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May 20, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:58:22

3691 MYSTICISM MADNESS - Call In Show - May 17th, 2017

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	Hey, hey, hey, everybody!
	Stefan Rolini from Freedom Main Radio.
	Hope you're doing very well.
	Hey!
	I heard you like some mystics with your mystics, so have we got a lineup of mystics for you tonight?
	This was provoked, summoned by a recent conversation I had with a woman, colloquially referred to on this show as Mrs.
	Mysticism.
	And the first caller thought that Mrs.
	Mysticism was making a very reasonable point, but making it weakly.
	And he thought that my response was to just viciously attack her because she couldn't make the case as clearly as she might have.
	And wasn't I just a bad guy?
	Wasn't it morally reprehensible in my own ethical system to do such a dastardly deed?
	So we had a good conversation about that, let me tell you.
	And the second caller had a definition of truth that added the word operational truth.
	And this was a little bit less about mysticism and more about epistemology, which I always love to discuss as a topic.
	So that was great.
	And the third caller wanted to talk about mysticism through the analytical psychology of Carl Jung.
	Carl Jung created these categories of personalities that later morphed into the Myers-Briggs test and so on.
	And we talked about that.
	I actually have been quite influenced by Jung.
	And the mysticism of the unconscious is a great, great topic.
	And the fourth caller, well, did not like that I was an atheist.
	He just didn't like it and made the case that there's no way that all of our thoughts and hopes and dreams can simply vanish after we die.
	Just can't disappear into the ether of nothingness.
	Why not?
	We went back and forth on that question.
	I really enjoyed it.
	And the fifth caller was a mom.
	Well, she was into mysticism, but unfortunately the call was cut a little bit short by the extremely pragmatic upset of her young child, so we'll hopefully get her back.
	So it was a great set of calls.
	I really enjoyed it.
	I hope that you do too.
	Please, please, help out the show.
	Please, I beg you, help out the show.
	at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux and we have an affiliate link should you be so inclined to shop at fdrurl.com slash amazon.
	Alright, up first today we have Nash.
	Nash wrote into the show and said, Mrs.
	Mysticism was making a very reasonable point, but making it weakly.
	Your response was to attack her inability to state the case.
	Is this not morally blameworthy in your ethics?
	That's from Nash and is referencing a video we published titled, ALL CAPS, MYSTICISM. Welcome to the show, Nash.
	Hi.
	Hey, Nash.
	How you doing tonight?
	Very well.
	Good.
	Well, I am eager, eager to taste the fruits of your moral instruction.
	So you felt that this woman, let's call her Sally, you felt that Sally was making a very good case and I was rude or disrespectful to her.
	Is that right?
	No, I think she was making a poor case, but she had a point.
	And the point was good.
	And I felt like you chose to sort of attack the fact that she wasn't making the point very well instead of attacking the point that she was trying to make or trying to help her develop her idea.
	You know that's not a feeling, right?
	I felt that you were trying to attack.
	That's not a feeling, right?
	I know.
	So let's start with the precise methodology to begin with.
	So what was the case that you felt she was making, albeit, as you say, poorly?
	I think she was making the point that mysticism is a real thing and that it should be taken seriously.
	That's not an argument.
	Oh, no, it's a conclusion.
	I could say elves are a real thing and should be taken seriously.
	I could say poltergeists are a real thing.
	I could say unicorns are a real thing.
	What is the case?
	Rather than just a statement, because it's a philosophy show, right?
	Which means people don't just get on, come in here and open up the bomb bay of their fields and dump all over.
	You actually have to make an argument.
	So what do you think the argument was that she was trying to make and try and state it in the form of what we colloquially call an argument, please?
	How about a syllogism?
	Sure.
	Oh, that's very, very welcome.
	Thank you.
	It requires two observations and then a simple conclusion that you can observe in the world around you.
	So the first observation is that there's different kinds of knowledge, right?
	So you do on your philosophy show, you do intellectual knowledge, but there's also kinds of knowledge that are non-intellectual, right?
	If I go to a factory and I ask a factory worker, do you know how to work the machine?
	He says, yes.
	If I say, do you know how the machine works?
	He probably says, no.
	Right?
	It takes an engineer to know how the machine works.
	And those two kinds of knowledge are different from each other.
	I'm not sure.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm not sure what you mean, how they're different.
	Knowing how the machine works and knowing how to work the machine are both practical applications of empirical knowledge, right?
	So what's the difference?
	You don't have to be able to describe...
	Very much about the machine's inner workings to actually use it, right?
	You know that goes intus, you know that comes out us.
	You work the machine, it's a part of a process, but to you it's just a black box.
	It does things inside that might as well be magic.
	But you know they're not magic, right?
	Like the cell phone is not a portal to another dimension where candies explode, right?
	So it's not magic.
	I'm trying to understand what you mean by different forms of knowledge.
	Because we're both talking about a machine, some people know how to work it, and some people know how it works, but I don't know how those are different forms of knowledge.
	There's less knowledge and there's more knowledge.
	Let me give you a different example.
	How about, does the tiger know how to hunt?
	Does a tiger know how to hunt?
	We're talking about people here.
	I'm not sure why we're bringing in...
	I don't know much about the epistemology of tigerness.
	Right, exactly.
	So, I mean, there are different kinds of ways we know things.
	Sometimes we're told things with language.
	Wait, wait, I'm sorry.
	Are you saying that because I'm not a tiger, I'm wrong?
	No, no, no.
	No, I was simply using it as an example of a different kind of knowledge.
	Like tigers know things different ways than we do.
	You have to be a tiger to know things the way a tiger does, whatever that means.
	You have to inherit the genes for their heritable behaviors, or you have to get the Care of a tiger mother to learn the trained behaviors, whatever it is.
	Nash, have you noticed a lot of tigers calling into the show?
	Trust me, if a tiger wanted to call into the show, we'd totally put them to the front of the queue because I think they're amazing animals.
	But I think we're going to just have to be annoyingly restrictive and deal with human beings at the moment.
	Because saying a paramecium has a different view of life than I do is not an argument.
	And human beings know how to hunt, and they know how to hunt far better than tigers, because there are more people who hunt tigers than tigers who hunt people.
	Well, you haven't let me get to the argument yet, right?
	You're arguing with just an observation.
	You've come up with two examples so far, neither of which work, right?
	Because I'm asking you to make an argument, and you started out with syllogisms, and the first one was something about a machine, and the second thing was something about tigers.
	So, so far, no syllogisms.
	I'm waiting for you to make the argument.
	I'm not being rude.
	It's just that you say you're going to give me an argument, and I'm just waiting for you to do so.
	Yeah.
	Alright, here's the argument.
	There's different kinds of knowledge.
	Some knowledge is intellectual and some knowledge is not.
	Right?
	And people in the world...
	Wait, do you think that's an argument?
	Observation one.
	No, I... Steph, it takes more than one sentence to make an argument.
	No, but you've stated your conclusions.
	You can't start an argument by stating the conclusions.
	That's like me starting a debate by saying, okay, Nash, let's both assume that I'm right and you're wrong, and let's continue, right?
	I need you to—I'm saying that there's two types of knowledge, one of which is intellectual and the other one is, I don't know, something else.
	You have to make that case.
	You can't just state that case and then backfill it with some kind of argument, right?
	You've got to make the argument from the beginning.
	I think it's kind of an observational level thing.
	We can observe, for example, in human beings, in child development, you don't have to teach a kid to walk.
	They just walk.
	You may be there to help, but they're going to walk as soon as their body grows to be able to do it.
	Because it's an ingrained behavior that's just a part of the body.
	We all do it.
	Unless something goes wrong, we're going to do it successfully at a certain point.
	Now, you can argue whether or not that's knowledge, like whether we are born with the knowledge of how to walk, whether that's a stretch of the term knowledge or not, we could dissect that.
	But I think in this woman's view, that's a perfectly reasonable example of knowledge.
	Right?
	Whereas what you want to restrict it to is just knowledge that has language associated with it.
	See, at some point, Nash, you have to ask me if I'm following what you're saying.
	This is the one thing that pisses me off about it.
	It's one of the many things.
	You all just speak and speak and speak.
	And you never stop to ask if I'm following it.
	You've probably listened to this show for a while.
	And also, you talk in my ear while I'm trying to make a point.
	But you've listened to this show for a while, Nash.
	Do you know the number of times when I stop and say, does this make sense to you?
	Are you following what I'm saying?
	Does it make sense?
	You just plow ahead, making these amazing statements that are highly controversial, as if they're just facts.
	And you never are stopping to ask if I agree, if I follow, and so on.
	And talking about how babies learn to walk as a form of knowledge, well, tadpoles learn to swim.
	Are they philosophers?
	No.
	Do they make syllogisms and arguments?
	No.
	You can't use knowledge as a substitute for instinct.
	Because instinct is shared by just about every biological creature, and yet only mankind, excluding you, can make a syllogism.
	So please, give me a syllogism, because that's what you promised me.
	Yeah, I can, but I mean, I keep stating the first premise, and you disagree with the premise, and so we're stuck on that.
	There are two types of knowledge is not a premise.
	It can be.
	No!
	That's what we want to establish.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Bingo.
	All right.
	So, because I was going to use that as the beginning and conclude with, therefore, mysticism is real.
	Right?
	Like, mysticism is a thing in the world.
	So, you were going to assume that mysticism is valid, and then your argument was going to somehow end up with mysticism being valid?
	That's called a tautology, and it's also not called reasoning.
	Well, I don't see how this...
	The claim that there are two different kinds of knowledge, or at least two, is the same as the claim that mysticism is real, right?
	Because you're making the case that there's philosophical, rational, empirical, objective, scientific kinds of knowledge, and then you're making that there's another kind of knowledge that is intuitive or extrasensory or other-dimensional, and then you're saying, and that's mysticism, and therefore it exists.
	So your other kind of knowledge turns out, I guarantee you, it's going to turn out to be a synonym for mysticism.
	So what you're saying to me, Nash, is let's assume that mysticism exists and is valid, and then I'm going to do the highly strenuous intellectual energy journey of proving to you that mysticism is valid and exists.
	But it's called begging the question.
	You can't prove, you can't say what is true when you're trying to establish something.
	You have to make a case for it.
	You can't just assume that it's true and then just say you've proven something.
	Okay, well, let's make the case for it then.
	That would be lovely.
	What is the criteria by which you want to delineate knowledge?
	Wait, you're calling in to make a case and now you want me to make a case?
	I'm not sure what you mean.
	Well, I think that we have a problem with definition of knowledge and I'm willing to take a definition of knowledge that basically is, you know, if you can transmit information from the current time to the future and then recover that information later, Then that constitutes some form of memory or knowledge.
	I'm willing to take anything that fits that definition, but you seem to want something that's much more, you know, that's tighter than that.
	Wait, sorry, your definition of knowledge is something which transmits information forward into the future?
	Right.
	I think that's a reasonable physical definition of knowledge.
	Not at all.
	Okay, so let's figure out where we're...
	No, and I already made this, because tadpoles, right?
	Tadpoles know how to swim without being taught.
	And so their genetics transmit the knowledge called knowing how to swim forward through time.
	Would you say that tadpoles have a form of knowledge, or would that be differentiated from something like an instinct?
	I would consider instinct a subcategory of knowledge.
	Well, technically, knowledge is a subcategory of instinct, if we're going to even co-join them, because there's far more instinct in the animal kingdom than there is knowledge, right?
	Yeah, but man does this funny thing where he proceeds occasionally, like we're doing, by reason alone and not by instinct.
	And if you follow the rules of reasoning, like we're trying to do together, the process isn't instinctual, right?
	It's constrained heavily, and so you get a different kind of thing from that process.
	How would we pursue knowledge in a conversational format?
	How would we pursue knowledge instinctually, Nash?
	I don't quite understand what that means.
	Right.
	I mean, that's, I think, the fundamental difference in why you sort of didn't get her, right?
	No, no, no.
	Don't express amazement that I'm bringing up the question.
	Just try answering the question.
	How would we pursue instinctual knowledge together in a philosophy show?
	Oh, you don't.
	You do it through things like religious ritual, right?
	So this philosophy show, as I talked about with Mrs.
	Mysticism, is not an appropriate format for a big kaleidoscope of fields masquerading as knowledge.
	Yeah, I agree.
	Okay, so she called into a philosophy show wanting to talk about her feelings and her intuitions and her mysticism.
	It's a philosophy show, right?
	Yeah.
	And so when you call into a philosophy show, it can't be too shocking when the philosopher asks you for definitions and arguments, right?
	I mean, if you're going to call into a science show, is it unreasonable that they're going to expect you to have something to contribute to or some basic understanding of the scientific method?
	No, I think it would have been great if she could have stated her point more cogently.
	I was really hopeful.
	You mean like you're doing?
	Like I'm trying to do anyway.
	Yeah, it's a difficult point to make, right?
	Because we're trained as a habit of thought to be extremely materialist, even in philosophy.
	And we really want their explanations to reduce to material stuff.
	And the point that mysticism is making, it has implications for the material world, but it also has this very central question, this platonic question of forms at the heart of it.
	There are real non-material things that we work with every day.
	Excellent.
	So now you're making a statement.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but I absolutely know mystics never shut up.
	I mean, I could literally wait here until the end of time and nobody ever circles back because it's just a bunch of words.
	So you're saying things that we cannot perceive exist.
	Is that right?
	I don't think I said that.
	I'm a mathematician, not a mysticist or whatever it is.
	So the things that I'm thinking of are things like mathematical theorems.
	And I work with mathematical theorems daily, right?
	But they don't exist in the way that a bridge exists, right?
	They exist as concepts in the mind, and they exist as relationships to reality, but they don't exist.
	Like, the number three, when being used to describe three coconuts, the number three does not exist in the same way that the three coconuts do, right?
	Correct.
	That doesn't mean it's subjective or arbitrary, of course, because it's trying to describe a triplet of distinct entities, right?
	Also correct.
	So, theories, concepts, ideas, logic, reasons, a scientific method, all of the various abstractions that we use to powerfully utilize within the world, they don't exist in the world in the same way that a tree or a rock does.
	Is that fair to say?
	Right, yeah.
	Okay, good.
	So they don't exist out there in the real world?
	They don't.
	I mean, it's not like you can go pick up a theorem from the store.
	Good.
	Okay.
	So we're in agreement, then, that what is in the mind does not exist in the world.
	And the value of abstractions and concepts is how they accurately describe the properties of the world itself.
	And therefore, we can extrapolate the properties which we get through our sense data.
	We can extrapolate them into concepts as a whole and then use them in new circumstances and new situations, like, you know, sending a probe past Jupiter and so on.
	So this is, I think we're in very much agreement as far as that goes.
	Certainly.
	Alright, so what is it that you're talking about with regards to mysticism, then?
	Well, you've proven that a theorem isn't a real thing in the material world, and I completely agree with that.
	But it's still a real thing, right?
	It's still a part of our shared reality.
	I can write a theorem down, I can hand it to another mathematician, I can write a proof for it.
	The proof is constrained by thermodynamics, interestingly, right?
	The way you can write proofs to prove theorems is a physical property of the universe and not just some magic insight that we connect to when we're proving things.
	And so, at some level, the theorem, the space that theorems live in, the structure of that space, the way that that space operates is a part of the material world Or connected to it, or who knows?
	We certainly don't have any physics at this level.
	Just to make sure I understand what you're saying, do you mean that the language that we're using to communicate requires physical properties, right?
	It requires the movement of air, the passage of electrons through a variety of inner tubes, and things like that, that communication requires the senses and sense data?
	Yeah, communication, but also reasoning is also constrained by physics, right?
	Good.
	Yes, it should be.
	Otherwise, it's not reasoning, right?
	Yeah, I mean, so we have these things, these theorems, and we can share them, we can communicate them with each other.
	They're very real.
	They have extremely high utility, and the operational realities of those theorems is constrained by the same physics that constrains everything else we do.
	So in what sense exactly are they not real?
	Well, hang on, we've already agreed that they're not real, so I'm not sure, are you changing your position?
	We agreed that they're not material, right?
	They're not in the universe in the same way that a tree is in the universe.
	But they're constrained by the way the universe is designed in a similar way to the way that a tree is constrained by the way the universe is designed.
	Well, sure, but this just depends how you want to use the word real, right?
	I mean, if you want to use the word real, I'm sorry, was I just about to say something or were you just about to say something?
	Please proceed.
	So, it depends how you want to use the word real, Nash, right?
