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July 14, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:05:49
3743 The Argument from Genghis Khan? - Call In Show - July 12th, 2017
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Hey, hey everybody!
It's Devan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing very well.
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Five callers tonight.
The first was a guy who had some questions about the approach I've taken to proving secular ethics called Universally Preferable Behavior, which is a free book you can get at freedomainradio.com slash free.
Kind of the argument from Genghis Khan.
Well, Genghis Khan was a volcano of semen who coated the world with his seed and the blood of his enemies, and he did very well, so there are no ethics.
Very interesting question.
We hashed it back and forth, got a little testy at times, but I think for a good reason.
Second caller has a girlfriend he thinks is great, but he's concerned that she might have excessive vanity.
Is that a red flag?
Could be.
You'll find out.
Third caller.
Oh man, what a story.
He was recently suspended from his university for a joke.
Now, that sounds like a joke, a tragic joke, but it's even crazier than what you think.
And if you're even thinking of getting anywhere close to a college campus over the next, say, five to ten years, you need to listen to this one absolutely, completely, and totally.
The fourth caller wanted to know, why don't parents actually protect their children?
Why aren't they honest with their children?
How do you tell your children about the world and their place in it?
It's a good question.
I've been wrestling with that one as well myself.
And the fifth caller wanted to know, what is the ideal educational system supposed to look like?
And I share my thoughts on that.
It's a great, great set of callers.
Thanks everyone so much.
Without further ado, here we go.
Alright, well at first today we have Jeremy.
Jeremy wrote in and said,"...is it possible for atheism to explain the existence of objective morality, subject independent, things are right or wrong independently of whether anyone believes them to be so?" How would UPB apply to, say, Genghis Khan?
It strikes me that UPB morality does not address the personal ethics internal to a single moral agent, only transactional ethics between a plurality of moral agents in most cases.
That's from Jeremy.
Hey Jeremy, how you doing tonight?
I'm doing great.
How about you?
I'm very well, thank you.
I'm very well, thank you.
So, you've read the book, Universally Preferable Behavior, right?
Yes.
So, what's missing for you in the book?
Well, what's missing for me, I guess, is that there is no objective arbiter of morality.
So, like I said in my question, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Hillary Clinton...
If you get enough power and money, suddenly it seems to me that universally preferable behavior isn't universally preferable.
Another example would be cultural differences between societies or You know, look, I understand the objections.
I address them in the book, and I'm just wondering where in the book you find the argument fails.
Because I wrote a book to answer these questions.
You say you've read the book, and you're just asking the questions as if the book has not been written.
And maybe the book fails in providing these explanations.
But I'm just curious, I guess, where you see the book lacking or where you find the arguments in the book lacking regarding these questions.
Well, Kindle location 211, you assume consciousness is an effect of matter.
I mean, I can't point to a specific place in the book because I don't have the copy in front of me.
I just downloaded a PDF on my computer.
Maybe you've not done this kind of analysis.
I mean, maybe this is just something that was drilled into me in studying philosophy under professors or mentors.
But if someone puts forward an argument, then the important thing is to, you know, analyze the argument, figure out where the argument, you know, what the premises are, and then figure out what the syllogisms are and how they logically follow and so on.
You know, it's sort of like I wrote a book on here's how you make an omelette.
And you read the book...
Or you read the recipe on how to make an omelette, and it's sort of very detailed.
You know, you get your eggs, you get your shallots, or your green peppers, or whatever you're putting in the omelette.
You heat up the griddle, you put it on, and you make sure it's a non-stick.
And it's like, you say, I want to know how to make an omelette.
Okay, Steph's written out this whole recipe on how to make an omelette.
And then you call me up and say, I've read your book on how to make an omelette, Steph, but how do you make an omelette?
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, I'm sorry.
I did read the book.
the book, I just didn't see any logical progression from a justified premise through the syllogisms to the conclusion.
I mean, your arguments at some points in the book were addressing theistic personalism and at some points addressing agnosticism.
And there was a lot of power behind the arguments, but I didn't see it clearly spelled out.
That might just be my own ignorance, but it struck me that you Assumed as one of your premises, without justifying it, that God is logically contradictory, and went on to provide a number of, you know, ideas for how morality could be derived absent God, which I thought those examples that I gave you were counterarguments to.
Were Genghis Khan as a counterargument?
Well, yeah.
Genghis Khan would be a counterargument because, you know, at one point he controlled A lot of Asia.
He went around raping and pillaging.
Look, I understand, Jeremy.
There are bad people in the world.
There are evil people in the world.
The point is the behavior is not universally preferable than Genghis Khan and anyone who assumed power or societies and their various contradictory morals.
I know, I know, I know.
But you understand that if human beings automatically chose virtue, in other words, if all human beings chose to be good or were automatically good, like a robot or like a computer program, Then there would be no point writing a book on ethics, right?
I mean, if all human beings always ate the very best food for their bodies, there'd be absolutely no point writing a book on nutrition, right?
Yes, granted, but the two questions that come up instantaneously are A, what is the good?
B, how do we come to know the good absent God?
And, um...
Well, those are the two main ones.
