism of women is hatred of women.
Whereas, apparently, criticism of men is not hatred of men, right?
Feminists and women can criticize and make fun of men all they want.
That doesn't mean hatred of men.
But to point out relevant facts about female intellectual capacities, the fact that women have babies and good moms breastfeed and so on, that takes them out of the marketplace and explains a large degree of the sort of supposed wage gap and so on.
So women can cast the most vicious aspersions against men as a whole, and it's never perceived as hostile to men or man-hating or anything like that.
Men can point out basic biological and real facts about women, and suddenly you hate women.
It's truly an unbalanced and mental kind of system that we have sadly developed, and it largely came about as a result of female suffrage.
And the fact that women didn't say, okay, well, I now have the vote.
I better really learn about politics.
I better really learn about economics.
I better really read up on this stuff.
Because when I get the vote, I'm not really paying taxes.
I'm going to get a whole bunch of benefits, so I could be corrupted by that.
I could vote for things that end up with conflict, and I sure as hell know I can't be drafted.
So now that I've been given this awesome responsibility...
To control, given that we outlive men and outlast men and outvote men, we've been given this massive responsibility.
We better damn well get up to speed and not vote based on the feels and not vote based on our desire for security and the avoidance of negative consequences for bad decisions.
And we know we have all of this power, so we better really mediate it.
We better be responsible.
We don't want to be like Mickey Mouse in that cartoon where he gets all of the mops to do all the mopping and ends up completely underwater.
We want to make sure that we take this massive power we've been given over and above our high sexual market value and control of early childhood.
We better learn.
We better study.
We better figure things out.
No, what happened?
You vote for the fields.
You vote for the security.
And...
You know, things get pretty bad from there.
So to me, it's sort of like if someone gives me a car and I'm 16, I say, well, I'd really better learn how to drive this thing.
I'd better go do some reading.
I'd better go do some practicing before I take this thing out on the highway at 100 kilometers an hour.
Not really what happened because men didn't say, okay, we're going to give you this, but let's just give you a test drive first.
Let's make sure you can figure out what you're doing.
Let's make sure you have a responsibility.
Now you have to vote.
Men have been conditioned because we're property owners and we're income earners, so we're conditioned for small government because we pay the taxes.
You guys are going to be on the receiving end.
It's going to be highly corrupting for you, so you'd better understand property rights and Austrian economics and small government and the whole bloody history of men that was reigning the state in for 10,000 years or so.
You better get up to speed with all this stuff.
Did any of that happen?
No!
The first woman who voted for old age pensions paid in a grand total of $4 or something like that and got thousands and thousands of dollars out of it.
And no one could say to women, guys, no, no, no, no.
You got to be responsible here.
This is a very new and big power.
You give us the car and we're wondering if it's the right color for us.
Don't you think it could be bigger?
Don't you think it could be a better color for me?
We're not even considering, what should we actually do with this thing?
No, it's about what's going to be the best thing for me in this sort of masturbatory exercise where it just feels great in the moment, but it's totally pointless and unproductive.
That's pretty much the feminine approach to most things, unfortunately.
And I don't hate all women before the few female listeners that you have, you know, start rushing in and being like, I hate all this stuff about how women can't do anything right.
Like, I want to homeschool my kids.
I was homeschooled by my mom.
You know, women are not all terrible.
Overall, as a whole, we make really bad decisions for society.
Well, I don't think, no, I don't think women make bad decisions if they're responsible for the consequences of those decisions.
But when women can run to the state...
Which is true for pretty much everybody, probably.
Yeah, this is like everybody, right?
I mean, can people make good decisions about the future of the country's indebtedness when they're being paid welfare?
Yeah.
Can a single mom vote objectively about benefits for single mothers?
No, I mean, but no more can a man who's dependent on the military-industrial complex composed largely of men can't vote objectively about the need for national defense spending, right?
So everyone's corrupted by the state.
It's just that we kind of know that about men.
We talk about the military-industrial complex.
We don't talk about the single-mother welfare complex because everybody knows that men are corrupted by power, but somehow Lord Acton's maxim, stop...
At the eggs.
The eggs are the giant barrier and cannot be corrupted.
Lo, the evils cannot pass the egg wall.
This is why I said mine shrieked, you know, when I heard this truth about women, and I was just like, well, now I know.
Well, okay, so when...
I don't know how old you are, and you don't have to tell me, but...
I'm 25.
Okay, okay.
So, I mean, for you, as a young woman...
What is your view of men?
Do you sort of feel like, you know, snap your fingers and you can, you know, have a boyfriend and, you know, three guys in the friend zone back out?
Could I or would I? No, could you?
Could you?
Okay, could you?
Absolutely.
I mean, can you see my Skype picture?
