June 24, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:38:56
3723 BRING THE BUTTER KNIFE - Call In Show - June 22nd, 2017
Question 1: [2:45] – “I am currently into the ‘autopsy’ of the new-testament, and doing it for a decent amount of time, but I doubt that I can ever say ‘it is finished.’ Today, I firmly think that Christianity is a brilliantly crafted artificial religion, created only to deliver a pure self-building, individualist philosophy, without the constraint of the IQ threshold. I had the opportunity to discuss some of the results with some great thinkers, but since it is a highly abstract topic, it requires a very experienced critic.”“So my specific (3) questions: 1. What do you think about the philosophical role of the concept of afterlife and the initial sin? 2. Do you think, that there is a way to somehow merge the current path of Atheism and the self-conscious Christianity, as a religion? 3. What can we do to overcome the IQ threshold of philosophical thinking, to reach all layers of society?"Question 2: [46:45] – “An old friend of mine has been on a self-destructive path for the better part of a decade, with no signs of stopping. While I have no longer have any desire to help her out of her hole, I do think I have an obligation to and have acted upon a perceived obligation to help my other friend deal with the problem, which more or less makes me an accessory to an intervention. Do you think there is any way to avoid being dragged into the main conflict by choosing this route, or will I inevitably be sucked into the gravity well? By extension, do you think that there is any merit in my friend attempting to intervene at all?”Question 3: [1:20:32] – “I engage in conversations with people with different views/beliefs/opinions on a fairly regular basis (though not nearly as much as Stefan). My dad, for example, believes that some government involvement in the free market is necessary and he always uses Rockefeller as an example of a greedy "robber baron" who used underhanded tactics to eliminate his competitors without the aid of government. I still can't seem to be able to explain to him how government intervention is bad, even though it seems like such an obvious, simple matter to me.”Question 4: [2:08:47] – “I dislike children. I often don't like being in the same room as children as they genuinely annoy me. I really don't like being around toddlers and babies and I never offer to hold or console them. Do you have any advice to work through and get past this personality flaw?”Question 5: [3:04:26] – “I was pondering existence when I began to think that that the origins of the universe, absent a creator, seem to violate the LAWS of thermodynamics. There seem to be three possibilities for the origins of the universe; it spontaneously came into being on its own, the universe is eternal and has always existed, or it was created by a creator. Spontaneous creation from nothing violates the first law of thermodynamics, and eternal existence violates the second law of thermodynamics, so is a creator the only valid scientific or logical explanation for the reality of the universe?”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hey, hey everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing very, very well.
We had five, oh you'll be able to count them, five callers tonight with some excellent questions and some great conversations.
The first caller wanted to know what I thought The second caller has a friend who has,
for about 10 years or so, been pursuing a very self-destructive path.
And he's got a friend who's kind of tied into this Titanic of a life and is going down.
And what should he do?
Is there any way to save someone who seems to be so hell-bent on self-destruction?
The third caller, hey, have you ever heard about these robber barons?
You know, the evil, monocled, monopoly-style, bad actress of 19th century economics who just enslaved everyone and had to be restrained by the government, Rockefeller and others, Vanderbilt's.
This guy's dad, very convinced of the myth of the robber barons, and we talked about some fairly important historical details and principles that, if you're ever in this kind of situation, and if you talk about the free market, you inevitably will be very, very helpful and very powerful information and knowledge for you to have.
The fourth caller just doesn't like children.
I know, I know.
It's like saying you don't like dogs.
It's just not considered to be the thing to say or the thing to feel, but he does feel it and he does say it.
We had a great conversation about some of the original roots of his distaste, in fact, dislike for children as a whole.
And the fifth caller said, look, There are scientific laws that seem to forbid either the perpetual existence of the universe or the spontaneous self-creation of the universe.
Therefore, since we are here, since the universe is here, does that not imply a creator?
So we talked a little bit about some of the theories around the origins of the universe and what the philosophical implications are.
For the challenges that the creation and existence of the universe pose for existing scientific theory.
It's a great conversation.
I love getting me some science geek on.
So, I hope you enjoy this show.
I hope you enjoy these conversations.
I hope, I hope, I hope that you will go to freedomainradio.com slash donate to help us out.
And follow me on Twitter, of course, at Stefan Molyneux.
Use our affiliate link at fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
Alright, up first we have Tibor.
He wrote in and said, To deliver a pure, self-building, individualist philosophy without the constraint of the IQ threshold.
I had the opportunity to discuss some of the results with some great thinkers, but since it is a highly abstract topic, it requires a very experienced critic.
So my three specific questions are as follows.
One, what do you think about the philosophical role of the concept of afterlife and the initial sin?
Two, what do you think that there is some way to somehow merge the current path of atheism and the self-conscious Christianity as a religion?
Three, what can we do to overcome the IQ threshold of philosophical thinking to reach all layers of society?
And that's from Tibor.
Hey Tibor, how are you doing tonight?
Hi Stefan, thank you.
I'm fine.
How are you?
I'm very well, thank you.
I'm very well.
Glad to have these questions.
I'll...
Just give you a couple of thoughts on each one.
We can take it from there.
Okay.
So what do I think about the philosophical role of the concept of the afterlife and of original sin, if that's...
Well, there's no philosophical role insofar as these doctrines are not philosophically provable.
It's like sort of saying, what is the scientific role of the soul?
Well, the soul doesn't respond to scientific inquiry in a very empirical manner.
And so I can't say that there's a philosophical role for the concept of the afterlife and of original sin.
However, however, I will say this.
It bugs me when bad people get away with stuff.
And it bugs me when good people suffer.
You know, Romero in prison and so on.
So...
It's always bothered me, as I think it bothers a lot of people, that there's this conflict between morality and biological success.
I mean, look at Genghis Khan.
I mean, the man, he's like this feminist fantasy of an ultimate frat party that spared most of Asia, right?
I mean, the man just raped his way across a continent to the point where, like, what is it, one in 17 people in the region now can trace themselves to his ancestry?
So from a biological standpoint, massively, massively successful organism.
But exceedingly brutal and unpleasant and evil.
And so the fact that biologically, you know, pillaging and raping and violence and so on, and if we just look at the more abstract, refined evils of state power and so on, it can be enormously successful.
Look at how much money the Clintons have made, like hundreds of millions of dollars.
Look at how much money Barack Obama is going to get paid for his...
Biography.
And it's, you know, when there are good people in the world who seem to have a hard time getting ahead, and then I think some highly corrupt and morally questionable individuals make out like bandits.
Now, the afterlife, I think...
It comes out of the resentment of virtuous and powerless people.
Remember, Christianity, I don't go all the way with Nietzsche that it was a sort of slave morality, the resentment that drove a lot of it, but it was popular among the oppressed.
And the oppressed, almost by definition, have no capacity to overturn their oppression in any direct manner.
And so there is this vengeful fantasy of the afterlife wherein your oppressors are oppressed, wherein those who torture you are themselves tortured.
So I can understand that frustration.
However, shifting that And this is so common in so many of these theological constructs.
It gives you immediate satisfaction at the expense of long-term progress in society.
Because once you accept that there's no afterlife and that there is no God who's going to, you know, underpants, lift, and give a wet noogie to your enemies for eternity, then you would just have to damn well make the world a better place in the here and now.
And I'm not saying that's absent completely or even somewhat from Christianity, but...
When you accept that there is no afterlife that's going to punish those who do wrong, you try and set up a system wherein the incentives for virtue and disincentives for vice are all aligned along freedom and human nature and so on.
What I like, and I've had massive problems with original sin throughout most of my life, Because saying that a child is born immoral because of the actions of Adam and Eve countless years ago, although I know some Christians have counted those years, is wrong.
And it is an imaginary disease called sin that an imaginary cure called salvation is offered to you in return for money.
Now, when I mention this and people say, well, priests don't charge and so on, but the church makes money.
The church makes money.
And if we were to lift the lid of the Vatican and look underneath, not only would we find precious few migrants, but we'd find an enormous amount of wealth and gold and art treasured and so on.
A lot of money in religion.
But what I like about Original Sin, though, is it does promote humility.
Virtue is always something that we strive for.
It's like health.
It's something that needs to be constantly maintained.
Although, I guess, unlike health, I think virtue has the capacity to increase over one's life.
There was something Clint Eastwood said some years ago.
He said, like, when it came to sort of standing up against...
The studios or standing up against the media or doing what he thought was important or artistically valid.
He said, I'm old.
I've had my career.
What are they going to do to me?
Right?
I mean, they don't have anything to hold over me.
And so I think when you get older, you do have the capacity to have less to lose and to have a greater perspective and a greater sense of where you stand in the sort of swaying pendulums of history.
So I think that, you know, hell fails...
Over the course of your life, your health is going to diminish over time.
But virtue, I think, can increase, and so I think there is that capacity.
But in order for virtue to increase, we must remain humble.
And the one thing that original sin does do, among the many bad things that it does, the one thing, the hope at the bottom of the chest of demons, so to speak, is that it keeps people humble.
If you have a standard of morality called God, That's a pretty high thing to aim for.
You're never going to reach it.
So it keeps you humble and keeps you working for the improvement of virtue.
You almost can't overexercise virtue, given that prudence is one of the virtues, right?
And so I do like the fact that the original sin keeps you...
Almost eternally and infinitely distant from the highest virtue, which has you keep working towards it.
And I think that is very important.
So, does that sort of make any sense regarding the philosophy, but the value of these concepts?
Absolutely.
I just didn't want to interrupt you because full thought is everything we have.
I hate when people interrupt me, so I don't do this to you.
May I give you a little background about this question?
Sure.
Okay, so I'm a naturally born atheist.
I was never able to connect with religion.
I had the connection to have the religion with the Catholic, Roman Catholic, to be precise.
And I never was affected by it.
I thought I was not affected by it.
But later, I'm pretty sure you know almost the best that what's happening around the society and the culture right now, this demolition.
And I started to look around at what may be the causes.
And each time I get close to the answer, the answer was always, and very simply, the abandonment of religion.
Every time.
So that's why I started to dig in deeper in communication and in dissecting the Christian New Testament, if I said it correctly.
I was appearing in the Ruby Reports fan show and I received lots of hate because of my theories.
So I was looking forward to discuss with you these three questions.
Basically, I heard half of what I wanted to hear and you challenged the other thoughts of mine.
That was the reason that I was calling.
So for me, The theory of afterlife is always the missing key to this problem.
Because you know that if a man can get away with the sins like you told before, if there are no consequences in tomorrow, if nothing affects me after I'm dying, why do I care about today?
Why do I do anything that will actually cause good in this life if I won't benefit from it after I die, because I will be a fertilizer according to the postmodernist.
So if nothing awaits me, no punishment, no reward, there is no consequence.
And about the second part about the initial sin, you summed up perfectly what I wanted to say, because I think this implies the image of imperfection, so that people need to work to be better.
That was what I get to.
Right.
And the second part that I wanted to realize about religion itself, that why does it have so much impact when I as an individual, as an atheist, have absolutely no need for religion?
And I went down to the communication part.
What can religion communicate and how can it communicate what philosophy cannot?
Go ahead.
Right.
So regarding your second question, do you think that there's any way to merge the current path of atheism and the self-conscious Christianity as a religion?
No.
I don't think...
We're either going to succumb...
To a very primitive religion, or we are going to find our way through to philosophy.
I don't think that there's any way to merge atheism with Christianity.
Because atheism is, in general, a tool for dismantling universal morality that is wielded by the left.
And the reason we know that...
I mean, if you want to get people wet...
You knock down their house.
Now, if you knock down their house and you don't want them to get wet, you better have another house for them to move into, like if it's raining.
And atheists knocked down Christianity and did not have another place for people to go.
Did not have a universal morality that they could accept and absorb and were willing to fight for When the universal ethics of Christianity were taken away.
And so the purpose of atheism seems to have been to knock down the church that sheltered the West from the world and provide no substitute shelter.
Just drive people out in the rain.
And so atheism was born out of Christianity.
Western atheism was born out of a combination of classical philosophy, I mean, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and so on, combined with Christianity.
And so, Christianity's focus on free will, and as I talked about, With Tom Woods some time back, and also with Duke Pastor, Christianity's focus on the value of scientific inquiry, contrary to most of the propaganda I received.
Damn it.
Nothing but lies in the hindsight.
The rear view is all a fantasy.
And...
So atheism, the capacity to be an atheist, came out of...
Some of the fruits handed to Christianity from ancient philosophical thinking in Greece and to a smaller degree in Rome, combined with the Gutenberg press, the fragmenting of Christendom into various Protestant and Catholic sects, and hundreds of years of religious warfare that finally...
I mean, I hate to put it this bluntly, and I'm going to put it this bluntly.
One of the horrible things that happened in Western history was when you had centuries of religious warfare, the most fanatical tended to wipe each other out.
Now, once the most fanatical tend to wipe each other out, who's left?
The moderates.
And we know that there is some genetic component to religious belief, and I believe that there is also some genetic component to the extremity of religious belief.
Or the extremity of ideological commitment in general.
You know, whether you're a democratic socialist or you are a full-on socialist or you are a communist may indeed have some genetic basis, I believe, that over time it will.
Now, when you have religious warfare in Europe, as has happened, I mean, raging back and forth across, in particular, Germany to a smaller degree, France, religious warfare, waging back and forth.
Well, who's willing to kill and die are the most committed to their religious beliefs.
Now, they do wipe out some moderates, but they will also wipe out each other quite consistently.
And at some point, society recognized that it could not continue with the unity of church and state because everybody was trying to use the power of the state to impose their vision of Christianity onto everyone else's.
A separation of church and state, which was also only possible if people were willing to let go of the idea of a government...
That was theological in nature.
In other words, God appointed the king as rulers over the people.
God instructed the king, perhaps sometimes through the Pope, but God instructed the king on what should be done in society.
So when the extremists wiped each other out, some of the moderates were left, who looked and said, if we are to survive, we must separate the state and the church.
So, this separation of church and state, combined with, you know, Greek or Roman influences, combined with the church's commitment in many ways to scientific exploration and focus on uncoerced virtue, virtue must be uncoerced, produced some of the soil in which atheism grew.
And then, of course, like all the prodigal sons, atheism then turns and spits upon the very soil that makes it possible, and atheism Look at Europe.
Atheism has largely been in charge with defending European values for the past two to three generations.
And Europe has never faced a crisis like it is facing now.
It's an overused phrase to say an existential crisis.
It is an existential crisis.
So after thousands of years of history, you hand over...
To the secularists, to the agnostics, to the atheists, you hand over to them because they say, we're rational, we're consistent, we're logical, we're true, we're right, all you have is superstition and theology and nonsense.
You hand over to the atheists.
You say, okay.
You ripped...
The church roof off the people.
But you say, don't worry, we've got a great new place to go to.
It's just through the woods there.
Just down that way.
It's a little bit down a little valley.
Up a little hill.
Round the corner.
Down in the glen.
And the people say, well, it's raining here.
We're cold.
We're wet.
We'll follow you.
And where did they end up?
In a deadly swamp.
Insects.
Thick with disease.
And cold eyes gleaming through the darkness approaching.
And people say, well, we were safe in the church.
Where have you taken us?
Oh, we thought that the utopia was around here somewhere.
Let's just go a little deeper into the swamp and see if we can find it.
It's been a huge con, frankly.
It's been a huge, horrifying, terrible con.
As a matter of fact, since I've been digging this body deep, I feel a really deep shame because I was a really arrogant, annoying kind of 80s before.
Gosh, I wonder what that's like.
Well, no, I said that.
The damage that I and my colleagues have done, it's immense.
Well, I agree with you.
But still, I have some problems with atheism and the philosophies that we are trying to spread, because that is a very big obstacle in a way.
And it's not the will, it's not the willingness to do something, because that's why we are here, that's why we are talking.
It's about the philosophy itself and its IQ threshold.
For example, for me, the closest philosophy is the objectivism, Ireland-type objectivism.
But I think we know that this philosophy has a very high IQ threshold.
It needs at least 10510 Western average IQ. That means we exclude 60% of the population just by promoting this.
And religion itself Does not have any IQ thresholds.
That's my first observation, which I realized that while religion is able to reach the lowest IQ population with its absolute materialist approach, God is a being, The heaven and hell are physical, the sin is real, and as you go up on the threshold, you can create more and more abstract thoughts, abstract reasoning.
And at the top, we will see the Christian atheists, if I can say that, the Christian originated atheists who are actually living by the Christian rules, the Ten Commandments, and avoiding the seven sins, but they are promoting atheism.
I mean...
Yeah, go ahead.
It takes a lot of intelligence to create a cell phone.
It doesn't take a lot of intelligence to use one.
Yeah.
So the question with regards to philosophy is how can you communicate it in such a way...
That people who aren't naturally drawn to philosophical exploration can benefit from it.
How can you make it user-friendly?
And I've talked about this before.
How can you have a graphical user interface over the Linux 1.0 or DOS 2.0 philosophy so that people can, so you can mass market it?
So you can mass market it, so to speak.
Now, of course, I have worked really hard to try and take philosophical concepts and, you know, I can machinate the polysyllables with the best of them.
But when it comes to speaking to the world, I need to find a way to translate philosophical abstractions into actionable and motivating principles that people can live by.
And so, now, it's very tough to compete with...
Going to heaven or going to hell?
Like, let's imagine there was some religious system out there that rewarded violence with paradise.
I mean, let's just go crazy.
Imagine that there was something out there, right?
Yeah.
How can you compete with that as a secularist?
What can you offer?
You can offer a cold grave with no consciousness of the worms eating through your bone marrow.
You can't offer a paradise.
And so, in terms of basic combat, how is that, in sort of basic conflict, how is that going to work?
Well, one of the ways that atheism can fight back against belief systems that are oppressive is to say, if those belief systems work, your life will be unbearable.
I mean, I can't even imagine a life where I could not talk about philosophy, where I could not speak my mind, where I could not pursue that which I'm passionate about in full frontal view of the world.
It'd be horrible.
An unbearable life.
A life of cowardice and crawling and cravenness and self-reproach.
You know, the devil wants to withhold courage from you until it's too late, and then he bursts illumination upon your form to the point where you see every step that led you to the dungeon with no way out.
So, as far as the IQ threshold of philosophical thinking, well, the challenge is if you want to sell a cell phone, make it easy to use.
Make it something that people can understand.
Make it enjoyable.
Make it exciting.
When it comes to selling philosophy to the masses, make it digestible, make it comprehensible, make it fun, make it funny, make it energetic, make it motivating.
Arouse in the sleeping heart of the West a desire for adventure.
You know, there's that old thing, born too late to explore the new world, Born too soon to explore Mars.
Born just in time for culture wars.