	So, if you want to use the word real to mean that which exists independent of consciousness, that which existed prior to consciousness, you know, matter and energy and so on and the properties thereof, then that's real in terms of external to the mind.
	Because clearly there are concepts in the mind...
	That are there within the mind that do not correspond to anything in reality, right?
	So we can think of magical beings.
	We can have the concept called a square circle and so on.
	And these things do not exist in the objective world.
	Now, there are also concepts that we have that are supposed to or designed to accurately describe that which is in the real world.
	And so if I think of some magical unicorn, that doesn't exist in the real world.
	If I think of a horse, that does exist in the real world.
	And so within her mind, there are concepts which, well, there are three kinds of concepts, right?
	One, things which could exist in the world, like flying lizards, we could call them dragons, as long as they're not magical and have self-contradictory properties, right?
	They could exist on some planet somewhere in the universe.
	There are things which could not exist, like purely magical creatures or square circles and things like that, and then there are things which do exist.
	And so as far as real goes, there are things which are real, there are things which are potentially real, and there are things which are not real, cannot be real, like self-contradictory concepts like square circles and so on.
	Now, you can't use the word real to describe these three categories of ideas, right?
	That which is, that which could be, and that which can't be.
	And so if you're going to use the word real to describe both the statue and the shadow, so to speak, then that's a tricky thing and gets very confusing very quickly.
	So we need to have a different word for things that exist in the objective universe outside of human consciousness, right?
	And the things which exist within our minds, some of which are related to what is out there in the world and some of which is not.
	So you can't use the same word.
	I mean, you can, it's just ridiculously confusing and I think kind of contradictory.
	You can't use the same word to describe tangible, empirical, objective reality with the things in our mind.
	Okay.
	How about we use the word natural to describe tangible reality and we use supernatural to To describe things in the mind and everything else.
	No, we can't do that because supernatural is a word...
	No, that is a word that is already owned and defined as mystical, as magical, as other dimensional, and so on.
	So we can't use...
	That's like saying, well, let's use the word magical to mean rational.
	Let's use the word self-contradictory to use non-self-contradictory.
	You can't use the word supernatural, right?
	I think you make an excellent point that there's a category here.
	And I think that if the question that we're going to get hung up on is whether or not the point that mysticism is real hangs on whether this second stuff, whatever we want to call it,
	this non-material real stuff, is really real, then I think that just feels like syntactic What we want to know,
	I think, is, is there some connection between the domain of knowledge that exists in the mind or, you know, wherever that's not Attainable.
	You can't buy it at the store.
	I have no idea what any of this means, but if you could explain to me what your definition of mysticism is, I think that would be a good place to start, because you used the word and you've used it a bunch of times.
	What is your definition of mysticism?
	Well, Google actually has a great definition.
	So let me read that.
	Belief that the union with or absorption into the deity or the absolute or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender.
	So I think that deity is a fraught term.
	If you dump the deity and the absolute stuff, what you're left with is the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect that may be attained through contemplation.
	All right, hang on a second.
	Let me just get that definition.
	Definition.
	Mysticism from Google.
	I believe that union with...
	Okay, so we'll take this step by step.
	So it's a good, yeah, good.
	Now we have a definition we can work with.
	That's great.
	Could have started that 25 minutes ago, but anyway.
	Belief that union with or absorption into the deity or the absolute.
	Now, I don't know what they mean by deity, and I certainly don't know what they mean by absolute.
	Do they mean absolute zero?
	Do they mean logic?
	Do they mean, I have no idea, right?
	I agree.
	Let's dump that clause.
	So union with or absorption into the absolute.
	Got it.
	Or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect.
	Spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender.
	Okay.
	Knowledge inaccessible to the intellect.
	So the problem is, again, with this kind of definition, that the word knowledge is used as part of the rational process of philosophical or scientific exploration of the universe or the self.
	So that word knowledge, but then if you also say there's some spiritual, which is non-bodily understanding of knowledge inaccessible to the brain, then you've got sort of this unholy trinity of confusion, because we're talking about a spiritual apprehension.
	I don't know what that means.
	But then you say of knowledge.
	Okay, well, then you're using the same word, not you, but these guys are using the same word for two different things, one of which is the intellect and the other which is the non-intellect.
	Knowledge inaccessible to the intellect.
	Well, that is a subjective experience, a feeling, a...
	You could say an instinct for the divine, or a sense of oneness, or a sense of unity, or a sense of grandeur, or a sense of largeness of the universe, or whatever it is that could be going on.
	It is a feeling that appears to certain consciousnesses as knowledge.
	But it is attained through the rejection of philosophy and the scientific method, here contemplation and self-surrender.
	Now that is a very real experience for a lot of people.
	I mean, you know that.
	I don't know if you've ever had one.
	I mean, I understand that people really do have this experience.
	They're meditating, they're contemplating things, and they feel a sense of spiritual oneness, and they feel a sense of depth, and they feel a sense of connection, or however it is that it is.
	I fully understand that.
	That is a very powerful, subjective, emotional experience.
	It's actually quite easy to replicate in a laboratory environment.
	There's a certain section of the brain where if it receives electrical stimulation...
	You get this sense of oneness.
	In fact, it's even possible to stimulate particular theological visions.
	Angels, cherubs, and clouds, floating above clouds is sort of this idea of heaven.
	And it is actually experienced, if I remember rightly, sometimes by people who have a kind of temporal lobe epilepsy, where some of this electrical stimulation that can produce these experiences occurs.
	So it's a very real experience that people have.
	And it masquerades enormously as a kind of knowledge.
	It just isn't a kind of knowledge.
	It is a subjective emotional experience that results from a particular stimulation of a particular brain center that may not be evenly distributed among the population.
	There may be certain people who would be more susceptible to this kind of subjective experience.
	This kind of sense of unity or the sense of oneness, which is not unrelated to epilepsy, the idea that it provides some objective or universal or communicable knowledge is mistaking a seizure for philosophy, which I'm not sure we want to do.
	Yeah, I agree with almost everything you just said, including the last part.
	We don't want to mistake what, in particular what this woman I think was claiming, As claiming that she's generating intellectual knowledge.
	She's not proving theorems or anything like that.
	She's gaining knowledge about her own interior state.
	No, she's not.
	No, no.
	Sorry.
	Now, if you say, well, I had a sense within myself, a subjective sense within myself of a particular emotional experience...
	Well, that's a true knowledge about yourself.
	However, if you think that your subjective emotional experience is somehow connected to the deity or the absolute or some otherworldly experience or some unity with all that is alive through some ether-based Borg sense or something, then you don't have knowledge because you're mistaking a subjective experience for some sort of connection with an objective universe or universe is.
	So that, to me, if you say, I had a dream about an elephant last night, then something's useful.
	And I think thinking about your dreams, I've done it on the show with myself and with listeners, thinking about dreams is very, very important.
	But if I think that I've actually gone to some other dimension and ridden a flying elephant in some kind of reality, I actually don't have true knowledge about what happened.
	Because what happened was I had a dream, not that I went into some other dimension where I got to fly an elephant.
	So mysticism, the problem is you can have true knowledge about your emotional experiences, but the moment you try and tie them into some external thing, like it's a reflection of something outside your consciousness, you've gone the opposite direction from knowledge because it's not true.
	And this is a real problem, right?
	But notice that this is a problem of efficacy and not beingness, right?
	Like the mystical knowledge, even if it's not communicable through language or what have you, it doesn't You know, it's still there.
	Right?
	What do you mean it's still there?
	You mean the subjective experience is still there?
	Well, you just agreed that she was having a subjective experience and that she was gaining knowledge of it.
	And that the problem was that she couldn't communicate anything universal.
	No, no, no.
	Oh my God.
	I mean, I get.
	I didn't say that she was gaining knowledge because she was portraying it as some otherworldly contact that she was having.
	And I just said it's the exact opposite of knowledge.
	Well, you kind of took my definition and you ran with it, and it's great.
	But I'd like to go back and make a couple points.
	And one of them is that the way that you want to use the word knowledge and the way the knowledge is used in the definition is not the same.
	Because the definition implies that knowledge contains an intellectual component and something else.
	And so we can change the word in the definition so that it's not knowledge.
	If you would prefer it, we could call it knowledge.
	Gnosis or something.
	But you kind of hung the whole argument about why this definition is no good on that problem, and it's not really a problem for the definition.
	We could say just as easily the spiritual apprehension of gnosis that's inaccessible to the intellect.
	And what we mean by that would be really clear.
	Part of gnosis is accessible to the intellect.
	We do it through language, just as we're doing now.
	We do it through mathematical proofs, computer programs, all kinds of physical processes.
	Sorry, you're saying that something that is inaccessible to the intellect is clarified by that definition?
	There's a lot of open questions here, right?
	I don't have all the answers, so I can tell you about the categories.
	But why do I even know there are mystics?
	Because if it's all spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, why does everyone who's a mystic talk about it?
	It's inaccessible to the intellect.
	So why are people even bothering to talk about it?
	That's where I got to with Mrs. Mysticism, where she said, "Well, it can't be communicated through language," at which point I'm like, "Well, why the hell have you been wasting my time?
	Because all we have on this show is language." I'm a mathematician.
	So I don't understand why mystics feel the need to burden everyone else with what they patently describe as completely incomprehensible gibberish.
	I don't make up my own language and then go yell at people's faces in the subway because I know they're not going to know what I'm talking about.
	It'd be kind of rude.
	So why do you feel the need to call into a show and talk about something which by the very definition that you've quoted is not able to be encapsulated in language whatsoever?
	Because we can encapsulate information about what the thing is without knowing all the And that knowledge is worth talking about.
	Your quote, spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect.
	Yes.
	So this is a negative definition.
	Right?
	It just says, we can't know what this shit is.
	No fucking clue.
	Don't know what it is.
	No idea.
	Can't be communicated, can't be understood by the intellect, can't be broken down into a syllogism, can't be reproduced, can't be examined by the scientific method.
	This is not a knowledge claim.
	This is a destruction of knowledge claim.
	This is saying, I want this vast other dimension where bullshit reigns supreme and it somehow becomes fact.
	Where subjective emotional experiences aren't just you going through something, which is perfectly fine, but are somehow...
	Some key in to the deity or the absolute.
	It can't be encapsulated in language.
	It can't be understood.
	This is a show dedicated to the rational pursuit of knowledge, empirical, objective, rational pursuit of knowledge.
	So why would mystics want to call in to try and talk to me about something which, according to the very definition of mysticism that you've quoted, can't possibly be communicated?
	I'm not a mystic.
	I'm a mathematician.
	I'm not interested in doing rituals and trying to find knowledge that way because I don't find it useful either.
	Okay, so why wouldn't you be upset with this woman calling in?
	First of all, I asked for definitions.
	That is not a rude thing to do.
	I mean, I've been talking about definitions for 10 goddamn years on this show.
	So when someone calls in and I ask them for definitions or arguments, that's not rude.
	That's like being really offended when you go to a restaurant and they ask you for a bill.
	If they ask you to pay your bill at the end of the meal, what do you mean pay my bill?
	It's like, come on.
	It's a philosophy show.
	This is how it works.
	This is how it works here.
	But what you're doing to me is very similar.
	And number two is when she said at the very end that what she experienced couldn't be encapsulated in language, why weren't you at all bothered that she was wasting everyone's time by calling in to talk about something which she said can't be encapsulated in language?
	Does that make any sense?
	I'm not sure why that wouldn't.
	It does.
	And if you'll take a deep breath and let me...
	Let me explain.
	I think I can clear it up.
	Sorry, why do I need to take a deep breath?
	It's kind of insulting.
	I'm a little insulted you keep calling me a mystic.
	I'm not a mystic.
	I'm a mathematician.
	Are you saying you have no sympathy towards mysticism?
	You said that you believe some of this stuff is valid.
	You gave me this quote.
	I believe that mysticism is real.
	And I believe that it's important to a large number of people.
	So how is that not being a mystic?
	Alright, well, if that's your definition of mystic...
	No, you said mysticism is real.
	How is that not being a mystic?
	If I say God is real, can I be called a theist?
	Um, yeah, but...
	Okay, so what the hell are you talking about?
	I'm not a mystic.
	I just believe that mysticism is real and valid and important.
	But I'm not a mystic.
	Why would you think that?
	Come on, man.
	What are you doing?
	I said it's important to some people, right?
	Is it not important to you?
	No.
	So you're calling in to talk to me for 40 minutes about something that's not important to you?
	No, what's important to me is that this is a part of the world, right?
	People do this, this is an experience they have, and they do gain knowledge about themselves, about how they should proceed in the world.
	How do you know that they do that?
	In language.
	I mean, if you had all of these mystical insights, wouldn't one of the mystical insights that you might have be, stop talking about mysticism, because it can't be encapsulated in language?
	Or, if you're calling into a show that is reason and evidence-based and works on definitions, that you might be expected to provide definitions.
	Shouldn't you get that kind of knowledge from mysticism, or not so much?
	No, no, no.
	No, it's the difference between knowing how the machine works and knowing how to work the machine.
	That's not an argument.
	No, it's a category.
	She knows how...
	To work the machine so that she can, you know, she described it, right?
	She talked about how if she was feeling out of whack, if she detected in her internal state that something was emotionally wrong, that she would go and create this experience of walking through the forest and that would rectify things.
	And at the end of it, she had the knowledge that things had been correctly rectified and she could go back to living her life in peace.
	Right now, that seems to me to be true knowledge about herself, about a way to adjust her own internal states For her own benefit.
	I don't see anything about that that we could claim is, like, not real knowledge.
	Okay?
	You're making the very excellent point that no one else can access that knowledge through her.
	And that's totally true.
	It's not the same kind of knowledge philosophers do.
	Right?
	But let's not be narrow-minded.
	Right?
	That's not an argument either.
	And, you know, being, like, insulting me by saying I'm being narrow-minded and need to take a deep breath.
	I mean, it's passive-aggressive trollery, of course, but it's not an argument.
	That's true.
	You've got me.
	100%.
	That's an appeal to insecurity.
	Well, I don't want to be narrow-minded, so I'm going to accept crazy talk like it's real.
	Not you, but mysticism as a whole.
	Come on, that's not fair.
	I'm not making a claim about efficacy here.
	You're absolutely correct.
	Mystics that come out and claim that they can access central truths of the universe and do physics and make magic, this is all total nonsense.
	Right?
	But people who say, hey, I have real spiritual experiences and I learn things from those spiritual experiences that when I put them into practice in my life actually affect things, that's not bullshit.
	I'm sorry, but there's two points.
	First of all, how do you know?
	People lie all the time.
	And you got, what, to listen to half an hour of this woman's...
	No, they do.
	Yeah, good point.
	This is why we need philosophy, because we lie to ourselves both consciously and consciously.
	Subconsciously.
	Our senses sometimes lie to us, right?
	The world looks flat, the sun and the moon look the same size.
	We lie to ourself both consciously and subconsciously all the time.
	Other people lie to us both subconsciously and consciously all the time.
	You got to listen to this woman for, what, half an hour?
	How do you know?
	That's number one.
	And number two, there's no one saying that she couldn't get that same sense of self-knowledge, that same sense of peace, that same sense of unity, that same sense of oneness.
	having to tie it metaphysically into some alternate realm or dimension, right?
	You can have, like, I want people to take the minimum amount of medicine, right?
	There's an old saying among doctors, like, first of all, never take medicine.
	If you can survive without taking medicine, don't take medicine.
	And secondly, just take the minimum amount of medicine necessary.
	And when it comes to this kind of self-knowledge, I mean, I'm very keen on self-knowledge, written whole books about it, but you want to take the minimum amount of knowledge, sorry, you want to take the minimum amount of medicine, so to speak, possible, And what that means is, accept that you had a deep and meaningful experience.
	I've talked about my own deep and meaningful experiences on this show, in my past, and actually on this show sometimes.
	So you can have all of that.
	And that is very powerful and very positive and can be very helpful.
	And maybe it takes a while to figure out what happened and how it happened.
	Like, I've had meaningful experiences, very powerful experiences that came out of me, came at me out of nowhere.
	And I'm telling you, man, it took me like five years to figure out what the hell happened.
	And I have great respect for all of that.
	But what I didn't do was say I'm being poked by the pinky of the divine or the absolute is opening up its bomb bays and pouring into my soul.
	It's like, no, something came together.
	For me, because of experience, because of intellect, because of philosophy, because of self-knowledge, because of the art I was working on at the moment and possibly due to some sexual frustration way back today, I don't know, but stuff came together for me and it's very powerful.