Like, I'm at least an 8.
I would say I'm 5'10".
I'm blonde.
I'm in really good shape.
I have one kid, but I don't look like I've ever had a kid.
I work out at this boxing gym.
And there's a ton of men that are just like, what do you want from me?
Yeah.
Here's my wallet.
So, yes, absolutely.
Okay, give me the speech of what it's like to be a hot young thing.
And what is your view of men and your power?
Because I don't think men really get this too well.
Well, I mean, we're going to get on to a totally different topic.
Do you really want me to talk about that?
I do.
Don't worry, I've got time.
We'll come back.
Alright, so you just want my opinion on whether or not men are perceptive about that?
No, just what's it like?
What's it like to be a young, attractive woman who can, you know, I mean, snap your fingers, not even snap your fingers, you know, drop your handkerchief and like four guys are fighting over giving it back to you.
I mean, what's your view of men from the perspective of peak sexual market value?
Well, I find that kind of behavior really disgusting.
Even when I was in high school, if I was going to go out to a movie with somebody who was just my friend, even if they knew we were just friends, they said, no, I'm going to pay for myself.
I'm not going to abuse you.
I'm not going to abuse chivalry and have this exchange take place that's totally unfair because we're both going, there's nothing in it for you to pay for me.
So I'm one of those chicks that has RBF. I don't know if you know what that means.
But men generally don't...
Or RBF? Yeah, it's resting bitch face.
No, but that's proportional to your level of attractiveness, right?
I guess.
No, no, listen, you have to have resting bitch face because otherwise, if you look friendly, then every geek and their dog will think that you're totally into them and will be all over you, right?
Yes, I completely concede.
The negative sort of affect or demeanor that I present in every social situation where I am not speaking with somebody that I'm familiar with or whatever is to kind of not mislead and not to send out these receptive vibes because everybody is looking at someone like me for receptive vibes.
They want to see that there so that they can hand me their wallet.
Yes.
Right.
Right, like the thirsty guys under the Lauren Southern videos who were like, Lauren, I'd like to marry you.
Notice me, please.
You're the hottest guy.
Okay, for you, you're the hottest guy.
Yeah, that's right, because that's where Lauren's going to check out her next date, is YouTube comments.
Right, obviously.
Hey, I mean, you can't hate them for trying.
You know, I always have a lot of respect for who try, even if it's like kind of pathetic.
I don't know.
It takes a lot of courage.
I try not to waste people's time by applying for brain surgery positions.
That's just my particular perspective.
A lack of realism.
I try to cut men a lot of slack because they're so abused nowadays.
You know, things are just not in their favor in any kind of way.
Well, then stop that stuff, which is just going to make them feel worse.
Anyway.
The RBF? What?
No, no, no.
I mean, the guys who are just coming on in these sort of YouTube-y stuff, I just, I don't know.
I mean, it's just self-abuse.
I mean, it's not going to work.
And I don't know.
I mean, they have some pride.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I guess my only opinion about it really is that I feel bad for the men because I don't think that there's a lot of self-awareness of Of how easily they're played sometimes.
There are perceptive men and there are intuitive men, but I would say that that is not the majority of men, especially the ones who are pursuing women at their peak sexual market value.
I think that it's something that men will tend to learn and acquire better over time and with a lengthier exposure to women.
Well, they're not being told the truth about sexual market value.
They're not being told the truth about hypergamy.
They're not being told the truth about what women are looking for.
Right.
Well, even if they were, to some degree, I think that there would be some major pitfalls for a lot of men because, you know, people want to be fooled a lot of the time.
They want to believe that, you know, there are four, but this eight is interested in them or whatever, you know, on a scale of one to 10.
That's a shame.
Sorry to interrupt, but it's a shame because, of course, if the man knows he's a four, then he can go and become rich.
Which will help to some degree, right?
Right.
So if they had more realistic views of themselves, then...
More often than not.
Men in their, you know, let's say 16 to 30, probably, you know, and matching women in that same age range, I would say men are less likely to accurately perceive themselves in romantic situations, not because they're not aware that they're a four, but because they want to be deceived, right?
More so at that period in their life than later.
You mean they want to be deceived about their own sexual market value?
In a way, yes.
They want to believe that the eight would be interested or would consider them ever for any reason.
Right.
And I don't, like, say that to be harsh.
It's just been my personal experience is that during, around those ages, you know, they just, they want to believe that.
Even if everything in their life at that point, or someone even has said, hey, she's just using you, or you buy her all this stuff and that's the only time she talks to you, those guys still go to her.
Even though you've told them the truth, you know, like, sometimes people just want to be deceived.
That's the unfortunate reality.
Can you, like, help me with my math homework?
Because it's...