Yay, me!
And so we all have a desire for courage.
Look at video games.
Look at action movies.
There is a lot of adventure.
People are bottled up.
And of course we want it all to be safe, but that's boring after a while.
We want the adventure of the intellect.
We want the adventure of language.
Jousting.
We want the adventure of debate.
We want the adventure that requires courage.
And if you can remind people that philosophy is understandable, it's actionable, it's...
Reason equals virtue equals happiness.
If you want to have happiness, you need to be courageous.
You need to stand up against the evil forces in the universe that want to take you over and piss on the light of your mind.
Have you go out like an old candle in a damp basement, finally running out of air, like a canary in a coal mine.
And so if you can make philosophy digestible, comprehensible, understandable, and motivating to bring into action, we all want to fight and we all want to win.
That's why we're at the top of the food chain.
That's how human society has always worked.
Now, we are in a place where we don't have to go Genghis Khan.
We're still in that place.
But at some point, we may not be in that place.
So, if I can peel people's eyeballs from the empty heroism porn of video games and superhero movies, and get them to understand that the mere, like, watching porn doesn't make you a family, and watching Wonder Woman doesn't make you a hero.
In fact, in some ways, porn would, I imagine, bleed your capacity for a family, maybe even your desire.
For a family, Google NoFap.
But, in the same way, or and in the same way, I would say that watching celluloid CGI heroism on a screen saps from you the desire to leave the theater and intellectually defend that which is the most precious to you, I hope, which is your freedom of conscience, your freedom of speech, your freedom of thought, your freedom of motion, your freedom of Of wisdom.
So, I don't think...
The IQ threshold, of course, we have the challenge.
But I like the challenge.
The challenge is what makes it fun.
I mean, the one thing I can say, and I have been a giant veiny dick with regards to religion at points in the past, but the one thing that rescues me from Or rescues my reputation with myself regarding that is that one of the very first essays that I wrote before I even had a podcast was Proving Libertarian Morality, was working on universally preferable behavior.
That was right at the beginning of what I did, and I have worked very hard.
I mean, I worked very hard to write that book.
I've made it available for free for years.
It's been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.
It's had significant impact on people's thinking.
That's pretty good.
So I knew that there was a void when it came to ethics with regards to atheism, and I worked like hell to fill that void with the clearest, most clarifying language and arguments that I could come up with.
And I've had dozens of debates on this.
Program regarding UPB and ethics and all that.
So yes, I was a giant veiny dick to religious people.
But on the other hand, I did at least fill the void that I knew was there at the heart of atheism and from the very beginning of my public philosophical career.
That was number one.
That was like the third essay or maybe even the second essay that I ever had published.
The first was The Stateless Society and Examination of Alternatives.
I think the second was Something About Worse is Better.
And I think the third was Proving Libertarian Morality.
So, and I of course thought that this was going to be, oh wow, atheists are going to love this.
We have finally found the ought from the is that has been eluding philosophy for thousands of years.
We finally have virtue without God.
We finally have virtue without the armed might and vicious hyper-regulation of the state.
We now have the proof for morality.
Oh, how naive I was.
I thought there would be fireworks in the streets.
There would be celebrations and ticket-tape parades, not for me, but for the answer, down the very avenues of atheism which I had skulked about and inhabited and danced down the cobblestone streets of rational thought since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.
The celebration shall roar forth!
We finally have the cure for the cancer of relativism!
Which kills more people than cancer.
And there was a...
Yeah, it's interesting.
I don't agree with this particular aspect.
Oh, can you tell me more?
No, it's, you know, I just don't really know it's for me.
And a couple of venomous little pissant articles about it and so on.
It just vanished.
Poof.
Amazing.
Amazing.
And that was...
Well, I knew it was going to take a while.
I mean, it wasn't like, oh, I published this article and then I worked on the book a little while later and so on, released the book and so on.
I was not expecting it to be an overnight turnaround, but I thought that it would at least be something that, you know, there's a guy in the desert who says he's dying of thirst and he just needs some water, and if you could just get him some water, and then you find a bottle of water buried in the sand...
You hand it to him and he's like, the hell's this?
I don't want this.
Ew.
And he throws it aside.
It's like, I'm sorry, maybe I mistook what you were begging me.
And so for years, like I grew up, people saying, oh, religious morality, superstition.
Okay, well, what's the rational proof for secular morality?
Well, it can't be tradition because that's religious.
Yeah.
I know the power of the state.
I'm like, I don't really think you want to go that route.
You don't want to be an atheist who's substituting state power for Christian morality, because you know what that makes you?
An asshole totalitarian communist.
Hmm, I wonder if any time in history atheists have tried to substitute state power for religious conscience.
Ah yes, that time when close to 100 million people died.
Relativism is Satanism.
Relativism is the devil's handiwork, for want of a better phrase.
100% agree.
Yeah, because if you want to win against people, the best thing you can do is make them pacifists.
Then you can just walk in and take them over, because they won't fight back and they have no weapons.
And also they believe they have nothing to defend.
If I go to a square mile of Sahara and I say, I'm going to take this over, well, nobody cares about it, nobody values it, so nobody's going to fight me back.
Try that with a square mile of Manhattan, well, you're going to have quite a different response.
And so when you make your culture a desert, when you make your culture arid, when you make your culture...
Something that is a stain upon the earth that can only be scrubbed away by foreign extremism.
Well, you've got nothing to defend.
And if you make people relativists, they have no values to defend.
So if you're an absolutist, a fanatic, and other people are relativists, you're going to win.
You care more for the victory.
Because you believe in victory as an absolutist, whereas the relativists don't believe in victory or loss.
No colors, man.
Just gray.
First of all, gray is a mixture of color, and there are different shades of gray, but anyway.
So, to overcome the IQ threshold of philosophical thinking, that is the great challenge of philosophers.
Listen, theology can be enormously complicated.
I may just read through some St.
Augustine or Tertullian, I believe, because it is absurd.
I mean, this is complicated stuff.
Read of some of the Buddhist teachings.
Read.
It is complicated stuff.
However, however, there are Bible stories for children.
The religious folks have found a way to translate abstruse and obtuse theological complexities to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Yes, exactly.
And that's been my goal, my job.
Yeah, well, what if I say to you that The reason I dissect Christianity is because I wanted to strip away every fairy tale-ish imagery from it.
For example, the existence of God was replaced with the abstract representation of the perfect human being.
The afterlife is a consequence loop which keeps you on the path even at your dead bed.
So if you strip away everything, you will get a pure, very easily consumable value system.
I have a feeling that maybe the creators, the founders of Christianity were just pegged up a very easy, very simple philosophy in this religious package to be able to sell to everybody.
Yeah, I mean, maybe you can, Tibor.
I can't go back.
You know, in terms of like, well, let's merge this and let's, I mean, maybe you can go back.
I can't.
I wish I could sometimes.
I wish I could.
I wish I could return to the faith I had as a child.
I wish I could return to the serious with which I took God and the devil and Jesus as a child.
I wish I could go back into those tiny footprints and walk that path.
Let me finish my quote here.
I'm still in the middle of a sentence.
Okay.
Those footprints are too small for me now and they're encased in concrete and I see where they lead, but I wish I could step back into those tiny footprints and walk with tender and dependent innocence under the umbrella of an all-loving God.
I wish I could.
I wish I could.
I can't because I cannot undo everything.
The reasoning that has led me to where I am.
It would be a repudiation, not just of my life's work, which is relatively, you know, if saving the world meant a repudiation of my life's work, it'd be very tempting.
I don't think the world works that way, however.
But to fall back into the secure arms of Jesus and God and to realize that That I stood on a flat plane with the sun sinking in the distance and a soul that stretched like my shadow to infinity.
That I could be an agent not just of my own individual will, but something motivated and moved by the divine, by the all-knowing, by the omniscient, by the all-powerful.
My goodness.
What a great thing that would be.
Jesus, take the wheel.
That I must only ask what perfect morality wishes for me to do and do that.
What, you know, it's as Hamlet says, although about a different topic.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
And If God spoke to me tomorrow, that would be an empirical fact that I would have to take into account when I was formulating what reality was.
In my metaphysics, if God spoke to me and I would of course, if I heard voices in my head, Other than the useful ones that help me polish my arguments, if I heard voices in my head, first thing I would check is my mental health.
But if there was a sane voice that informed me of information I could not possibly obtain or had not obtained on my own, or if a voice informed me of knowledge that no human being possessed is yet, which I had no particular path to achieve, well...
That would be a different situation.
And I am not fundamentally opposed to that should that happen.
That would be an amazing experience.
And God has done it countless times throughout history.
If we believe the Bible, if we believe the statements of religious people, God has more than whispered.
He has Bellowed like a trumpet into the ears of some.
But not me.
Never me, though I avidly pursued God as a child.
Never.
People say, oh, well, that's a test of faith.
Well, the problem is, like, I'm sorry, I'm trained in thought.
I'm trained in philosophy.
There's no null hypothesis.
Sometimes God talks to people, and that's really helpful to them.
Well, God has never talked to you, and that just shows you that God exists all the more.
It's like, no, no, I'm sorry.
That's not how philosophy works.
There's no null hypothesis for that.
God speaks to you, that's how you know there's a God.
God doesn't speak to you, that's how you...
Yeah, I can't.
I can't.
And it's not even willful, stubborn, like I literally can't.
It's not like, well, I resent it, or...
I can't.
I can't.
You know, I can't pick up the phone and pretend I'm having a conversation with a dial tone.
I'm sorry for everyone with a cell phone.
A dial tone is what used to happen when there was no...
I can't do it.
I can't hold up a hand puppet and think I have a friend.
I can't...
It's not possible.
It's not possible.
You know, if there was a God and he gave me the capacity to reason, which interfered with my acceptance of his existence on hearsay and faith, that's not a kind God.
To say, Steph, you have an extraordinary capacity for language and metaphor and rationality and critical thinking, and I'm going to hide beyond the impenetrable clouds of rational thought.
I'm going to hide behind the reason I gave you and demand you believe in me.
That's like paying your kid 50 bucks if they win at hide-and-go-seek at home and then going for a drive.
Oh, you didn't find me.
What a shame.
Sorry.
That's a dick move.
That's a dick move.
And if I found a path to a God through that, I would not find a path to a God I could respect.
Because universality is universality.
I can't have...
You know, I say to people, you can't have opposite standards for government than you have for people, because government is just people.
I can't have an opposite standard for a god than I would have for a virtuous human being.
As I've talked about with people, and as I've done...
I did a show, podcast, like seven or eight years, or nine years ago, maybe, called Power or Virtue, a Love Story, about whether you're worshipping power or you're worshipping virtue.
And...
I don't...
I don't have...
It's not even the capacity...
I don't have the desire to do a 180 on carefully reasoned arguments for the sake of emotional comfort.
The whole point of the reasoned arguments is to get to the truth.
And if there is then some...
This standard called, well, you have all of these recent arguments, all of these carefully assembled syllogisms and all of this carefully constructed chain of evidence and causality, but it'll make you feel better if you do X. It's like, well, then what the hell was the point of that?
What was the point of...
Decades of philosophy.
What was the point of the suffering that philosophy has at times engendered within me?
The isolation, the fracturing of relationships, the discontent, the knowledge of what is coming unless we change course.
What was the point of all of that suffering?
And this is not an argument.
You could say fallacy of some costs.
I understand all of that.
But...
What was the point of all of that hot-footed pursuit of truth that, you know, there was an old, they call it trial by fire, right?
There was an old methodology for pretending you knew something about guilt or innocence in the past in sort of medieval Europe in places where you had to grab an iron out of a hot fire.
If you were accused of a crime, you had to grab an iron out of a hot fire.
You'd pull it out.
And you'd let it go.
And if you wound became infected, you were guilty.
And if you wound did not become infected, you were innocent.
The trial by fire.
They also did it where you would reach in for boiling water and so on.
So...
What was the point of that trial by fire?
If all I had to do was wish?
If all I had to do was believe?
If all I had to do was hope and things came true and things became real?
And again...
If God spoke to me tomorrow, or tonight, or now, I have an earpiece in one ear, nothing in the other, then I would accept and absorb that as, okay, something has changed.
But I do not have the capacity to wish things into existence.
I do not have the capacity to will things into material form.
And I can't go back.
And it's not like I have this huge desire to go back, but I just, no, you're not allowed because...
I can't.
And I don't think, as a society, we can.
We must push forward to philosophy.
Going back, I don't see how that's possible.
You know, even if I... Changed my mind about all of this tomorrow and said, I'm going to join the church, the church of reason.
I'm going to bring my formidable rhetorical skills to this endeavor.
I still don't think it would be enough.
The challenge is to get the atheists to stop being socialists and nihilists.
That has been my challenge for the past little while.
And I think there's some progress in that area, but we have to work pretty damn hard.
And...
Harshly in this area.
All right.
I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I hope that this helps.
And I really do appreciate the questions that you brought up.
But we got like seven callers tonight, which is going to be like an eight-hour show unless I move on.
But thanks very much, Tibor.
I appreciate your question.
All right.
Thank you very much.
Alright, up next we have Cornelius.
He wrote in and said, An old friend of mine has been on a self-destructive path for the better part of a decade with no signs of stopping.
While I have no longer any desire to help her out of her hole, I do think I have an obligation to, and have acted upon, a perceived obligation to help my other friend deal with the problem, which more or less makes me an accessory to an intervention.
Do you think that there is any way to avoid being dragged into the main conflict by choosing this route?
Or will I inevitably be sucked into the gravity well?
By extension, do you think that there is any merit in my friend attempting to intervene at all?
That's from Cornelius.
Hey Cornelius, how you doing?
I'm doing pretty good, Steph.
How are you?
I'm doing well, I'm doing well.
What's she been doing, this self-destructive?
Well...
That's a good question.
I wrote you guys a short book about this when I first sent my email, so I think I'll just kind of condense it here.
Basically, she is...
I guess for the better part of seven years, she has just made one terrible decision after another, and it's culminated in her getting married to a Tunisian man who...
He's a few years older than her, pressured by his parents, is violent, sexually frustrated, all of the above.
And, you know, she's thinking, oh, maybe I'll move in with him and his parents when they move to Qatar.
So there's even more stuff, but that's the basic gestalt, if you will.
Does she have her job?
Yeah.
She used to.
I mean, that also plays in.
It's her mother that's been paying for all this stuff.
Is she pretty?
She had something once.
She does take care of her image, but her image is not good at all.
Why do you think she's on a self-destructive path?
Well, I mean, it all started back in high school with her parents' divorce.
She just started going into the whole drinking, drugs, partying thing, like whole hog, because her parents weren't there to basically say stop or to really comfort her or say, you know, this isn't the right path to go down.
And so she went down that path.
She went down the Shaving her hair, dyeing her hair like eight different colors in one year to the point where it didn't grow back.
And ever since she's been sleeping around, apparently she claims now, three years later, after having, I think the phrase I used was, shot through her barrel full of fish, she's back and saying, oh, I've had my experience, it's time for me to settle down.
And it all points to, at least the way I see it, it's a cry for help, but in a complete and utter lack of realization that the cry for help and that the answer that she's getting is basically hurt me.
I'm sorry, what do you mean by a cry for help?
What does that mean?
I mean, I know what the phrase means, that you think that she's acting in a self-destructive way in the hopes that someone will save her, but how do you know she's not acting in this way in the hopes of dragging other people down into the same pit of dysfunction?
I'm sorry, could you repeat the question?
Okay.
So...
How do you know she's, like, flailing around hoping that someone's going to pull her out of the quicksand of her life?
Or, like, differentiated from someone who's going down in quicksand, they don't want to get out, they want to pull other people down with them.
Okay.
You know, some people will say, come to my drug party...
And then you are saying, well, maybe it's a cry for help that they're trying to get you to stop them from taking all these drugs, or maybe they want to get you sucked into the same druggy lifestyle, and that's why they're saying, come to the drug party.
Yeah, that's...
Yeah, I see your point there.
And to be honest, I think I'm leaning more towards the fact that she does want to drag other people down because she's had such a hard time.
Wait, because she's had such a hard time?
Oh, Mr.
White Knight!
I didn't think it would take him long to show up.
Hey, whoa!
She's a victim!
Well, I mean, if you go back to how her parents brought her up or did not manage to bring her up at all, there is an element of victimhood there.
I can't deny that.
I don't think anyone could deny that.
But I still recognize the fact that every decision that she has made since the age of 16 or 17...
Even before then, has been 100% her responsibility.
And she should know better.
She should know that what she's doing is...
Well, she's told better, right?
Sorry to interrupt.
But there are people around her who say, I assume, yourself and others, this is a bad idea, you should not do this, right?
And here's why.
Right.
So she's full access to people who would help her make better decisions, who are committed, as you were at some point, and your friend is now still, who are committed to having her or helping her make better decisions, right?
Exactly.
So she doesn't want better decisions.
Right.
Now, do you know much about her upbringing?
Do you know what may have gone...
You can just give me very sketchy details, roughly.
I can give you the sketchy details.
Basically, everything that you have ever mentioned in one of your Gene Wars presentations that could have gone wrong, except perhaps sexual abuse went wrong.
Um...
So...
Man, where do I start?
Um...
Her own parents were both victims of parental abuse.
They had no respect for each other, and basically, by extension, they had no respect for her.
And then, you know, she gets that from them, and she has no respect for them, and just has a terrible time making friends, being able to talk to people, being able to reason things out with people.
And all that came to a head When her parents divorced and she was sort of liberated from their gays, that's when she went whole hog partying because she had like a seven-month period where she lived with my other concerned friend.
So it's basically a mess.
It's a mess.
And how, I mean, she's older than you, right?
No, she's younger.
She's what?
She's younger than I am.
She's younger than you are?
Not by much, but she's younger.
And why do you care about her?
I'm not saying you shouldn't.
I'm just curious why you're tying some of your life to this self-destructive person.
Well, that's the thing.
Um...
I don't know that I do really care what happens to her personally anymore, which is why I asked the question.
But no, you care in proxy, right?
I mean, because you're having another friend deal with the problem.
So you care to some degree.
Yes, to some degree.
It's a very small degree.
Well, listen, if it's really small, I'm going to move on to the next caller because I try not to deal with tiny problems in this show.
I'm not trying to threaten you, I'm just sort of pointing out that if it's like, Steph, I was mildly upset because I bought some milk at the grocery store and it seemed a little out of, it was sold close to its best buy date and they didn't tell me, it's like, sorry, we deal with slightly bigger fish on this sea hunt.
Yeah, well, that gets to the real problem here, which is that my other friend, who is much, much more involved and does care a lot more about the situation, She's reached a point in dealing with it where she has to ask herself the same question.