	And I respect and encourage those kinds of insights.
	You know, I've talked about meditation and yoga.
	These things are wonderful.
	But there's no reason to say from that There's no reason to overstep that into a completely metaphysically crazy world where some divine force, power, or absolute, or some other dimension is pouring this knowledge into you.
	Do you understand?
	So you're saying, well, people have these amazing experiences where they learn.
	You're saying people have these amazing experiences they learn from, Of course they do.
	It's fantastic.
	And they should pursue those and they should set up the conditions within their own minds through therapy, meditation, whatever floats your boat as far as getting you to these insights.
	Go.
	Fantastic.
	Do that stuff.
	Make that stuff happen.
	Dwell on it.
	Meditate over it.
	Think about it.
	Speak about it.
	But don't imagine...
	For one second, that it comes from some deity, some absolute, some capitalized pronoun, or some other dimension.
	It's within you.
	That's where the power is.
	I don't like it when people...
	Diminish the power within them by trying to pretend that their insights come from somewhere outside.
	No, no, no.
	That is the amazing power of our minds and our subconscious, our intellects.
	And that's why the pursuit of self-knowledge is so fantastic.
	These things can happen.
	These planets can align.
	These incredible insights can happen to us.
	And then when we say, well, it came from outside me somewhere.
	It came from some other dimension, some other universe, some deity or some absolute...
	Some spiritual hell out.
	You are diminishing yourself.
	You are diminishing the power of what you're capable of.
	If some guy can lift a thousand pounds over his head, he lifted that thousand pounds over his head.
	If he said, angels picked it up for me, well, it means he's going to train less.
	Right?
	Because angels are lifting it for him.
	It means he's not taking pride in what he did.
	I want people to understand that what's within them is within them.
	It's not being poked through some alternate...
	Tear in the fabric of space-time by some other dimensional being.
	It is within themselves, and it is a result of their training.
	Nothing magical, nothing mystical, nothing spiritual.
	I want people to own, take pride in, and recognize how much they've done to earn those insights, not ascribe them to some other dimension.
	Yeah, and I think that's great.
	I have no problem with that.
	People should do all of that stuff.
	I think in reality, as a shortcut, A lot of people, they don't have the time, the inclination, whatever it is.
	You have an audience of 600,000 people who aren't like this.
	But a lot of people are like, hey, you know what?
	I got stuff to do.
	Philosophical contemplation of my own self-worth is not really the number one thing on my list.
	And I'm going to sort of offload understanding all this stuff onto this blob of Concept I'm going to call the deity, and that's going to be good enough.
	Because it actually, I mean, we talked about it earlier.
	We agreed that theorems are a real thing without being material in some sense.
	And that's all these people really sort of mean.
	It's not an appeal to some realm of magic.
	It's an appeal to the realm of the mind, to the interior landscape of the human experience.
	And that realm is real to us.
	And you can definitely say, well, it's different for everybody, but that doesn't make it less real for everybody.
	And so I think when people say things like, you know, if I'm having problems, I go for a walk in the forest to heal my soul, that's a pretty clever way of short-circuiting all of the Freudian psychoanalysis and getting down to the nitty-gritty, which is, I don't feel good and I need to go somewhere and do something ritualistic to feel better.
	Yeah, I don't know what really any of that means.
	What I certainly get is that I should lower my standards because people are too lazy to pursue self-knowledge.
	No, that's not what I said.
	No, you said some people are too busy and they need shortcuts and they need some other way of doing it.
	And I'm not going to lower my standards.
	People want to create some alternate dimension where knowledge pours into them.
	From other beings, I'm going to have to tell them no, that they're wrong.
	I don't have a choice about that.
	I mean, this is not my will.
	This is not me just choosing to be mean.
	I don't have a choice about it.
	People have to make a case for what is real.
	But we did make a case for what is real.
	The amount of damage that is done to society, the amount of damage that is done to the world by people who think something is real when it's not real.
	Well, that is something I have to push back against.
	So maybe there are some benefits to a few people.
	I don't care.
	I don't care.
	What I care about is, A, is it true?
	And B, does it damage people as a whole?
	And the idea that there's something beyond ourselves that gives us knowledge that is incomprehensible but absolute is totalitarian in nature, right?
	It's like class conflict.
	It's like your particular, if you have a particularly feral religious set of beliefs and so on.
	There is a huge amount of damage done by that.
	And I just, you know, it's not up to me.
	These are the facts and these are the standards of belief that philosophy requires.
	And if other people want to pursue this otherworldly spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect.
	They need to do it on their own time, not mine, because this is a philosophy show.
	But I really do appreciate the call in.
	I'm going to move on to the next caller, but thanks for your conversation.
	I really enjoyed it.
	Thanks for your time.
	Up next, we have Orion wrote in and said, I believe that objective truth is the foundation of reality, but not that evidence-based objectivity completely encompasses all truth.
	Operational truth, as I call it, exists where the objective jury is out, but a judgment call must still be made in an attempt to avoid cognitive dissidence.
	The foundation of this kind of truth is still evidence-based, but self-knowledge plays a much larger role due to the limited amount of possible objectivity.
	Is this the most clinical characterization of belief that I could come up with?
	What do you think?
	That's from Orion.
	Hey, how are you doing tonight?
	I'm doing very well, Stefan.
	How are you?
	I'm well, thank you.
	I'm well.
	Objective truth is the foundation of reality.
	I'm not sure what that means.
	Does that mean objective truth is somehow under or beyond reality?
	Well, just that we don't know all of the objective truth that is, right?
	You mean we're not omniscient?
	Yes, exactly.
	Okay.
	I'm not instantly tall and I'm not omniscient.
	Let's take it from there.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm trying to start with the basics because I'm really regretting bringing up mysticism at all.
	Because really, I'm trying to talk about belief more in line with the architecture of belief video that you did with Jordan Peterson.
	Hey, don't back down.
	If you've got a case, make it.
	Make it.
	Well, no, no, no.
	I'm not backing down.
	I'm...
	My only intention with bringing up mysticism at all was that a lot of people sort of hint at the edges of what I'm trying to bring up and don't really get there and try to prove God exists.
	Okay, so we don't know everything, we're not omniscient, so then what?
	Right.
	So then sometimes we have to make decisions with incomplete information.
	Well, or based on...
	The information that stands out to us or whatever, you know.
	Let me ask you this, because I was thinking about this question.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but I was thinking about this question earlier today.
	I was trying to think of a time, Orion, in my life when I made a decision with complete information.
	Well, exactly.
	Have you?
	I mean, I could always think of something I didn't know, because, you know, I mean, even with simple decisions, you know, should I... Well, I guess, I guess, no, you know, actually, I could say if I go in for a walk and I don't want to get wet and it's currently raining, well, it's not really a decision to bring my, I bring my umbrella, but I already have all the information I need.
	If it's kind of cloudy, I might need to bring it.
	If it's sunny, I don't.
	So, but most times in life, when we're making decisions, we really don't have complete information, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And that was, again, I didn't know about the Jordan Peterson video that I mentioned until two days ago.
	And so a lot of what I brought up in my email sort of you've already talked about and proven.
	And I think, you know, we're good there, which is unfortunate.
	But that was sort of, yeah, I suppose, depending on how this conversation goes.
	But man, am I hesitant.
	Anyway, so I guess that was that was a big part of my point was that belief is integral.
	In terms of sort of defining or I guess some people would say creating, but I don't think that's the right word.
	Like reality, you know, like the objective truths that you observe and then what you believe about those truths, that sort of ends up being true or false in those situations where...
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Oh man, I tell you.
	I keep telling everyone to slow down and everyone just keeps plowing forward.
	Okay, so you're saying that beliefs create reality?
	No, no, no, no.
	Just that...
	Based on the objective reality, they're both interrelated.
	If you have X amount of objective evidence that you're working with in a situation where you have to make a decision, then you assume, based upon that evidence, what you must do.
	But belief is sort of inherent to that process.
	I don't know what you mean by belief, though.
	Well, it depends on the situation.
	Because it's not in your email, and you haven't defined it yet.
	So I don't know what you mean.
	I just use this word like I know what you mean, right?
	Well, can I use an example?
	Yeah, listen, I'm not trying to be a dick.
	Like, I genuinely, I want to follow what you're saying.
	And this is the same thing was the case with this Mrs.
	Mysticism woman, is that I don't want to zone out from what people are saying and just not.
	Like, I genuinely want to follow what people are saying.
	And that's why I have to interrupt and ask for definitions, because I don't know what, like, I don't know what you mean by belief.
	And you may have a very good definition, we may agree, we may disagree, but I can't.
	I can't assume or take for granted that we're talking about the same thing, if that makes sense.
	So if you could tell me what you mean by belief, I'd be thrilled.
	Right.
	So this is an example, I think, of a situation where there's little objectivity to be had.
	Well, not that there's little objectivity.
	Right.
	So marriage.
	You say to somebody, I love you.
	I'm going to be with you forever.
	Right.
	Well, I think that's a question more than a statement.
	Would you like to be together forever?
	Sounds good.
	I'm going to be with you forever.
	Sounds like you're stalking, but okay.
	I promise to do so.
	You know, this is what I want for the rest of my life.
	I want to be with you forever.
	Yeah, totally theoretical.
	You can say based on certain points of objectivity, you know, You have certain things in common.
	You have similar values.
	You're of similar age.
	If you care about that, no.
	You think each other is attractive.
	All that kind of stuff.
	Purely objective.
	But the belief about that statement also plays a huge, meaningful, measurable impact, right?
	I still don't know what you mean by the word belief.
	For me, a belief is something that you hold to be true.
	Exactly.
	Okay, so that's pretty easy.
	I don't know what we're talking about marriage for.
	Is a belief something that people hold to be true?
	Well, it's because it's super important in that example that you actually think you are compatible, not just, you know, on paper you are compatible, right?
	Right, so you have a belief that you're compatible with the woman that you want to marry.
	Yes, and that is maybe even 50% of what Makes that true.
	What is 50% of what makes that true?
	Oh, you mean if you believe you're compatible, you are compatible?
	No, no, no, no.
	But if you are compatible and you believe you're compatible, then you are in fact compatible.
	But if you are compatible but you don't believe you're compatible, then you're not compatible.
	Or you don't have the practical effect of compatibility, which is a relationship, right?
	Exactly.
	Yes.
	Yes, exactly.
	Right.
	Right.
	So if there's a girl, like this is something that you hear about a lot, like the girls who like their bad boys, right?
	Yes.
	And they think that a good guy, who they're usually keeping around, right, is the beta on deck guy who's going to pick them up when they're 35 and want to settle down.
	So they think, well, a good guy would be boring.
	A good guy wouldn't be any fun.
	You know, this is like the original Clerks movie from Kevin Smith, right?
	Right.
	The hot girl, the crazy girl, the wild sex girl, the whatever, right?
	So if the guy's into bad girls or the girl's into bad guys, they think, oh, well, I'm not compatible with a nice, normal, decent, whatever, right?
	Yeah.
	And the reality, of course, is that if they believe they're not compatible, then any potential compatibility doesn't manifest.
	Because they won't go out with a guy.
	They'll say, there's no chemistry.
	And what that means is that there's no danger.
	I don't get cortisol sex.
	I don't get hate screwing, right?
	And so...
	Yeah, exactly.
	Yeah, okay.
	I think I understand what you mean.
	And so, another thing I kind of was...
	Using this to build upon was that those two pillars are what morality exists on.
	It's sort of dependent on your self-knowledge as well.
	If you are aware that you have a tendency to go towards bad guys and that doesn't work out, then you will have a measurable gain from that realization, obviously, but also you won't fall into that kind of paradigm.
	You probably will have more successful relationships if you are more self-aware.
	Sure, you'll have better dating.
	I'm not sure where the morality thing comes in, though.
	Well, I guess that I was trying to maybe make a statement that your morality is sort of defined by a mixture of self-knowledge and objective truth.
	As is your belief about things.
	Your knowledge of yourself and your knowledge...
	Sorry to interrupt.
	Can you give me an example?
	And I can't think of one, but it could be totally my limitations.
	Maybe I'm being narrow-minded.
	But can you think of an example of self-knowledge that would be completely unrelated to objective truth?
	No, absolutely not.
	Oh, good.
	I'm glad I wasn't just alone in that.
	Because sort of my big insights have come about usually...
	Like, if you think of a dam that's built on a river, and the water level just keeps going up and up and up, and then eventually the dam just gives way, right?
	Whether it's a beaver dam or the hoover dam, right?
	Superman style, it just gives way.
	So for me, my big insights, Orion, have come about because I have rejected empirical facts for so long that the pressure builds up.
	These people love me!
	Well, the evidence does not support it.
	The evidence does not support it.
	The evidence supports something quite the opposite.
	No!
	These people love me!
	And then after, I don't know, three decades of that, eventually it's just like, these people don't love me.
	I shouldn't laugh.
	But it's like, for me, it was the acceptance.
	What we call insights is generally just the final dam busting of repeated denials of reality.
	And it's like, wow, we get this flush of flood of insight.
	It's like, well, that's just because we've held it at bay for so long.
	So that's been sort of my experience of it, just to characterize it that way.
	Yeah.
	And I think that that's the same as saying, like, well, I'm not going to use an example.
	That's why I started by saying objective fact.
	You know, that is the foundation of what we can consider to be real.
	Yeah.
	In terms of trying to define what is real or trying to decide what is real, your self-knowledge and your belief plays a huge, huge role.
	And Where I was going with morality, I think we kind of went in the opposite direction, where you said, like, the lack of objective knowledge about a situation, right, is the dam that breaks.
	No, denial.
	Sorry, the denial of objective reality or your belief, that's sort of the dam that finally breaks.
	But again, that's in contradiction with what is actually true.
	But what I'm saying is that in situations where you have to make those judgment calls, the truth of what you decide is determined not only by objective fact, but about your level of self-knowledge and judgment.
	previous self-knowledge when you've been building your self-knowledge and your belief structure and who you are as a person.
	But isn't that like saying if I want to give a speech to Japanese people, the success of my speech is partly my passion and my topic, but partly my ability to speak Japanese, the study time that I put into learning Japanese?
	Yeah.
	And now you're making me worry that I'm too obvious.
	No, no, listen.
	That's exactly what I'm trying to say, yes.
	No, listen.
	When it comes to complex topics like self-knowledge, an analogy that clarifies doesn't mean that the contribution is minimized.
	It's a way of just getting the plug into people's hearts, so to speak, right?
	So yes, certainly the quality of your decisions is going to have a lot to do with your prior self-knowledge work.
	And that is so important.
	And this, I don't think it diminishes what you're saying.
	I think it provides people a good incentive, a good reason why they should pursue self-knowledge.
	Like, the quality of your piano playing has a lot to do with how much you practice.
	And better decisions in your life has a lot to do with the self-knowledge that you practice.
	Pursue.
	And the self-knowledge, to me, usually has to do with accepting the blindingly obvious that I've been programmed to avoid.
	Taxation is theft.
	That I've been programmed to avoid for a long time.
	And the simplicity of true knowledge is a great danger to existing power structures.
	The simplicity of ethics, the simplicity of knowledge.
	And this is why things get so convoluted.
	But, Orion, I do want to mention that it was about 15 minutes ago I asked for a definition of belief.
	I still don't have one.
	That which you theorize to be true in the absence of a preponderance of evidence.
	Maybe there's some evidence, right?
	but not necessarily a true deciding amount.
	So that's a good way to put it.
	So we would use the same word, or would we use different words?
	So I believe that two and two make four.
	Now that is not a belief, despite evidence or an opposition to evidence, that's belief in something that is in fact true.
	I believe that the world is a sphere.
	Sorry, warehouse guy.
	So are we going to use the same word believe?
	You know, there's that cheesy thing.
	They always do this in movies aimed at young teenagers.
	Believe!
	You know, these big, just believe!
	Stop believing!
	Think!
	Think!
	Stop believing stuff!
	Stop thinking!
	It's not just willpower!
	Believe in stuff!
	No, think, think, think!
	Yes, yes.
	So, we don't want to use the same word for things that we hold in our mind that are true and things that we hold in our mind that are false, right?
	Well, but see, that's kind of the gray area, right?
	Is that you believe that two plus two is four, but it also is four, right?
	Yeah, the belief is true.
	It's both at the same time.
	And so that's what I was trying to get at is that there's a whole lot of belief that exists in the world that, you know, is totally unfounded.
	But the amount of belief that is founded is actually what kind of It moves the world forward, right?
	I don't know what moves the world forward means.