I mean it strikes me that the ontology of the argument, not to mention the epistemology, but ontologically, how is there an objective good to which we can aspire if there's no god?
Because either you get into Platonism, which postulates shadows in the cave… That human beings aspire to, but which raises a whole host of other questions, because then you have, you know, Objective, non-material things somewhere in the metaphysical universe, like the good, the beautiful, the true, to which all humans are aspiring.
Okay, well, let's not go into all the competing theories.
Because if I accepted any of those competing theories, I wouldn't have written my own book on ethics, right?
So, let me ask you this.
So, you remember in the book, at least I hope you do, you remember that they're the examples of two guys in a room, right?
Do you remember those at all?
Yes.
Okay.
So, do you remember, or can you step me through the argument about how, for instance, something like theft, it's impossible for theft to be universally preferable behavior for two guys in a room?
Well, yeah, because then you get into retaliation and tit for tat.
No, I didn't mention anything about retaliation.
I'm just wondering if you remember the argument from the book at all.
I'm sorry, I don't remember.
I read the book.
It sounds to me like you skimmed the book, because that's kind of the heart of the book.
So if you can't remember these things, I'll refresh you.
Maybe they'll come back.
So you've got two guys in a room, Bob and Doug.
It's my homage to SCTV. So you've got two guys in a room, and you have as a moral theory that theft is universally preferable behavior.
Everyone should steal from each other all the time.
Right?
Well, you can't have that occur with two guys in a room.
Let's say they both have an iPod, and your theory of ethics is that it is universally preferable behavior for one man, for both men really, to steal each other's iPods all the time, right?
That can't work.
It can't work practically.
You can't continually keep stealing stuff back and forth.
It's sort of pointless, because you end up with your iPod anyway.
But fundamentally, it's impossible.
Because if I say that theft is universally preferable behavior, then it cannot be universal because theft occurs when you take something of mine that I don't want you to take.
So you have to want my iPod, and I have to not want you to take it.
Like, if I'm happy for you to take my iPod, it's not theft, right?
Like, if you're taking it back because you lent it to me, or if we paid 50-50 and it's your turn to use it, or I don't mind, you're my brother or my friend, I don't mind if you borrow my iPod, then clearly it's not theft, right?
So theft occurs when I don't want you to take the property, right?
Yeah, alright.
Okay, hang on, no, no.
You follow the argument so far, right?
Yes.
Okay, do you have any issues with the argument so far?
Yes.
Please, go ahead.
Well, that assumes that just because someone doesn't...
It conflates desires of an individual agent or the agents as a whole with the good, right?
I mean, just because...
No, no, no, we haven't talked about the good.
We're just talking about, is it possible...
For you to steal something from me that I willingly want to give to you.
Oh, no, that's obviously not possible.
Okay, good, good.
So it is impossible for theft to be universally preferable behavior.
Because if it is universally preferable behavior, then I want you to take my property.
I want you to steal from me.
But if I want you to steal from me, it's not theft.
Granted.
So it is impossible for theft to be universally preferable behavior.
It is impossible for rape to be universally preferable behavior because if I, quote, want you to rape me, so to speak, then it's not rape, right?
It's role play or some weird kinky stuff, whatever you want to call it, but it's not rape.
Same thing with assault.
If I want you...
To beat me up, then clearly I'm just playing hockey or we were boxing or, you know, something like that.
Or it's some sort of sadomasochistic, wax on the nipples, 50 shades of grey kind of stuff going on, right?
So it is impossible for rape, theft and assault and murder to be universally preferable behavior.
So this is how we know that bans on rape, theft, assault and murder are rational.
Now, If I say, respect for property rights can be universally preferable behavior, well, that works perfectly.
You and I can both have an iPod, we can both be listening to our Gwen Stefani, and we can both be enjoying our own use of our own property, and there's no contradiction in that whatsoever.
Respect for property rights.
It's perfectly, rationally, consistently achievable for everyone at all times.
It doesn't mean everyone will do it.
I just mean it's theoretically, like it's logically possible.
Whereas having violations of property or personhood as universally preferable behavior is logically and practically impossible.
Right?
Yes.
Okay.
So there we've made some significant progress.
So anyone who says...
That theft is universally preferable behavior has made both a logical and a practical error and such a theory should be rejected as impossible to achieve in reality and self-contradictory in its formulation.
Okay.
Are you done?
Can I ask you some questions?
So, two questions.
How would you get to universally preferable behavior In an instance where there is conflating or conflicting motivations,
like where there's a morally ambiguous question, and it's not something as straightforward to analyze as murder or theft, how do you come up with a system of So we have just established that rape,
theft, assault, and murder can never be universally preferable behavior.
Now, let me ask you, Jeremy, do you think it's a pretty—let's say you accept this formulation, and I think you have as rational— We have a pretty big job in this world getting people to understand that rape, theft, assault, and murder are things which we can't have as part of universally preferable behavior.
And this is more than just for private citizens.
This involves into things like the state and soldiers and policemen and war and so on, right?
So we have more than a life's work in just getting this idea across to people in a consistent and universal way, right?
Because UPB... It's bigger than the state.