Should I help ever again?
Should I bother?
Should I care?
And there's a stepping stone that needs to be stepped over, which is the fact that we think that she might hurt herself if she is told anything.
What do you mean, if she's told anything?
If she's criticized, she might kill herself.
She might hurt herself or worse.
Right.
So that's terrorizing people, right?
Yeah.
Right.
So there's no free speech involved in that relationship.
You can't speak your mind because you're afraid she's going to chew her arm off or stick her finger in a pencil sharpener and crank or something like that, right?
Okay, so there's no free speech in that relationship, right?
Right.
Exactly.
All right.
So you can't help her because she's, you know, over you as hanging this sword of Damocles of self-harm.
Right.
Right.
And let me ask you this.
Is she a good person?
Does she help people?
Is she a positive influence on those around her?
Is the world made a better and brighter place by her courageous moral presence?
No.
It is not.
Okay.
Because she is not moral.
Nothing she does is moral.
Have you known her to be mean or cruel or difficult to people or a net negative in people's lives?
Not so much when I was closer to her, but as time has moved on, yes.
One really important example was this other friend of mine whose house she was living at for these seven months.
This other friend's My mother got cancer.
And she had no one really to tell.
It was a shock, as I'm sure you're aware.
And she told this girl who's the problem.
And the girl couldn't even say, like...
I'm there for you before moving on to a, you know, I got this text from my dad, and OMG, I hate my dad so much.
So, yeah, okay, so the woman she was staying with, the woman's mother got cancer, and she's trying to talk about this with the woman she's putting up, this friend in question, or ex-friend in question.
And the ex-friend could barely listen to her before bringing it back to her own problems, right?
Exactly.
Right.
Hey, Cornelius, would you like to hear a provocative thesis?
I would.
I would.
Thank you.
I'm not going to speak about this woman in particular.
I've heard, obviously, a little bit about her.
I could, but I won't.
I'm just going to, let's say, there's a woman called Sally.
And Sally is a pretty horrible person.
She manipulates people.
She uses people.
She's greedy.
She's selfish.
She cheats people.
She lies to people.
She's an addict.
She causes people no end of heartache and heartbreak.
Now, she cannot respect herself or love herself for this kind of behavior, for being a chameleon, a predator, a manipulator on others.
And I do believe that we have a conscience.
Now, I know that there are people...
Sociopaths or whoever, like, they say, oh, I have no conscience, I have no conscience.
But nonetheless, I do believe that those people still have pretty unsatisfying lives as a whole.
But there are people who have a conscience and who still act badly.
The causes of that, let's not worry about at the moment, just what happens and how it plays out.
They act in ways that are hateful to good people, and they end up hating themselves.
Because there's a good part of them that has struggled with their bad impulses, their immoral impulses, their evil impulses perhaps, and has failed on the evil impulses the person has chosen, you know, the devil on one shoulder, the angel on the other.
The angel keeps speaking loudly and the devil sometimes only whispers, but nonetheless, you turn to what the devil points at and take your greedy shit on the street there.
And so maybe, maybe, just maybe, people who are self-destructive are self-destructive because they're destructive.
And maybe they end up self-destructive because they're hateful people.
There's a possibility for some subsection of people who are self-destructive.
Because we look at self-destructive people and we think, oh, you know, they have low self-esteem or they don't think they're worthy of good things in life.
And yeah, I'm sure there's some truth in that for some people.
But sometimes I think it's possible that they are on a self-destructive path Because the wages of sin is death.
It's all they've earned.
It's all maybe they feel they deserve and maybe it is in fact all they do deserve.
It's just a possibility.
What do you think?
Some harsh words, man.
Harsh words.
No, I... Yeah.
Yeah, that's...
Even though I'm not involved that much with it, it does pain me that that is the conclusion that I reached.
It sucks.
Yeah, maybe this is what she's earned by her actions.
And if you're willing to admit you've done wrong and apologize and make amends and so on, then I think you can change this.
But if you're If you're just still committed to making the world a worse place by your presence, well, there's a reason, Cornelius, that we don't do bad things.
Or we try not to, or we make amends if we do, because we don't want to end up trying to wipe our own evil off the planet.
So my question though is, Why is any of this in your life?
Well, we went to the same school together.
I'm still very close with the other friend.
We go to college together.
That explains nothing.
You understand?
Oh, yeah.
No, because I do care a little bit.
Why?
Why do you care?
What has she done to earn your caring?
I mean, I assume you have, I hope, you have some good people in your life who've earned your caring, who've earned your loyalty, who've earned your respect, mom, right?
I hope that you've had good people in your life.
I hope you have good people in your life who earn your respect.
What has this woman done to earn your regard, to earn your concern, to earn your attention?
How does she deserve the precious time that you have in this world being devoted to her?
What has she done to make that happen in you?
Well, it's a bit far removed from today, but we used to be very good friends.
She was the only person that I could talk to at the school in a more...
What would you say the word is?
Less filtered, I guess.
More personal.
So she was a good listener before your friend's mother got cancer.
Yeah, with me at least she was.
Okay.
So she was a good listener.
Yeah.
Okay.
And how long has it been since she was a good listener?
Like I said, very far removed.
How long?
Probably three or four years now.
If it gives you any perspective, the last time I saw her, she was under the influence for the entire encounter.
Let's say that a really good person comes along into your orbit, Cornelius.
A good person, like a...
Morally strong and proud and courageous individual comes along and finds out about this quagmire you have going on in your life.
What do you think that that moral, good, strong person is going to think?
Watch out.
Yeah, it's not good.
A man is known by the company he keeps, right?
You are the sum total of the five people in your life you spent the most time with, in some ways.
In some way.
Because it seems to me, Cornelius, that you may have what some people call a scarcity mentality.
I must try and find some way to rescue this friend because three or four or five years ago she showed me some kindness a couple of times.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
The boat has sunk.
Only this half-rotten rain barrel is the only thing keeping me afloat.
I can't look for anything else because it's all I have.
It's not...
My concern is not, you know, I mean, whether you have the chance to change this person's course or your friend's...
I mean, forget it.
Forget it.
Forget it.
I doubt a skilled therapist would have much luck with someone like that, right?
Yeah, she doesn't want to go to therapy.
She thinks she's above it.
Sure, I understand.
So she doesn't even think there's a problem, right?
Nope.
Neither does her mother.
She's going to go off and get beaten up and cut her.
You take what you want and you pay for it.
Choices and consequences.
But my question is, who's not in your life because this shit's in your life?
What kind of peace and love are you not getting because this drama is floating around in your life?
Who's being driven away because of your scarcity mentality?
Wow, it's really hard to make new friends, so I better hang on to this dysfunctional, decaying death orbit of self-destructive behavior and its consequences and its ripple effects.
Because, you know, it's really hard to make new friends, so I've got to hang on to this old shit.
No, no, no, no.
It's hard to make friends because you're hanging on to this old shit.
Because that is a clear signal of your self-esteem and what you think you're worth and what you think you deserve in life.
This can't be the best you can summon in the world regarding relationships and friendships and positivity.
I mean, you sound really down to me.
And I know it's maybe just this topic, but even as a whole, why can't you get...
It's just so easy...
Why can't you get better friends?
You won't get better friends until you let this shit go.
You won't.
What?
You want to disagree with me?
Just disagree with me.
I'm just telling you my thoughts.
I'm not saying I'm right.
I do not disagree with you at all.
I don't have any problems making friends personally.
I don't think my other friend does either.
You don't know.
Do you know something that...
I do know something that you don't.
Which is this is on your mind, right?
I'm not saying you're obsessing about it, but it's on your mind, right?
Enough to the point where of all the things you could have talked about with me, you chose to talk about this.
It's on your mind.
It's weighing you down.
You don't think that has an effect on the kind of friend you can attract?
Or the kind of lover you could attract?
You don't think that has any effect on your enthusiasm and positivity and energy in the world?
You don't think you're not spraying out clear signals?
That you're swimming along in the Caribbean Sea and everyone is laughing and playing beach volleyball and throwing a water frisbee and having a great time and you're being dragged down by a kraken.
You're being dragged down by a giant squid.
You don't think that's going to have any effect on how you come across?
Yeah, no, I agree with you.
I'm not going to disagree with you on that.
I am going to offer a little bit extra information.
I don't know.
Maybe Mike knows this.
Maybe he read the full email.
Maybe not.
But I haven't interacted with her personally more than three times in the past three years.
So she's not affecting the company that I keep right now.
In a negative way, I'd say more of it The fact that I can tell this story and see these things wrong with what she's done and actually talk about that with other people, that's actually gotten me more friendships, in a sense.
It's opened more doors.
So...
I don't know.
What do you think of that?
You've no emotion about this topic, Cornelius.
You have no emotion about this topic.
I mean, you've got to listen.
I hope everyone who talks to me listens back to it.
It's really, really important.
Because there's one thing in the moment, in the conversation, in the public aspect of it.
You need to listen back to it.
You have no emotion about this.
You might as well be reciting the plot of the most boring movie you've ever seen.
Right?
And what that means is that, I think what it means is that you are avoiding mourning.
Your friend is gone.
Your friend is highly unlikely.
Virtually impossible, in my obviously amateur opinion.
Virtually impossible for her to prevent this spiral.
She's gone.
Now, if you had connected with that, then you would be sad about it.
But you sound empty about it.
Which means she's still dominating your emotional apparatus with false hope.
Almost nothing empties us out emotionally more than false hope.
All delusions empty us out emotionally, but false hope is one of the worst.
If you accepted that if she praises the behaviors...
That she is undertaking.
If she's cool and edgy and funky and fun and spontaneous.
Oh, I hate that word, spontaneous.
I'm spontaneous!
No, you're manic, you're crazy, you're random.
I'm spontaneous.
If she's praising the behaviors that she's pursuing, she's not going to stop them.
They're only going to escalate.
Whatever we praise, we escalate.
So, from the outside, Cornelius, I can't detect that you...
Give even half a rat's ass about this friend of yours.
This is what's confusing.
You're calling in to talk about this.
You tell me, well, it's not a big problem.
I barely talked to her in years, and it's not really an issue, and it doesn't have any effect on my ability to get friendships and so on.
And it's like, okay, so if it's not a big problem, why the hell are we talking about it, right?
And if it is a big problem, why are you emotionally vacant about it?
I hadn't actually thought of that.
Thanks.
It's not a thought.
I don't think you have problems with thoughts.
I think the feelings are more of a challenge for you.
Well, yeah.
I mean, when you think of her...
If you think of your friend or your ex-friend going down this path, accelerating, hitting the gas, if you don't care about her that much, it's going to be, well, that's a shame, but people make choices and...
You know, like a third cousin who got lung cancer after everyone told them to stop smoking.
It's a shame.
Just another example of what not to do in life.
Okay, then you could say, I don't care about her that much, but then why are we spending all this time talking about her?
If you do care about her, then why don't you have any of that caring in your voice?
Why is it a monotone, like you're bored?
And your friend, who's still trying to help.
This woman, right?
Is this the same friend whose mom had cancer?
Yeah, yeah, it's the same one.
So your friend is trying to help the woman who gave no shits about her mom having cancer.
Are you kidding me?
She, well, she's in a different boat than I am.
She's very, very distraught about it and has been.
Distraught about what?
About the friend who didn't care about her mom having cancer?
Yeah, she goes between being Like you said, mourning the friendship and being extremely angry with her.
But why?
Why is she tied emotionally into someone who didn't care about her mom having cancer while they were putting her up?
Yeah.
I mean, isn't that everything you need to know about this cold-hearted individual?
Yeah, yeah, your mom has cancer, but listen, I just got this text from my dad.
It's really pissing me off.
Come on.
Come on.
Where's her self-esteem?
Where's her self-protection?
What the hell?
It used to be pretty low, I'll tell you that.
Used to be?
Well, it's gotten better, but it was pretty low.
Oh, this is the better part?
Yeah.
That's not funny, man.
It's not funny.
No, it's not.
So she's as deluded about the situation, I would argue, as anyone.
Mm-hmm.
And if there are threats of self-harm choking and cloaking the relationship, it's not a relationship.
It's a relationship like being stuffed into the trunk of a car and driven someplace sinister is a relationship.
It's not a relationship.
Yeah.
Oof.
Well, um...
If she's not going to learn from reason, if she's not going to learn from good advice, if she's not going to learn from the clear empirical evidence of her life, right, the self-destructive friend, do you know the only way she's going to learn?
Consequences.
Do you know who's currently shielding her from those consequences?
Your friend.
Yeah.
Right?
Oh, I'll still be your friend.
I'll still call you.
I'll still see how you're doing.
No!
You give people good advice.
You listen to them.
You sympathize.
If they don't listen, it means they're not going to learn through reason.
They're not going to learn through evidence.
They're not going to learn through empiricism.
They're not going to learn through good, well-intentioned, well-meaning, honest, decent advice.
Which means there's only one other way that they're going to learn, which is rock bottom.
Also applies to societies as a whole, right?
So anyone who's enabling or pretending that the rock bottom isn't the necessary place to go, again, this is all just my opinion, just some idiot on the internet, but my opinion is the very best thing that could happen to this woman is rock bottom.
Because she doesn't even think there's a problem.
In fact, if you say that there's a problem, she probably thinks you're being a jerk.
And she's gonna go hurt herself, right?
So if you are standing between this woman and rock bottom, you're not helping her.
Right?
It's the function of a stone to fall.
And you know what happens if you're in the way of a falling stone?
You get a concussion.
Yeah, you get crushed.
You get crushed.
You get cracked.
You...
If somebody's on a self-destructive path, and they don't listen to advice, and you have to withdraw, and you have to go through the morning.
That's very sad.
Don't get me wrong.
It's very sad.
There's a line in my book...
The god of atheists.
The nihilistic young man is finally honest with himself when he's writing a song.
And one of the lines in the song is, I am what remains when history wins.
I am all that is left when history wins.
His own personal history won.
Is that choice?
Is that determinism?
At this point, it doesn't matter.
But you need to take a long, hard look at what in yourself is causing you to circle the drain with someone like this.
What it's costing you.
What it's costing you in terms of empathy.
What it's costing you in terms of anxiety.
What it's costing you in terms of opportunity costs for better relationships.
I'm telling you, if I, you know, we were chatting at a party and you were telling me this story about some woman who's whoring around and drugs and, you know, going to get beaten up in Qatar by some Tunisian guy, I'd be like, well, good luck with all of that, man.
I'm going to go chat with someone who's not involved in that unbelievable and ridiculous drama.
Like, why do you need this drama?
What does this drama serve?
Does it make you important?
Does it make your life exciting?
What's missing in your life that you're filling it up with this chaos and danger and self-destruction?
What's missing in you that you need to fill up with all of this?
Ice-splosion fireworks of dismal spectatorship.
I, uh...
You think it's your friend who's self-destructive.
It's both your friends who are self-destructive.
And you, who have a self-destructive impulse by being anywhere near this shit.
Huh.
I, you know, you're right.
I do believe I am.
You're absolutely right.
All right.
Well, I'll stop while I'm ahead.
I appreciate the call, Ian.
I think you know where I stand, but thanks a lot for calling in.
I do, sir.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Alright, up next we have Eric.
Eric wrote in and said, I engage in conversations with people with different beliefs slash views slash opinions on a fairly regular basis, although not nearly as much as Stefan.
My dad, for example, believes that some government involvement in the free market is necessary, and he always uses Rockefeller as an example of a greedy robber baron who uses underhanded tactics to eliminate his competitors without the aid of government.
I still can't seem to be able to explain to him how government intervention is bad, even though it seems like such an obvious, simple matter to me.
That's from Eric, and I thought it would be fun to do a roleplay where he played the role of his dad or other people with arguments, and Steph could try and poke holes in them.
So welcome to the show, Eric.
Hey Eric, how you doing?
Alright.
Now, I did consent to this roleplay.
But I thought that Mike told me I was going to play Christian Grey from Fifty Shades of Grey, so I'm going to need to change some of the backdrop and equipment in the show if it's just going to be verbal sparring.
So I just wanted to get you up to speed on that.
Steph, do you just want a helicopter?
Is that what you're telling me?
Oh!
All right.
Completely went over my head.
As helicopters generally do.
So, Eric, do you want to play your dad, and I'll play you or someone who's not your dad?
Yeah, I'll try.
It's not always easy for me to...
I don't know, because it's not always easy for me to really understand the argument.
You know, playing Devil's Advocate...
Understanding the argument on the other hand, because I'm the one that's arguing against it most of the time.
No, I know.
Basically...
But you're not arguing against it successfully, which is why I'm going to sort of say, like, if your golf swing keeps going awry, I'm going to reach around your hips and I'm going to help you fix your swing, right?
Right, right.
Now, basically the argument is, like, for example, with the example with Rockefeller...
We know, sorry, I hate to interrupt you when you're just nodding, but We know, everybody knows, like everybody who's interested in this topic knows about the sort of greedy robber baron and so on.
And these guys were just riding roughshod over the population and they were squeezing out competitors with using unjust and wrong methods all within the free market.
And the desperate consumers who were being ground into nutmeg under the giant stone wheels of their monopolies had to reach out and cry out for the government to bring in the Sherman Antitrust Act so that these companies could be broken up and there could be some space for the free market to operate.
We all know that.
Particular story, right?
Right.
So your father would say something like that, right?
A little more specific, though, is he would specifically talk about Rockefeller building a gas station or something similar to that next to another one, undercharge the prices, drive the other one out of business, and then when they go out of business, jack the price up higher than what the other ones was.
Okay, so he would say something like that, right?
No, he would say something like that.
So I would say, I would say that.
I would say, look, if there was a possibility that Rockefeller was a very successful businessman, not a corrupt guy who, like Mr.
Burns style, just, you know, was a creepy guy with spots and no discernible business expertise who mysteriously owned a nuclear power plant, but if he was a very good businessman and if...
He was legitimately out-competing the competition.
Like, if he was efficient, if he was cost-effective, if he was innovative, if he had very different business methods that were more successful than his competitors, is it understandable that his competitors would not like him?
Yeah.
Okay.
And again, we're just theorizing here.
Now, if his competitors...
Were the ones who wrote the history of Rockefeller.
Do you think that they would write negatively about him?
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, they would.
If the government wanted to have power...
Over the market.
Would it accept the arguments of his competitors that Rockefeller was just some mean bad guy in order to pursue their goal of having more and more power over the economy?
And of course if they offered to take care of Rockefeller to his competitors then those competitors would give those politicians lots of donations and lots of positive press and lots of good things, right?
Mm-hmm.
Now So these are all possibilities, and I haven't proven anything yet.
I'm just looking at a possibility.