	That's a pretty hallmark kind of soupy...
	I don't know what that means.
	Moves the world forward in time, space, in progress.
	Listen, a lot of people's nonsense beliefs are highly motivational in the world, right?
	Well, but I was sort of saying, like, if you're on the cutting edge of some scientific field...
	Maybe you have some evidence to support your newest finding.
	But in a sense, that's kind of a belief, you know?
	It's not really manifest.
	No, no, no, no.
	Hang on.
	See, now you're using the word belief to talk, I think, about belief in mysticism or belief in a deity and the conditional acceptance of a scientific hypothesis or a conjecture.
	I don't think you want to use the same word For valid or invalid, true or false beliefs, or beliefs that follow an objective methodology versus beliefs that follow a culturally transmitted subjective absolute.
	Like, just try not to use—we need to have words that differentiate between truth and falsehood, because we don't have that.
	I don't know how we can explain anything because there are valid beliefs and invalid beliefs.
	True arguments, false arguments, valid arguments, invalid arguments.
	And we need to use different words for these things because if we put every human supposition or idea or perspective under one category of word, then...
	It doesn't clarify anything, because then, in a sense, there's no linguistic prize for accuracy and no penalty for fantasy.
	And I am not trying to make a new word right off the bat here, but I... It's really hard to nail down because we're going between totally different kinds of realms of thought, like the scientific thing, nearly 100%, except for the small little highly backed up beliefs that people hold that move whatever field forward.
	That's largely based on objectivity, almost 100%.
	99.999.
	But in terms of relationships, stuff like that, it's...
	Your belief, your self-knowledge is far more important.
	That's not to diminish the importance of objective knowledge in the situation.
	It's just that when the two are combined, that's sort of a good barometer.
	That's really my whole message was that while there are many beliefs that are invalid, right?
	Provably invalid or you have a feeling they're invalid or whatever.
	The beliefs that are valid, those are determined by your self-knowledge.
	And that's also kind of related to morality.
	I'm still flushing that out of my mind.
	Hang on.
	The beliefs that are valid are validated by your self-knowledge?
	Well...
	I'm not disagreeing.
	I just want to make sure I understand.
	It's a big packed-in kind of statement.
	I just want to make sure I understand it.
	Like, for instance, back to the marriage thing, the belief that you will make a good couple...
	I'm sorry about the fire engine.
	I'll just wait.
	You're calling from Saudi Arabia into a call-in show, are you?
	I'm sorry.
	A philosophy show.
	I'm sorry.
	So, the belief that you have that you're a good couple, it's still inherently tied to the objectivity of the scenario, but...
	The trueness of that in the future is also largely determined by your commitment to that belief and the belief itself, you know, the fact that it exists.
	Sure, but then again we have two categories.
	We have the category...
	Of beliefs that become true because you believe them, and there's some supporting evidence, and the beliefs that are true or false, independent of whether you believe in them, right?
	The earth is a sphere.
	It's true or false.
	It's true whether you believe in it or not.
	The speed of light is a constant, 186,000 miles a second.
	That's true whether you believe in it or not.
	So there are some truths that become manifest through belief, and there are other truths which exist independently of belief.
	So I'm going to just give you an alternative way to look at this and describe this, and hopefully it will become a little simpler.
	Because as you can, you know, my big goal is to make...
	Make the GUI of philosophy, like the graphical user interface, to make it simple enough to explain to a three-year-old, which is what I did with my own daughter, right?
	So you get this as complicated as hell, and how are you going to explain things to people with an IQ of 95?
	How are you going to explain things to little kids?
	How are you going to have it make sense to them?
	And the way that you're approaching it, Ari, and I'm concerned that it's overly complicated.
	So let me just give you an alternative framework.
	Belief is irrelevant.
	Belief doesn't matter.
	Because that's accepted.
	Everyone has things that they believe to be true, things that they think might be true, things that they believe are false.
	And so that's a given.
	You know, it's like if you go to an auction, focusing on bids is not really that important.
	Pretty much a lot of people are there to bid, right?
	If nobody's there to bid, there won't be an auction.
	So the bidding isn't really that important.
	What matters is the bidding that succeeds or fails, right?
	And so, accept that people are going to have perspectives.
	They're going to have beliefs.
	They're going to have things they think are true.
	The question is, how are those validated?
	How do you know what you believe is true?
	Now, there are, of course, truths that you have to conform with or you're crazy.
	I mean, basically, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Or the truth that you have to conform with or you're wrong.
	You're wrong or you're crazy, right?
	I mean, you can live thinking the world is flat, I guess, as long as you're not a pilot or an astronaut, right?
	You can live thinking the world is flat.
	You're kind of nutty, but it's not...
	A cartographer.
	Right.
	You're not, you know...
	But you can't live thinking that oxygen is poison, right?
	And that arsenic is healthy food.
	There are some things you can't survive the craziness of.
	There are some things you can't survive the craziness of.
	And so the question to me...
	Okay, everyone has beliefs.
	That's a given.
	How do we validate what's true and what's false?
	Well, reason and evidence, right?
	I've talked...
	I mean, I've got this whole book.
	I was just a little tired tonight.
	I've been working on the audiobook all day.
	And it's tough to get the Art of the Argument book across as an audiobook because I really want people to be able to listen to it.
	But there's a lot of syllogisms and some somewhat technical.
	Anyway, so...
	We just want to give people a methodology for evaluating whether their beliefs are true or false.
	And the way that we do that, I think, is we tell them that there are beliefs...
	If you claim a belief about objective reality, you need to subject it to reason and evidence.
	If you have a belief about yourself, I'm gonna be a star!
	Right?
	I mean, I had a belief about myself.
	For decades, I felt I was going to be very important in the world.
	Not because of vanity.
	I didn't even want it.
	I'd love to be an anonymous guy just doing work in an attic somewhere, but I knew that I had this belief that I was going to be important to the world somehow.
	And actually, in my book, which I wrote in the 90s...
	No, wait.
	Wait, wait for it.
	Wait for it.
	No, a little bit after the 90s, but a long time ago, I wrote a book about a guy...
	Who spoke into a webcam and illuminated the world with great arguments.
	This is long before YouTube, long before podcasting, long before this is in the very dawn of the web.
	Ahead of my time, I dare say.
	But I had this belief.
	Now, could somebody say, is that belief empirically validated?
	I would say, well, no.
	No, I mean, I was an entrepreneur, grew a company to, I don't know, 30 or 40 people and did pretty well, still running.
	And so I was important, but that's not the kind of importance that I was talking about.
	I meant, like, important for the world, across the world, and for a long time to come, for all time to come.
	I genuinely believe that as long as philosophy is studied...
	What we do here will be studied.
	Hopefully not as an example of everything that could go wrong, but I think it will be studied.
	It's just going to be an indelible mark upon the history of philosophy.
	And this is a collective endeavor, so I don't certainly take all the credit for myself.
	So I had this belief that I was going to be important to the world in the realm.
	I thought it was originally going to be in the realm of art, but as it turns out, it's in the realm of ideas.
	I guess I'm Either better at ideas than at art, or the world needs ideas more than it needs art.
	Probably a combination of the two.
	So that belief is something that I had some empirical evidence for.
	I've always been very verbally fluent.
	I'm a good writer and very creative and imaginative and so on.
	So I had some reason to believe that.
	But my belief that I was going to be important to the world motivated me to work towards that end.
	Exactly.
	Yeah, to write books, and this is long before I became a public intellectual, but to write books and to read philosophy and to practice thinking and to debate and all of the things that I did for decades before I hit the public-facing sphere.
	So that belief was not, that belief was, I can't do it if I work hard at it.
	Not, it's going to happen because magic, right?
	So that was a belief that motivated me in action to pursue it.
	But it was never a belief that had no empirical evidence.
	Exactly.
	Right?
	Like, I knew a guy who was easily 50, 60 pounds overweight and wanted to become a judo champion.
	Now, wrestling, maybe.
	Judo, not so much.
	Right?
	So that was an illusory belief that I never did pan out.
	Got injured.
	Never became a judo champion.
	And so there are beliefs which are independent of consciousness.
	There are beliefs that are hopes and dreams where you have some empirical evidence that they can be achieved.
	Right?
	If somebody's got a terrible singing voice, but they want to be an opera singer...
	All the motivation, all of the hard work, all of the singing lessons in the world, it's not going to happen.
	It's not going to happen.
	Don't have the physical instrument embedded in your breathing tubes.
	So you have things that are true independent of consciousness.
	You have things that are hopes and dreams which have empirical evidence.
	You have hopes and dreams which are going to be giant wastes of time because there's no empirical evidence.
	And then you have beliefs which are just plain false.
	So you have beliefs that are true and false about reality.
	You have beliefs that are true and false about your own potential, your own relationships.
	I think we just need a methodology for differentiating these two.
	So I wouldn't worry so much about what people believe.
	I would just continue to approach them with, here's how you can determine what is true from what is false.
	Okay, that's it for me, and I'm happy to give you the last word on this topic.
	Sure.
	So, real quick.
	I guess the only thing I really wanted to add to that summation was that the thing that you can utilize to determine whether your beliefs are true or not is, in fact, your previous beliefs and your self-knowledge.
	It's all kind of recursive, but...
	For example, your belief that your show is going to impact...
	Western civilization, save our culture, which I believe, in fact, I might prove that I believe it more than you.
	It's going to play a part.
	I certainly wouldn't claim sole authorship, but I hope it's going to play a decent part.
	Anyway, the trueness of that, I think, you know, it is manifestly today, if you look at Any analytics you could possibly find to determine whether you are having a positive impact on our culture, I would say yes, you are, right?
	Get 150 million views and downloads a year minimum.
	That's a big impact.
	Yeah.
	That's a big impact.
	Absolutely.
	And so it's not that your belief solely determined the truth of itself, right?
	But it's also not that it was deterministically like, yes, it was going to happen.
	All of the knowledge aligned in such a way that this man, he was the one to do this.
	I'm not fulfilling a destiny, right?
	I'm not like...
	I'm not like some caboose that's careening down train tracks.
	No, this is something I had to will.
	A lot of delicacy, a lot of balance, a lot of challenge, a lot of maneuvering to get the truth in front of people in a way that doesn't get me hemlocked.
	It is a challenge.
	And dedication, right?
	Yeah, there's empirical.
	I had the belief within myself.
	Making it manifest in the world was more of a delicate operation.
	Well, and the dedication as well, right?
	Even when things seemed to you to not be objectively, you know, okay, yes, this is working out.
	Even the times when it seemed that objectively this wasn't going to happen, you still were like, no, I'm sticking with it in the absence of objectivity.
	And yet here we are.
	Right.
	Or maybe I should say, not in the absence of objectivity, but maybe you were in the absence of some objectivity.
	In your thinking that this was not going to work out.
	Well, and I'm sure you've known people, Orion, who have dreams that are disastrous.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Like, truly, the dreams hang off their life like a leech off their nuts, you know, or a vampire off the necks of their children.
	It's like, please, let me find a stake and drive it through the heart of your dream.
	It must die so that you may live.
	And that's the question I was trying to get at, is how do you prove to someone that their belief is not true?
	Empiricism!
	Well, but, again, there's some, like, someone who's just bound to their, oh, my, this marriage is gonna work out, and it's like, your wife's cheating on you, you know, like, it's not gonna work out.
	It's hard to just take objectivity because in their mind, they've used objectivity in a flawed way in order to make that assumption.
	And so I think in addition to providing conflicting objective truths like, listen, she's cheating on you.
	It's not working out.
	You also have to look at the self-knowledge involved and the existing structure of their beliefs and say, you probably think this because this.
	And not only is it manifestly not true, but the error in your thinking is very clear if you would just look at yourself.
	So I was going to get married before I got married.
	And this marriage, this is the marriage.
	This is the one.
	This is the great one.
	Yes.
	And you know it.
	Yeah, of course.
	And I knew it before.
	I knew within a few months of meeting my wife-to-be.
	Now, the marriage before I got married, I was in a state of having proposed.
	Right.
	And a friend of mine's wife said, I thought engaged people were supposed to be a little happier.
	That was not shaking me by the neck.
	It was just a comment.
	Yeah.
	And it was a comment that hit me like a narwhal harpoon through the chest.
	You know, you're kind of right.
	I should be happier.
	But the problem was unraveling that.
	Because everyone else in my life was like, yay, you're getting married.
	That's great.
	Nobody watching my back!
	Nobody watching my back gonna deliver me to the family court system within five years.
	And accepting that, it wasn't even so much accepting that this was not going to be the right marriage for me, to put it as nicely as possible.
	It wasn't accepting that that was the big problem.
	It was everything else that it meant.
	Because if people around me were going to let me wander into a bad and dangerous marriage, Could it really be said that they love me?
	Because that's a very, very bad thing to let happen to someone you care about, right?
	Either they thought that this woman was great for me, in which case they didn't know me or didn't know her, or they didn't think she was great for me, but couldn't be bothered to mention it to me.
	Do you know, like, either way, and this is what I mean when I say it's just, it's this damn, you hold back this knowledge, you hold back this knowledge.
	And then, boom, it comes through.
	And what really is the foundation of the dam is your lack of self-knowledge, in my mind.
	Because those bad people that you're interacting with in that scenario who are letting you down, not giving you the good advice, or the person that you're trying to be in this relationship, you know, which is just pointless or totally self-destructive, you know, whatever.
	Those people are out in the world.
	The reason that you're there is because you can't identify within yourself what brought you to these people, what made you trust these people.
	No, no, that's harsh, man.
	I don't view it as a personal failing on my part.
	Because you know the amount of propaganda in society.
	Your family loves you no matter what.
	The amount of propaganda that we're subjected to regarding family of origin issues is beyond staggering.
	And so saying that, well, it was simply a matter of deficiency of self-knowledge on my part, I don't think is fair.
	It doesn't mean I had no agency in the matter, and it doesn't mean I wasn't at all responsible.
	But when we recognize that The amount of propaganda we're subjected to about a wide variety of topics, having invalid beliefs about those topics is something that's much more understandable, right?
	So I don't sort of look back at myself and say, oh, I just lacked self-knowledge.
	I was pursuing self-knowledge the whole damn time.
	It just took a comment and therapy and journaling and 18 months of insomnia and, and, and in order to Break out of that delusion.
	And I had been studying philosophy quite significantly for many years at that point.
	So I'm always concerned, and I'm sorry to nag you and by proxy the audience about this, but I'm always concerned when a lack of self-knowledge is identified as a merely individual characteristic, but society is.
	Is complicit, right?
	There's an old joke from Monty Python.
	A guy, I think, kills a bishop or something and they arrest him.
	Ah, it's a fair cop, but I blame society.
	And the cop says, agreed, we'll be charging them too.
	And they're all stuck in my head.
	And it's like, well, that's true because there is the individual responsibility and that's valid and that's fair and that's true.
	But the way that I retain a sort of positive relationship with my earlier self is also to recognize just how much indoctrination is poured on us.
	And I go into more of this in a show called The Death of Reason, which if people want to, this sort of more personal story about it.
	But there's a lot of propaganda we're subject to.
	Like if someone's raised in a particular religious cult or whatever, and then they come out with certain beliefs, we don't just say, well, you lack self-knowledge.
	It's like, well...
	Programmed with a lot of wrong information and it's hard.
	It's hard for us to break out of that for pretty evolutionary reasons.
	We need the approval of the tribe to mate, reproduce, to have them protect our children.
	So we're very dependent upon the good approval of the tribe and genes which provoked ostracism didn't last long in the gene pool.
	And so it's a complex relationship.
	So I'm sorry to nag you on that, even if you didn't mean all of that.
	I just want to make sure because I don't want people out in the audience here to To sort of say, well, I guess the mistakes in my life, the tragedies, the design, I just didn't work hard enough on self-knowledge.
	It's like, hey man, I was working really hard on self-knowledge for a long time.
	And I missed some pretty obvious stuff because I'd been just so programmed that way.
	Right.
	Well, and my intention wasn't to assign blame.
	Certainly, you know, I look back and just as a knee-jerk reaction, I go, oh, this is so dumb.
	But I don't think that that's really the proper way to view my past, right?
	But it's also true that looking back, the reason hindsight is 20-20 is because you can look back and say, oh, I did feel that way.
	And if I really thought about why I felt that way, then I would have known.
	Even in the situation with the person who's raised in the religious cult, it Granted, this doesn't impact the fact that you're not able to change your environment at all, and you're totally under someone else's control.
	But internally, you still know that...
	Yes, or even as an adult in those situations, I think.