It is bigger than armies.
Because armies, being composed of human beings who are subject to universally preferable behavior, well, there's a challenge in supporting that, logically.
So what we have done, just in a few minutes here, Jeremy, is we have uncovered more than a life's work of getting this idea across to people, right?
So the welfare state.
Well, the welfare state is a violation, right?
Of property rights.
It is saying, well, some people are allowed to initiate the use of force in order to take money against the will of other people.
Well, that's illegitimate, according to universally preferable behavior.
In other words, according to philosophy and basic reasoning.
And so we have a life's work ahead of us to get this idea across to people in a consistent way and save civilization.
Now, from this few minutes of conversation, we have...
Gotten the kind of moral and intellectual and philosophical labors we can reasonably bequeath to our grandchildren, then they still won't be close to being done.
But you immediately want to go away from that central core work of getting this idea across to humanity as a whole, and you want to start talking about morally ambiguous situations.
It's sort of like there's a plague that is taking down the entire world, and in five minutes I train you on how to treat 99% Of those plague victims, and then you're like, well, yeah, but what about the 1% where it's kind of hard to tell and this and that?
It's like, come on, man, we've got our work cut out for us.
Do we really want to vault straight into the morally ambiguous stuff?
I mean, I will if you want.
I just wanted to point that out.
No, that's a fair criticism.
And the, you know, broad questions of morality, universally preferable behavior, it strikes me, covers them pretty well.
But I was only bringing up the more ambiguous stuff.
Because if a moral system doesn't, can't, can't give an answer for, you know, intricate moral questions, details, you know, you have in your personal life, then it strikes me as deficient.
No, no, hang on, hang on.
And I'll get to those, but I just want to push back against that.
Now, do you understand Einsteinian physics is more accurate than Newtonian physics, right?
Yes.
I mean, at very high velocities and so on, right?
Yeah, yes, I do.
Okay.
Do you think that sailors should never have explored the ocean because there was not Einsteinian physics as yet?
Do you think that they should have just stayed home completely because, you know, maybe it would have been a millimeter off using Newtonian physics to cross the Atlantic rather than Einsteinian physics?
No, of course not.
Yeah, there's good enough, right?
There's good enough.
There's good enough.
Things don't have to be perfect to be usable.
Because you understand, you can always come up with some scenario that is going to be a challenge to any sort of ethical system, and you can keep inventing these and inventing these and inventing these.
That's just a form of avoidance.
That's just a form of avoiding the essential work we need to do.
It's like, well, you know, I can't feed the starving masses because I don't have the right kind of hollandaise sauce.
It's like, well, they're going to starve to death unless you get out there and feed people.
The food is good enough for them to survive on.
So this idea that an ethical system has to have a sort of pat answer for every theoretical complexity you could point at it to me is saying, well, we can't explore the ocean because a better theory of physics might come along in a few hundred years.
So I'm sorry.
We're just going to have to wait.
But I think that's a faulty analogy.
I didn't say that universally preferable behavior ethics system can't be used, and we shouldn't teach the morals that it points to.
I'm saying what is the ontology of morality?
And just because we have a system that for 99% of cases points to the right thing, that's not a philosophical system.
What are you talking about?
Are you saying that biology, which has ambiguities in the very definition of life itself, it has blurred lines somewheres between different categories of animals, are you saying that because there is fuzzy borders in the realm of biology, that biology is exactly the same as astrology?
It's not a science?
No, of course I'm not saying that.
I'm saying that you can't get through universally.
Okay, so you're willing to accept when it comes to organic things like human beings and morality, you're willing to accept some fuzzy lines and it does no disservice to the philosophy to say that there are fuzzy stuff at the edge, right?
No, but what I am saying is that it does not – universally preferable behavior cannot – No, no, we just did this.
We just did this.
Rape, theft, assault, and murder.
We agreed on that.
Now, we can go back and you can undo your agreement on that, but no, we have objective moral standards here of universally preferable behavior, respect for persons and property.
You're equating preferable with good behavior.
Which are two distinct categories, I would argue.
Just because something is preferable for the flourishing of human life doesn't equate to good.
There's a lot of good things that you can do, like stay up late and study for your college exams, or...
That's not a moral question.
Alright, I'll name another...
Your exam could be to be head torturer at a concentration camp, right?
Here's another example.
You can suffer, stay up late, For the sake of your children, for example.
Even if your children are horrible people, just because you love them.
Your children are horrible people?
No.
If you're the parent, wouldn't you have some say in how your children turn out?
Well, yeah, but that's beside the point.
It's a hypothetical.
If your children are absolutely...
You know, awful people.
They should be in jail.
Oh, yeah, let's pick that up.
Oh, come on.
Jeremy, are you listening to yourself?
Are you really going to start criticizing a moral theory by saying, your children are evil and should be in jail?
This is your pushback?
Are you a parent at all, just out of curiosity?
Yeah, I actually had a job.
You are a parent.
Okay.
Do you know how much influence you have over your children at all?
Yeah, I do.
Okay, so do you think your children can just randomly or become or be evil, which has nothing to do with your parenting?
Yes.
There's free will.
I mean, my parenting...