And I would say, Dad, would you be surprised to learn that the person who wrote the most popular work on Rockefeller was the brother of the treasurer of the Pure Oil Company, company which was being put out of business by Rockefeller's Standard Oil prices.
In other words, that the person who wrote the most about Rockefeller and coincidentally the most negatively about Rockefeller had a direct conflict of interest in that Rockefeller was putting her brother out of business and his entire company.
Massive millions of dollars of family wealth was bound up in all of this.
Huh.
I wasn't actually aware of that one.
Yeah, so you want to look up the journalist Ida Tarbell, I-D-A-T-A-R-B-E-L-L. Her brother was the treasurer of the Pure Oil Company, could not compete with Standard Oil's low prices.
Sorry, real quick, could you spell it again?
Sure.
I-D-A-T-A-R-B-E-L-L. She wrote article after article, lambasting him as a robber baron and calling for government action, and she wrote an entire book about the guy, lambasting stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Now, another thing that I would say about Rockefeller...
Is, if he was a robber baron, then clearly he was not innovative in business.
Like, you can't really be both.
You can't just, like a robber baron, you can't just be horribly predatory and use your power in evil intent and also be very innovative in business and very efficient in business, right?
Right.
Well, I think my dad would argue that it's because he owned the land that the oil came from, and you don't need to be very innovative in order to just mine oil.
All right, okay.
So, in other words, if Rockefeller was innovative, then that would be an argument against him being a robber baron.
Yes.
Okay, good.
Well...
Now, it would.
If he said you don't need any intelligence to drill for oil, or you don't need to be innovative to accumulate that amount of wealth, then if Rockefeller was innovative in the business world, then that would undermine the argument that he was just some robber baron, right?
I don't know if that would undermine the idea in my dad's mind.
No, no, no, I understand that.
But if your dad made the case that you don't need much innovation to get rich through oil, then if Rockefeller...
Well, first of all, Rockefeller didn't primarily become rich through oil.
That's sort of misunderstanding.
So let's just do a quick 411 of the guy, right?
Rockefeller, guy came from a dirt poor background.
His father was a peddler, like wandering street to street selling buttons and crap, right?
Barely made any money.
Guy was born in 1839...
You can get some more of this stuff from Mises.org.
He was one of six kids.
His first job when he graduated from high school at the age of 16, he was an assistant bookkeeper.
Do you know how much he made a day as an assistant bookkeeper?
I wouldn't begin to be able to guess.
Probably a very, very tiny amount.
How much do you think it would be in today's dollars?
Probably less than minimum wage would be my guess.
Less than $10 a day or so.
So at the time, it was 15 cents a day he was making.
But he worked very hard and he was a mad bastard for saving money.
So he started as an assistant bookkeeper.
He was good at sales.
So by 23, he'd saved up $4,000.
That's a hard-working, big-saving guy, right?
So he invested this four grand in an oil refinery.
Now listen, four grand back in the day, that's a staggering amount of money for a young man.
A lot of guys would be like, hey, I'm going to pull a Justin Trudeau and travel 4,000 different countries so that I can learn that there's no such thing as values.
So he took this money at the age of 23, didn't get married, didn't go party, didn't drink, didn't travel.
He invested it in an oil refinery.
And...
This, there was a lot of innovation.
So he would actually go and work the physical labor jobs of his employees to make sure that he understood how to be as efficient as humanly possible.
So this is a little quote from an economist who wrote about the guy, Dominic Armentano.
So the firm was originally Rockefeller, Andrews, and Flagler, and it later became Standard Oil, which still lives on in the acronym...
So, right?
So, the gas station was originally SO, Standard Oil.
So, the economist wrote that Standard Oil, quote,"...prospered quickly in the intensely competitive industry due to the economic excellence of its entire operations.
Instead of buying oil from jobbers..." They made the jobbers profit by sending their own purchasing man into the oil region.
They also made their own sulfuric acid and barrels, lumber, wagons and glue.
They kept minute and accurate records of every item from rivets to barrel bungs.
They built elaborate storage facilities near their refineries.
Rockefeller bargained as shrewdly for crude oil as anyone has before or since.
And Sam Andrews coaxed more kerosene from a barrel of crude than the competition could.
In addition, the Rockefeller firm put out the cleanest burning kerosene and managed to profitably dispose of most of the residues in the form of lubricating oil, paraffin wax, and Vaseline.
So, two things.
It's not the only two things.
But two things that Rockefeller and his company did is, number one, what's called vertical integration, right?
So, to produce stuff, let's say, to produce all of this stuff, they needed a bunch of coal, right?
Right.
So what you do, before Rockefeller, what most people did was they said to some coal company, okay, we need three years of coal from you.
Here's the price that we're going to go with.
Now, at some point, that price may vary.
It may go up, it may go down.
If it goes down, they're going to want to renegotiate for you to pay them a different amount, right?
If it goes up, they want variable interest rates.
They want to go up and down.
But you sign something so you can plan ahead.
We're going to pay you X amount of dollars for the next three years.
Now, if the coal, again, it will change in price, and maybe they'll abide by the agreement, and maybe they won't.
Maybe the coal company goes out of business.
Maybe there's a big fire.
Maybe it's some big problem, right?
And so what Rockefeller and his company did was they did what's called vertical integration.
So instead of saying, well, someone's going to make our barrels, someone's going to produce our coal, someone's going to make our wagon, someone's going to even build the company a store, They did it all themselves.
Now, there are pluses and minuses.
You don't get as much specialization, but you get a much more reliable system.
And so, you can really monitor the quality of your own inputs.
You're not going to ship substandard coal to yourself.
You're not going to use substandard wood in the building of your factories and so on.
And so you get high-quality stuff.
You don't get as much variability in price, right?
So just buy the coal mine, buy the coal plant, or whatever it is, and you're all set.
So that's number one.
This is very innovative.
Number two was the oil industry is incredibly wasteful, or at least it was before Rockefeller, right?
So you'd make the oil, like you'd make the refined oil or the crude oil, and you'd end up with all this crap.
But they figured out how to turn this leftover crap into stuff like lubricating oil, paraffin wax, Vaseline paint, varnish, and other things.
In fact, in Rockefeller's company, the waste that was left over from the production of oil was turned into 300 different products.
Now, that's huge, because if you can't find a use for that stuff, you've got to pay to dispose of it.
Now, of course, this is before environmental regulations and so on, but you still had to pay to get rid of it, and you couldn't make money from it.
I mean, you can't just dump it on the factory floor.
You have to ship it out somewhere and find some place to house it or put it.
And so the fact that they were able to make 300 products and make money from the waste that other people had to pay to dispose was enormously valuable.
Now, one of the things that's so important is that, like, you build an oil refinery, right?
And you spend, I don't know, $50 million to build your oil refinery.
Now, the more customers you add...
The cheaper it is per customer to produce the oil, right?
So from 1869, the Rockefeller Company cut its cost of refining a gallon of oil from three cents in 1869 to less than half a cent by 1885.
So that's astonishing.
I mean, that's incredible.
That's like one-sixth of the price in, what, 16 years.
It's incredible.
Now, if Rockefeller was some robber baron, then he would have kept all of that money for himself, but he didn't.
He passed a lot of these savings along to the consumer.
The price of refined oil from 1869 was more than 30 cents a gallon and went down to 18 cents.
Sorry, went down to 8 cents by 1885.
So that, again, is very, very significant.
So he's got vertical integration going.
He's getting all the waste products turned into profitable products.
Things that he can sell.
And he's reducing the cost of producing oil enormously.
And he passes those savings along to the consumer.
Now, you can't just turn around and say, I'm going to imitate that.
I'm going to just go and do all the vertical integration.
This stuff takes a long time to set up and takes a lot of skill to manage.
Now, another thing that really annoyed his competitors...
Was that shipping oil?
I mean, you basically had to use rail to ship oil.
And because he had such an enormous volume, the railroad companies gave him a huge discount.
Because it's just easier, one person to build, you can get a whole train full of the stuff, only one place to stop, not a lot of different pickups and drop-offs, right?
Like, I mean, if you're UPS, you want to take 100 packages from one place than one package from 100 different places.
You can give a much better deal to the guy who's going to send 100 packages from one place.
And so, because Rockefeller was producing so much...
He got incredible deals from the railroad industry.
Now, the railroad industry, Cornelius Vanderbilt was one of the guys in the railroad industry.
He said, listen, if you give me the same volume of business that Rockefeller does, I'll give you exactly the same deal.
But because nobody produced or was as efficient as Rockefeller, no one could do it.
So everyone else had to pay more and pay more and pay more.
And what he did was he was so good at making kerosene, which is, I guess, one of the byproducts of the oil industry, that in the 1870s, Rockefeller facilitated the replacement of whale oil by kerosene, right?
This is the primary source for light in America, right?
You know, there's little wicks and there's a little...
I used to use these when I worked up north sometimes.
You've got these little oil flasks, these wicks that go up and you light them off.
It's huge.
It's huge.
So, in fact, Rockefeller saved the whales because the whales were being decimated because of everyone's thirst for whale oil.
And this was huge.
Whale oil was so expensive relative to kerosene that when kerosene replaced whale oil, it meant that you could actually do things after dark, like work, and you could read, and so on.
And this was very big.
It actually exploded literacy rates and helped the spread of books and libraries in the 1870s.
And Rockefeller was very generous with his employees.
He paid them significantly more than the competition did.
Why?
Because he wanted the best.
And so he almost never had any strikes or labor disputes.
And if his managers came up with good ideas for making things more efficient or reducing the cost of things, he would give them big bonuses and paid time off as making an incentive for them to do all of this.
So this was all very innovative stuff.
A lot of this is kind of taken for granted now, but this was very, very innovative.
And the one thing that...
This woman who was the brother of the treasurer of a competing oil industry that stood to lose their family fortune, I'm guessing, if Rockefeller succeeded, the one thing that she popularized, which is what your dad would refer to in this conversation, the one thing she popularized was, you know, tell me if this makes sense, is this idea that, ah, you see, Rockefeller had so much money.
That he could artificially lower the cost of what he was selling to the point where all of his competitors were driven out of business and then he could jack up the prices enormously after they were driven out of business, right?
Yep, that's exactly what he said.
Yeah, economists don't believe this at all.
There's no evidence for it whatsoever.
This idea of predatory pricing and so on, no empirical validity.
It has never ever been demonstrated in the entire history of economics that a monopoly has ever been created in that way.
And it was never a tactic that was used by Standard Oil, which was never a monopoly anyway.
Now, the most they got was in the mid-80% dominance of the industry, which is huge, right?
But, I mean, that was Microsoft with PCs relative to Apple and all.
So they got into the mid-80s.
Now, by the time the government started investigating them for supposedly being a monopoly, I mean, his business practices had spread throughout the industry and so on.
So he was losing market share enormously.
So from the mid-80s, he'd gone down to only the mid-60s in terms of his dominance of the oil industry.
And so whatever monopoly there was, because he was kind of first to market with these innovations, they were then copied.
I mean, you can't patent vertical integration or anything like that.
So he was already losing whatever supposed monopoly he had, which is relatively temporary because he was so innovative.
So the market was solving it already when the government came trundling along.
And so, you know, regarding this, and I've heard this a million times, well, you know, there's so much money, you're going to lower your prices, drive everyone out of business, then jack this stuff up.
That is, I mean, it doesn't take a lot of thought, and this is sort of my concern about your dad and the sort of propaganda, right?
Right.
It doesn't take a lot of thought to realize that this is a very, very risky situation.
Business strategy, right?
Because if you're going to...
Like, if you're dominant in the market to the point where you supposedly have all of this magic money, let's say you have 80% or 80...
I think they had a high of 88% or so in 1890.
Then it went down to 64% by 1911.
So if you're selling 88% of the oil and then you sell below market price to, quote, drive out competitors...
You are losing a crap ton of money because you're selling the most oil.
So if you're selling below market, you're losing, like in real terms, more money than your competitors, right?
And how long is this supposed to take?
How long does it take to drive other people out of business?
See, if you're a competitor to somebody who's selling below market to drive you out of business, you can say that to your investors.
Listen, Rockefeller's crazy.
He's losing, you know...
X amount of money on every barrel of oil he sells.
He can't keep it up forever.
We just have to hang tight.
He's destroying his capital reserves.
He's going to have less money for R&D, less money for expansion, less money for improvement, less money to pay quality employees.
We're going to be able to poach them very easily.
All you have to do is give us some money and wait for him to self-destruct.
Because how long does it take to drive all of your competitors out of business by undercutting them?
Is it a decade?
Is it 20 years?
Maybe.
Maybe.
Maybe for some profit down the road.
Because let's say you do drive a bunch of people out of business because you're willing to lose money for 20 years or whatever.
What about people overseas?
They can ship oil to your...
What about Canada?
What about Mexico?
They can ship oil.
And what can you do about it?
I mean, so it doesn't work.
There's no history of it working.
Standard oil never did it.
And there's no example that I'm aware of in economics that says this ever.
It was a story told by the sister of the guy who was going to lose millions if, I guess, if Rockefeller succeeded, but it's not a valid concept in economics.
Well, I guess most people that believe this sort of thing believe that it takes a lot longer than 10 years, probably a year or less, to drive somebody out of business using those tactics.
But I guess...
In order for that to work, the businesses that would lose out would have to have tiny, tiny profit margins for them to go under that quickly.
Right.
And you would be losing more money than them.
If you've got 88% of the market and you're selling way below cost, and why would you?
You've already got 88% of the market!
Why would you want to risk that in order to get another couple of percentage points?
Well, they would argue that that's how he got 88% to begin with.
Except it's not.
Because there's no evidence that he ever sold below cost.
There's no evidence that he ever sold below cost.
Now, he sold below his competitors' cost.
Now, those competitors, like the people who were losing out to this guy, I mean, good lord.
I mean, think of the Democrats.
Last November, right?
They had a 30-year experienced politician.
Lose out to a guy who'd never run for office before.
Now, did they say, wow, you know, we really misread things, we really misjudged things, we must be so out of touch with the American population.
We better rejig things and fire things up again and maybe get some people, some changes at the top of the...
No, what did they do?
The Russians hacked the election!
They didn't tell the truth about why they lost.
They made up all these conspiracy theories.
Now, if you're a losing company...
If you're the head of a losing company, a company that's losing out to Rockefeller to Standard Oil, are you going to go to your shareholders and say, I'm incompetent.
I'm an idiot.
I'm not doing all the stuff that Rockefeller's doing.
You should sell my shares and go and buy his shares, or you should at least fire me, for heaven's sakes, and maybe sue me for fiduciary misconduct for not doing obvious things to protect the value of your investment.
No, he's not going to go there.
He's going to pull a Democrat party and he's going to blame everyone but himself.
Oh, they're undercutting us.
They've got this war chest.
The reason why they're able to charge less than us is because they're selling at a loss, but they're not telling anyone.
That's the kind of bullshit you're going to make up, right?
You're not going to say, well, the reason he can sell less than us...
It's because while I was courting all these people in Washington and I was having wonderful quail shoots in the marshes and I was going on sail-around-the-world trips with all of your shareholder money, while I was doing all this crap, he was figuring out how to turn whale oil into cell phones or, I don't know, how to turn waste byproducts into Russian brides or something, right?
Right.
Oh, real quick, by the way, the coal that you'd mentioned earlier, that is also very frequently given as an example of monopolies that existed without the intervention of government.
But see, what do they mean by monopolies?
monopolies no but sorry what I mean is if it is a monopoly because everyone else is selling oil for two cents but he's selling it for half a cent So everybody wants to buy from him.
Is that a monopoly?
What does that even mean?
Well, in this particular sense, it's not necessarily that one, for example, one coal mine has a monopoly and sells to everybody in that sense.
It's more that they have a...
A monopoly on employees, where if you live in this town, for example, you've got really not much choice but to work for the coal mine.
You don't have a choice to move somewhere else and get another job, per se.
For example, the song, St.
Peter, Don't You Call Me Because I Can't Go.
I owe my soul to the company store.
Because the coal mines...
Well, at least this is what we're told.
Would basically be self-sufficient for the company, but they would provide everything to their employees, like for example food, clothing and such, but they'd still have to pay for everything.
So they would So they had to get their – but they had a monopoly on all of that, so they had to get their livelihood or their everyday needs through the company that they worked for.
Sure.
No, I get it.
If you go to an all-inclusive resort or you go to a resort where – sorry, not an all-inclusive.
If you go to some resort and it's kind of in the middle of nowhere, you kind of have to eat at their restaurants, right?
Right.
They have a monopoly on food.
Those evil robber baron bastards with tanning oil.
So what?
So I don't understand.
I mean, you can open up a competing store, right?
Well, supposedly these people would become indebted to the company so that they couldn't, you know, like, for example, the line in the song that says, you know, I owe my soul to the company store.
I don't know if we want to base economic theories on folk songs written by communists.
Right, right.
I mean, come on.
Right, but of course, you know, but that's where the song supposedly came from.
Yeah, but look, I mean, let's just, sorry to interrupt, but let's say there's some town, right?
The town of Bobsville.
And Bobsville has a big mine, and the store is the company store, right?
Right.
Okay.
So if the store is selling stuff for too high a price, then you can just take your store, sorry, you can just take your home, convert it into a store, and sell stuff for cheaper.
Right.
Assuming that you can get the supplies that the company can get.
What do you mean if there's a mail service?
What do you mean if you can get the supplies?
I mean, you can go and get them.
You can wheel them in.
You can hire people to bring them in.
Assuming that you can do it at the same price that the company can.
Okay, but if you can't, then the company's not ripping anyone off.
If you can't sell it for cheaper than the company can, then the company's selling it as cheap as it can be sold.
Right.
I guess the argument at that point becomes, well, they're still not paying their employees enough to even be able to pay the cheap prices.
Well, if they're not paying their employees enough to live, then the employees need to go start a store and sell it for cheaper.
And if they can't, then it's not an economically viable mine.
to not be at the place where that mine is.
They got to move somewhere.
They got to go somewhere.
This happens all the time.
Mines get exhausted and everyone moves away and they move someplace.
Now you've seen all of these creepy ghost towns of like old mining towns that nobody's lived in for 50 years or 100 years.
So if you can't make it economically viable, then you go somewhere else, right?
Right.
Now, it couldn't be that there were alcoholics who drank themselves dry, like who drank the entire store dry and ended up with a bill that they were shocked and appalled about and blamed the company for their own alcoholism, right?
That could never possible.
I'm going to write a song about the company store, rip me off.
It's like, I don't know, I'd like to see some of the numbers there.
I'd like to see what you bought.
That's a good point.
There is a huge population of people in the world.
It's another one of those things that makes me glad that I've never drank.
Yeah.