	But it's more a prison of your own mind.
	Anyway, I think that you still internally, you know, like, okay, I don't really want to be starved and locked up.
	You internally know that that's wrong.
	And so...
	The determining, a really impactful thing on the rest of your life at that moment is whether you know that that's wrong and you go, okay, I know that I'm right in knowing that this is wrong.
	Or if you accept the wrongness and go, yes, this is what's right.
	I'm going to live this way.
	That makes a big difference.
	Right, right.
	Okay, I think we're in agreement then.
	So, listen, I know we danced around a lot of topics, but I found it a very helpful and positive conversation.
	I really, really appreciate you calling.
	But I will move on.
	We've got a massive workflow to call tonight, so I'm going to move on.
	But thanks for calling in.
	I really, really appreciate it.
	Up next, we have Haitian, wrote in and said, That's from Haitian.
	Etienne, I think it is.
	Is it?
	Is that right?
	Yeah, that's correct.
	Hi, Stefan.
	Hi, nice to meet you.
	Nice to meet you.
	Excellent.
	Do you want to tell me a little bit more about how to successfully communicate the message of philosophy?
	That would be interesting to me.
	Yeah, yeah, exactly.
	That's precisely what I wanted to do.
	So, yeah, the first thing, the first distinction I want to make is, let's define mysticism properly.
	First of all, there's true and false mysticism.
	False mysticism is what the definition you can find on Wikipedia, for instance, or Google about being one with God and stuff like that.
	It doesn't mean anything, you know, it's what I would call New Age bullshit.
	Okay, so yeah, true and false mysticism.
	So the true mysticism would be Okay, so if you take the definition from Wikipedia, it says mysticism is popularly known as becoming one with God or the Absolute.
	That doesn't mean anything.
	It also refers to the attainment of insight in ultimate or hidden truth.
	That's bullshit too.
	But the third one is interesting.
	It refers to human transformation supported by various practices and experiences.
	So, what would be that transformation?
	What I would argue from having...
	Because I found...
	I started to read about Carl Jung a few months ago.
	Well, hang on a sec.
	Sorry to interrupt you.
	Because you said that these two definitions are false, but how do we know that they're false compared to what?
	Well, they might be true, they might not be true, but they just don't really...
	No, no, no.
	You said they were New Age bullshit.
	I need you to not make claims and then back away from them immediately, because that does not...
	That does not help me trust your objectivity.
	So you called them new age bullshit and they're wrong and false.
	And I just want to know how you know that these definitions are wrong and false.
	I wouldn't say that they're wrong and false.
	I would just say that it's a way to put it that's not really relevant and it's not going to be useful for what we're trying to do here.
	But you said new age bullshit, right?
	Do you remember that?
	It is new age bullshit because it...
	How could that not be false?
	Bullshit is really used to mean not useful.
	That's the wrong key.
	Bullshit!
	No, bullshit means false and ridiculous and bad and wrong.
	That's what I want to understand.
	I agree with you that it's wrong, but I just want to make sure we agree with each other for the right reasons.
	Yeah, well, I think if I go on, it will clarify itself.
	Please bear with me.
	So I'll go on with my definition of what mysticism is or what I understood from reading Calhoun.
	Wait, I'm sorry.
	So you're not going to answer?
	You want me to accept that they're wrong, but you're not going to give me a reason yet?
	I mean, it's fine if you want to not.
	You're not doing what I'm asking, which is to tell me why you think something is wrong.
	You've told me something is wrong, and I don't know why.
	Now, we can bookmark it and say we're going to come back to it, but I just want everyone to be aware.
	I'm not trying to play gotcha, but I've asked for something.
	You said something's false, and I've said, how do you know?
	I just want to make sure that you're going to circle back to it if I let you go on, because sometimes people say that to me, hoping that I'll forget.
	I promise I will, but why I think it's wrong is because...
	Basically, it's a way to formulate what mysticism is that's just going to confuse most people more than help.
	It's like, you know, it's using words, a rational thinking, to describe something that is not rational.
	So it's not...
	I better go on with my...
	It's going to be more clear if I... I promise.
	I promise it will.
	I'll hold you to that.
	Go ahead.
	It's a promise.
	So after reading Carl Jung, what I realized was that Mysticism was a combination of various practices and experiences, whose shared objective is to reunite an individual with his own subconscious, with his own unconscious, with his own unconscious, basically, yeah.
	So that's what it is.
	That's what it's just to know yourself, which is what you were saying earlier.
	And there's no magic, there's no...
	Wait, sorry, do you have that definition somewhere?
	That's basically what comes out of reading Jung.
	He studied alchemy to try to understand the unconscious.
	So it's a way of uniting somebody with their own unconscious, is that right?
	Different exercises and practices that try to reunite you with your own unconscious.
	But that's self-knowledge, that's not mysticism.
	It's self-knowledge.
	Right, that's not mysticism.
	Right.
	Correct.
	That's self-knowledge.
	But mystical practices in their purity when the true mysticism is what is...
	That's what true mysticism is supposed to be doing, basically.
	It's not...
	There's no...
	There never were any magic.
	That's just what people believed in.
	That's what happens when the unfit started to study subjects that they shouldn't have.
	People with the IQ, basically.
	Okay, so if I understand this, Jung has been a big influence on me, although I have some skepticism more recently, which I'll get to in a sec.
	So you're saying that Jung's approach to mysticism is that it's sort of like Freud's examination of dreams, which he called the royal road to the unconscious, right?
	So Jung would analyze dreams as a way of trying to understand The state of mind, or in a lot of ways, things which were accepted as true by the unconscious because of accumulated empirical evidence, but which are rejected by the conforming superego, which wants to get along and gain access to eggs and reproduce and so on.
	And this tension between the accumulated empiricism of history versus the moral or ideal rules that are propagated by the superego, this collision produces a lot of anxiety and neurosis and so on.
	Now, Jung had this to some degree with civilization and its discontents where he said, basically, we're animals and we want to go and have sex and hunt and eat and hit people over the head who disagree with us.
	And we don't do that in civilization, which sucks, except it's even worse when we do it, right?
	So we're kind of doomed to be restrained by civilization, although we want to act out this sort of seething, id-based, animalistic side.
	And so Freud would say, I think, we study dreams to learn about ourselves, to learn about the part of ourselves that remains untouched, By irrational cultural or religious imperatives.
	But we don't study dreams the way that some ancient witch doctor would study a dream, like it was some portal into another dimension that held essential truths and was real and whatever, dimension X that's out there.
	We would study our dreams to learn about ourselves, but we would not consider dreams to be God-given prophecies in sort of Oracle of Delphi style from the ancient world.
	And so if the processes of studying, whether it's dreams or alchemy or mandalas, which he was very big on studying as well, if the process of this is to try and dislodge irrational cultural or religious imperatives to actually find out what we believe deep down, which we're not told, right?
	So much of So much of what we experience, or we think we are, so much of who we think we are, is just stupid shit programmed into us by controlling tribespeople.
	You're born this way.
	You're born natural.
	You're born free.
	You're born curious.
	You're born rational.
	But that doesn't work for a lot of society.
	That doesn't work!
	If you're going to be owned, if you're going to be controlled, if you're going to be a tax livestock, if you're going to be sent off to war, if you're going to be drafted and just show up and say, yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir, who should I shoot for you today sir?
	If you want to be controllable, if you want to be a weapon that can be pointed against those who disagree with the rulers, Or if you can be drafted to defend the rulers at the expense of your own life and the future of your own family, well, you can't just be allowed to be a natural human being.
	You've got to be brutalized.
	You've got to be programmed.
	You've got to be acculturalized, so to speak.
	And so there's a part of us that survives the acculturalization, survives the programming, survives the propaganda, which generally takes up its hidey-hole refuge in the unconscious.
	And so there is...
	A process of pursuing and lassoing and accepting and absorbing the true self, the authentic self, the self-actualized identity, which is, what if most of what I've been told is bullshit and I actually have to think for myself from first principles?
	What if I accept the empirical evidence of my existence and cast aside and wipe with a blank slate All of the stuff that I was told, what if I think originally from the beginning, from nothing?
	Cartesian style.
	But this, to me, doesn't have anything to do with mysticism.
	This is simply comparing one's beliefs to empirical evidence and objective rationality.
	And for me, the process of self-knowledge was the rejection of Of mysticism.
	You know, even in a secular sense, we have the mysticism called the collective good, the will of the majority, democracy.
	We have all this mysticism.
	It's more secular in manifestation, but the level of subjugation is the same, whether you surrender yourself to God, whether you surrender yourself to the king, or whether you surrender yourself, your life, your property, your children, your future, your integrity, to the will of the people, to democracy.
	It doesn't make any difference to the rulers.
	As long as you serve something that they control, they're happy.
	So, to me, collectivism is a form of mysticism.
	Class conflict, central planning, class consciousness, exploitation, these are all forms of mysticism.
	They're not supernatural fundamentally in their manifestation, but they're equally irrational in terms of their effects.
	So, to me, mysticism has a particular component which is another dimension, another reality that's more important than sense reality and so on.
	Now, that can show up in the traditional thing of, you know, spirits from otherness and...
	Oneness and absoluteness and all the other capitalized stuff that passes for arguments.
	But to me, it can also be the collective.
	It can be the common good, the will of the majority, class consciousness, or whatever.
	That, to me, is also a form of mysticism, because it is saying you must subjugate yourself to something that does not exist, that only the rulers seem to speak for.
	We talk about the will of the majority, but it always turns out to manifest whatever the hell the rulers want.
	So...
	As far as mysticism goes, no, I can't employ it to change the world for the better.
	I do agree we need to appeal to people's feelings, we need to appeal to people's sentimentality, we need to appeal to people's passions, because it is passion that is the engine for change, mere analytical understanding.
	It's like knowing how the motor works without having any access to the gas pedal.
	It is passion.
	It is commitment that is the gas pedal.
	Now, it helps to really have a well-tuned motor and have your car pointed in the right damn direction.
	But the motivation comes out of passion.
	It comes out of love.
	It comes out of caring for the future.
	It comes out of having children and loving those children.
	As Mike here pointed out in one of our last True News shows that a bunch of the leaders in Europe don't have any kids.
	Don't have any kids.
	So they're going to have a different perspective on the long term versus the short term.
	So I do think that we need to appeal to passions.
	I mean, I got a whole book called Real-Time Relationship about how to communicate your thoughts and feelings in the moment.
	So, I'm with you there, but I would not call the methodology of doing this anything to do with mysticism.
	Right.
	Yeah, I agree with almost everything you just said.
	I have a question for you.
	Do you, have you read, are you familiar with Jung's personality types?
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah.
	So you understand, you know, the MBTI tests and all the big business, they're usually psychological tests to evaluate people.
	And basically, if you're a rational person, for Jung, what he said, you know, there's two types of people, really.
	You can be extroverted or introverted.
	You know, an extroverted person is somebody who's basically He takes his energy from the outside, from his relations with different objects, which mean people or everything.
	They're people that connect.
	They like to connect with the outside.
	The truth for them is outside of them.
	And introverts are people for whom truth is inside.
	It's their truth, what they're thinking or they're feeling.
	Their inner life is the truth.
	They don't connect with people so easily.
	Me, I'm an introvert.
	I've had problems in life because of that.
	And so that's one part of it.
	And then on the other side, he said, he came up with this theory, which I think is correct, that the human brain has four different ways to deal with reality, basically.
	The brain can...
	We have emotions.
	The senses, intuition, and reason.
	And this is basically the four ways in which we can interact with the world.
	There's no other.
	Unless you can think of one, you can.
	I'd be glad to hear it, but to me it sounds correct.
	And so for Jung, everybody sort of develops one of those functions over the other.
	So some people are more rational, some people are more They're feelers.
	They feel reality.
	Some people are purely intuitive.
	Somebody who's rational is somebody for whom what's true is ideas.
	It's the world of reason.
	It's what that person thinks.
	That's his reality.
	And you're just born like that.
	You can't really do anything about it.
	It's genetic, basically.
	And, you know, somebody who's a feeler, somebody who's a feeler type, it's just feelings are this reality.
	It's what he feels.
	Or for an extroverted feeler, that would be the feelings of others are the reality.
	You know, that's what's true.
	That's as true as what the reason and evidence is for a rational person.
	And we're just born like that, you know?
	And obviously, women tend to be more like feelers type.
	I think it's like 75%, 25%.
	75% of women are feelers.
	And 25 are thinkers.
	And for men, it's like 50-50 or 55-45, I think.
	So that's one part.
	That's the conscious part.
	But for Jung, the unconscious was automatically opposed to the conscious function.
	So basically, if you're an introvert consciously, well, automatically you have an extroverted unconscious.
	If you're a reasonable person, you're a thinker, you're purely rational, well, automatically, your subconscious is going to be a feeler, sensitive and intuitive.
	Basically, the unconscious is trying to, for Jung, It's always trying to sort of create an equilibrium because the more you push in one direction consciously, the more the unconscious is going to push in the other direction unconsciously to sort of balance you.
	And if you're like fully rational all the time, you're going to be like, you're going to have challenges and you're going to be at odds with yourself and it's going to create conflicts.
	And I think to me that was, I thought that was very interesting to Because that's the book I'm reading, basically, psychological types from you.
	And I thought that really helped me understand myself a lot better.
	Because I realized stuff about myself, like, okay, yeah, that makes so much sense.
	Yeah, I do.
	I can see.
	And where was I going to get with that?
	Well, just while you think of that, I just wanted to point out the sort of Myers-Briggs test, which is to some degree based upon Jung's personality types, is not scientifically validated in any way.
	And it's kind of dying off.
	Like, was it two million people a year sort of take this test?
	It's kind of a religion for a lot of organizations, both public and private, but it is not validated in any way.
	Now, There are personality types or personality aspects that do seem to have a genetic basis, conscientiousness and so on.
	You can check out a book called The Welfare Trait, T-R-A-I-T, The Welfare Trait, for more on that.
	But it is...
	Yeah, the Big Five, basically.
	There's the MBTI and the other is called the Big Five test.
	But basically, they correlate with each other most.
	There are studies that show that both But anyway, those tests are kind of stupid in the first place.
	The theory is more useful just to try to understand...
	You know, I think that it would just be, I mean, a genetic test, because there are significant personalities.
	Personality is to a large, large, large degree genetic.
	Right.
	Now, whether it falls into what Jung came up with, I doubt it.
	I think I would much rather go along the genetic personality trait lines that have been developed by people, and you can sort of look into genetics and personality.
	And so, just as far as that goes, I don't really...
	I've never taken the Myers-Briggs test, but I do remember hearing, I think, about something similar when I was at a Libertarian conference 32 years ago?
	33 years ago, maybe.
	So I... I'd be skeptical of that.
	I don't know about that kind of stuff as far as self-knowledge goes.
	I think we want to wait until there are better tests for the genetic markers for certain personality types.
	But so you do need a variety of ways to communicate.
	And I try to mix it up in the show as much as possible to bring as much philosophy to as many people as possible.
	Some people wanted to change the world.
	Some people wanted to change themselves.
	And I try to sort of mix it up.
	I think as far as shows go, I was thinking about this the other day.
	We cover a ridiculous amount of topics.
	Oh yeah, so somebody, I did a couple of interviews with a great guy, Elliot Hulse, and somebody was like, man, is there any topic this guy doesn't touch on?
	And it's like, well, yeah, I mean, I have a pretty wide-ranging and significant degree of intellectual curiosity, and we do talk about a bunch of different things in this show, and I certainly try to bring as much of my complete personality to the conversation as possible.
	I think that can be as motivating to As much as possible.
	And of course, I think just about anyone can find something that they like or can find profit in consuming from this show.
	So I certainly hope that I'm trying to do that.
	It's a good reminder to continue to try and do that.
	But I still do have to push back against using the term mysticism to say self-knowledge.
	That is to say that the identity is supernatural, which I can't get to.
	Yeah, nothing is supernatural.
	Let's not call it mysticism, but there are practices, exercises that people can do that can help to understand that part of ourselves that is unconscious.
	Because me, as a thinker type, as an introverted thinker type, I just cannot understand the reality of an extroverted Thinking that a fear type, you know, I try people that connect with people They're so happy to see people everywhere and I just can't that's not a reality for me,
	but through certain exercise you can start to get a glimpse into Like the other the way people are completely different and That are totally different from you.
	Well, there's a lot to do with genetics.
	So I'll just, this is from the study, Construct Validation Using Multi-Method Twin Data.
	The case for a general factor of personality.