No, not for children, there isn't.
If there was complete free will for children, they'd be adults.
They'd be fully morally responsible.
I can mold my children and give them the proper lessons all I want, but at the end of the day, their free will has to elect...
To choose to follow my guidance and my wife's guidance or not.
Similarly, if they turn out to be horrible adults despite all our best parenting, universally preferable behavior might say, well, somehow they got… On the wrong track during their life.
Wait, wait.
Are you saying universally preferable behavior might say they got on the wrong track in their life?
I don't understand that.
Universally preferable behavior is a rational analysis of behaviors, which could be theoretically universal.
I'm not sure where your kids getting off on the wrong track has anything to do with that.
What I'm saying is, pause it, I raised them well, they somehow turned out wrong, murdered somebody, whatever, they're in jail now.
I might give up on them under one system or not give up on them under another.
But the fundamental question is, is it good?
How do you get moral values and duties in all circumstances, even when it's detrimental or hard in the short term?
Wait, how do you get moral rules in all circumstances?
I'm not sure what you mean.
Yeah, moral values and duties.
You mean how does an ethical system tell you exactly what to do in all circumstances?
Yeah, well, what's the ontology?
What is the thing that says, this is the good and you should do the good?
So even though I recognize a universally preferable behavior, if I get enough power, why should I do that?
What consequence is there for me if I don't do that?
So again, like Genghis Khan, Genghis Khan raped and pillaged throughout the world.
He was not doing universally preferable behavior, yet from the standpoint of atheistic materialism – not sure if I'm a materialist, but what he was doing propagating his genes throughout the world was for his benefit.
He was not following universally preferable behavior, but he was – Being evolutionarily hugely successful, right?
So, universally preferable behavior is situation-dependent, individual-dependent for most people, but not for all people.
I'm sorry, I'm a little...
Again, are we back to people do bad things, therefore there's no such thing as ethics?
What is the ontology?
But that's like saying some people...
Don't understand math, therefore math is completely subjective.
Some people don't follow the scientific method, therefore there's no such thing as science.
People eat badly, therefore there's no such thing as nutrition.
People don't exercise, therefore there's no value to exercise.
People have the choice to reject virtue.
They have the choice to reject virtue whether you are a theist or an atheist.
Do you understand, right?
Because it wasn't like God put a big holy wall between Genghis Khan and his endless rape victims, right?
I mean, I mean, he chose to reject, let's say, that God, as Dennis Prager argues, that without God there is no good.
Okay, well, then Genghis Khan, by believing what he believed or not believing whatever he didn't believe...
Well, he acted against the virtue that God commands.
Thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not steal.
He bypassed all of that sort of stuff.
So I'm not sure when you say, well, people disagree or act against virtue, and that's a problem for atheism.
How is that not a problem for religion?
How is that not a problem for a God-based ethical system?
Because people can choose Satan, they can choose agnosticism, materialism, atheism, they can choose nihilism, they can choose...
Any other god that allows them to do certain things.
They can choose to embody the Norse mythology of Ragnarok, right?
So, if you're going to say, well, there are bad people who do bad things and therefore UPB is flawed, well, how is that any different for atheistic morality?
Well, there's a theodicy in at least Catholicism for that.
I mean, in Roman Catholic theology and the mainline Christian belief of the past 2,000 years, As well as the Old Testament Jewish belief, God gave man free will, which entails the ability to contradict God's rules and dictates.
Now, obviously, the natural question arises about the problem of evil.
Why would God even permit such an evil thing?
Well, the reason is because human beings aren't robots.
He gave us free will.
He wants us to freely love Him, and with That moral agency comes the ability to choose what is bad and what would bring you closer to him.
The question of innocent suffering, like how do you explain to a rape victim why was she raped, right?
That's a question that's bugged a bunch of atheists for a long time, and that's part of the That's a component.
No, not atheists.
I think you mean theists, right?
Well, no.
Yeah, theists.
Sorry, that's atheists' most strong argument, the problem of evil.
Well, then it's not a very fair argument.
Free will in the religious context, right?
I mean, we know statistically, right, Jeremy?
We know statistically that certain life events, particularly in childhood, raise the odds of somebody becoming a criminal or a sadist or a psychopath or a sociopath and so on.
And so, for some people who are raised in the congenial bosoms of loving families with resources and good moral guidance and so on, the odds of them becoming nasty criminals are virtually zero.
Whereas if children are, you know, beaten and raped and abused and kidnapped as child soldiers and forced to shoot their own parents in the face and stuff like that, the odds of them growing up with the same free will to choose virtue as compared to the kids who are raised in peaceful, patient, loving, protected homes, it's not a very fair starting line when you start talking about free will.
It doesn't mean that it's deterministic, but...
It's not like everyone starts in an even line when it comes to moral choices.
I would concede that point as a problem for everybody, for universally preferable behavior, for atheistic, materialistic philosophies of ethics, and for Christian ethics all the same.
What I was going to say, though, is that the problem of evil is only a problem When you take it from the perspective of an individual human being rather than God, I mean, at least as a Christian, my answer to the problem of evil, I would say, is that since God, you know, God is the commander at D-Day.