No, there's a huge population of people in the world who blame the nefarious actions of others for their own screw-ups, right?
Right.
You know, how many people in the last recession, like the housing crash of 2007-2008, where people ended up not being able to pay their bills because they didn't read...
Not even the fine print, but they didn't read or understand the basic principles of variable rate mortgages, right?
How many people said, well, I took a lower interest rate with variable rate mortgage.
I was aware that there could be a risk, but it's okay because I buffered for that.
Or did they just sign some piece of paper when someone said, you get a loan at 2.5%, and then when it went up to 5% or 6% or 7%, they said, man, I got ripped off.
The bank is stealing from me and stuff like that, right?
Yeah, well, I'm sure that's happened plenty of times.
It happens all the time.
How many times do people say, it wasn't me?
Russia stole the election from us, folks!
Oh, something I hear on a constant basis, you know, when people have been divorced, or, you know, especially if they've been divorced more than once...
You know, the fault is never themselves.
It's always, well, you know, like, well, my spouse was terrible to me, he was abusive, and it was better that I got out of it.
And when you point out, it's like, well, you chose this person to begin with.
Oh, no, don't say that.
You know, oh, yeah, I've gotten tons of blowback from even suggesting that.
You know, it's like, okay, it's not your fault that you got abused immediately.
Except only to the point where you chose to be with the person that was abusive.
And of course they try to say, it's like, well, there's no way that I could have known beforehand.
I don't believe it.
I don't believe it at all.
I mean, I don't believe it at all.
People don't hide and camouflage that well.
But I don't know how to explain this either.
I'm a little lacking in the rhetorical skills, but...
I just find that the cough can be helpful.
Bullshit!
You know, something like that.
It can be enormously helpful.
The other thing, too, is that one of the reasons that the government, I think, didn't like Rockefeller was because Rockefeller, by making kerosene so cheap and allowing people to read into the wee hours, this was a time of great American political activity.
There were pamphleteers.
There was lots of stuff going on.
There was a great sense that America was drifting from the Constitution, especially after the Civil War and so on.
And there were lots of people writing.
I mean, just think of Lisander Spooner, The Constitution of No Authority.
This is great stuff to read about how voting is, you know, largely nonsense.
But the population was becoming enormously well-educated as the result of Rockefeller's innovations.
Most would say that's probably because...
Most people would say that it's because of the proliferation of public schools.
Yes, of course.
Public schools always trying to inculcate a sense of skepticism towards government.
Oh, yeah.
Those government schools.
Yeah, I'll wait for that for the moment that...
Coca-Cola puts out an ad showing a penny being cleaned by being dropped in a bottle of Coke or something.
People's teeth rotting or whatever.
I even mentioned something like, for example, college.
You send an idiot to college and all you get is an educated idiot.
Well, no, it's more dangerous than that.
You get a propagandized idiot, which is far more dangerous.
Well, yeah, that's true.
What's the old thing?
You can't make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
You can't make anything propaganda-proof because propagandized people are so ingenious.
Right.
The response that I had gotten to that was, you know, one of, you know, considerable skepticism.
Like, are you suggesting that, you know, educating people doesn't work?
And I'm like, well, the way that it's being done, no, it really doesn't.
What do government schools have to do with education?
I mean, just because they've got the word school in the title doesn't mean that it's anything to do with education.
Right.
Well, I think far too many people rely on the public schools in order to teach their kids how to read and write.
And, you know, they don't...
Well, most kids who go through public school, sure, they can read and write.
They can't do it very well, but they can do it.
My daughter and I were flipping through the curriculum the other day, and she said, why is it all so meaningless?
Why would you learn any of this?
You know, we were like, here's how you build different types of bridges.
And she's like...
Building a bridge, that's like one of a thousand jobs you could possibly get.
Why would you focus on that?
And so I had to sort of explain that when you get multiculturalism, you get all these different value systems.
And if you teach any values whatsoever, anything really important about virtue or gods or truth or ethics or any...
If you teach anything about the government or anything, you know...
Then you're going to offend and alienate and upset a whole bunch of people who are going to make your life difficult.
Like when I grew up as a kid in England, this is right, you know, I guess after Enoch Powell's speech or during the whole flood of third world immigration that Enoch Powell...
You should look the speech up called Rivers of Blood.
It's quite powerful.
Which, of course, he was naturally condemned for because he was...
Well, a slightly toshier or poshier version of Tommy Robinson, but...
I could have, like, I was taught a lot of nationalist pride in England, you know, where the lamp of human civilization, we brought all these great things to the world, we entered the slave trade, we brought civilization to the darkest corners of the world, the empire, a lot of national pride.
You can't have that anymore, right?
Because a lot of people are coming from outside of England, and if you teach all this national pride that England is the best, well...
What are the kids from Somalia going to think?
And what are they going to say to their parents?
And their parents are going to get really upset and you're propagating to my children.
I mean, you can't have any value content.
It's either boring or blandly pro-state propaganda.
But it's never about values and it's certainly never about virtue.
You can't have any of that in school.
That reminds me.
Are you familiar with Evan Sayet?
I know.
Oh.
Evan Sayet, he was actually a comedian.
He was a writer in Hollywood for a while.
And he used to be a big government liberal.
Mostly because he was a New York Jew.
It was just kind of how they were.
But...
He gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation, where he explained his conversion from being a liberal to being a conservative.
And he gives this explanation as to how the modern liberal thinks, and all this stuff, the reason that they value multiculturalism so much.
I tell you what, it was a real eye-opener.
For me.
Of course, I'm sure if you listen to this speech, you'd probably just hear a lot of the things that you've already discovered or things like that.
It's just that at the time when I first heard it, this was a real eye-opener.
Because I've been a conservative my whole life.
I never had that transition period.
The ideas put forth by liberals just never made any sense to me.
It's like, how can you possibly have these I mean, don't you see how nuts everything that you believe is?
Right.
Now, I would also say to your dad, like, I made a lot of sort of...
I gave a lot of evidence in sort of what I was saying.
But remember that if your dad is saying this guy's a robber baron and so on, then he needs to provide proof, right?
He's the one making the positive claim.
He's the one who needs...
The burden of proof is on him.
Now, there certainly were people who used the power of the state to stifle competition, right?
It's the old argument.
It's like, you can either build a better mousetrap or you can have the government suppress all the other mousetrap makers, you know, or at least prevent people from shipping them in from overseas or whatever.
And there was a lot of this that went on in the 19th century.
Like, there were two philosophies or ideas behind building railroads.
And lots of people say, oh, the railroads in America, they could never have been...
Built without government subsidies is complete nonsense.
There was a guy named James Hill, again, from a very, very poor background.
The people in the 19th century were amazing.
One of the biggest and best engineers in America was blind.
Legally blind!
Right before the American with Disabilities Act.
Completely blind.
Sorry, completely blind and became an engineer.
Incredible.
And this guy Hill...
Was an incredible railway engineer.
Incredible.
I mean, he was looking for a pass through the Rockies.
It was kind of legendary.
He paid a guy for months to just wander around the Rockies until he found this path.
And he was overjoyed because it cut like 100 miles off the route.
He was funding it himself.
He paid for everything himself.
And so he built the very best material.
So he never had to rebuild anything.
Now, there was another railroad that he was supposed to join up with that was all political bullshit.
They were paid by the mile.
And so what they did was they had all these wandering, loopy-loopy things, right?
And then, of course, some mayor would say, hey, man, if you bring the railroad to my town, have it go past my town, that would be fantastic, you know, and maybe I'll give you a little something-something for that and all.
So they ended up with these ridiculously inefficient...
And they used crap materials, like even cottonwood and stuff that just like after one winter was totally useless.
And they had to rebuild most of it the next year.
And so the guy who got all these subsidies and also they skimmed like crazy.
Like the railroad companies got all these subsidies from the government.
I mean, they just stole like crazy.
Now, if it's your company, what's the point of stealing from your own company?
You know, it's like, hey man, I took a stapler home from my own company.
You know, it's your stapler either way, right?
So, Hill, there was no corruption there, but the guys who were getting all this government money, they just siphoned all that stuff off.
You know, the usual $500 hammer stuff that you see going on in the military-industrial complex.
And so they say, oh, these railroads could never have been built without subsidies and so on.
It's like, well, they were built, and they were built way, way better.
And Tom DiLorenzo is great on this stuff.
Yeah, but just remember, your dad is the one who's making a claim.
This guy was a robber baron.
It's like, okay, well, what's your proof?
Well, he cut all these prices to drive other people out of business.
It's like, okay.
Where's the proof?
Rather than somebody said this, where's the actual proof?
Otherwise, it's, you know, kind of slander.
He was a robber baron.
Where's your proof?
Where is the actual proof?
I mean, there's some guy, some poor, dedicated, probably aspie bastard, who went through the 11,000 pages of the government's case against Standard Oil as a monopoly.
And he went through it all and just said it was all nonsense and it was all political and it was all, you know.
So he was a victim of the real robber barons of the people who use state power.
I called crony capitalism or crapitalism.
I tend to call it corporatism.
Corporatism is another way of putting it, although there are honest corporations as well.
But it is the people who use political power.
To get what they want done and to profit through political relationships rather than relationships with customers in the free market.
Those are the real robber barons, but the government wants power over business and bad businessmen want someone else to blame for the losses that their companies are experiencing.
And the media, of course, loves to shit on business and has for, well, since the days of pre-Judas.
And so you put all these things together, you're going to end up with a history of 19th century capitalism that is about as accurate as the history of Joseph McCarthy in the 50s.
Sorry, go ahead.
Well, it just makes me wonder why so many of these big corporate heads are so liberal.
I mean, like, for example, you look at Apple, you know, I think Apple's a fine company, I think they make fine products, but their leadership is pretty much all liberals And it's just...
I don't see how you could be...
Unless you yourself are using the power of the state...
Of course, that's kind of how the system is built these days.
Unless you yourself are actively using the power of the state to suppress your competition...
I don't see what's in it for them to be liberals.
Oh, okay.
Well, that's, I mean, sorry to be annoying, but that's probably because you don't know all the backdrop to how they make their money.
So, a couple of things.
Apple, in particular, sells to a younger set.
And younger sets tend to be liberal.
Right.
And so if Apple is out there stumping for liberals, it's more in accordance with the leftist views of their primarily youthful audience.
That's sort of number one.
Number two is they use the power of the state to gain unfair leverage over their employees through these H-1B visa programs where you're basically tied to your desk, like you're basically a tech surf.
They get all these people coming from overseas.
This came out on Breitbart, I think it was just yesterday, or maybe the day before, Which is that 330,000 foreign students were hired by American companies, mostly in the STEM fields, right?
And of course, they were hired instead of Americans.
And why were they hired?
Because the government gives big tax breaks and subsidies if you hire foreign workers.
And the universities love it, of course, because the foreign students pay a lot more in tuition than domestic students.
The companies love it because these are controllable, malleable, right?
Programmable programmers, so to speak.
And it's just really, really bad for everyone else.
And so the tech companies are highly dependent on state power.
This is not even to mention things like IP and all that kind of stuff.
And...
But no, they get a lot, a lot of indirect subsidies through immigration programs, visa programs, H-1B programs, and the highly subsidized hiring of foreign...
College students, of people who are foreigners who've graduated from American universities, they get an automatic year-long visa to work, and then it can be extended.
Because if you get fired from that job, I think you have to leave the country.
They have a way unfair advantage as employers, so they can bully and boss these people around and so on.
So this is just the tip of the iceberg, and you want to read Michelle Malkin's book.
I interviewed the co-author on this.
Michelle, just do a search for Michelle Malkin.
H-1B visas or other things like that.
Crap weasels is in the title, so you should check that out.
But no, it is a lot.
And of course, a lot of these companies sell a huge amount of stuff to the government.
I know that myself.
So it's kind of tough for them to be anti-statist, even if they're not doing anything as direct as the Sherman Antitrust Act.
It is, you know, it's hard to be a conservative.
In America.
And sometimes it's dangerous to be...
You know, the number of people I've talked to...
Who've said, oh man, I can't wear a Make America Great Again hat anywhere around.
I mean, I'll get the crap kicked out of me.
I mean, it's physically dangerous.
And, you know, they want to be popular.
They want to be liked.
And they want good write-ups in the mainstream media.
They want good relationships with their investors and so on.
And so, yeah, they want to be nicey, goopy stuff.
But, of course, it's become very stale.
You know, Paul Joseph Watson, you know, conservatism is the new counterculture.
It's really boring to be a leftist these days, and it's very much the mainstream, and it's very boring.
Anyway, I'm going to move on to the next caller, but thanks for the call.
I hope this was helpful and instructive in terms of debating this kind of stuff.
Well, it was definitely informative.
There's a lot of things even I didn't know.
I knew what they were saying was a lie, and I just...
I didn't really have a way to explain how it was a lie.
So yeah, it's very, very informative.
Well, you can also just ask people, have you read any arguments counter to what you're telling me?
I mean, you can ask this if you're dad.
Okay, so you've heard about these robber barons.
I'm curious, have you ever read anything that counters that argument?
And if they say no, then they really have no right to debate, because it's all propaganda.
Listen, I have absorbed so much leftist material in my life.
It's ridiculous.
I mean, I need to do some of it for the show, of course.
But I mean, just the way I was raised.
And I mean, I went to undergraduate in two different universities and then graduate school in a third university.
And I was in theater school.
I mean, I've had 12 lifetimes full of leftist crap.
Yeah.
So I get the leftist arguments.
I understand them.
I've absorbed them.
I know where they're coming from.
And so, you know, when I read non-leftist sources, I'm balancing with a lot of leftist stuff.
But there's a lot of people.
I mean, I bet if your dad, you know, if you were to ask him, okay, what have you read that's counter to this perspective?
What is the countervailing argument?
It's the same thing.
Oh, that's McCarthyism.
It's like, oh, so you think McCarthyism was just some crazy witch hunt and he was insane.
Have you ever read Anything counter to that perspective?
Well, well, well, well, no!
It's like, well, then, you're just a single Oasis consumer, which means you don't have any right to have an opinion because you don't even know it's an opinion.
You think it's a fact because you have avoided all contrary sources.
Right.
Of course, the funny thing about my dad is that he's generally pretty conservative about most things.
He's just not as libertarian as I am.
Right.
In fact, of the people in my family, I'm probably the most libertarian of a lot.
Well, keep working on them.
We need all the small government people we can get a hold of.
And, you know, again, if you say to your dad, so did you learn this in a government school, that the government is really necessary for the functioning of your freedoms in the marketplace?
Yeah, yeah.
You don't think there may be a conflict of interest there?
Anyway.
All right.
Well, thanks for the call, man.
I'm sorry I've got to move on to the next caller, but thanks very much for your time.
All right.
Thank you.
All right, up next we have Zach.
Zach wrote in and said, I dislike children.
I often don't like being in the same room as children, as they genuinely annoy me.
I really don't like being around toddlers and babies, and I never offer to hold or console them.
Do you have any advice to work through and get past this personality flaw?
That's from Zach.
Oh, hey Zach, how you doing?
Hi Steph, how are you doing tonight?
I'm very well, thank you.
So, the reason why I call, or...
I mean, I do feel like I want to be a father when I'm older.
It's just that I feel like that's a huge conflict of interest, I guess, because I don't want to hate my children, per se, to put it crudely.
So I was wondering if you could give me any pointers, I guess.
Sure, sure.
Have you...
This is way old.
You're way too young for this.
But there was an old show I used to watch when I was a kid.
Or a teenager, I guess, called WKRP in Cincinnati.
Have you ever...
No, I haven't.
Okay.
I think they're on YouTube, but anyway.
There's a pretty funny show about this woman who's trying...
She's trying to get people who are interesting from the neighborhood.
To get on the radio.
Because people are like, oh, all we have are these professional DJs.
Let's get some people from the neighborhood who have interesting things to say.
And of course, she just gets a succession of nut jobs.
And...
So this one guy comes in and he seems to be very reasonable.
But then when he gets...
And he's a child psychologist and she's supposed to be a child expert.
Uh-huh.
And...
He gets on the air, and he just goes mental, right?
And so he's called Dr.
Monroe, and he says, My study's established without a shadow of a doubt that children are, by adult standards, insane.
And, and, more than a little, immature.
And the host says, And that's bad?
He says, Well, sure.
He says, Well, what should we do about it?
Round the little gutter snipes up!
And, uh, have you ever seen the way they eat?
It's disgusting!
And the host says, so tell me, doctor, where did you receive your degree?
He says, in Long Beach, California.
And the host says, oh, Long Beach State College.
He says, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I got it!
I got it!
From a man at the Casa de Soma apartments.
His name was Buddy.
And Buddy knew that I knew all there was to know about children.
You know, and it was a really mental thing.
So I was just remembering when you were talking about how you disliked kids.
It was a pretty funny episode and well worth watching.
So...
When did you first notice that you disliked kids?
I would say maybe about a year ago when my...
My cousins had their first children, and I just couldn't stand to hold or make eye contact with the baby.
I don't know why.
I just didn't want to, per se.
That's when I started to notice that this might be a bit of a problem.
Right.
Yeah.
Did you have this feeling when you were a child as well?
I have a theory.
Much like the last caller, I have never been liberal in my life, and I'm only 22, so I've been pretty conservative since I was in middle school.
But what I would say, because I was always the do-gooder guy, never wanted to break any rules in class and stuff like that, and whenever people Did stuff I was just always kind of mad.
I just don't have a lot of patience for childishness, per se.
And that's kind of what I see what's going on.
I just wanted to mention I'm going to fine you $5 every time you say per se.
I just wanted to mention that because that's not a word that kids use.
Is there a particular age that you find more annoying than other ages?
Probably toddlers.
Yeah, maybe like three to five or six.
Right.
And is there anything, is it mostly the physicality, like the look?
Is it the awkwardness?
What is it that you think is negative about these toddlers?
Awkwardness, I would say.
Physical awkwardness?
Yeah, that's a good point.
Like what I said, I avert eye contact with them a lot of the time.
I'm not sure why.
I mean, I'm an introvert, but I don't know if that explains much of it.
Ah, wait a minute.
Okay, hang on.
You're an introvert?
Yes.
So eye contact is awkward for you?
Yes.
And kids are not well-schooled in the art of doling out Small doses of eye contact, right?
I mean, when kids look at you, especially at that age, they're just looking at you.
Yeah.
And that is uncomfortable for you because perhaps of your introversion, right?
Yes.
Now, when a kid looks at you like a predator, when kids look at you, what is your emotional experience of a toddler looking at you?
I guess at first I'm wondering why they're so enamored with looking at me, but I don't I just kind of avoid it.
I don't know a better way to explain it.
My god.