	Oh boy, did they ever know their marketing.
	So here's an estimate.
	So, extroversion.
	What do you think, so far extroversion, what would you guess the genetic component of that personality trait is?
	Well, how would they calculate?
	How can they figure that out?
	Twins, and don't worry about that.
	Just given that this is where the science is, what would you guess on what percentage of extroversion is genetic?
	I don't know.
	Probably 85, something like that.
	All right.
	Very good.
	86%.
	Environmental accounts for 14%.
	And of course, they did with twin studies, right?
	Twins who grew up in different families.
	Twins are going to share...
	100% of their genetics, identical twins.
	And so if you have twins raised in wildly different environments, they both end up extroverted, and you find enough of that, then you're going to be able to calculate how much appears to be genetic.
	So for openness, it's 92% genetic.
	The environment only accounts for 8%.
	Emotional stability!
	Sorry, emotional stability.
	Genetics.
	Now, this is interesting, because the genetics are only 59%.
	The environment is very big.
	It's 41%, and I think that makes sense to me.
	Agreeableness.
	Genetics are 85% of that.
	Environment only accounts for 15%.
	Conscientiousness.
	The genetics are 81%, environmental is only 19%.
	So it's not like environment is meaningless, and these aren't moral categories.
	Right, so this has nothing to do with being a good or an evil person or anything like that.
	Right.
	I mean, I can't disagree with that, obviously.
	But if we go back to my original...
	I'm sorry, I just wanted to mention, since you were asking about...
	So this study uses both self-reports and peer reports.
	Because asking someone, are you an extrovert, is somewhat challenging.
	But if you ask people around them who know them, is this person an extrovert?
	And you combine those two.
	When you get both the person's self-description and the description of them by others around them...
	Then that really seems to up the genetic percentage in most studies.
	So, okay, I'll give you the last word and move on to the next caller in a second, but go ahead.
	Well, yeah, so the original question was, what I was saying is that mysticism is good for rational people like us.
	The problem with mysticism is that when it gets… What?
	Mysticism is good for rational people like us?
	Yes, because when it gets into the hands of people who see the world through feelings, then they get lost in this stuff, and that's when it becomes New Age bullshit.
	But if for people, for totally rational people who like to think and analyze it...
	I swear to God, I never know if this mic is actually on.
	I mean, actually, I've just made this massive case, massive case, against mysticism.
	Right, you did.
	And then suddenly...
	I'm in your tribe of people who think mysticism is great.
	Like, I swear to God, I don't know if this microphone is actually on, or if people are putting on headphones listening to Baba O'Reilly until I finish talking.
	I tried to listen to you as good as I could.
	Well, I tell you what, don't say anything more then, please, because I've really enjoyed the conversation.
	Just have a listen back to this show, and hopefully it will make more sense.
	So I appreciate your call in, and let's move on.
	Alright, up next we have Eddie.
	Eddie wrote into the show and said, Stefan, you're an atheist.
	I'm not.
	I've had supernatural experiences.
	I've spoken in tongues during what I would call a spiritual battle where the Holy Spirit's presence was felt by everyone in the room.
	I back up this statement with simple science and say that humans have a spirit slash soul.
	Therefore, God exists.
	Science teaches us...
	That matter doesn't disappear, it changes forms.
	Water, ice, steam.
	Same thing, different form.
	Doesn't this prove the existence of God?
	Life after death?
	If not, what happens to the mind, thoughts, and dreams of someone when they die?
	How can anyone just believe that all that magic disappears into the ether of nothingness?
	That's from Eddie.
	Alright, up next we have Roxanne.
	Roxanne wrote in and said, A previous caller, Mrs.
	Mysticism, attempted to explain the necessity of mysticism.
	Though her explanation was garbled in spiritual slash mystical rhetoric to the point to where it was even confusing to me, I still want to repose the question.
	Do you think that reason slash rational is in conflict with the mystical?
	If we are always learning about new dimensions of science and our physical reality that informs how we live today, in renouncing mysticism as gobbledygook, are we turning our backs on obvious facts about the world, much like flat earthers rejecting the possibility that the earth is round?
	That is from Roxanne.
	Hello, Eddie.
	How are you doing tonight?
	Hello, Stefan.
	How are you?
	I'm well, I'm well.
	I admire and appreciate you calling in with these topics.
	Very impressive.
	I wonder if you could tell me a little bit more about your supernatural experiences.
	Okay.
	Well, this happened about 15 years ago.
	I was in my, I would say, mid-20s.
	Yeah, about 17 or 18 years ago, in my mid-20s.
	It was during what I would call my Jesus phase, where, yeah, basically, long story short, I grew up Catholic, and I converted to, you know, like a born-again when I was 13.
	That's when I got baptized, and I'd always just had this in my thought.
	And basically, I was at a party, and The party was dying down.
	It was at my cousin's place.
	And there was a lot of people that were not in their right mind at this party.
	Let's just put it that way.
	And well, what basically happened is there was like a couple of different groups of people.
	There was almost this feeling.
	Not almost.
	I'm going to just say because this is exactly how I felt.
	There was basically good and evil in this room at the same time.
	And there was the good people, which I was a part of, basically the leader of, and there was the evil people, the people that were the partiers all the time, the drinkers, the drug doers, and that really wasn't my atmosphere.
	And basically, the party was dying down.
	Everybody was just chilling.
	It was maybe 20 people in the room.
	And then all of a sudden, it was out of this world.
	All I can say is basically what happened was it almost was like something out of The Exorcist.
	The room divided, kind of.
	And you had about five or six people sitting on a couch, and they started screaming at me, you get the fuck out of here.
	You know, you shouldn't be here, you know, whatever.
	And it was just, there was just this thing.
	And in my head, I was like, hold on, I'm the good person here.
	I believe in God.
	And I remember speaking, and I remember them speaking, but it wasn't in English.
	It was in a completely different language.
	Even their faces seem to have changed a little bit like they were possessed.
	That's the only way that I can explain it.
	And I thought to myself, after they were cursing at me and kind of trying to bring me down, I basically realized that, hey, hold on, I'm the good person here.
	I'm the one in control.
	I'm the one who believes in God.
	I'm the powerful one in this room.
	And I basically had a thought or said something like, I will send you all back to hell.
	I'm the dominant one.
	And within a second, this extremely hot room had this ice-cold blast.
	And I literally felt at that moment, and everybody in the room, not just me, everybody in the room literally turned around and looked.
	And one girl literally walked up and said, are you God?
	She literally said this to me.
	And I go, no, like not even close.
	Because I knew it was some sort of projection or something.
	And the people that were screaming and cursing and telling me to leave and all of this negative stuff basically were gotten...
	They had just shut up.
	They couldn't even look at me anymore.
	I basically had just shut them down.
	And...
	It pretty much ended and it was like they couldn't even look in my direction.
	And like I said, the entire room was like frozen.
	When I say frozen, I mean like ice cold.
	We're talking about like an 80 or 90 degree room in the middle of the summer in Michigan, damp, and it was probably 50 degrees in there.
	Everybody was frozen.
	And that's the only way I can explain it.
	So at that time, because I was going through my Jesus stage, I had felt at that time, and I still feel that the Holy Presence basically protected me from this spiritual assault that was going on.
	Yeah, it's pretty creepy.
	I know.
	It's far-fetched.
	I mean, unless you were there or unless you were in my body, it's hard to believe.
	But I've had this discussion with my cousin.
	I mean, do you remember that day?
	I just saw him in San Diego a couple of months ago and we talked.
	Do you remember that day when we were at your bar and we were hanging out?
	And he was like, I can't even go.
	That was crazy.
	I've never seen anything like that before.
	And so it's not only that I remember it, it's that my cousin also remembers it and so does the other girl.
	That had asked me the question that said, you know, are you God?
	And I said no, and the other couple people that were kind of cursing at me in this demonic presence, or however you want to phrase it.
	I'm kind of lost for words here because it's so creepy even thinking about it, but it happened.
	And what brought it up is about a year ago, my girlfriend asked me to come with her to her friend's I'm sure you know what the evangelicals do in some churches.
	And I was just like...
	I've actually done this.
	It happened to me where I've spoken like this, but it was real.
	I just felt like it was phony.
	Can you tell me what the experience was of speaking in tongues?
	It was surreal.
	I remember what I was saying, but I don't...
	I remember what I was saying.
	When the girl asked me if I was God, I said, no, but it wasn't in English.
	I was speaking in a completely different language.
	When I was in this argument with them, when they were cussing at me, and I said, hey, I'm the one in control.
	I'll send you all the hell.
	I've got the power here.
	It wasn't in English.
	And when they were speaking to me, or not really speaking to me, they were basically taking turns yelling at me.
	It was just like a guttural voice that they were speaking in, and it wasn't English.
	And it wasn't My second language, which is Arabic.
	It wasn't in my third language, which is Aramaic.
	It was out of this world.
	That's the only way that I can explain it, Stefan.
	Is that really the only way you could explain it?
	There's no other possible way to explain any of this stuff.
	There is.
	Listening to a previous caller, we had mentioned that because of My beliefs at the time, because I was in my, quote, Jesus phase,
	that maybe my hallucination, or what I thought happened, basically projected itself onto everybody in the room by my sheer force of will, because I'm like a super alpha person.
	God, I hate being egotistical.
	Extremely good looking.
	Had a lot of money for that age.
	A lot.
	So, yeah, it could have been a number of factors.
	There's no question about that.
	I'm not going to sit here and say, you know, I'm advocating for Jesus.
	I don't even know what I believe now.
	I just know, I feel that there's something after death because it's like Because I've experienced that, and it's just like you have all of this raw power and energy and drive and ego and emotion and thought and just your whole stream of consciousness.
	And even with the science, matter doesn't disappear.
	I mean, it changes forms.
	Energy doesn't disappear.
	Now, I'm sure you will agree that Our brains, our bodies do produce electricity at about 20 watts from what we eat, and it turns into kinetic energy.
	So we have electricity flowing through us, and something has to happen to that energy.
	Now, maybe I... Phrase it wrong by using God.
	Well, no, but if you have a, I just, because you're a mystic, I know that you're never going to ask me what I think.
	So for the most part, I'm sorry, I have to interrupt you, and people get mad at me for interrupting mystics, but they never stop.
	No, please.
	That's the whole point.
	So if you have a radio, a portable radio, and the batteries run out, we don't think the voices inside went somewhere else, right?
	Just the energy that propels them is gone.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Okay, but how does that explain the other three people who specifically remember this?
	No, no, no, no, I don't know what you're talking about that.
	What I'm talking about is, you say, well, after we die, the energy has to go somewhere.
	Well, sure.
	But when a fire runs out of fuel, right?
	You've done this probably when you go camping, right?
	You have a nice blazing fire and it's nice and cozy and then you go to sleep and like four o'clock in the morning you wake up and you're freezing, right?
	And all you've got is a couple of dull embers half put out with moose piss or something, right?
	So the fire hasn't gone up and floated away somewhere.
	It's just that the fuel that drives the energy of the fire has run out.
	And it's the same thing when your body stops working.
	Then the energy that drives the electricity and biochemical energy that your consciousness needs to operate, the energy has run out.
	So you haven't gone somewhere, it's just the energy that Keeps your consciousness going.
	You know, when you turn a light bulb out, you don't say, the light has gone to heaven, right?
	It's just that the energy gets cut off that keeps the wire heated and going, right?
	So, when the energy is removed, the effects of the energy are removed.
	But the effects of the energy don't fly off somewhere, right?
	I mean, when you turn off your cell phone, you don't think it's gone to another dimension, do you?
	You just, it's off, right?
	No.
	But turning off your cell phone and turning off a light switch are voluntary decisions.
	This was not voluntary.
	Wait, are you talking about the time when you had the spiritual battle with the people at the party?
	Yes.
	No, no, no.
	You're talking about death.
	You said, where do the minds go?
	Where does our energy go?
	Where does our consciousness go when we die?
	It doesn't go anywhere.
	Any more than a light goes to heaven after you turn the light switch off, right?
	The energy that propels your body is gone.
	The energy that propels the light is gone.
	It's off.
	Like, if you turn off a tap, you don't say, the water has magically gone into another dimension.
	You've just, the tap is off, and the water stops flowing.
	When the body dies, the energy stops flowing to the brain, and your brain dies.
	Okay.
	Well, a hundred years ago, the definition of death Was when somebody's heart stopped beating because that's just what it was.
	Now somebody's heart could stop beating and they could still keep them alive because of the, you know, because of machines.
	And so our definition of death or the time of death has changed and you have...
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Definition of death has not changed.
	It's just that we have the capacity to keep people alive longer because we can use technology to substitute for a heartbeat, which we didn't have before.
	The definition of death hasn't changed, just our capacity to prevent it has changed.
	I agree with that.
	Let me rephrase.
	What about all of these people that, let's say, die...
	And come back.
	These after-death experiences or near-death experiences where they've definitely thought that they've seen the light or they've had the most horrendous nightmare and they want to change their life because they felt like they were going to burn.
	You understand.
	Do you understand the question?
	I'm sure you do.
	You're very smart here.
	When people are dying, physically dying, their brain is undergoing enormous stress and pressure.
	And I'm sure hallucinations, I'm sure white lights, I'm sure, you know, I don't know, the blood supply to the optic nerve is dying.
	I mean, there's lots of wild stuff, I imagine, that's going on in consciousness when you're dying.
	It's like the LSD at the end times of your existence.
	So, you know, do I think that they floated up and met their relatives?
	No, I don't think that at all, but I think it is a very powerful experience to die.
	It must be.
	And so the fact that people have very vivid memories, and the fact that some of them are similar to me is perfectly understandable.
	I mean, we have the same physiology, the same wild hormones and drugs flow through our system when we're dying.
	And so I would assume that there would be similarities there, but the idea that this proves life beyond Death, I don't...
	I mean, I have dreams of floating out of my body every second night.
	Sometimes it seems the idea that I'm actually floating out of my body and I'm doing some astral spiritual Dungeons& Dragons journey is not credible.
	I'm having a hallucination and the gorgeous, wonderful nightly hallucinations of dreams, that's what I'm having, but I'm not actually going anywhere in another dimension.
	Okay.
	I see your point.
	But death, it's not instantaneous.
	I mean, unless it's something like spectacular, instant car crash, overdose, you know, it's become, like I was saying, it's become more difficult to even define when people are dead.
	Okay, but there's times, you know, when someone's been buried for a year, we don't think they might still be alive, physically, right?
	True.
	I get it's a little bit of a fuzzy boundary, but not at the extremes, right?
	I can agree with that.
	It's just that the energy that we have, I understand you're saying it's shut off, but how can we not think all of this power that we have, I mean...
	I've read that we only use approximately 5% of our brain.
	That's false.
	That's false.
	Yeah, that's not true.
	What is the correct...
	No, we use all of our brain.
	We just don't use it all at the same time.
	No, because look, I mean, evolutionarily speaking...
	It would be completely crazy.
	And listen, I believe the same thing.
	So, I mean, I understand.
	But when you think about it, from an evolutionary standpoint, like our brain is our most expensive organ.
	It uses the most energy.
	It's like 3% of our body mass or something, but it uses like a quarter or a third of our energy.
	I mean, it's a crazy expensive organ.
	And so the idea that evolution would 95% build redundancy into our most expensive organ would make no sense.
	Because if you only use 5% of your brain...
	5% the size of your head.
	You could be a pinhead, literally.
	And so you'd need less food, you'd need less water, you'd be evolutionarily much more adapted, better adapted to your environment.
	Or, you know, babies could be born a whole lot more advanced if our brains were smaller, right?
	Because we basically, we get born like three minutes before our brains get too big and we'd split our arms in two, right?
	And so we're helpless for the first year of our life because it's like called the fourth trimester, like the first nine months to 12 months of your life.
	So if our brains could be 95% smaller, but we could still do all of our cool stuff, that would be a huge evolutionary advantage.
	So no, it's not true that we only use, that's just one of these urban myths.
	It's tempting, but it's not true.
	It's, okay, maybe I phrased it wrong.
	Because, do you believe there are people that can do things that maybe me and you can't, like photographic memories, where they're just tapping other parts of their brain?
	Like, at that time, somebody's...
	Like Beethoven, he was deaf, but he...
	There is genius.
	Of course, yeah, there is genius.
	Some people have incredible...
	Abilities with regards to their brains.
	Sure, because, you know, brains and complexity and intelligence and creativity, they all fall along a bell curve, right?
	There are people who can't tie their shoes, and there are other people who can multiply six numbers in their heads together, right?