Be a friend.
I'm in a girl's bedroom!
I'm in!
The funny memes about that now are actually about League of Legends.
Are you familiar with that video game?
League of Legends?
No, no.
Is it a morgue?
It's a MOBA. But no, there are a whole bunch of women who are trying to climb the ranks in League of Legends.
There's not really a huge female gamer base, but there is some.
I'm one of them that happens to play League of Legends.
But there's a whole bunch of memes about that, about she gets to platinum by manipulating this guy to come and get there for her.
It's funny.
That's more what you see on the internet now than math homework.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, no, this is like the women who complain about sexual harassment, like the women in media, women on TV, they complain about sexual harassment.
You know, I've never seen Bill O'Reilly in his lingerie, but I've seen some of these other women in their lingerie.
And to me, if you're kind of milking your sexual attractiveness, it's a little bit tough to complain about being objectified when you're dropping your boobs in my face like I'm a newborn.
Anyway.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Completely agree with that.
I mean, I literally can't imagine what it's like to be in that kind of demand.
Well, to be fair, my RBF is pretty intense.
Are you like Ronda Rousey terrifying?
A little bit, yeah.
I would say I've only been actually approached by a stranger, like hit on by a stranger twice my whole life.
Wow, you must be like bone chilling.
A little bit.
But that's good because you do want a brave guy to get through, right?
If you can get through the RBF, then more power to you, right?
I hit on everyone.
I initiate.
That's been my life.
I will initiate.
Even my husband, he basically stalked me in high school.
I had no idea, but he knew who I was.
He stalked you in high school.
He would watch me from his lunch table.
He knew everything about me.
But he never had the guts to just come approach me.
And then one day, this is going to make me sound old, even though I'm only 25, in a blockbuster, he was working and I noticed him and was just like, oh, I kind of like what I see, whatever.
He's not going to hit on me.
Men never do.
So I hit on him and we've been together ever since.
But he thought that I was just the most beautiful woman he's ever seen.
But because I was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen and I have this kind of like F off written on my forehead, there was no way.
Did that exist for you pre-puberty?
I was ugly pre-puberty.
Really?
Not horrifically ugly.
This is part of the reason why I am kind of the way that I am and very selective about who I'll approach.
I kind of like it that way that it's on my terms and everything.
But I was overweight and I had the most horrendous gap-tooth deal going on.
Oh, really?
Like you run and it sounds like a whistling marching band?
Oh, no.
Where I could, you know, shoot water out of like four areas of my mouth like, you know, kids can with the gaps and everything.
Now available is rotating sprinkler system.
Right, right.
Oh, that's rough.
My brother was beautiful.
He is beautiful.
He's this 6'5", strawberry blonde, incredibly fit slice of man meat.
He's just beautiful.
He's always been very beautiful.
But I was the smart, ugly one all up until about puberty.
I went to high school early.
I was 12 my freshman year.
And I got braces.
And so right after that, I realized, I was like, okay, I'm not ugly.
I had grown into myself.
I'd lost weight.
I, like, really, really dieted hard the few years before as a prepubescent girl.
I, like, really, really heavily dieted.
What did you lose?
What did you drop?
Probably 30 pounds.
Wow.
Yeah, for a kid, that's a lot.
Yeah, it was pretty intense.
And I grew a lot.
I'm 5'10 now, but those few extra inches really helped to kind of thing you out.
It's like rolling that Play-Doh.
Yeah.
So it was a process.
And because of that past, I worked very hard with the upkeep and I stay really fit.
It only took me six, seven months to be back to my pre-baby weight after I had the baby.
And I'm just like...
On point with all that stuff.
So I know objectively, even if you're not into tall blondes, I'm at least an eight.
Right.
If you are, I'm probably eight, nine area.
But no, yeah, men never approach me ever.
Happened twice.
Wow.
Twice.
And both times it's because I was smiling about something.
And this is the thing too, like you can't have the unconscious happy mask out in public where there are men around, right?
Right.
Oh, the unconscious happy mask.
I would say it's the opposite.
I look very unhappy.
No, no, what I mean is though, but you can't have the spontaneous happy thought with men in the vicinity.
Because then you're like, smile, your God will be down, and then it's like, incoming.
Yeah, then they're like, oh, she's receptive because smile means receptive.
Yeah.
Or at least some kind of open.
And I'm never rude.
I may have F off on my forehead, but I'm never rude or unkind to somebody, whoever approaches me.
Because I just think it takes a lot of guts.
I know.
I've always had to approach everybody I've been interested in.
But, you know, it's still there.
No, I mean, I think significant levels of physical attractiveness for young women is kind of like a...
It's a bit of a beauty prison.