Do you have an identifiable emotion in your body that you can communicate to me, my friend?
Or not?
Nothing you've told me is an emotion.
Okay, what is your feeling when a toddler looks at you?
Don't give me analysis.
Don't give me thoughts.
Don't give me abstractions.
What is your feeling?
Maybe, now that I think of that, maybe a bit of fear.
Okay.
Maybe fear of being a father person.
You're going to fine me $5 and say that I can't.
Wait, fear of being a what?
Father.
A bother to the child.
Father.
A father.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Okay.
Yes.
Fear of being a father.
Yes.
Now, you know that...
DNA is not transmitted by eyesight, right?
Line of sight does not determine paternity.
Do you mean that you feel that if you have a child, and if you feel awkward with a toddler, or you feel fear with a toddler, that you may feel fear with a child of your own?
Yes.
Okay, but that doesn't explain why you feel fear with the toddler.
Because if you didn't feel fear with the toddler, then you wouldn't feel fear of being a father.
So I appreciate that explanation, but it doesn't help.
So why do you feel fear when a toddler looks at you?
I mean, I can tell you if you want, but I'm curious if you can get it.
Oh, it's so much fun when people say that.
I know this is probably going to play a bit into my last answer, but maybe just the fear of responsibility being a role model for someone.
No.
Because all they're doing is looking at you.
Nobody's asking you to adopt them, right?
Or take them home.
So that's not it.
You're going way too deep.
Way too deep, yeah.
Yeah, we don't need to.
It's way too abstract.
I guess I'm stumped.
All right.
Can I tell you why you feel fear when a toddler looks at you?
You don't know what to do.
Okay.
Right?
Because that's the only thing that's immediate in the moment.
You don't know how to respond.
You don't know what to do.
That makes sense.
Right?
Because that's the only thing that could cause anxiety in the moment, because again, it's not future fears of fatherhood, and it's not your big responsibility.
A toddler is looking at you, and the toddler has an expectation of you, which you perceive, which you can fulfill.
Right?
Right?
Now, so imagine you're a diplomat at some very high, important meeting, and let's say you're a bit of a germaphobe, right?
And then the leader of the state that you're supposed to be meeting, it's the flash photography everywhere, and he coughs it into his hand, and then he holds his hands out for you to shake, right?
Mm-hmm.
That's kind of awkward, right?
Yeah.
I have to hold his hand.
His hand is covered in germs.
I can't stand germs.
That's a very awkward moment.
You don't know what to do or how to respond, right?
Yep.
So when a toddler looks at you, he's looking for a connection, he's looking for some feedback, he's looking for some interest, he's looking for some interaction, right?
Mm-hmm.
Do you know what to do?
I guess I don't.
He's going to see the hatred in my heart for him, and I will be found out, right?
Yeah.
Don't ever say you don't like dogs.
You're not allowed.
Everybody has to like dogs.
So the question then is...
Why don't you know what to do with a toddler?
Hmm.
Uh.
I guess maybe I'm just not good at...
Because in this situation it would be kind of like a play thing with them.
Yeah, you can make a funny face.
You can do some patty cake.
You can, you know, you can ask them how they're doing.
You can get into a conversation.
You can ask them to show you their toys.
Kids love showing you their toys, right?
Yeah.
And...
I mean, kids are with toys like Mike Myers who is with his ass.
You can't get through without seeing.
It's not possible.
There's always going to be a flyby of some kind.
Canadian moon.
That's not funny anymore.
So it's going to have to be some spontaneity or some, in a sense, talking at their level or whatever it is, right?
Yeah.
And so it's not complicated what to do with a toddler.
You just kind of have to relax, have fun, and...
Do obvious things that toddlers are going to enjoy.
Show me your pictures.
Oh, what's this?
You know, it's pretty easy to do, but it's something that you don't feel conscious with.
If you feel, and I assume that this is somewhat related to introversion, but if you feel self-conscious, it is impossible to have fun with kids as a whole.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
Okay, so tell me a little bit about self-consciousness if that's something that occurs for you.
Well, just rewinding a bit, I don't feel I'm very spontaneous at all, or...
I can't think of the word that you said, but yeah.
Self-consciousness.
I do feel very nervous a lot in open settings, group settings.
I mean, it's a little hard.
I'm nervous talking to you.
I started off the conversation.
I was doing well.
Kids won't give you the same...
Like if an adult...
Like if you're an introvert, right?
An adult will pick on that usually very quickly and will work around it, right?
Yeah.
Kids won't.
Yeah.
Most kids, right?
Most kids won't particularly care that you're an introvert.
Yeah.
So kids aren't managing you.
Kids aren't...
Deferring to your anxieties, right?
They're not upholding their end of the social contract, which goes something like, well, I won't do anything that makes you uncomfortable because that would be bad, right?
No.
So you can't rely on them to defer to your introversion.
So your introversion actually gets challenged.
Yes.
Which is not bad, right?
That makes a lot of sense.
I mean, you'd want to have a little less introversion if you could, right?
I mean, I was a pretty introverted kid, just loved to read and draw and write stories and all that.
And I found it wasn't that people were unbearable, they just weren't more fun than me, so to speak.
So I had to do some work to get out of being introverted and find a way to interact with the world in a way that was fun for me and hopefully fun for others as well.
So it's kind of cool.
When you're around people who aren't going to defer to your anxieties, right?
It gives you the opportunity to confront your anxieties a little bit, right?
Right.
Because kids have not been trained into the seal-clapping avoidance that most adult interactions outside of this show and other places.
But, you know, there's this kind of...
Diplomacy or avoidance that goes on.
And anytime anyone makes anyone uncomfortable, oh, sorry, you know, I didn't mean that, right?
So you can't rely on kids to give you that kind of avoidance.
They're just going to say what they think.
You know, my neighbor has two rabbits.
They're just going to say what they think.
And there's no...
Like, what you say is immaturity is more authenticity and spontaneity, right?
Yeah.
You know, if a kid, if you're trying to be funny and a kid doesn't find you funny, what's the kid going to do?
Not listen.
Yeah, they're not going to laugh.
They're not going to laugh.
You know, my daughter, you know, like any parent, I have a couple of running gags with my daughter, and, you know, they run for a little while, and I'm better at it now, but there were times where she'd just say, you know, Dad, that's not funny anymore.
Fair enough.
I'm glad you told me.
Whereas adults will be like, you know, they'll give you that polite laugh, and then they'll roll their eyes or whatever, right?
So adults are two-faced.
Kids are honest.
So directness and honesty and a lack of manipulation and a lack of deference, what's the problem with that?
It's a good point.
Yeah, I guess maybe it's just...
I know I put it out there already, but I'm avoiding...
making that leap to make myself not so introverted.
I said it again.
No, I find, you know, if you have a problem with self-consciousness, facetiously offering to find you for repetitive language doesn't help.
Sorry, I didn't realize that about you.
Okay, so what would it be like for you, Zach, if you were at a social gathering where people just walked right through your self-consciousness and didn't care and interacted with you anyway and just brushed it aside, ah, you'll be fine or whatever?
I mean, what would that be like for you if people just kind of blew past your anxieties in this area?
Can you rephrase the question?
Sure, sure, no problem.
Okay, let's say that I met you at a party, and you were kind of anxious, so I got that you were, I'm pretty good at reading people, I got that you were nervous or anxious or a little bit avoidant or a little bit self-conscious.
And has this ever happened to you?
Or I would probably say something like, Zach, you appear to be kind of anxious at the moment.
Is there anything wrong?
Is there anything you want to talk about?
I mean, how are you doing at the moment?
What would that be like for you?
Usually I treat that with more repulsion.
It would be horrible for you, right?
Yes, yes.
Like, could there be anything worse?
Like, if I just attacked you with a butter knife, wouldn't that—if you had the choice, wouldn't you say, hey, bring on the butter knife, Baldy?
Right.
Hey, we have a show title, Bring on the Butter Knife, Baldy.
Anyway, so that would be awful.
If someone honestly and accurately identified and was sensitive to your emotional state and reflected it back to you in a compassionate and curious way, that would be, like, the worst thing ever, right?
Oh, yeah.
It's happened many times, too.
Oh, it has happened.
A lot of people say, you seem anxious, you seem nervous, or whatever?
Yes, and I think that's very annoying.
How dare you honestly and accurately interpret my emotional state and reflect it back to me in an empathetic way?
Some people do it to be decks, right?
Yeah, sometimes.
But not always, right?
Some people are concerned that you're high-strung or anxious about something, right?
So why is that so bad?
Are you caught out?
out you don't get to hide out or pretend that something is different than what it is uh it's so bad I mean, it's a good point because it's a personality flaw.
It shouldn't be so uptight or This is the judgment drone, which you have buzzing around your head, which evaluates and judges positively or negatively everything you do.
We'll get to that in a second.
But what is it like for you emotionally?
What happens to your emotions, to your body, to your heart rate, to your adrenaline?
What happens when somebody says you appear to be nervous?
I guess I get more nervous.
When someone points it out, just because they found my belly to strike me.
Okay, so then this brings me to my next question, which is, when, as a child, were you attacked for being honest or undermined for being honest?
Uh...
When I was in school, I would say, I mean, I don't think I was very popular at all, especially when I was younger.
And whenever I tried to play fair or, I don't know, just call balls and strikes in any type of play setting, people would get mad.
If you did what?
Call balls and strikes?
Like, if I saw someone cheating, per se, that's...
Right.
So if you saw someone cheating and you said you're cheating, you'd get attacked, right?
Yes.
Right.
Correct.
What else?
That's not enough.
Because it doesn't translate into a social situation where you're not saying anyone's cheating, right?
So what else?
Um...
I don't know.
I guess I was somewhat bullied as a kid.
Uh...
I don't know.
People took me as a nerd because I was very quiet.
Didn't talk that much to people when I was younger.
So you were already in a state of anxiety.
So the question is, where did the anxiety come from?
You're talking about the effects of the anxiety, which I sympathize with.
You know, the weakness invites attack is one of the staples of federal government schools in particular.
But why were you quiet and anxious to begin with?
What happened earlier?
Maybe even between the ages of three and six, since those are the ones you brought up as the most difficult for you when dealing with other people's kids.
I hadn't quite thought about that.
Good.
That's why we're talking.
If you'd already thought about it, we might start talking about it.
I mean, there's nothing that I could really, really call back to, I don't think, on the spot.
Yeah.
Because I think I've had a pretty good upbringing on my parents' side.
When did your mom stay home with you when you were young?
Both my parents' work, they had my grandparents babysit me when I was younger.
So your mom, do you know how old you were when she went back to work?
I don't know.
Do you have any memory of your mom being home with you?
I... I think so.
I don't really remember much anything before four years old.
Do you know if you were breastfed?
I mean, if your mom went back to work, how did you get your milk?
I was breastfed, yeah.
And through a bottle, I would assume, if your mom was at work, right?
No, I think she took leave for a while, but...
They worked when I was like three...
Two or three years old.
Okay, got it.
And what was your relationship like with your grandparents?
It's still good today.
I talk to them periodically, like on a monthly basis.
So, how has your family helped you with your introversion?
Actually, so this is going to get a little deeper.
So, when it came to the ACE score, I was thinking maybe a half point on the first one with a verbal abuse.
Because I feel like sometimes I get bullied by my dad.
When I was younger and still today, but I don't know if it's just him trying to set me straight on some things or if he's being a bit of a dick.
Okay, can you give me an example of an interaction that you recall or that you find memorable?
I know when I was pretty young, I liked video games a lot, and...
And he despised them.
And whenever I'd play, whenever I'd ask for another game, sometimes you'd just be like, no, you're too old for that.
Get over it and all that stuff.
And you're just a kid, a baby, if you want to keep playing that stuff.
So that was one that particularly stuck with me.
I mean, he said that every once in a while.
Right.
Do you think that you played video games to some degree because you were somewhat socially anxious?
I mean, were there kids in the neighborhood who you wanted to play with or why did you gravitate?
It's not like it means that you were.
I'm just curious if there's some relationship.
I could see it because, I mean, I'm an only child and I... Whenever I play video games, it was by myself all the time.
Unless my cousins were over, but it was always by myself.
So it was more of a retreat from people.
Did you live in a neighborhood where there are other kids around?
Maybe a couple, but I didn't hang out with them very much.
Do you know why?
I didn't have much in common with them.
Right.
So, did your parents say, okay, well, he's an only kid.
He's going to need to socialize, you know, to some degree with other kids.
What can we do to make this happen so that he gets sort of more of a horizontal integration into some kind of peer group at times?
Yes.
My dad particularly pushed me into team sports a lot.
And I'm grateful that he did do that because it's very helpful in the Socializing me.
Why do you think your father...
This is a strong word, Zach, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'll be honest, obviously.
I want to be as honest as I can be always.
Is the word contempt too strong, that he had contempt for your video gaming?
I don't think so.
I think it's accurate.
Okay, good.
Because it's a very, very strong word, and contempt is a very...
It's a very indicative word to use in a relationship.
Contempt is very, very strong.
In fact, and I'm not speaking, of course, relative to your dad, but the one predictor that is the strongest with regards to a marriage working out or not working out is if there's contempt between the partners, the marriage will not work out.
It is the strongest negative Perspective or emotion to have in a relationship, in a marital relationship.
I don't know if it's been studied with parents or children.
So how old were you when your father would speak this way about video games?
Maybe around the age of six, eight, nine.
I'd say six and up.
Right.
And it got worse as I was getting my later game and stuff like that.
You mean your father's contempt or his expression of it?
Expression of it.
Right.
Interesting.
Do you know if he had contempt for any of the activities you had as a child outside of video games?
No, I don't think so.
Maybe that I was too much of a couch to potato on...
TV. He just wanted you to be active is what I took it as.
Right.
Did he ever sit down with you and try and understand why you were interested in video games and what you liked about them?
See, that's the most frustrating thing for me because I don't think he's ever made that effort.
I mean, honestly, the stuff that my daughter's into, I don't...
But I need to understand.
It's my job to understand it.
It's the parent, right?
Yeah.
I mean, I don't have any impulse to condemn it.
I just find some of it a little baffling.
But, you know, there's a boy-girl thing, too.
So there's going to be a bit of a bridge to gap at times.
And it's my job to understand why it's important to her, why it matters to her, what motivates her about it.
So, do you still play video games?
Yeah, I do.
And how much time a week do you think you spend playing video games?
Maybe four hours.
So, it's kind of a hobby, but it's not sort of dominating your free time, so to speak, right?
No.
Okay.
I do a lot of more political listening to nowadays.
I can only approve of that.
I say, good job.
Good job.
All right.
So what's interesting is there's an overlap here at the age of six.
You said that you had trouble in particular with toddlers from three to six.
And at the age of six, you said you had trouble sort of knowing what to do or empathizing or feeling relaxed and spontaneous around them.
But at the age of six, your father was expressing contempt about something that was very important to you, which was video games, right?
In other words, he was not empathizing with you.
I'd say that's accurate, yes.
Do you see there's a pattern here?
Yeah, I just caught it.
Okay, good.
I wasn't sure if you just blew past that one completely.
So it seemed kind of important to me enough to drop anchor and circle the coral for a while.
So what did you get from that?
Since he doesn't express any curiosity in my interest, then it's coming down to me not expressing any curiosity in the toddler's interest.
Well, it's stronger than that.
Stronger than that?
Yeah, because he disliked what you liked as a child.
In fact, contempt is somewhat close to hatred.
Like, he hated your video game thing, right?
Yeah.
So, he hated what you liked as a child, and children annoy you.
Do you see the pattern?
Yeah.
That makes a lot of sense.
It's mirrored, right?
Yeah.
We learn how to empathize by being empathized with, right?
And look, I get that this was one of the things that your father was, you know, I'm sure there were lots of other things that were positive, but this is the one thing that kind of stuck, right?
Yes.
Now, my question is, did you, and I'm not saying you should have, obviously, it's a lot to ask from a kid, but I'm kind of curious.
Did you ever think to say to your dad, it's cooler than you think, I'm learning more things than you think, it's really fun, let me show you.
I always said, well, I did try to show him on a couple things.
Like, he played Galaga with me every once in a while, but other than that, never anything.
Oh, the Space Invader clone?
Yes.
With the rays and the double ship and brrrr, yeah, I remember that one.
Yeah.
You can never get that third guy in the triangle, drove me crazy.
Showed up in Palladium recently.
It pulled me right back!
Anyway.
Yeah.
But other than, I mean, I remember telling, because he was like, you spend so much time on those video games, and it's like, well, you spend so much time watching SportsCenter all the time, and that was a clip that I have back all the time, and you don't like it, so...
Now what?
So when you said that back to him...
Okay, so hang on.
So did he understand the Galaga thing at all?
What the hell were you playing Galaga?
What are you, 40?
What?
Wait a minute.
I'm 22.
I know, it's strange.
Galaga?
That game's way older than you are.
Yeah.
Wow.
So he played some Galaga.
Was it like a two-player thing?
Did you play sort of side by side?
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, I guess it's like Space Invaders with a Y-axis.
Okay.
And did he enjoy it at all?
Did he sort of understand anything about what you liked?
Yeah, he likes that game because he played it when he was younger in the arcades.
Wait.
Hang on, hang on.
Oh, my God.
Okay.
All right.
Oh, Seth.
I'm sorry, Zach.
Okay.
Zach, your father played video games when he was a child.
Only that one, I believe.
But he played that game and enjoyed it, right?
Yeah.
But he claims to have no understanding as to why you like video games.
Yeah, I think so.
Does that make sense to you?
No.
To me, I think it's more because he's frustrated that I'm not outside doing things.
But also, he doesn't make an effort to understand what I like now, like as modern video games and stuff like that.
Did you take any interest in sports?
Yes, I mean, I did.
No, no, I mean, sorry, I don't mean the team sports, I mean the sports center that he was watching.
No.
Right.
Right.
Now, if you were to ask him this, if you'd have said...
You know, did you want me to watch sports with you?
Then he probably would have preferred it if you'd watch sports with him than play video games.
Because a lot of parents will view when the children wants to do something other than what the parent wants to do as kind of a rejection.
Okay.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
Like, my son Zach prefers playing these idiot video games rather than spending quality time with his father watching sports.
I am rejected.
He prefers other things to me.
I am losing any competition with a 40-year-old video game.
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does make sense.
And, no, no, I've had that.
I'm like, hey, hey, daughter of mine, Fruit of My Loins, let's go for a walk.
And she's like, no, I'm reading this book.
I'd rather not.
Oh, okay.
You know what I mean?
I mean, you have to obviously be mature about it, but there is a little bit of like, okay.
Yeah.
I'm just going to cry.