God knows how to position everybody so that the best result can come about.
Individual soldiers will die and, you know, you're Your attack boat might not have a full tank of gas or might open right on to a machine gun nest.
But just because it's bad for the individual doesn't mean it's bad for God.
I never know what to make of those kinds of statements because they're not philosophical.
They're just statements of theistic or theological preference.
But with regards to someone like Genghis Khan, The danger in the world, Jeremy, believe it or not, at least in the modern world, is not Genghis Khan.
The danger is not people doing evil things.
The danger in the world is people doing evil things that they think are good.
Now, philosophy has no magic shield with which to bar the behavior of evil people.
That's up to self-defense, right?
That's up to the cops or whatever, right?
So there's no protection from evil spell that morality casts about you where they bounce off you like, you know, trying to scratch a marble or something.
But the problem is not evil people doing evil things.
Let me ask you this.
Have you ever been mugged in your life?
Yes.
And how much did the mugger get?
My candy loot when I was trick-or-treating as a kid.
Oh, yeah, okay.
So you got an early lesson in taxation.
Yeah, I got an early lesson.
So you lost, you know, like 10 bucks of candy or something, right?
Yeah.
Have you paid a lot of taxes in your life?
Oh, yeah.
I'm all for your stance on government overreach.
Oh no, I understand that, but what I'm saying is that as far as your property being in danger, as far as your property rights being violated, it is not the criminal that you have to fear.
It is the people who think they're doing good.
When they're not.
It's the people who think that taxation is not theft, that the government is not an agency of coercion, who think, well, it's the price we pay for civilization, and that's how the poor are going to get their health care, and that's how the roads get built, and it's good, and we need it, and it's necessary, and it's virtuous.
You understand?
UPB takes aim at those delusions.
The delusions that currently are...
Dragging the West down into a virtual pit of prehistory.
So UPB, once you're in Genghis Khan land, you know, and it's kind of a Darwinian rape and blood and pillage and sword fest and so on.
So that UPB is not going to solve Genghis Khan.
UPB Solves things like taxation and the welfare state and war and all of these other issues, which are the real issues that actually directly affect people by far the most of all.
You know, oh, the mafia is charging people protection money.
I bet you it's still less than their property tax plus other forms of taxes that they're paying in their businesses.
So it is designed to educate the misinformed rather than reform the evil.
Granted, but it can't be termed universally preferable behavior, and it can't be applied to the situation of Genghis Khan.
If both of those are true, then I would argue that there's something deficient or lacking in the system.
I'm sorry, I'm still not sure what you're saying.
How does the Genghis Khan think?
Well, you say it's universally preferable behavior.
Well, it's not universal in that if you're Genghis Khan and Genghis You know, a thousand years ago or whenever.
Oh my god, do we have to do this again and again and again?
It says universally preferable behavior, not universally preferred behavior.
People can choose to reject morality.
Of course they can.
It doesn't say that everyone is going to choose this all the time.
Otherwise, like, the book is not, here man, here's how you breathe.
Take a deep breath, hold it for a moment, and breathe out.
Here's how you breathe when you sleep.
Here's how you make your heart beat.
Because those are autonomous nervous system.
Habits, right?
Particularly your heartbeat.
You may be able to slow it and speed it up and so on, but you can't really mentally just stop it, right?
So those are automatic systems within your body.
You don't lecture it.
Your liver or your spleen on what to do in your body, right?
But when it comes to ethics, absolutely, people can choose not to follow them, just as people can choose to consult chicken entrails rather than science.
Or people can choose to flip coins rather than consult a weather expert.
But that doesn't mean that science or weather experts or meteorology are all personally like they're just random and subjective and so on.
So this idea that there are people who do bad things, that's why we need an ethical system, right?
People are irrational.
That's why we need science.
People don't understand usually much to do with numbers beyond their own personal metrics, which is why we need mathematics.
People can't usually judge what stands up when it's 20 stories high, which is why we need architecture and engineering.
And some people build houses by ignoring those principles, and those houses fall down.
And then you say, well, because some people ignore architecture and engineering, and they build houses using rule of thumb and gut feel, and those houses fall down, therefore, architecture and engineering are invalid.
It's like, no, no, that makes them more valid.
If you look at the results of what happened when people don't accept universal morality, as in Genghis Khan, that's very, very bad, which is why we need to keep reinforcing the value of universal morality.
I think I see what you're saying.
People eat badly.
People eat badly, so we need to really reinforce the value of nutrition.
You say, well, people eat badly, that invalidates nutrition.
No, that's why you need nutrition.
Genghis Khan is exactly why you need universal morality.
And I'm with you as far as atheism goes.
Atheism has severely, and I would say catastrophically neglected, its duty to provide universal morality when taking down God.
Because God was the mechanism by which universal morality was embedded in the conscience.
It was the conscience of the West.
The Christian morality, anchored in God's dictates, was the actual conscience of Of the West.
It was the toughness of the West.
It was the sternness of the West.
And we gave people an acceptance of free will, and Lord knows atheists are a little more on the deterministic side.
And when you're on the deterministic side, you don't give people the responsibility of free will.