Because you can't be as organic and spontaneous because you always have to be aware of the effect that your attractiveness is going to have on those around you.
And it's a shame.
I don't know if there's any way around it, but it does, I think, lack a certain amount.
There's a certain amount of self-consciousness that comes around physical attractiveness and knowing its effect.
You know, it's the power that can be used for good or for ill, and it sounds like you've used it for good and good for you.
But I don't think people really kind of get that as much.
Yeah, definitely not.
I would say age is the only thing that sort of helps with that.
So I think probably when I'm in my mid-30s, you know, 40s area, I think it'll be easier for me to be a little more free and open and friendly.
But at this period of that sort of like peak prime time that I'm still living through with regards to society and men and women actually, women hit on me more than men do, believe it or not.
I have a feeling there's a certain Joey Tribbiani section of the audience that would like to know more about that.
There are many women that have hit on me.
And if they're like a couple and they're like swingers, the woman will approach me.
That has happened more than twice in my life.
But with men, two times.
Both times smiling.
Both times totally not paying attention to them at all.
Smiling is something else.
You had your guard down.
You didn't know.
No, and having that kind of power is...
I mean, I think women obviously have evolved to know that they have that kind of power, but there is this weird thing where it's the kind of power that exists largely because it's denied.
Because I think for women to openly talk about the sexual power that they have over men, or the attractiveness power, you could say, that they have over men, that is tough, because a lot of female power comes from...
Helplessness and victimhood and so on.
And so for women to, like, we hear this all the time, right?
So women will say, I'm a single mom, but it's not my fault!
You know, in which case, you know, the reasonable question is, well, where's the father?
And what do they say?
They always say the same thing.
He was great.
He fooled everyone.
There was no way to know.
And then, boom, he turned into this raging monster and I had to protect my child, right?
So there was just no way to know ahead of time.
Because they can't say, oh yeah, no, he was unemployed, he had tattoos, he was on drugs, because then it's like, well, why the hell would you choose that to be the father of your child?
So I think women have to downplay the amount of power that they have in society in order to retain the amount of power that they have in society.
And so in a weird way, they have to portray themselves as children so that they can be very powerful, if that makes any sense.
I suppose in a way it's a little bit of a bait and switch if you're really trying to lure in a certain type of man anyway, or most men.
It's definitely easier to be the fainting damsel so that they feel like they have something to offer you and it's an element of control, especially if you're on the higher end.
I'm sorry, I think we missed...
I think that was a bit of a flyby.
So I'm not talking necessarily...
I'm talking more sort of politically and so on.
I'm not talking about women pretending to be helpless to attract an alpha male.
I don't think alpha males are particularly interested in that sort of fainting damsel in distress stuff.
But what I mean is that...
When women make mistakes, then what they do later is they say, there was no way I could have known ahead of time.
They sort of play dumb, they play incompetent, they play easily fooled, or apparently every man who knocks up a woman and then is a bad father is a completely Machiavellian, perfect chameleon manipulator that nobody could possibly figure out.
Ahead of time.
And statistically, that's just not true.
I mean, it just can't be true.
So what I mean is that when women play the victim, when they play helpless, then society, governments, whoever, rushes in to help them out.
And if women didn't have the helpless card to play after they'd made mistakes, which actually encourages them, in a sense, to make mistakes because they know that People are going to rush in and sort of help and solve their problems and so on, particularly when they have kids, because they could say, ah, well, maybe I've made mistakes, but my child shouldn't pay for it.
So I don't mean in terms of just dating and attractiveness and so on, but in terms of, I think it's Warren Farrell, he said something pretty cool.
He said that a woman's greatest strength is her show of weakness, and a man's greatest weakness is his show of strength.
I think there's something sort of important in that.
Now, you don't, because you have a husband, happily married and all that, you don't have this access or really a desire for this helplessness.
I assume that if you played some helpless, fainting Victorian heroine, it would be kind of a turnoff for your husband and probably wouldn't be looking that great for your child or whatever.
But for a lot of women out there...
This helpless thing, this I-couldn't-know-I'm-a-victim thing is extraordinarily potent because it really provokes this white knighting.
I see.
I agree with that.
All right.
I said we'd get back and let's get back.
So, let's see.
Everything deficient about education.
So, when we talk about education, do you mean sort of like the primary school, or are we talking higher education?
What level are we looking at?
Both, I would say.
Because the way that I like to look at it is in a comparative sense.
I feel that in any kind of field I've observed that's predominantly...
It's run by men or they're the ones that are doing most of the exchanges and the orchestrating or whatever.
The system always sort of looks like this.
It's generally thankless and there's a very clear exchange that happens.
It's very black and white.
This person does this job.
I do this job.
This is the result.
Or this is the mutual pursuit.
It's very clear.