So, do you think that your father, if he viewed this as competition, then contempt, of course, is the worst way to deal with it, right?
Yeah.
So, you didn't like watching sports, and you wish your father wasn't watching as much sports, right?
Yeah.
Uh, either battery wouldn't try to push watching sports on me as much, I guess.
Listen, I mean, I'm with you there, Zach.
Compared to sports, video games are really, really interesting.
At least you're doing something.
You know, you're not just...
Like, sports is like watching other people play video games when you're never going to play them.
Yeah.
Like, I've never played a Zelda series.
So for me, like, watching some...
Hey, here's someone playing Zelda.
I've never played it.
I doubt I ever will play it.
I was a Baldur's Gate kind of guy.
But even Temple of Elemental Evil.
Oh, yeah.
That's how far back I went as far as that went.
But...
So...
But if you were to sit there and express contempt...
Towards his watching of sports, that would not motivate him to do anything, right?
Yeah.
Right.
I understand that, yeah.
I don't know if I express...
I mean, I'm biased, obviously, towards my own experience, but I don't know if I held contempt for watching sports.
I mean, I did still go to...
Baseball games with them all the time to watch the Orioles play.
We live in Maryland and the United States.
I mean, I still watch games with them every once in a while, but it's like, there's got to be a little give and take, I thought.
Right, like I'll do your thing, you learn something about my thing, right?
Yeah.
So, in terms of reciprocity...
To some degree, your experience with your father was like win-lose.
If he wins, I lose.
If I win, he loses because we can't find ways to enjoy each other's stuff, right?
Yes.
Does that make sense?
Mm-hmm.
Right.
So, we have arrived.
We are here.
We have pulled into the station of, I think, understanding.
Okay.
With kids, it's win-lose.
For you.
Okay.
Right?
If you do what they want to do, it's going to be something you don't want to do.
And you can't get kids to do what you want to do because they won't.
Especially at that age, three to six.
Yeah.
Right?
That makes so much sense now.
Okay, go on.
You take it from here because I think I've got us there.
You can step off the train.
Go ahead.
I don't know.
Maybe I just...
Because...
I don't want to compromise in doing a little playing game with them because, I don't know, I'm too uptight and too upstrung.
And, I mean, then they won't want to listen to anything that I have to say to them.
Right.
And let me tell you something else, Zach.
Let's say that you're with a toddler.
He's six.
And you find a way to really enjoy what that toddler is showing you, right?
So, you know, one of the things that kids like to do is they want to show you their toys, and they want to show you their drawings, and they just want to share, right?
What's important to them?
It is their conversation.
It's the world they know, and when they're saying, oh, I've got this cool toy which I really like, that's the equivalent of you and I talking about philosophy.
It is their conversation.
Now, if a kid pulls out a bunch of drawings, right, and they say, you know, here's a drawing of a spaceship, and here's a drawing of a dinosaur, and here's a drawing of a dragon, and a unicorn, whatever it is, right?
Now, you can just sit there and kind of zone out and say, oh, uh-huh, oh, that's nice.
Oh, uh-huh, right?
It's boring as hell, right?
Yeah, that's what I usually do.
It's boring as hell.
And so the kid is getting what he wants and you're not enjoying it, right?
It's like you're off.
You're just making those, you know, adulty murmuring noises.
Oh, yeah, that's really cool.
I like the colors on this one.
I like this one.
The letter, right?
You're not there.
So the kid's there, but you're not there.
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
And you can't figure out what to do where you're both there.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
And that's what I mean by win-lose.
The kid is showing you his stuff, but you've evacuated the situation emotionally, right?
You're not there.
You're like having an out-of-body experience, right?
Yes.
Now, if you could find a way, Zach, that you could both be there.
In other words, if you could say, okay, show me this picture.
Okay, what's the name of this guy?
Where does he come from?
And then you could start contributing bits to the picture, like backstories or whatever.
This dragon is in the tree because he was running from a goat that was on fire.
Whatever.
And you could both end up making a story, giggling about it, it getting more and more absurd.
Then you would both be there, right?
Yeah.
Now, if that were to happen to you, Zach, I think, genuinely think, it would break your heart.
Thank you.
I mean, it made my eyes water a little bit there, to be honest.
Go on.
Just thinking about that message.
I mean, just empathize more.
No, no, that's too abstract.
Good lord, man.
Okay, so...
If you're sitting there with a kid, and it could be with his toys, it could be with anything, right?
Oh, what's the name of this guy?
Does he know this guy?
Do they ever fight?
Are they friends?
You know, like the two dinosaurs, who would win and what weapons do they have?
And I think this guy's got a breath weapon and I think this guy's got gravity wells on his eyeballs.
Like you could just goofy, silly, enjoyable fun, right?
And it doesn't, like, when we had a sleepover some time back, we had an inflatable mattress and I was holding it up at a 45 degree angle and I basically said to the kids, climb the mountain!
You know, when they were like wrestling their way up the inflatable mattress and trying to climb up to the top.
And I was sort of shaking it.
And it was like hysterical fun.
And I was really enjoying myself.
And they were really enjoying themselves.
And it was a blast.
Or we've had other times where, you know, kids are not great at ping pong, little kids.
Because, you know, so we just have a game called Keep Alive.
Where it's like as long as it's bouncing, it's still in play.
It doesn't matter if it's going off the wall, off the ceiling.
And it's hysterical fun.
And I enjoy it.
They enjoy it.
Whereas if I'm just sitting there saying, oh, he mishit it again.
We can't play.
It's like it's really annoying.
The kid wants to play, but I'm finding it boring.
It's just finding some way that you can both have fun at the same time.
And if you were to sit down with a six-year-old or a five-year-old and engage and enter into the world of imagination that you could share together, that's a lot of fun.
And that's actually getting to know someone.
Like, if a kid's just showing you the pictures and you're not getting to know the kid, but if you both engage in some sort of fun or creative...
Play through imagination, through physical stuff, it could be any number of things.
Then you're both there, if that makes sense.
You're both connecting, and you're both learning about each other.
And so the reason I said why that would break your heart if you did that, you're avoiding doing that, because doing that will make you very sad.
And do you know why?
You said your eyes watered up a bit.
Do you know why that would make you so sad?
Uh...
I guess not.
Right.
The reason, Zach, that it would make you so sad to do that with a child, the reason why it would break your heart is because of all the missed opportunities with your father.
That you could have had that a dozen times a day with your father, and you didn't.
Instead, you got contempt and distance.
Yeah.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Lost opportunities.
You can't rewind and have that stuff again because you're an adult now.
You're not avoiding children.
You're avoiding mourning.
You're not avoiding play.
You're avoiding sadness.
You don't dislike children.
You feel sad about what could have been more fun with your dad at times.
That is a good point.
It's not getting you much emotionally, though.
Like, I'm not trying to get you emotionally, but that's a very...
I mean, maybe it's not true at all.
This is just my idea, right?
Yeah.
I mean, my eyes did genuinely water a bit.
That's because I thought it was a very nice image.
But...
I had another thought.
I don't know how much more time we have.
Yeah, no, go for it.
Maybe it's jealousy a bit, too, that I feel for children.
Just because of the jealousy of childlike wonder and ignorance, I guess, maybe.
I don't know if there's anything in that thought.
Children do have a spontaneity and authenticity of self-expression that a lot of us kind of keep tamped down a lot.
A lot of adulthood is this kind of chilling Victorian corset restraint.
Don't say this.
Don't upset people.
Don't do that.
Don't, you know, don't tell a joke that might be offensive or might be upsetting and don't free-form your thoughts because people will look at you like you've just sprouted a second head.
There's a lot of restraint in adulthood that is kind of like this little roving cone of silence prison spell that we're kind of stuck under, right?
Yeah.
We've got to be presentable.
We've got to be acceptable.
There's a great Supertramp song, the logical song, which is a very logical name for a song.
When I was young, I felt that life was so wonderful, a miracle.
Oh, it was beautiful, magical.
And it's about how much wonder there was as a child.
And then you grow up and you just become logical and restrained and empty.
And then you don't even know who you are anymore because you're so busy conforming to expectations that you don't have any spontaneous authenticity anymore.
Who are you when you're conforming to other people's expectations?
Who are you when you're following social rules you never invented and probably don't even fundamentally agree with?
How much, and this is to do with shyness or introversion as well, how much of your life is consumed by restraint?
You can't interest children with restraint.
You know, children love enthusiasm, they love curiosity, they love spontaneity, they love creativity.
That's a Yeah.
I guess a lot of my life's been dictated by constraint, except for this past year.
I've had an awakening on political correctness stuff, and now I just kind of, at least among adults, I put what I think out there, and I don't care what other people think.
It's because I think it's the truth.
Good.
And so because you're breaking out of that straightjacket, You now are able to look at this issue of disliking children and want to, like, recognize it and wanting to solve it, right?
Yeah.
That's part of it.
I mean, I'm a big follower of Jordan Peterson, and I love the phrase, sort yourself out to make the world better.
And this is what I'm trying to do.
This is what I'm trying to sort myself out.
Right.
No, and good for you.
I think that's very, very important.
So then the challenge is to find a way to like kids.
And the challenge is to find a way that you and the children can both be there at the same time.
If you have a parent around who's critical or contemptuous or dislikes significantly something you're very interested in and doesn't work to resolve it or doesn't work to try and figure things out, that's a win-lose situation.
And if you can find a way that both you and a child can be present having fun at the same time, that breaks that cycle.
It's going to be painful as hell, I guarantee you that.
I mean, certainly in the way that I parent, I recognize that there are times when I feel very sad about the missed opportunities that my parents had to have the kind of fun that I'm having.
It's tragic.
It's heartbreaking.
It's so unnecessary.
You know, when I was a kid, I remember this so clearly.
I was, I mean, five or six, oh, so-and-so's getting divorced, so you hear some, you know, we lived in a crappy apartment building, and you hear, you know, the usual crap of people yelling at each other and screaming at each other, and just the usual backdrop of Spanish soap opera hysterics that pass for emotional self-control in the lower classes.
And I just remember thinking...
What the hell's wrong with people?
How hard is it to just get along with someone?
You know, just be nice.
Like, what the hell's the matter?
Why is everyone so tense?
Why is everyone so upset?
Why does everyone get so mad?
Just be reasonable, be nice, be fun, and get along with people.
And then, lo and behold, 35 years later, I was able to achieve just that in my marriage and among my friends.
I have very little conflict in my life.
Very little conflict in my life.
Which is kind of funny for a philosopher.
But anyway, nonetheless, it's the way that things work.
And I want you to denormalize, Zach.
I want you to denormalize this idea that it's win-lose with kids.
Because if you have to evacuate your own personality, if you have to turn into some murmuring, nodding zombie around children, of course you're going to dislike them.
Because they get their way and you cease to exist in a way.
But that's not what they want.
They want you to be there and for them to be there.
Having two people present in the same conversation at the same time is actually pretty rare in life.
Usually someone's just waiting for their turn to talk or...
They're judging the other person, or they're thinking about something.
Like, having two people actually present in the conversation at the same time, both there, interacting back and forth spontaneously, creatively, is really rare.
But it's where we need to be in society, because it's the opposite of political correctness.
Because I mentioned earlier this judgment drone, right?
Self-consciousness is having this attack judgment drone around you.
Like, you know, in the original Star Wars movie from, like, 1977, Luke Skywalker is in the Millennium Falcon and there's this drone that keeps shooting bolts at him and he's got to deflect it with his new lightsaber and so on.
Then he's got to put that helmet down and pretend like he's just got to feel it or whatever, right?
But the judgment drone, it floats around you, floats around you.
Oh, you've done something bad!
Boom!
Zap!
Ow!
Son of a bitch, that hurts.
And we get jumpy from the judgment drone that floats around us and zap, zap, zap!
And we can't exist because this is punishment that occurs.
This punishment that occurs.
That glare, that negativity, that you're wrong, you're bad somehow.
I mean, I remember being at a dinner.
I was maybe 12.
The movie The Life of Brian had come out, which I loved at the time.
And now that I see the effect of atheism, I have some ambivalence towards.
But something ridiculously lucky happens to one of the characters in the movie.
And he ends up surviving something he never should have survived.
And someone says to him, he says, You jammy bastard!
Jammy means, like, incredibly lucky, right?
And, no, it wasn't the dinner.
I was watching a friend play a video game, and he pulled off a really cool move, and his parents were sitting somewhere in the background.
And I laughed and said, you, in the Monty Python force, you jammy bastard, you know?
I can't remember how it went, but something like that.
My friend turned to me and glared at me and indicated his parents, because I'd said the word bastard, even though I was quoting a movie we'd both seen, right?
Uh-huh.
And I remember that glare, like, oh, you shouldn't say that.
And society is trying to implant this judgment drone, the zap drone, all the time.
That's what political correctness is.
Microaggressions, manspreading, mansplaining, insensitivities, gotta think of everyone's feelings, gotta zap, zap, zap, zap, zap, all the time.
And...
It is sort of the modern equivalent of what used to happen in religion, right?
Or in Christianity and other religions as well, that God is always watching, and if you don't do this, or if you do do that, or you break this rule, or you do this, or you zap, zap, zap, right?
There used to be this giant conformity drone called the deity, and now it's been turned into this political correctness and online attacks.
You type something online, oh yeah, people are always watching, right?
Zap, zap, zap.
And if you recognize the...
This is the funny thing.
That if you disarm the attack drone, they really can't do much to hurt you.
Because all they're trying to do, the world out there, is they're trying to get you to self-attack.
They get you to set off your own attack drone, to zap you.
They can't.
I mean, they're just people typing in the middle.
They know who cares, right?
But if they can get you to attack yourself, then they control you.
And disarming, this is this...
I don't know what Jordan Peterson means exactly by the sort yourself out in this context, but I would say that...
Disarming unjust self-attacks is foundational to positive change, to creating and facilitating positive change in the world.
Because the moment you start interfering with the goals and pleasures of irrational or evil or destructive or neurotic people, they're going to feel bad.
And they're going to try and activate this remote control attack drone that circles us, that's been implanted by us within society.
Which is not terrible.
It's not the end of the world.
I mean, it's got the Ten Commandments, and at least some of those are well worth following and so on.
But if there's no remote controlled attack drone, then we can be spontaneous and we can be free.
And...
That would be my suggestion with regards to kids.
That you find a way that you can both be there and you can both enjoy what you're doing.
And feel free to be goofy.
Feel free to be silly.
Feel free to be spontaneous.
Feel free to look foolish.
Because if you have this attack drone out there, you're being foolish.
You're being silly.
People will not respect you.
You're being immature.
You're being blah, blah, blah, right?
Or Sinovich talks about in the guerrilla mindset and his father said, when are you going to get serious?
Because he was crying for being bullied.
If there is this claustrophobic death star seriousness that you have to have, then you're going to annoy kids and you're going to be annoyed by kids.
Because that's not what they live.
That's not where they live.
And we can learn a lot by relearning that spontaneity, that creativity, that this is what I want.
And if we can be in the presence of that and still be ourselves, that is the greatest gift that we can give to kids, which is both people are in the conversation and enjoying it.
Because that's the only intimacy there ever is in the world.
Everything else is make-believe.
All right.
Well, let us know how it goes.
I really appreciate the call.
We can move on to the next caller.
Thank you, Steph.
Very illuminating.
Okay, up next we have Seth.
Seth wrote in and said, Spontaneous creation from nothing violates the first law of thermodynamics,
and eternal existence violates the second law of thermodynamics.
So is a creator the only valid scientific or logical explanation for the reality of the universe?
That's from Seth.
All right.
So do you want to explain more these laws of thermodynamics and so on so that people understand a very good set of questions about where we came from?
Sure.
So, with the first law, the first law is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
So, and this is actually what triggered my thinking about this.
I just, you know, I'm thinking about here we are in the universe.
And, you know, they say that the Big Bang was roughly 14 billion years ago.
And, but where did it come from?
Did...
And I just had trouble getting past thinking that it just came out of nothing.
And then I started looking online and I found an article written by a guy named Jeff Miller.
He's got a PhD in mechanical engineering.
And he had thought about this more thoroughly than I had.
So I had only thought about it in terms of the first law.
But actually the second law is commonly referred to as entropy.
And that basically says that energy becomes less and less useful over time.
Basically, things get old and they die and decay.
And this happens, you know, not only to organisms, but to solar systems and galaxies also.
And even black holes eventually die because they emit radiation.
But new stuff is formed, right?
The most accepted theory for what you could call the death of the universe is the big freeze.
Oh, no, sorry, sorry.
What I mean by that is that, like, the sun is 10 billion years old.
So, you know, matter coalesced into the sun, which created some, obviously, to us, very useful energy, which lasts for a long time.
And so stuff is created.
No, it's not, sorry, less than 10 billion years, the sun.
It's 4.6.
Thanks, thanks.
I appreciate that.
Is it 10 billion is the total life cycle of the Sun?
Something like that.
It's crazy.
We're roughly halfway in the life of the Sun.
There we go.
10 billion.
So, yeah, 4.5 and 5 to go, whatever.
So, there was no solar system and there was no Sun.
Now, there's this coalition into the giant atomic bomb that lasts for 10 billion years, which, if you think about it, is just completely mind-blowing.
Every now and then, I'll just look at the Sun and say, wow.
Wow.
That is a lot of explosions going on right now that's going to keep going on and on.
So there is the creation of things as well.
Entropy does, you know, just the sort of Brownian motion of the atoms and so on did coalesce into a solar system, planets and asteroid belt and a sun that burns for 10 billion years, give or take.
So there is entropy, of course, but there is also the coalescing and creation of focal points of energy like the sun.
That's correct.
However, The universe is constantly expanding.
And in order to coalesce, our understanding is that they have to be within a certain proximity for the gravity to actually Right, but there's been a whole lot of coalescing, and I agree with you completely, right?
So just for everyone's visualization, if you think of a bunch of people standing on an infinite rubber sheet and that rubber sheet is kind of expanding, then all the people are getting further and further away from each other.
And that is, of course, happening.
But what are they, like 100 billion galaxies, each of which have tens or hundreds of millions of stars?
So there is a huge amount of concentrated energy points that have coalesced throughout the universe as a result of some of this randomness.
And yes, the universe is expanding.
I don't think, as far as I understand it, there's some idea that it's sort of an expansion followed by a collapse, which could be thought of as a giant universe heartbeat of matter and energy.
But that would require, of course, a gravity well at the center of the universe that I think remains somewhat obscure at the moment.
So there are, of course, some ideas that just keeps on going out and so on.
And the reason for that, of course, just for those who don't know, there's sort of two reasons they know that this is going on.
Number one, of course, is the...
What is it?