And therefore, you become a social engineer.
Well, it's not their fault, and they were victims, and blah, blah, blah, right?
So I am with you that we need a universal morality.
And...
Atheists have severely, catastrophically I say, neglected their duty to provide universal morality after they eviscerated God from the conscience of the West, therefore obliterating to a large degree the conscience.
And what do we have instead of a conscience now?
We have sentimentality instead of a conscience.
And we have socialistic determination in place of free will.
And when you get sentimentality instead of responsibility, you self-destroy on pathological altruism.
But, sorry, go ahead.
I just wanted to sort of make that point.
So I want to be cognizant of time.
I don't want to take up too much of your time with the other callers on the line.
I was wondering if I could just ask one more question of you.
And that is, how would you phrase, you know, preferable, you know, contributes to the flourishing of human beings?
I'm sorry, say that again?
How would you describe behavior that is universally changed Universally preferable for human beings, i.e.
contributes to the general flourishing of human beings.
How would you equate that with good?
In other words, why is it good for human beings to flourish?
Sorry to interrupt, Jeremy.
I don't know why I would give a shit about human beings flourishing.
It's not up to me.
I'm not a central planner.
I don't have giant levers that control people's happiness.
What I do want, Jeremy, is for people to be free.
I want them to be free of coercion or the threat of coercion.
I want them to be free of fraud or the threat of fraud.
Now, after that...
I want people to be free, and I want them to accrue to their own lives the consequences of their own choices.
Now, for some people, I think for the majority of people, that freedom will be highly beneficial.
For some people, that freedom, they will use it badly, they will exercise it badly, and they will not flourish.
And their lack of flourishing, in fact, their entire disastrous of their lives, will be the wonderful signal for everyone else to not do whatever they're doing.
Like in the past, as you know, if a woman got pregnant outside of wedlock, Well, she became kind of unmarriable.
I mean, unless she scooted off to some place to get an abortion or have the kid to pretend that her mom had a late pregnancy or something like that.
Like, if it came out, if she had a kid, then she would be unmarriable and her parents would have to keep her at home and take on the entire cost of raising that kid and it would be a big, giant disaster.
And because it would be a big, giant disaster for a woman to get pregnant outside of wedlock, Because the social and economic costs accrued to the individual family, parents were actually gave a crap about their children's, their like adult children's sexual habits, right?
Their daughters and their sons.
So I want freedom.
Now, I believe that in a state of freedom, a lot of people are going to flourish and some people are going to do bad.
Like, Genghis Khan, in a genuinely free society that understood UPB, would end up in jail, because he was a psychopathic mass murderer and rapist, right?
So he wants this Mad Max beyond the Thunderdome planet of kill or be killed, this Darwinian struggle, because he's the most vicious, the most brutal, and willing to do the most ugly things to achieve his will.
So he wants that world, and his genes flourish in that world, as you know.
Like, what is it?
Like, 1 in 16 people in the region can trace their genetics directly back to the guy?
I mean, the man was like a volcano of semen that coded the damn continent from end to end.
And so, from a pure biological standpoint, he was highly successful.
From a moral standpoint, I mean, he was stone evil.
And so...
As far as human flourishing goes, I don't care about it at all.
I want freedom.
I want responsibility to accrue to people for their choices, which is what happens in a state of freedom.
The government, through its coercive redistribution of wealth, is constantly shielding people from the consequences of their bad decisions and sometimes even paying them directly for those bad decisions.
Hey, you had another kid by another guy.
You don't remember his name.
Great.
Here's another thousand bucks a month, right?
Right.
And that destroys incentives, destroys society, undermines the family, and destroys the capacity we have to love each other based upon necessity.
So as far as human flourishing goes, to me, that is a very positive statement.
I don't want human flourishing.
I want freedom.
Now, I think the consequence of that will be a lot of human flourishing, but I don't care about that because I can't have an ethical system that depends on consequences, right?
Well, it's like saying, how can you guarantee that all the slaves who are freed in the world will flourish?
I can't guarantee that.
In fact, some of them will hate being free.
Some of them, a few of them, would have preferred to continue to be slaves.
The question is not what happens after.
The question is what is the right thing to do.
Do right, though the skies fall.
Fair enough.
Thank you, Stefan.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
It was a great conversation, and let's move on.
All right, up next we have Ola.
He wrote in and said, At what point does female vanity become excessive and a red flag?
My girlfriend is amazing, and as the Eastern European woman she is, is not afraid of exhibiting her femininity.
However, a few things about her worry me, and I'm not sure whether they point towards something problematic or if I'm the one who just needs to get over it.
For instance, she often wears lipstick of different colors, but for some reason I can't stand lipstick.
She also does a pose on pictures instead of a smile, which brings out a dark feeling inside me and when I am in front of the camera with her.
She also sometimes wears glasses without strength and smokes, which I strongly dislike.
However, she is a wonderful woman, a wonderful human being who is family-oriented, extremely loyal, and self-secure.
It is an absolute joy spending time with her.
We live in different countries at the moment, but we have started to discuss how that could be solved.
But I could really use your perspective on this.