The terms are very clear about what is supposed to happen and to take place here.
What I've experienced personally and tangently through other people, especially my husband's little brother who just started high school, is that this is not what education looks like anymore.
Everything is very muddled and there's actually no clear expectation that you can have even to what you're to get out of a class that you're taking.
There should be some general expectations about what your competency is going to be after, what sort of things you're going to cover, what you're going to learn.
And I realized as well, things like Teacher Appreciation Day didn't exist until, you know, I don't know, like the 1980s or something.
Because we actually had more pejorative stabs at teachers, I would say, before the 1950s.
You know, those who can't do teach and other phrases like that.
Not because we hated teachers, but because we understood that they had a job to do.
Which was to educate, and we expected them to do that job and do it well, and that was it.
There was no actual personalization.
There was no stroking of the ego for these teachers.
And that's not to say that they weren't important or gifted or whatever, but once women started coming along and really dominating the face of education, because we've had female teachers forever, that's not...
Like, a hugely new thing.
But they've really, really taken control recently.
Now there's, you know, you need to bring an apple to the teacher at the school.
You need to appeal to her as a person.
You need to know how to address her in this way.
We don't call her by her last name respectfully like we do the other teachers.
We call her this nickname because she prefers it that way.
You know, we have extra credit in case you didn't kiss my ass enough by doing the assignments I gave you before.
Here's ways to do it even more, you know?
If you're not going to pass the class, because I feel like men and in general male teachers that I've had, if you don't do the assignment, you fail.
If you don't complete the coursework, you fail.
And that's just it.
It's black and white.
It's clear.
Here is what I expect from you.
You either do it or you don't.
And that creates a weeding out.
It creates standards.
It creates competition.
And women hate all of those things pretty much because they're offensive to our vanity.
We want things to hide competition.
We want to take mirrors out of schools so that we can't see how ugly we are without our makeup on.
And all other kinds of just ridiculous nonsense things that don't actually contribute to the efficiency of the exchange that is supposed to take place in education.
There is supposed to be inefficiency, there is supposed to be a weeding out, and there is supposed to be competition.
And all of those things are just being diminished year after year after year in favor Of not only bolstering the students who are not succeeding and not interested in competing, but in the teachers who are in the same boat, who are not interested in being better teachers, they will seek to change the rules of the system before they would change themselves, where a male teacher, if he wasn't performing and his students were failing, then we would just cut him immediately.
But a female teacher We'll make all these kinds of exceptions and change the whole way that the school does things.
You know, we won't grade on this kind of system or whatever.
You know, it's all just catering to what women prefer, you know.
So we don't actually have to constantly be competing with these other standards, you know.
Right.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, I think...
I have a lot to say, so I'm pausing for interjection.
Yeah, no, no.
Keep going.
I've got some thoughts, but I don't want to interrupt your floor.
Well, one of the things I thought...
Well, actually, I'll give you a personal experience that I had in college.
And I had some female professors that were very good.
But I had two very striking comparisons between a male professor and a female professor.
And I had this male professor who was very gifted.
I'm terrible at history, or at least I was in college, a little bit better at it now than I was before.
But I've never applied myself at it.
And partly because, you know, high schools don't really put a lot of emphasis on history anymore.
They basically want you to know about slavery and that's it.
And I was homeschooled by my mom before high school and she's not that great at history, so I'm coming into college really not good at history.
We're really deficient in that area and this teacher just obliterated the classroom.
He gave us all study guide before our first test and you know it had the main points of everything that we had gone over those few weeks and then the test material came out and none of the study guide questions were on there.
Now, the material was still related to the study guide, but the specific questions that were prompted through the study guide were not on the exam.
So it wasn't a cheat study guide like a lot of teachers will give you.
It wasn't like, here are the questions I'm going to ask you next week.
Make sure you notice these ones.
But every student had perceived that study guide equals pretty much what the test is going to be like.
So everyone was really pissed off.
When I got the actual exam, which was one of the hardest exams I've ever taken in my life.
And it was the only C I ever got in college.
The only C ever on anything.
And my reaction was, holy shit, I need to work harder.
I need to actually take better notes.
I need to get out my highlighter more, bring my book to class, do more than what I've been doing, because this isn't going to be a cakewalk for me.
Now, what I found was after the next test, I improved and the rest of the students signed a petition to get him fired.
Sure.
Because they said, why would you give us a study guide that does not give us the answers?
Yeah.
Because now we're only studying the material in the study guide.
Instead of the weeks of notes that we were supposed to be taking, the study guide was a guide.
He doesn't even have to give us one, which was what he said.
He said, I don't even have to give you a study guide.
If you don't like that it wasn't a copy of the exam, then I can just not give you anything, which was his reply.