The red shift of the galaxy is violet as if it's coming towards you, red if it's going away, and the furthest galaxies away are going away at the furthest amount.
And there's also a huge amount of background radiation that exists in the universe that is considered to be an effect of the Big Bang.
The Big Bang does remain a theory, though, right?
I mean, it's not absolutely established.
I've heard of other examples or ideas about...
The universe that are different from the Big Bang, right?
So there's a quantum equation that predicts the universe has had no beginning.
The universe may have existed forever according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein's theory of general relativity.
The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy resolving multiple problems at once.
And I have nowhere near the expertise necessary to judge this on anything but a superficial level, but there is some arguments that the Big Bang is not particularly valid, that there are other ways of approaching some of the challenges of the expanding universe, the background, radiation, and so on.
So it's...
It remains a fairly big question mark at the moment as far as I understand it.
Yeah, and I'd like to look into this a little more, but my understanding though is that you need your lighter, your helium and your hydrogen.
And the reason that stars explode is because once they burn all their lighter, first they burn the hydrogen, And then once all the hydrogen's gone, they start burning helium.
And then eventually, they get to the point where they're burning heavier and heavier molecules until they just explode.
I don't know all the details of it.
But then you get heavier molecules sent out into the atmosphere, the lack of atmosphere, into space.
So you're actually losing your fuel for suns over time.
Right.
So if the age of the universe was infinite, then my understanding would be that all of the energy would already have been used.
And we observe that that's not true.
Right.
And, I mean, I don't know if the universe contracts again and explodes again.
Maybe there's a way to reformulate the hydrogen and helium.
I don't know.
I mean, this is so...
But I guess...
So, you know, we can say that we don't know the origins of the universe, and that is, I think, fairly valid.
There's lots of indications it may be one thing, but there's some indications it may be something else, and there are lots of questions around that.
So I guess my question is, what's wrong with just saying, I don't know?
Like, how does this lead you anywhere towards...
The conception of a deity that might have some characteristics that we might be able to understand.
The only thing that we can say is we don't know.
I don't think we can anthropomorphize or say, well, because of this physics property, there must have been a creator and so on.
Because if you have a creator of the universe, that violates infinitely more laws of physics than Than the first and second law of thermodynamics, right?
Because then you've literally got a guard creating something out of nothing, and that violates just about everything you could conceive of, right?
I disagree with that, and that's because...
I mean, the way I... The example that I think of is like a computer programmer, okay?
So what if you as a programmer were to make a game...
With a, you know, a vast universe within the game, and your AI was so great that your characters in your game could, you know, ponder their own existence and live their life, and they'd be totally, what's the word?
You know, they'd have free will.
Self-aware, you mean.
Yes, self-aware, that kind of thing.
Now, you as the programmer, you're in a totally separate environment.
You could create your own laws of physics.
Now, it's hard for us to think about that because all we know is what we experience in this universe.
But if there are other universes, we have no way of knowing how they would be governed at all.
Right.
So we have a giant unknown.
And this goes back to an argument that I've made In a book which people should check out.
It's one of my favorite books that I've written called Against the Gods, which is...
I listen to it.
Okay, so you understand that if there's something that we don't know, we cannot describe it any characteristics at all, right?
Sure.
But the moment you say the word God, you're describing characteristics.
Omniscient, all-powerful, consciousness, without matter, or whatever.
So if there's something outside the universe, if there's something before the universe...
We can't describe it in any way, shape, or form.
It is utterly beyond language.
It is utterly beyond our conceptual abilities.
It's beyond thought.
It's beyond language.
It's beyond communication.
It's beyond everything.
We can't say anything about it.
But the moment that you say, well, then maybe there's a god or a creator and so on, then you're starting to ascribe characteristics.
And you cannot ascribe a value to a null.
The moment you ascribe a value, it's no longer a null.
And all we have...
When we don't know stuff is a null.
We don't have any knowledge of it.
We can't describe any characteristics to it at all.
I mean, all we have is, you know, the religions that have come up with, you know, stories and...
Well, no, we don't have that at all.
Because those religions and those myths or those stories or those descriptions...
They are ascribing characteristics to the creator of the universe.
Well, you have to call it something.
No, you don't have to call it anything.
You know, it's sort of like saying, I don't know how much money some person in India makes.
They say, well, you've got to provide a number.
No, I don't.
I don't know how much money an anonymous person in India who lives...
In Mumbai on certain...
I don't know how much that person makes.
Well, you've got to ascribe some kind of number to it.
It's like, no, I don't.
I can't.
I don't know.
And somebody says, how much does that person make?
I don't know.
And where does the universe come?
I don't know.
And I can't ascribe...
I can't call...
I don't have to call I don't know anything other than I don't know, if that makes sense.
So can I ask you...
For me, I guess this stemmed from a...
A feeling that I want to believe that there is a reason for existence.
And I just don't see that.
No, no, no, no, no.
That's not accurate.
Sorry to be annoying.
That's not accurate.
You want to believe that there's a reason for existence that you're not responsible for.
You want to believe that there's a reason for existence that's going to be handed to you by a story, or by a concept, or by a mythology, or by a word.
There is a meaning to the life and there is a meaning to the universe.
And it's called truth, virtue, courage, integrity, fighting the good fight, making the world a better place.
It's just not handed to us from outside.
It's reasoned through us, through philosophy.
But you want someone to give you a ticket to go somewhere.
You want a meaning to be infused to you from outside.
You don't want to face the challenge of Of defining and pursuing and enacting it in a self-generated way.
Well, I think that free will, I mean, I'm a relatively new Christian, and I think that what you're describing is consistent with, you know, the concept of free will that's not inconsistent with a creator I'm not sure what your argument is there or what your statement is.
If there's no God, then there is no meaning that comes from the universe to you.
There's no conformity to an external set of rules that's not rational, that's not philosophically based.
There's no possibility of achieving virtue through conformity to story.
And there's no meaning that is going to be ascribed to you.
It's sort of the difference between if you want to make a picture versus if you want to do those join-the-dots pictures, or you have an existing picture that you want to color in.
You know, the pictures, the black and white pictures, you want to color it in, or the paint-by-numbers.
If you're given a blank canvas, you can make your own picture.
If you're given a picture that somebody else drew that you just color in, then you're staying within the lines and Conforming to all of that, right?
That's a good point.
Because if there's no God, then the meaning that you're being given is being given to you by man, by a person, by somebody who believes in a religion or a God.
In other words, the meaning is being given to you by another human consciousness, and I'm saying that you have the responsibility to Define, derive, and understand and enact meaning through philosophy, not through conformity to someone else, whether it's a god or a person.
And I would argue, let's take the position that there is a god who created the universe.
He created the universe and then absented himself from direct perception within that universe.
And the reason he would do that is because he would want us to think through what meaning is, what virtue is, what courage is, what integrity is, what goodness is.
He would want us to reason that ourselves.
Otherwise, he'd just come down and tell us what he wanted us to do every day, but that would be to violate our free will.
For us to have free will and to have rationality and to be an empirically based life form as God designed us to be.
God gave us no direct connection to the divine, but very direct connection to the material universe, which has got to be some indication of what God wants us to do with our faculties.
Not focus on obeying the words that people have written down they claim comes from God, but on obeying reason and evidence.
We reason and we are incredibly good at detecting evidence.
We've got five senses for a reason and one of them is not faith.
We have five senses and we are very rational.
So if there was a God and he created us, he created the universe, he created us specifically to focus on reason and evidence.
That's what we do best, that's what we do naturally, that's what we do virtually automatically.
So God would want us to not focus on conformity to people who claim to speak in his name, but to focus on reason and evidence, to focus on philosophy.
If you're a parent, you know, in the normal scheme of things, you have a child, you raise a child, and you die.
And that child continues.
And that child is going to have to continue without you.
So if you have a child, and you raise that child to call you up every morning and say, Dad, I have no idea, what am I supposed to do?
What do I do with my day?
And you say, okay, 11 o'clock you do this, 12 o'clock you do this, and then you've got to do this, and then you've got to do this.
You're making that child dependent upon you, not on their own reasoning, not on their own Thinking and experience of the universe and principles that can derive from that interaction.
Because you know as a parent that your job is to make your child self-sufficient, not dependent upon your approval, not dependent upon your instructions, but independent of you, their own person, and then they will pass that gift of the development of identity and autonomy onto their own children.
Now, God made a universe, made people in that universe, and has absented himself from our perceptions.
I can only imagine, I can only believe, that that would mean that God wants us to think for ourselves, using the faculties that God gave us, using the senses that God gave us, to focus on the material universe, on reason, on evidence, on philosophy.
If he wanted us to focus on God, he'd stroll around and give us instructions every day.
No.
He made the universe, he made us, and then he absented himself from the equation.
And there are so many people who claim to speak in the name of God.
I don't believe them.
I'll listen to the man himself, and no one at all.
Can I ask, how do you...
Why do you think, for example, Christianity became so popular?
Why do you think, if it was just a big scam...
Then how, why did it dupe so many people?
I don't think I referred to it as a scam.
I'm not saying you did, but I'm saying if it's not true, if there is no God, then why do you think, because I guess a lot of Christians would say, well, you know, people witnessed miracles and You know, the apostles healed people.
No, that's not why.
Every religion has claimed miracles, but Christianity succeeded for, to me, a different set of reasons.
Because Christianity is the belief system with some of the most advanced and greatest moral truths of any religious system.
You know, there was a debate recently between Piers fucking Morgan and Tommy Robinson, which was an absolute embarrassment for Piers Morgan, in my opinion.
I mean, he was terrible at every conceivable level.
And Tommy, in a very difficult situation, which only if you've grown up in England to some degree and understand the class tensions is really possible to fully understand, did very, very well.
And, I mean, Piers Morgan, where would you even start?
And I'll get to why this is important in just a second, but Piers Morgan was saying, was equating Islam to a race.
And, I mean, this is, it's not a race, it's a belief system.
It's a belief system, it's not a race.
Can't be racist with regards to Islam.
Anyway, so what Piers Morgan said was, he said, there's a lot of violence in the Bible.
But Christianity is not just this big blob called the Bible.
Christianity, hence the name, is kind of focused on the New Testament.
And the New Testament is quite different from the Old Testament.
That's sort of the point.
The New Testament is love your enemies.
The New Testament is love your neighbor.
The New Testament is let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
The New Testament is much more gentle, is much more philosophical.
The New Testament...
It does not punish people with the penalty of death for leaving the religion or for trying to convert people away from Christianity.
It is philosophical, much more so, than this big giant blob called the Bible.
And you'll notice that when people want to criticize Christianity, they talk about the Bible.
But Christianity is very specific too.
The New Testament.
And Christianity has attempted to absorb other cultures rather than, you know, like you see these radicals in the Middle East, they come to some new region, they destroy everything that's there that's not part of their particular belief system and so on.
But Christianity has worked with the Greek or Roman philosophers, has worked with other philosophers from around the world, has tried to struggle to absorb them into the general way of thinking.
And Has facilitated a lot of the progress that the Western world has been a part of.
And that is something that is kind of hard to escape.
So I think that one of the reasons why Christianity succeeded is it succeeded because it allowed for the internalization of a belief system.
You know, there aren't, in Christian countries, like armed guards roaming around the streets, whacking everyone who's not openly displaying fidelity to particular Christian precepts.
You can decide not to go to church and...
That's pretty much okay.
And so, because Christianity allowed for the internalization of the conscience, it freed up a lot of social resources for other things like art, literature, architecture, beauty, exploration, colonialism, the positive and the negative aspects of it.
it.
And it also allowed for the development of the free market, because resources weren't being poured into policing everyone all the time, I guess in the brief span between medievalism and political correctness, that is.
And so there was a lot about Christianity that was philosophical, that was virtuous, and allowed for the internalization of the conscience, which freed up social resources for the development of that lovely little thing we call modern civilization.
So So there was a lot in that that I think had a lot to do with its success both philosophically and economically and scientifically too.
Okay, can I ask a couple questions from your book, Against the Gods?
Give me just one or two, because it's been almost four hours, and I just want to make sure I'm staying as fresh as humanly possible for your remaining questions, so just give me one or two of the most important ones.
Okay, so you said that if a child has a question of why soldiers get a medal and murderers go to jail, That that doesn't make sense to them.
Now, what if you had...
Do you believe that there can be a good society and a bad or evil society?
And what if the evil society attacks the good society?
Isn't it then moral for them to fight them and have soldiers that kill for them?
Well, sure, I understand that.
But the difference is, have most soldiers throughout history...
Fought for abstract moral virtues or fought for one of two reasons either a because they'll be shot if they don't or b because they're ordered to by their government and Well, self-defense is moral, of course.
I mean, I've made that case many times.
I think it's acceptable and good to use violence in self-defense.
But soldiers throughout history have generally, I mean, been drafted a lot of times, right?
You're forced to go and you're forced to fight.
That's not moral.
If you don't have a citizenry that's willing to come to the defense of your culture voluntarily, I don't think the solution is then just to force them to and we've seen what happened in the European civilization when twice in the span of a half century a lot of the bravest and strongest young European men were forced into wars which slaughtered them by the millions and we've seen what's left over.
Yes.
They died to defend a European civilization which their deaths rendered unable to be defended.
So most of the time, it was not, I guess, just war would be the term.
Well, no, no.
The war, I mean, the arguments for the justice of the war can go back and forth.
What I'm talking about is the individual people were often lied to.
I mean, think of the Americans more recently.
Think of the American soldiers or people who were civilians who signed up to go to war in Iraq, To protect America after 9-11 from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction that were pointed at American cities, and we don't want the smoking gun to be in the form of a mushroom cloud.
They went and fought in Iraq to defend America from weapons of mass destruction pointed at the heartland by Saddam Hussein.
All lies.
Well, their hearts were in the right place, but they were misled by their leaders.
Right.
Right, I understand that.
But I, as an individual, am still responsible.
I, as an individual, am still responsible for the morality of my actions, even if I've been lied to.
There's an old story.
It might be Stephen King.
It might be someone else.
A woman gets attacked or assaulted or raped or something like that.
And she goes...
Her husband finds her and says, I was attacked.
I was assaulted.
I was raped.
And so he takes her to the place where it happened.
And she says, there, that's the man.
That's the man who did it.
And he goes and attacks that man.
Kills him, I think.
And then they're walking home.
And then she says, no, no, that's the man.
That's the man who did it.
And it's some other guy completely.
And then she says, no, that's the man.
That's the man who did it.
She keeps pointing at all these different men.
Okay.
Okay.
Now, clearly, that's not self-defense, because it's not immediate, and it's not even himself.
But we would have some sympathy for him attacking, though it would be wrong, for him to attack the man who had assaulted his girlfriend or his wife.
And the fact that she positively identified him, we'd say, okay, well, that makes it somewhat understandable.
I don't agree with it, but somewhat understandable to have that reaction.
But he's still responsible.
That's why we have courts.
That's why we have a legal system.
That's why we have the burden of proof and so on, because people make mistakes all the time.
So in a private situation, you can't say, well, I was told this, and therefore I went and did this thing.
You'd still be responsible.
And so that's the challenge.
I think that what the media did to the soldiers is murderous.
Murderous.
Well, the media amplifying the government propaganda and refusing to be critical.
And what happened?
Nobody lost their job.
Well, one person lost their job.
No consequences.
You know, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis got killed, thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, if you include accidents, of Americans got killed or maimed because of lies.
Because of lies.
And who paid for it?
Who suffered for it?
So, as far as why people go to war, yes, there's a moral case for a just war.
Yes, there's a moral case for the self-defense of a cultural geographical region and so on.
I agree.
But that moral case is rarely made honestly to the soldiers.
What happened in the First World War is if you didn't go charge out into the hail of bullets coming from the German machine gun nest, they just put a bullet in your head in the trenches.
Like, they shot people who didn't go into this suicidality of charging across no man's land to the point where tens of thousands of soldiers would get killed sometimes in a single day.
And not only that, I... I saw when I read the book, The Creature from Jekyll Island, the Lusitania.
So that was kind of one of the tipping points that got America, the United States, into the war.
And the German embassy had actually issued a warning to, I think it was 50 of the largest newspapers in the United States, telling them that if they Sailed in that area that they would be targeted.
But the US State Department called all those newspapers and told them they could not run that warning.
But it was run in one newspaper refused to listen to the State Department.
It was the Des Moines Register.
And there's a copy of the warning in the book, The Creature from Jekyll Island.
And so they...
You know, they sent all those people off to die so that, you know, they could make the case that, you know, they killed our people and now we need to go fight them because they're, you know, they're bad guys.
Yeah.
And it is horrendous what is done to very brave men.
Very necessary men get expended like people just burning trash in their backyard.
Those men, the men with the courage and the willingness to fight in this manner, are essential to society and should be conserved at all costs.
And yet they are spent wantonly, they are burned alive wantonly for the sake of politics, for the sake of protecting the petrodollar, for the sake of hegemony, for the sake of Some imagined geopolitical gold in the Middle East.
They're burnt up like they're trash, and they are essential.
And we see what happens to society in their absence.
We can see that happening now.
Anyway, sorry, you had another question?
Well, you said that God must be very simple, because if he was, you know, he hasn't evolved, is what you said.
But I don't...
I don't see how that's necessarily true.
No, that's just a biological argument that complex biological traits or entities or organs must be preceded by less complex.
Traits or entities or organs, right?
So you would not expect, like, there are certain cells that are more sensitive to light, and you get little patches of those in your bodies, and eventually they sort of coalesce into eyes or whatever.
But you would never expect the more complex eyes to exist prior to the less complex eyes, if that makes sense.
The complexity always goes from, in evolution, it must go from simple to more complex over time.
And the argument is that if something exists that has any biological characteristics, like life or thought or existence in some sort of manner that is something to do with life, like sentience and so on, then the more complex that existence is, The more it must have evolved from something that is less complex.
But if God is positive as a form of sentience that is the most complex possibly that could exist, but did not evolve from anything, then that becomes rather confusing, because then we have the problem of where did God come from?
And if the answer is, well, he didn't come from any kind of If God spontaneously exists in a permanent fashion, then that violates laws of thermodynamics and so on, and entropy, of course, because we would expect the energy or concentration or omnipotence or omniscience of God to decay over time, that God would then be above or beyond the laws of physics.
And again, once we get to above and beyond the laws of physics and not subject to the laws of evolution, we can't say anything about anything because it is simply a complete unknown.
Well, I'm going to appreciate the call.
I'm going to end the show as we're closing at the four-hour mark, but I really, really want to thank everyone for calling in.
It is a great pleasure to chat with you all about such important issues.
I really, really appreciate your input and the care and thought which goes into these questions and the conversations are a real delight.
Thank you everyone so much for listening and for watching.
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