	So, sure, there's a bell curve and some, you know, it's sort of like...
	You know that old Arthur C. Clarke saying any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?
	Which is kind of like a clever but mostly bullshit phrase.
	Because it's not magic, it's technology.
	It's just one of these things that sounds clever.
	And he was smarter than that.
	But when it comes to people's abilities mentally, there are people who are born so smart that what they do appears to be supernatural, right?
	And so we've got, you know, across various different human races and subspecies and groups, there are different sized brains, there are different levels of complexity on average.
	IQs are not evenly distributed among human subgroups.
	And so, you know, for the very smartest people in the very smartest groups, what they do appears to be supernatural.
	They can pick up the most amazing insights.
	They can do the most amazing mental feats, but that's because they have the most amazing brains.
	Just massively complex and supercharged, overheated, overclocked brains.
	And they can actually do things that other people don't.
	Can't do.
	And that is, it's an amazing thing to see, but it's not magic.
	It just falls along the general spectrum of what people can do with their brains.
	Okay.
	I have a child and he recently turned 18 a few months ago.
	And yeah, so no family court system for me anymore.
	That's a whole other topic, but just wanted to throw that in there.
	But, and I know you have a child, a daughter, And when you look at your child, you don't see something...
	I'm sure you do.
	Do you not see that there's something that you've passed on to your child that is like a light?
	Yes, it's called genetics.
	Exactly.
	I can't dispute that.
	I'm talking above and beyond the genetics.
	Your things that are just not genetic...
	Maybe the way she walks or the way...
	Maybe that was a bad example, because that is genetic.
	Wow, you know, just that spark, that ember, you know, or have you ever seen your child?
	As far as the wonder of consciousness goes, it's incredible.
	It's amazing that one of my little tadpoles could help produce something that can think and reason and make jokes and astonishingly achieve teenage levels of eye-rolling just slightly ahead of schedule.
	But no, it is incredible.
	It is a fantastic and wonderful thing.
	And my greatest pleasure is that there's nothing mystical about it.
	That is my greatest pleasure in it.
	That's astounding.
	The fact that it is mere genetics that produces this unbelievable inferno of intelligence and curiosity and creativity and jokes and humor is just wonderful.
	I experience the wonder because I don't ascribe it.
	And won't ascribe it to mysticism.
	That, to me, is the power and the wonder of it.
	I fail to see how understanding the thermonuclear bomb called the sun and understanding the physics of what makes it run, I fail to see how that makes it less powerful and less wonderful and less amazing.
	Right?
	So, if I imagine it was some chariot being pulled by some god or whatever...
	Then I would have a particular point of view of it, I suppose.
	But I don't see how, for me, looking at the sun and saying, it's a giant atom bomb that's going off for 10 billion years or something, I don't see how that makes my appreciation of the sun any less powerful.
	In fact, to me, it makes it more powerful because I actually understand what's going on and why it does what it does.
	So I don't see...
	How rejecting or avoiding the concept of the soul or this sort of magic spark, how does that make my daughter any less wonderful to me?
	It makes her existence and her creativity and my own all the more powerful.
	If we avoid the concept or the temptation of magic, we can be even more amazed by what Mere meat and electricity can do.
	I'm not saying, do you agree with me?
	Do you sort of understand what I mean when I say that?
	Because I'm not ascribing things to magic, I can be even more awed by what happens.
	Just from the scientific?
	Well, just, yeah, just the basic empirical reality of it.
	I mean, it's incredible.
	What human life can achieve.
	And I don't know how adding ghosts to the machine makes it any more miraculous.
	To me, it takes away from the magic of it.
	Because it gives an explanation that isn't there.
	I don't want to have explanations that aren't there.
	I prefer the wonder of not...
	I don't know how consciousness works.
	I don't know how ideas are created.
	I understand something of the biology, something of the physics, but I don't know.
	And I won't pretend to know, because to me, pretending to know something takes away the wonder of it.
	I will agree with you on that point.
	That's why I don't subscribe to any particular religion.
	I just don't understand.
	Believe me, I get your viewpoint.
	And I think you're a brilliant man.
	I even think you're a genius, actually.
	I mean, I've been listening to you for a year.
	But to me, it just seems like Somebody with such a high intellect and such a rational thinker that just, I don't know.
	I believe that you have said that you grew up Christian and you just lost it.
	I'm not advocating for any kind of religion.
	To me, religion is a man-made patriarchy to hold a brother down.
	That's just the bottom line, to get 10% of your income if you're dumb enough to do it.
	I'm not kind of advocating that.
	And like I said, my original story was, you know, because I was going through my Jesus phase.
	Now, if I had been involved in Buddhism, maybe my experience would have been different.
	I understand where you're coming from.
	And I'm sure you understand mine, but you just don't agree with it.
	No, no, I think that you're wrong.
	It's not that I don't understand.
	I'll give you an example.
	I jotted this down because it was pretty funny.
	This was, I think, a month or two ago.
	Okay.
	So, my daughter does not enjoy grocery shopping, right?
	Because she's a child, right?
	Unless we're going for candy, which we don't do because we don't really eat sugar.
	So, my wife was heading to the grocery store and she wanted to bring my daughter.
	My daughter didn't want to go to the grocery store and she pretended to hang on to a curtain.
	And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa.
	The family can't have two drama queens in the house.
	And then I, you know, joked that it was my daughter and my wife.
	It were the drama queens, right?
	It's just a joke.
	And my daughter then said, fine.
	So when mom goes grocery shopping, there will be only one drama queen in the house.
	So that's fine.
	Brilliant.
	Boom.
	Doesn't even think about it.
	It doesn't even think about it.
	It just comes out.
	That to me is amazing.
	Now, if I say, well, that's a soul, I'm pretending to know something I don't know.
	You can't come to a conclusion in the absence of reason and evidence, right?
	I mean, you can, but you're just, you're wrong.
	You're wrong.
	I mean, so am I. It's just you can't do it.
	It's a leap of faith.
	I agree.
	It's a leap of faith.
	No, a leap of faith is a nice way of saying, I have no reason to believe what I believe.
	Right?
	Like, I can't say two and two make five.
	No, no, it's just a leap of faith, right?
	I mean, that doesn't...
	Again, that's just a non-answer.
	Well, I don't...
	I gotta disagree with you there.
	I mean, I can't agree to that.
	Because if I'm saying...
	Why?
	Just take a leap of faith.
	I'm just saying, go on.
	If I'm saying that I believe that when I die that my energy force, spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it, just call it a soul to keep it simple,
	that my soul goes back up into the universe and I can choose to come back at any period of time as any historical figure As anything, I don't know.
	This is just like, to me, it is faith.
	Like, I believe that there is something more.
	Wait, I'm sorry, I don't want to make sure I understand that.
	So after you die, you can travel through time and possess anyone?
	Yes.
	I believe...
	It's almost like a reincarnation.
	I believe that when you die...
	So you could, in fact, be somebody who's already died, who's come back in time to possess you.
	Like an old soul.
	And how would you know whether this hypothesis is true or false?
	I don't.
	So it's nonsense then, right?
	If there's no null hypothesis, then it's nonsense.
	Right?
	Because there's no way to disprove the stuff that you're saying, and you're probably only getting away with it because you're rich and pretty, to be honest, right?
	Right.
	Philosophically, there's no way to get away with it.
	I can't justify it.
	This being a philosophy show, you understand where I'm coming from, right?
	100%.
	And that's why I wanted to have a debate with you, because...
	No, it's not a debate, though.
	You're just saying stuff without proof.
	A debate is when you provide reason and evidence for what you're saying, and we go through it to see if it holds.
	But you're just saying stuff.
	The reason and evidence that I have can't be summed up, because...
	I have that 2 plus 2 equals 5, which is what you're saying my faith is, that something is there after we die, something greater than us.
	Sure, and so because you're just making a statement with no reason or evidence behind it, it's not a debate.
	You're just saying stuff, and I'm saying, well, where's the reason and evidence?
	You're saying, I don't have any, and I'm saying, okay, well, then we can't really talk much about it, because this is a philosophy show, which is about reason and evidence, and if you're just going to make statements...
	There's really not much to talk about.
	It's still a good conversation.
	I'm not disagreeing.
	I'm just pointing that out.
	Where do I go with this?
	If you believe that you live after you die, then you have to ask yourself, why don't you remember anything before you were born?
	Like, I lived before yesterday, so I can remember very clearly what happened before yesterday.
	And so if today is just the life I'm currently inhabiting, but I had a life prior and I'm going to have it tomorrow, hopefully, then the way that I know I don't just live for one day is I have very clear memories and physical evidence that I've done stuff before.
	It's all over YouTube, right?
	Yeah.
	So if you believe that you live forever, then clearly you lived before you inhabited this current body.
	And given that I know I didn't just exist today, I know because I have memories of the past, and I have evidence that I did things in the past, so that's how I know I didn't just live today.
	So this is a way that you would test your hypothesis.
	I live forever.
	I am eternal.
	Therefore, I should have memories of myself or have memories of some identity before I was born, but you don't.
	I do.
	Oh, you have past life memories now?
	Not past lives like the way you're saying it, but there are times where I felt like a connection to a historical figure or I felt like I could have been a part of a certain Maybe I'm crazy and that shit just interests me.
	Maybe I just happen to like Roman history and I don't feel like I was there.
	It's funny because you have this idea like, well, maybe I'm crazy by not thinking I lived in these past lives.
	No, no.
	It's crazy to think you did, right?
	The sanity is saying, hey, I'm drawn to particular things.
	I'm drawn to particular viewpoints.
	I love particular music.
	There are certain historical periods that interest me more than others.
	Like, I was just reading about...
	Let me just get this up.
	I'm going to mention this, because this is...
	I thought this was kind of interesting, right?
	Okay.
	Do you while you're younger than me?
	So there was a band a long time ago, you probably know it, called Supertramp.
	I'm not too big of music, but okay.
	So, pretty good music.
	Pretty good music.
	And one of the founders of Supertramp was, let's see here, Rick Davies.
	And he and Roger Hodgson, Rick Davies was like the working class guy, Roger Hodgson was like the prep school guy who has this very high, extraordinarily mournful, like halfway between sting and a wolf howl of sadness kind of singing.
	Rick Davies, his father just put on a record, and when Rick Davies heard it, he's like, I love music.
	I love music!
	And that's all he cared about, and he tried guitar, and then he tried pianos.
	He found pianos worked better for him, piano worked better for him.
	And he never took a lesson.
	And if you hear, you can hear live at Paris.
	Supertramp.
	And Bloody Well Right, I think, is the one which has got this great piano intro, or keyboard intro, I should say.
	Bloody well write the Supertramp, okay?
	Yeah.
	And so this is a guy who never took a keyboard lesson, never took a piano lesson.
	He's playing to...
	Tens of thousands of people all over the world.
	He wrote, together wrote some great songs.
	Goodbye, Stranger.
	Breakfast in America is a great album.
	Sold like 20 million copies.
	And it's well worth listening to.
	My favorite song of theirs is called Asylum.
	Although, Dreamer is pretty good.
	And Give a Little Bit is fantastic.
	Especially the sort of scat, off-the-cuff, ad-libbed kind of vocals that Hodgson does.
	And they were actually just going to go on tour recently.
	And they were on tour, I think, for a while.
	But Ray Davis and Roger Hodgson, they were the Lennon and McCartney of the group, and they had a falling out way back in the day, and who knows what happened, right?
	But people were kind of mad, because Supertramp was touring, and they used Roger Hodgson's songs and voice.
	But Roger Hodgson had been...
	He even said he would go, but they just didn't want him there.
	And he's declined to sue them, even though...
	Anyway, and now...
	I think Rick Davies is...
	I think he's got cancer, and so they've sort of cancelled the rest of the tour.
	But the reason I'm bringing that up is that Rick Davies just heard an album, and it was like, boom!
	I'm just all about music.
	And that's what he did for the rest of his life.
	Incredible.
	And...
	Out of nowhere?
	Well, who knows?
	It's fascinating.
	I first read...
	Philosophy.
	When I was 15 or 16.
	And I was just like, man, that's it for me.
	I've got to find a way to make it happen for me, to make it happen for the world.
	I have to find a way.
	And that, who knows what that comes out.
	You could say, well...
	Maybe this Rick Davies was a keyboardist in his previous life.
	Maybe he was some ancestor of Rick Wakeman.
	I don't know.
	But I don't think that that doesn't answer anything.
	He just had a particular configuration.
	He's a pretty good baritone, kind of a raspy baritone, but a nice falsetto.
	And...
	Fool's Overture also is a great song.
	But...
	Who knows where his interest came from?
	He had a particular ability.
	He had a particularly musical mind.
	And people have this all the time.
	They hear something, they see something, they get influenced by something, and boom!
	That's it.
	For the rest of their lives.
	That's all they want to do.
	That's all they want to do.
	Now this guy, his father died.
	He ended up being a welder for a while, but always trying to get back into music.
	And...
	I don't know where that comes from.
	I don't know where that drive comes from.
	I don't know where that ability, that single-minded focus was just amazing.
	And...
	That's the difference, I guess, between what you're saying and what I'm saying.
	Like, I would say that he...
	Yeah, I just...
	Yeah, no, you're making points.
	And I really can't...
	Because I can't explain it either.
	There's really nothing to say you're making a good point.
	I can't say that, you know, it was a gift from God.
	It's impossible.
	I can't say that, you know, he must have done it in a previous life.
	I can't say that it was, you know...
	But it doesn't answer anything.
	Correct.
	Because what about the guy who did it in a previous life?
	What about that previous life?
	Where did he come from?
	It's like turtles all the way down.
	It's infinite regression problem, right?
	Maybe he just...
	What's that old Brian Adams song?
	Got my first feel, sixth string, ooh, at the five-end time.
	Played it till my fingers bled.
	Hey, I had a guitar I tried learning a little bit when I was younger.
	I didn't really like it that much.
	It's kind of cool.
	I learned All Dead, All Dead by Queen and a couple other songs, but I just didn't like it that much.
	Played piano when I was younger.
	Did 10 years of violin.
	It just never...
	You know, you think of Ian Anderson dancing around like a mad French hare with his crazy flute, right?
	This is the Aqualung band.
	And...
	It's just something that they love.
	It's something that speaks to them.
	It's something they do.
	I have no idea why.
	Maybe at some point it will be figured out.
	Maybe it won't.
	Well, I'm...
	I'm trying to think, uh, Occam's razor.
	Okay.
	Isn't, what would the simplest answer then be in this case?
	That we just don't know?
	We can't even ask that question?
	What do you mean?
	I'm asking the question.
	You're not.
	You have an answer called past lives or soul.
	You're not asking the question.
	You have a pretend answer.
	You have, you have a little, you have little capacity for curiosity.
	No, I would say that I'm extremely curious about everything.
	No, no, because you have answers.
	You have answers as to why people love what they love.
	You have answers as to what happens after we die.
	I don't...
	No, I have answers to why I love what I love.
	I don't believe anybody else.
	I don't believe that I know the answers on anybody else's life in any way, shape, or form.
	What do you mean?
	Do you think other people...
	Don't have this past life?
	Are you the only one who has this past life?
	My God, you are God!
	They were wrong!
	You're cracking me up now.
	My beliefs are mine.
	And as somebody else, if you feel like there's nothing there, obviously I'm not going to convince you.
	You're not going to convince me.
	Somebody else that maybe is A complete Christian or a Catholic or a Buddhist is going to have their beliefs and everybody's going to be different.
	Would you agree with that?
	We're all different?
	I don't even know what that means.
	But if you're going to make truth statements like we have a soul and we have past lives and this explains things, then you can't just say everyone gets to believe what they believe.
	I can't say that two and two make four objectively and then say, but anyone can believe whatever they want.
	The moment I say objectively or it's a fact or it's true, then other people aren't free to believe what they want, right?
	Well, when you're speaking about math and stuff that can be quantifiably proven, of course not.
	No, but you believe that these things are true.
	You believe that you have a soul.
	You believe you're going to live after death and you can fly back through time and inhabit the body of Catherine the Great, right?
	Well, I mean, I'm not into the transgender thing, but okay.
	Well, your soul has no gender, right?
	I don't know the answer to that.
	I really don't.
	But I've never had a feeling that I could be or would be or felt like a female or connected with a female figure in any way, so I would say no.
	I'm sorry, I'm just thinking that...
	One of the best names for a Motown band would be Manjunk Soul.
	I just wanted to mention that before I forget.