And every single exam, this was the reaction of the students.
They were constantly coming to the board, trying to get him fired, trying to get a replacement, you know, whatever.
And he was so disheartened by it.
It actually really crushed me because he was one of the only professors that left, like, a real resonance with me because he was so passionate about it and was just so knowledgeable.
And I really appreciated that he expected so much because I learned a lot from his class because he expected so much.
It really crushed me to see how disheartened he was by the end of the semester because he ended up transferring and not teaching at that branch of the college anymore because of the mob mentality, basically.
How dare you show me that I'm not smart enough for this?
How dare you have expectations for me?
How dare you whatever?
All these things that are like, you're offending my vanity.
Yeah.
Not just women, but these men who have been raised by these overly vain women who have been indulged by the state and all that other stuff.
Now this female professor I had.
I've never experienced such an abuse of power in my life, probably ever.
And you may not think it's that big of a deal, but to me, I was 17 years old, I think, when I was taking her class, maybe a little older.
And I hadn't experienced a whole lot of life.
I'd had a job before, but I was really young in high school.
I was pretty young in college.
And I'd already taken all of the 400-level classes for my major because I was an English major.
And her class was a 200.
So I'm like, oh, this is going to be a piece of cake.
No big deal.
And it was a piece of cake.
I got at least a 95 or better on every single assignment she put for us.
But in the beginning of the year, in her syllabus, she said she has attendance requirements.
And to me, I'm like, this is college.
What do you mean?
You have an attendance requirement.
If I don't show up to your class, I don't show up to your class.
Who cares?
If you want me to show up, have pop quizzes.
Have things in class that are going to actually affect my grade.
Otherwise, if you just want to lecture and talk about nonsense and hug it out, which is all she wanted to do, she actually at one point did have a hug and cry session with one of the other students, which was the day I was just like, enough of this.
I'm not coming to this class anymore.
But before that happened, I did miss a day because I was sick and I had to go to the doctor.
And I brought her a doctor's note.
And I was like, oh, here, for my absence.
Because I knew, she said, if you miss three or more class periods, that that's a 10% grade doc.
Right off the top, 10%.
And so I was like, I don't want to have one of my three absences uncovered.
So I bring in my doctor's note.
And she refused to accept it.
She said, no, you have two more absences before it affects your grade.
I don't accept excuses for the absences.
And so I just had this whole anti-authority attitude about it.
I was like, no way.
Hug, cry, sesh.
Not for me.
Nope.
I'm getting A's on everything.
You don't have pop quizzes.
None of this stuff.
Whatever.
So I did every single assignment.
Missed a whole bunch for class.
And I had, like I said, a 95 or better on everything.
And she still gave me a C in her class because of how much I'd missed.
Right.
And I was furious.
I was like, how can you live with that?
Like, that should make you happy that there are students coming in who really don't need that much attention, you know?
Like, this is college.
This isn't high school, you know?
Like, I'm here applying myself to all of the work that you're giving me, and I'm doing very well on the actual work, showing you I'm reading the material, and I'm writing competently like you would expect from someone in a 200-level class or whatever.
And she had this assignment where she required a certain number of pieces to be done to get an A. It had nothing to do with quality.
It had to be quantity.
You had to have, I think it was 20 or more pieces that you'd written, like a review sort of the work in this book that she'd given us.
And so I did it.
I was like, whatever.
You want quantity?
I'll give you quantity.
I still tried to have some quality in there, but whatever.
I was doing a million of them.
So...
This guy that was taking the class with me still got an A, but only did 10.
And so I'm like, so you're just changing the rules now.
You'll have it all spelled out.
But this one person who kisses your ass and does a couple pieces that you like, and she had us do this ridiculous art piece at some point, and his was all touchy-feely, and she was like, oh, it's the sweetest thing ever, and just totally appealed to her feminine side or whatever, because it was really gay, let's be honest.
It's just ridiculous, the piece that he did.
But me, who comes along and is just like, I'm actually doing what you're telling me to, with the exception of showing up to your class, but you're still going to punish me for doing well when my tuition is what pays for you to work here anyway?
I was just blown away by that.
And I had another experience with a female professor.
Okay, let's keep this quick.
It's been a long show, so I'm happy to hear the story, but let's just keep it snap because it's like 20 minutes to the last one.
I won't even go into it.
Can you do it quick?
I don't mind hearing.
It was just a teacher who she refused to leave politics and her personal opinion out of her English class.
And I confronted her about it.
And I said, look, this doesn't have a place in English because you're teaching me how to write.
You're not teaching me about politics.
And she refused to abstain.
She just flat out was like, no, there's no way that I could possibly ever keep my opinions about these things out of the classroom.
Right.