Am I right to worry about these things, or is it something I have to work on to get over?
That's from Ola.
Ola, how are you doing tonight, brother?
Doing well, Stefan, and hopefully good.
It's always a good combo.
How did you meet your girlfriend?
I'm nervous.
A little bit of background, I guess.
It was in May 2015.
She was traveling with a friend through this service called Couchsurfing.
Are you familiar with Couchsurfing?
Yeah, it's kind of like low rents get into people's places and move on, right?
Yeah.
Like bed and breakfast with dust bunnies.
Yeah.
And it's supposed to be free.
So that's kind of the thing.
It's not Airbnb because it's supposed to be free.
You're not allowed to even take a payment.
So she was traveling with a friend and yeah, nothing really happened then.
But I was traveling a lot in Eastern Europe later that year.
And I actually visited them, and I stayed at what's not my girlfriend's place.
And yeah, sparks were lit, so to speak, when I was there.
And I really didn't have any further plan at that moment, because at the moment I was fairly influenced by Like the self-help community, a lot of pickup community stuff, especially influenced by a book called The Alabaster Girl by a guy named Zan Perian.
And I really had a huge appreciation for Eastern European femininity.
I don't know the book, but it's just sort of the argument that I've heard that Western women having been affected by leftism and feminism are like volatile estrogen bombs of man-hating neediness, whereas Eastern European women, Melania Trump style, are, you know, gracious and feminine and appreciate masculinity.
I'm probably bastardizing the argument, but does it go something like that?
Yeah, pretty much.
It's more of a kind of a lyrical book where he's like a very romantic kind of guy.
The main argument is basically that women love lovers of women.
Like men who truly appreciate femininity, that's what women love.
So women kind of love to be seen by a real man, so to speak.
So not a lot of virtue in this.
You just have to love femininity as you see it.
True.
Okay.
So not like women love men who are courageous and honorable and productive and generous and strong.
And it's just like, if you pander to femininity, you're in!
Something like that.
Yeah, I mean...
Because loving femininity generally means don't say no to women.
And I always find that.
There's so many different ways of not being able to say no to women.
Loving femininity is one.
Having a giant welfare state is another.
But that's sort of my initial thoughts.
But go on.
Yeah, either way.
I really didn't have any further plan.
But she took the initiative to come back to Norway, which is my country, a few months later.
And she also traveled actually several hours to meet me when my band was playing on a mini tour in Poland, like a month after that.
And she also came and visited me in August, and I visited her in Poland in September that month.
This is last year.
We didn't really have an official onset of the relationship, but it kind of made clear During I mean kind of last fall I would say that this is kind of a serious thing so that's when we kind of yeah as I said no official onset of the relationship just yeah right so over the last few months I've
really had to like whoa this is kind of actually happening But I've been surprised at how difficult it is for...
So, this girl is Russian, mind you, and she lives in Poland.
But it turns out it's pretty hard logistically.
That's sort of another...
That's a topic for a little bit later, I think.
And are you thinking of marrying her and filling her with seed and babies?
That's the question.
You must be thinking of it, otherwise it wouldn't be a question.
Of course, of course.
So there's so many things.
I have a whole list here.
I have some notes, like things that I really, really like with her.
And being from Scandinavia, I must say, it doesn't grow on trees, a lot of these Eastern European feminine qualities.
Okay, so what are the things that you like?
So first of all, she's incredibly kind, very open, very present wherever she is.
Also very proactive.
She'll plan lots of stuff while traveling and stuff.
initiative all the time and like whenever we're on the street and stuff like I'm it's such a cliche but I'm like the guy who likes to use a map and don't not ask people on the street but she will just ask like anyone and she will ask like five people to get to the right place anyway very very proactive also she's very confident She's authentic and very, very honest.
Doesn't hide who she is.
And also she's really curious about the people she meets.
And especially in me, like all my interests like philosophy, economics, sports.
She will be really curious because I am interested in those things.
And one time she even said we were on a bus.
So teach me something about economics.
And she really likes...
Marry her!
Sorry, sorry.
You should have seen the people responding to Lauren Southern making a Lord of the Rings reference in a video I did with her recently.
Anyway, go on.
Yeah, so...
Yes, we sometimes even read together, like after a meal or something.
So she will read it.
I will, like, have a book that I really like.
Like, one of your books, actually.
Or Peter Schiff, actually.
Yeah.
And she will read aloud and she really enjoys it.
And then we'd spend time after discussing what we just read and stuff.
Oh, she's an incredible cook.
Just amazing.
And also she's very family-oriented.
The most important thing in her life is to be close to the ones that she loves, like kids and family, and she wants kids.
And yeah, it's basically, she's very simple that way.
That's like her main goal in life.
Right.
Okay.
Now, help me understand the authenticity that you point out with some of the things I think that are troubling to you regarding vanity.
So you said she sometimes wears glasses without strength.
Does that mean she wears glasses that are just glass to make her look a certain way?
Yeah, it's not a common thing.
She did buy a couple of cheap glasses at one point.
She doesn't actually usually wear them, but it's happened just a couple of occasions.
I actually...
It's not a big thing.
It's a fashion accessory.