	Okay, well listen, given that you're saying everything is kind of subjective and you can't convince anyone of everything, I'm going to move on, not as punishment, but just as sort of a recognition of that.
	I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I do appreciate the call.
	It was most interesting, and let me know, if you go back in time, what happened to Miletus from the days of Socrates.
	So thanks for the call, man.
	Have a great evening, and let's move on to the next one.
	You got it.
	Thanks.
	Alright, up next we have Roxanne.
	Roxanne wrote in and said, A previous caller, Mrs. Mysticism, attempted to explain the necessity of mysticism.
	Though her explanation was garbled in spiritual-slash-mystical rhetoric, to the point to where it was even confusing to me, I still want to repose the question.
	Do you think that reason-slash-rational is in conflict with the mystical?
	If we are always learning about new dimensions of science and our physical reality that informs how we live today, in renouncing mysticism as gobbledygook, are we turning our backs on obvious facts about the world, much like flat earthers rejecting the possibility that the earth is round?
	That is from Roxanne.
	And how are you doing tonight, Roxanne?
	Hi, Stefan.
	How's it going?
	Oh, it's going well.
	Thank you.
	Enjoy my evening.
	How about you?
	Pretty good.
	I gotta give it to you, Matt.
	You're, I mean, talking through with six different callers and stuff.
	I gotta hand it to you.
	You have a lot of energy and, you know, vocal strength.
	Well, thank you.
	Technically, I just have a lot of caffeine, but I appreciate the sentiment anyway.
	Oh, wow.
	I knew this would happen.
	I knew as soon as it was my turn, my two-year-old would come into the room.
	But anyway, I'm going to try and continue here.
	All right.
	I'll use a sing-song voice that helps get kids to sleep.
	All right.
	So, gobbled in mystical rhetoric to the point where it was even confusing to you.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
	I would say that I... Alright, this is going to be tricky with my son here.
	But, you know, I saw what she was trying to explain.
	And it's just that I guess people get so caught up with...
	Sometimes when you have an experience with the mystical or with the spiritual, it can be so difficult to describe that to another person.
	And I think...
	That's why it was a bit frustrating for both of you for her to get her point across and also for you to understand what exactly she was talking about.
	And in that way, I could relate to her because I've had experiences of the mystical, of the other realm, you know, that it's so difficult to put into words sometimes.
	And it's like, Gosh, I wouldn't even try to explain some of them because it would just sound like I'm insane.
	You know, so I thought that was something that was definitely taking away from the point of what she was saying.
	But, well, just to give a definition for what I understand as mysticism, I see it as persons trying to understand the laws and the principles that are You know, at work in a realm that we can't see, but we do experience, whether knowing or unknowing.
	And people go in search of understanding this realm.
	They might go on top of the mountaintop, or they might become a Buddhist monk and try to do, you know, transcendental meditation.
	People go through a lot of lengths to try and understand the mystical And that's what I understand mysticism to be.
	So you said persons trying to understand the principles of a world we can't see?
	Yes.
	So how do we know it exists?
	Well, I mean, we're always experiencing things that we can't see.
	We can't really see gravity, but we know it exists because we can see it acting upon objects.
	Yeah, we can see its direct effects, right?
	So that's not a great example, right?
	Well, but in the same way, the energies that exist in the realm of this mystical realm, they do act on things.
	They do act on people.
	They act on physical objects as well.
	And you may not be able to see What is causing that, but you can see that there is something acting upon it, at least for people.
	Okay, can you give me an example?
	For example, even if you want to look at positive and negative energies, right, say that you have a crying child, you know, and the child is upset and, you know, the child has negative nervous energy, but And so to calm that child, you can't use negative energy.
	You can't say, you better stop that crying right now or else blah, blah, blah.
	And then that gets a positive result.
	You have to use a positive energy, an energy of love.
	You have to be soothing.
	You have to, you know, be calming and use a soothing voice.
	And then the child eventually, you know, they catch on to that positive energy and they feel soothed.
	And then the child quiets down.
	So that's like a simplified, you know, a very obvious thing that most of us can tell.
	But how is being nice and soothing to your child mystical?
	Well, the thing is that you'd think that it's not because it's so obvious, right?
	But there are actually mystical principles that are taking place in our everyday lives, including The use of positive and negative energy, we see it as just being nice.
	But that energy that you're using to calm a child or to calm somebody who's angry or to change a conversation so that it becomes less aggressive, that's actually the use of spiritual energies.
	But we use it so regularly in our lives that we think that's not spiritual, that's just something that's practical.
	But what do you mean by spiritual then?
	Because, I mean, if you're nice, you're generally going to get a positive result.
	From some people, there are a few people who will see it as weakness and take advantage and so on.
	But generally, if you're relatively nice, then you can get a positive result.
	How is that mystical?
	Or tell me what you mean, Roxanne, by the word mystical, because I don't follow in terms of being nice can be helpful in social interactions.
	Right.
	Well, you see, the thing is that it seems so mundane that it doesn't seem like it's a part of the mystical.
	But, for example, a law that we see that is a mystical law, but we use it every day in life, is the law of karma, if you want to use what the Buddhists call karma.
	It's also in the Christian religion.
	It's called reaping what you sow.
	Right?
	This law that people know.
	It's like if you do something good, you'll receive something good in return.
	It may not be from the person that you did good to, but somehow it comes back to you.
	And we don't really know how exactly or when, but it happens.
	And this is a law that most of us believe happens, that if you do good in the world, good comes back to you somehow.
	And this is a law that Buddhists have Discovered, they call it karma, a law that Jesus talked about when he was walking about in Nazareth telling people, you know, you'll reap what you sow.
	If you reap good things, I mean, if you sow good things, you'll reap good things.
	And this is something that even, you know, wealthy philanthropists will say that, listen, you know, a part of my business is that I give to charity events and somehow my business also does well.
	You know, these are laws that are actually spiritual laws, but we use them practically in life that it's so mundane, we don't even think it's a part of the mystical.
	Do you think, I mean, I know what you're saying, and I agree with you.
	I think if you put out good things, a lot of times good things will come back.
	But I don't know, I mean, I can think of examples against that.
	One I was thinking about today was, if you look at German culture, modern German culture.
	Right.
	You know, 70 plus years after the end of the Second World War, a lot of German culture is still kind of self-hating, self-loathing, and they've really taken on and owned, in a multi-generational, culture-wide context, the issues around Nazism or national socialism.
	And that culture is in significant risk of being, I think, undermined and destroyed.
	Because they have taken on this heavy burden, this heavy conscience of the Second World War.
	If you look at another culture, I mean, we've talked about in history, the Islamic slave trade, right?
	Way, way bigger than North American slave trade.
	The Islamic slave trade responsible for the death of 100 million Africans.
	And to my knowledge, the Muslims aren't exactly self-flagellating themselves in the way that the Nazis do over this historical horror that they were a part of.
	And of course, not just blacks.
	I mean, millions of Europeans and so on were snagged by this Arabic slave trade, this Muslim slave trade.
	Right.
	And so, or if you look at sort of, you know, white Western European, in particular, white Western European men, right?
	So there's the history of slavery, and when you think of slavery, you think of Europeans owning slaves, even though Europeans owned the fewest slaves for the least amount of time of any culture throughout history, and European males in general fought all around the world, paid massive amounts of blood and treasure to end the slave trade as it stood at the time, which was a very good and positive act for That sort of white male Europeans gave to the world.
	And so that good act, though, seems to have been, quote, repaid by everyone thinking that the only evil of slavery was, you know, white European males owning slaves.
	And so when you go out into the world and you say, this thing was a bad thing and we're going to change it, it seems that you end up doing a lot worse in this world culturally and nationally than if you basically never, ever admit falsehood.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, the people who never ever admit fault, their culture seem to be growing and flourishing and spreading, and the people who have admitted fault seem to be dying under the tank-like wheels of history.
	So, I know what you mean at a personal level, but I do have some sort of...
	I don't know where would this kind of stuff fit into...
	What's going on?
	Like, part of the, oh, you've got to take refugees for the Germans has got to do with the Second World War, but the Japanese aren't taking anyone, pretty much.
	They were in the Second World War, they did terrible things, they did horrible things to the Chinese and other people, and to the Australian prisoners of war, and they were horrible, horrible human beings regarding that.
	But because they don't admit any particular fault, they've been, you know, a few expressions of mild regret, but it's not become pathological.
	How does that...
	issue of where the guilt, the shame, the desire to change things, to make things better, gets viewed as a kind of crushing weakness to be exploited by larger groups of people in society who don't seem to be overburdened with the same level of conscience.
	Does that make any sense?
	I'm trying to follow you here.
	I am trying to follow you.
	What I'm getting, though, is that you're looking at cultures that feel guilty about something that has happened in the past, and have made efforts to change that, but have suffered.
	It doesn't look like they've gotten much of a good return.
	Well, so for instance, right, I mean, just looking at the blacks in America, it was sort of white Western Europeans that ended slavery and were the first culturists to reform that.
	And you've got some blacks, of course, joining the nation of Islam.
	Islam, as a sort of historical belief system, was responsible for the death of 100 million blacks.
	And no one's sitting there saying, well, where are the reparations from the Muslim countries?
	You know, there's no...
	Focus on that because it's like, I don't know if they don't feel bad about it or don't discuss it or don't talk about it, but it's like showing a conscience in this world seems to mark you for cultural distraction, if that makes any sense.
	Well, you know what?
	I would say, though, that let's look at the real cause of why people, blacks in particular, are choosing to join the nation of Islam.
	Unfortunately, it may be because of Of some ignorance on the background of a lot of Islamic civilizations and their part in slavery.
	We all know, we were all taught in school about the transatlantic slave trade and the Europeans taking slaves from West Africa.
	And so not as many people are as aware of slavery that went on In Muslim countries.
	It was 4% of the slaves from Africa, I think, ended up in America.
	4%!
	That's a whole lot of not America that slaves are going to.
	And actually, Stefan, I'd say that you just told me some new facts there because I really didn't know the proportion of which went to the Islamic countries versus The Europeans that enslaved, the Blacks that went through the European slave trade.
	So that's a new fact for me.
	So I'm pretty sure it's probably not something that's common knowledge.
	And maybe if, because we see all those movies, those roots and things like that going on, I would say that a lot of Blacks are making decisions And not maybe knowing the whole story, I wouldn't say that that's white nepotism coming back and slapping them in the face.
	I'd say that that's just how the media portrays Yeah, why aren't there really any blacks in Muslim countries?
	Because the black males were castrated.
	Castrated!
	I mean, this is...
	I mean, castrated.
	No anesthetic, no healthcare, no medicine, no antibiotics.
	I mean, most of them just died.
	Yeah.
	But you see, and again, that's not really...
	That's not really an example of like, okay, we're doing good, but good is not coming back to us.
	We ended slavery.
	We've tried to correct our wrongs, but yet Blacks are deciding to become Muslims or join the nation of Islam.
	That's just a lack of information or disinformation in mainstream media.
	So that's not really, I would say, No, the question came up, sorry to interrupt, but the question came up sort of around karma, like if you do good things, bad things, like good things will come back to you.
	So for like Europeans ending slavery, North Americans ending slavery...
	Good things coming back?
	I'm curious, you know, maybe you have your own perspective on this, but as far as, I don't see a lot of the world saying, good job, wow, that was fantastic.
	I can't believe we had slavery for 100,000 years until you white Western European males ended up ending slavery.
	Good job, man, that's fantastic.
	You are like the best culture around as far as slavery goes ever.
	In fact, quite the opposite occurs, where white Western European males are considered the only people responsible for slavery.
	You know what I mean?
	As far as karma goes, I get what you're saying on an individual level, but sort of a big social level, I don't know if it does a whole lot of good sometimes to admit fault, if that makes sense.
	I would challenge you on that, because let's not confuse recognition of doing good with Good coming back to us.
	Let's look at most Islamic nations, particularly those under Sharia law.
	Those Islamic nations, and let's look at Western European nations and see how well they're doing in comparison with each other.
	I mean, sure, maybe nobody's blaming the Muslim countries for slavery of blacks, but let's look at them economically and see how they're doing, how their people are doing, how the women are doing.
	And let's look at what's happening in Western European countries.
	Well, I mean, if they're doing so badly, Why are so many Muslim immigrants from all over the place flocking to Western European countries for salvation?
	Well, technically not immigrants.
	But no, and I understand what you're saying.
	But what I mean is that as far as good, positive energy coming back from...
	Like, so for instance, when...
	It doesn't necessarily take the form of recognition, of being seen as, okay, the rest of the world thinks that the white man is...
	Wonderful for his nepotism.
	It doesn't come in the form of recognition.
	It comes in the form of, you know, how are you doing?
	Are these nations prospering?
	Well, look at, for instance, in the Western nations, and this is, I don't think, particularly race-specific, but in the Western nations, Western men said, you know, let's give as many rights as possible to women, right?
	Let's give them voting rights, rights of equal property, rights of contract, rights of education, and so on.
	And now that's the first culture in history that, outside of the aristocracy, that that's occurred in, right?
	Right.
	Do you need a second here?
	It's kind of loud.
	I'm not trying to make you tense or anything.
	If you need a moment, that's totally fine.
	Yeah.
	Boy, this is what always happens.
	Ben, please.
	Please.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Yeah.
	In my experience, the attention-seeking doesn't go down until you address it, right?
	Okay.
	Yeah, so men worked as hard as humanly possible to make women's lives as sort of politically activated, as equal rights as possible, and, you know, kind of even went above and beyond in some ways in terms of quota systems and equal pay for work of equal value, despite the fact that women generally work part-time and take time off to have babies and so on, which I'm wonderfully pleased about, but...
	You would think, of course, that when men did all these wonderful things for the first time in human history, tried to extend as many rights and as much social and creature comforts as possible to women, that women would say, wow, you know, we are very, very lucky to have such a male culture.
	We're very happy to have these equal rights and even superior rights for the first time in human history ever, right?
	Except when I was a kid...
	And this has continued, and I think in some ways it's gotten even worse, Roxanne.
	Maybe you have noticed it, or maybe you disagree.
	But when I was a kid, all I heard was that, you know, men are male chauvinist pigs, and there's this evil patriarchy, and now it's, I think, gone even crazier than that, right?
	And so this sort of question of karma I find very interesting, because I agree with you on an individual level, but socially, doing good deeds...
	It appears to provoke an extraordinary amount of resentment and hostility and rage.
	You're trying to help people, causes them in many ways to attack you.
	It's sort of like showing weakness in a predatory herd.
	And so sometimes it feels like the nicest, most positive, most empathetic groups in society are like the sickly zebra on the African plain.
	They're the ones who get sort of chewed up and spit out.
	It almost feels like that virtue is a sign for predators to bring you down.
	It is a sign of weakness.
	It is a sign that you have a conscience, you can be controlled, you can be manipulated, and you're going down.
	No, I would say, Stefan, that's a very subjective perspective you have on how white males are viewed.
	Because it would seem as though white males are being portrayed in, again, mainstream media as Chauvinistic.
	And then we have this really unhealthy movement in feminism.
	I wouldn't say it's the majority of people who are feminists who have this kind of antagonism towards men and towards white men.
	That, again, is a perspective.
	It's just a perspective.
	It's just something that is perceived.
	But is it really...
	Are the rights of women really going underappreciated?
	And...
	Listen, do you want to pick this up another time?
	I don't want your child to be upset by this.
	We can totally pick this up another time.
	It's a great conversation.
	I'd like to continue it, but I certainly don't want your child to be upset by this.
	The thing is that it was the wait because he was sleeping like all two and a half hours.
	Yeah, yeah, no.
	Listen, it's no problem.
	I want your child to have a positive association with my voice for the future.
	So do you want to pick this up another time?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Please reschedule me.
	And by the way, I love this show.
	I listen to you guys.
	I listen to you all the time.
	Watch you all the time on YouTube.
	Well, thank you very much.
	I appreciate you calling in.
	And I do want to have more of this topic.
	It's a very, very interesting topic.
	And I really, really do appreciate everyone who calls.
	And it was a very interesting set of shows.
	Sorry, very interesting set of conversations tonight, which I hugely appreciate.
	It's nice getting the perspective from, I guess, the other side of the aisle with regards to mysticism.
	And I appreciate the callers who've called in.
	I'm glad for the back and forth.
	And thanks, everyone, so much for listening and for watching.
	Please, please check us out at freedomainradio.com.
	You can help support the show, and I hope that you will.
	I hope that you will.
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	This is Stefan Molyneux signing off for the week.
	We will talk to you soon.

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