It's incapable of self-restraint, so let me teach you.
I was like, wow.
Okay.
And my husband's brother was talking to me about his experience with high school teachers and how different it is having a male teacher and a female teacher.
And there are bad male teachers.
I've had plenty of them, obviously.
But we were talking about extra credit.
And I was just like, man, there's just nothing more feminine to me than extra credit because a man is just going to be like, no, if you didn't do it, you didn't do a good job, whatever, you fail.
But a woman will be like, well, you want to kiss up to me?
You want to get more than 100%?
Or you want to do better on this one thing?
Here are all these pointless assignments that you can do for me that are going to make me feel good and validate me, you know, because I need to be validated constantly.
Right.
Ridiculous.
Well, I mean, the lowering of the quality of American education is pretty significant.
And this is true throughout a lot of the West.
I mean, the fact that you have so many women on college campuses now and you have this emotional hysteria and this need for safe spaces and so on.
I mean, how cliched could you possibly be when it comes to female emotions?
I can't hear criticism.
I can't hear counter arguments.
I need a safe space.
And it's like, oh, come on.
I thought you guys were coming to enrich the Western intellectual tradition, and it seems to be a lot of needing teddy bears and videos of puppies and stuff, and that's just so cliché.
And, you know, I sort of understand it.
I mean, women's brains react pretty negatively to negative stimuli.
Men have a better capacity to manage that on average.
And there's been a lot of dumbing down, and some of that dumbing down just has to do with women going into the educational fields.
Certainly, teachers now...
are taken from the very bottom of the SAT scores and the ACT scores in America.
The lower the quality of the undergraduate institution the student is attending, the more likely, statistically, they're going to end up in the teaching profession.
This is from—I was just looking this up.
I had this pretty handy.
Godless, the Church of Liberalism.
It's a great book by the great Ann Coulter.
In a 1999 interview, Hoover Institution fellow Thomas Sowell We're good to go.
Sowell also remarked that, quote, the most childish letters I receive in response to my newspaper column come from teachers.
They seem to think that they can simply make up their facts and that they can psychoanalyze me.
They like to tell me, for instance, you must have had a bad experience of teachers.
And in 2001, only 60% of education students taking the basic teacher's licensing exam in Virginia were able to pass.
There's an example of a question there, which is ridiculous.
And she says, anyone who could not answer that question should not be allowed to serve food in a public school, much less teach in one.
But nearly half the aspiring teachers got it wrong.
And this is, of course, then they had to lower the standards in order to up the passing rate.
In Massachusetts in 1998, 59% of candidates for teaching positions failed a basic skills test geared to 8th graders.
One-third of the test takers couldn't even pass the basic skills question.
And therefore, of course, they lower the...
Right.
No, and it's not just the teachers, too.
This indulgence that's constantly going on.
I don't know if you watch the show The Goldbergs, but the mom, this, like, overly protective mother, Beverly Goldberg, is constantly approaching the school and saying, basically, appeal to my vanity because if you...
Say my kids aren't good enough.
That's saying I'm not good enough.
So change this thing for me instead of asking me to change.
Just like we'll lower the standards instead of asking people to do better.
I just see it as like men obviously are capable of committing these same things.
Whatever you want to call them.
Having these same deficiencies, being weak in this way and being easily appealed to through vanity and stuff.
Obviously it can happen to them.
But I think generally it's because they had a mother who overly insults them to protect her own vanity.
And so I think ultimately, I'm trying to wrap it up here so you can get to the last person.
Ultimately all of this stuff, just like the huge shift towards socialist practices here and through the West, it's all connected to the ovaries, man.
It is.
And of course, in the sexual marketplace, young women are used to getting their way and used to having society defer to them.
And then what happens, of course, is the woman is supposed to use her high sexual market value time to get the highest quality man she can.
Sorry, but this is why we're all here, because our parents chose better people than they could have otherwise chosen, which is why we evolved and why we're not, you know, hitting rats with rocks for a meal anymore outside of Venezuela and certain areas in Detroit.
So the fact that you're supposed to use your high sexual market time as a young woman to get the very highest quality man and then stick with him.
That's the whole point.
And so what happens is, of course, if women use this high sexual market value to fuel their vanity rather than find a great man, then they end up with their ovaries drying up, they're screaming, as you say it, they hit their 30s, they hit the wall.
Bitter, hysterical, angry, depressed.
They then turn from appealing to nagging, right?
Because what are the two ways that women have historically used to get their way?
I mean, intellect, of course, and all that for the brilliant women out there, but traditionally it has been sexuality and nagging, right?
And you can see this transition happening.
You can see it happening with people like Madonna and Sharon Stone and other people.
And it's happening to Scarlett Johansson as we speak and even to Katy Perry to some degree.
It's like going from using your sexual appeal, then you start to hit the wall, you start to get a little long in the tooth, a little wrinkly around the crow's feet, and suddenly then you go from being sexy to nagging and complaining and whining and victimizing and being a victim and calling out the patriarchy and so on.
You become a shrew where formerly you were...
resources.
And you were supposed to use your maiden time to get material resources based on your sexuality and then grow into being a great wife and a great mother or a great entrepreneur, if that's what you want to be.
But then you can see this happen.
The women who didn't use their high sexual market value time to get a good man end up turning into these horrible leftist shrews who just nag and complain to get their resources, which didn't used to be available to old maids, which is why they had to get a good man when they were young.
But now because of politics and voting, they can actually nag politicians to get resources from men and give them to the women.
But the men don't get a sandwich in return.
It's really not very fair.
We're supposed to use this time to acquire security.
And then when they've wasted that time and they don't have security, there's just panic.
Panic and all hell breaks loose and we're living through it right now.
Yeah, and so I think a lot of, like, American education is dose-dependent stupidity.
Like, kids in America start off relatively equal to international standards, but every single year that they're in largely female-run and female-controlled government schools, they drop further and further behind.
It is dose-dependent retardation that happens in government schools.
It's not all the fault of women, but they're not entirely unrelated, given how much power women have in the educational system as a whole at the moment.
It's really astonishing.
They encourage the kids to focus on things like self-expression and self-indulgence and, you know, even encouraging the type of writing that's not analytical but that is just like reader response, you know, which is their version of, like, female version of stream of consciousness basically before they...
And how does that help you to satisfy voluntary consumers in the free market who don't really care about your feelings?
Like, I don't care whether the guy who made my cell phone was feeling self-actualized at work.
I mean, I'd rather in an abstract way he was, and I think in the long run it'll be better if he is.
But I don't care.
You know, when the guy operated on my throat, I didn't really care.
I mean, I like the guy.
He's been on the show.
But it was most important that he didn't behead me.
Don't cut the carotid artery.
Don't do that, right?
Carotid artery, that's the thigh, isn't it?
Anyway.
The jugular.
There we go.
Don't cut the jugular.
Don't turn me into a human hose.
That's all I'm asking.
And so, you know, when I was a waiter, like I was just the other day, I had a bunch of people over and I had to take a whole bunch of plates.
And because I was a waiter for a couple of years, I like immediately spread them out fan style and know how to go up and down stairs and all that.
And I was just thinking like when I was a waiter, nobody cared if I had a good or bad day.
They wanted hot food.
They didn't care that much about my feelings.
And there's something about the free market that is a challenge for certain types of women and certain types of men as well, because they're raising people to think, well, I can manipulate or smile or, you know, get my way out of problems.
And it's mostly about my feelings.
And that's not how the free market works.
Absolutely.
It's that clear exchange that I talked about before.
People like that masculine, clear exchange of expectations.
We know what's going to happen here.
It's going to happen like this.
And I heard this person talking about, he was speaking to business owners, you know, the successful people.
And he's like, this is why it's so hard for you to work with millennials.
You just don't understand them.
When they say that they don't feel like they're making an impression or At work or, you know, whatever he used, some phrase, you know, he's like, it really means this.
And I said, no, honestly, what that means is that these hipsters are coming in just like nobody's kissing my ass for this basic ass work that I'm used to getting my ass kissed for because I did extra credit my whole life.
And so I'm used to everyone praising me for every little nonsense thing that I do instead of understanding, no, there's a clear exchange here.
We are not going to kiss your ass for everything.
You have a job to do.
Do it.
And it's no accident to me that when the government wants to grow, it puts women in charge of children's education.
Totally agree.
Yeah.
I'll let you get to the next call.
Well, listen, thanks for a great call.
Welcome back anytime.
I appreciate the insights into the land of the lovely ladies.
It's always fascinating.
And people really need to think about this.
Try and get yourself into the mind of Diana.
Try and figure out what it's like, and that will really help you get the kind of woman that you want, or maybe the kind of man that you want, if that's what you're into.
Well...
Honestly, being a vain woman myself, I would love to talk about me anytime on your show.
Excellent.
I think it's really helpful and I appreciate you calling in.
And I just want to thank everyone so much for these amazingly exciting, fantastic, wonderful conversations.
The fact that, you know, you're willing to lift the kimono of your mind as I'm willing to open the kimono of mine and we can really stare deep into each other's existence is a really great opportunity.
Pleasure.
And I think, you know, kind of rare in the world that it can be a little bit superficial.
And so I appreciate the honesty and the openness.
I appreciate the support.
You can help out the show at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Thank you everyone so, so much for listening and for watching.
Don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
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