It's a look, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
And what is the pose on the picture instead of a smile that brings out, you say, the dark feeling inside of you?
It's...
It's strange.
I just have this strong...
I'm not sure what's the right word, but aversion, almost, towards...
I guess you could say posing.
What is the pose?
Oh, it's something where she would...
Oh, how do you even explain that?
Instead of standing next to me, she will stand maybe before me and...
It's kind of hard to explain actually.
Does she do something to accentuate her figure or her looks in terms of the pose?
Yes.
Right.
Okay.
And that is because I assume that they may end up on social media, right?
Yeah.
Right.
So she wants to look her best when facing the world.
If this was just going into your own like draw or something, it would probably would be a little bit different, right?
Okay, so she is a woman who likes to look good when she is being presented to others in the form of a picture, right?
In other words, she's a woman, right?
Which, you know, that's the deal.
Now, what's with the different color lipstick?
Why is that?
Oh, man.
Again, I'm not sure if this is something...
I'm having trouble with because there's nothing inherently wrong about lipstick.
Like, come on.
But I don't know.
Whenever I see lipstick, especially girls that I'm with, I just get this...
I don't know.
I think it's not gross, but I'm kind of repelled by it.
Well, it generally doesn't taste very good when you're kissing, right?
True.
And unless it has a natural lip color to it, I'm like, oh, that does not make you look better.
Like, please just put it off.
And to be fair, she doesn't wear lipstick that much anymore when she's with me, because, you know, I'm not a big fan.
Right.
And as far as looks go, where are you both on the 1 to 10?
We're both in the 8-9 range, I would say.
Right Don't see a big issue with vanity myself stuff.
You know, she wears some lipstick.
Well, you know, you're going to get all Amish or Islamist on her.
No lipstick.
I mean, come on, right?
She occasionally wears glasses just for a particular kind of look.
Eh.
You know, that's, I guess, to be, that's fine.
I mean, look, she's not 40, right?
Yes.
I'm turning 29, she's turning 27 this year.
Right, okay.
So, she poses, she wears a bit of lipstick sometimes, and occasionally she has glasses on that she doesn't need.
Yeah.
And she, so the last thing, she also smokes.
So that's kind of the last thing.
I also have something I didn't mention.
Well, look, she'll have to quit smoking if she wants to be a mom, right?
Sure.
And that's what she says.
If she one day becomes pregnant.
Oh, no, no.
She has to quit smoking before she becomes pregnant.
I agree.
Yeah, and a fair amount of time before, for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that when you quit smoking, if you've been a long-time smoker, it's pretty stressful on your system, and you don't want that stress transferring itself to a fetus.
So she has to, like, the moment you say, okay, we're getting married, we're going to become parents, you know, she's got to cut it out, right?
And also, one last thing.
It's probably maybe even more important than whatever issues that I have with her Looks or whatever.
It's this self-knowledge thing.
So I'm extremely growth-oriented.
I'm really dedicated to confronting every part of myself.
She, however, is not particularly versed in those introspection kind of conversations.
Not really familiar with self-analysis.
That at the moment is not an issue at all, but I'm just...
No, but she's curious, right?
So if you keep growing and she's curious about it, then she will most likely come along with you, right?
I mean, having a relationship, being married...
Is alternating between leader and follower in various things.
There are some areas in which my wife is the leader, and I'm just like, yes, dear, no dear, right?
And there are some areas in which I am the leader, and they generally are in similar areas going forward, but not everyone needs to have the same level of enthusiasm, expertise, or interest in everything.
And so if you are pursuing self-knowledge and she loves you and she's curious about what you're doing, then she's going to come along for the ride to some degree.
But, you know, I'm more interested in economics than my wife is.
She's more interested in other things and so she's the leader in some things.
She has more firm and fixed ideas on living space.
And I'm like, you know, well, if there's a roof over my head and power from my laptop, I'm good to go.
And so there are different areas of leadership and expertise that we have.
And they're not equal.
And why would you want them to be?
It's called the division of labor.
Like if you're building a house, you need the guy who's really good at the electricals.
And you need a guy who's really good at the plumbing.
And you need a guy who's really good at the caulking.
You know what I mean?
And so they work together as a team.
The division of labor within a marriage is one of the reasons why marriage is so powerful.
So for her to have the same level of interest that you have in everything would be...
Well, of course, it's unrealistic.
And it would be inefficient as well.
Yeah, I really appreciate how we're different.
I just...
I'm just worrying that there's something I'm not seeing at the moment because I try to ask her, like, so, like, what are your, like, personal insecurities?
Like, you don't have any?
She seems like such a confident in every area of life.
So it's her confidence.
It's her confidence.
Listen, I'm sorry to interrupt you, Ola, but she has a freedom of self-expression that you don't have.
Like, for you to say, I'm going to wear glasses to look cool, you'd be like, well, I can't do that.
That's inauthentic.
Right?
So she has a kind of freedom of self-expression that you don't have because you're self-conscious about some of this stuff.
And it's not a good or bad thing.
It's just that the stuff that troubles you, like, so she does a pose to look good on pictures.
She wants to show off her assets.
She wants to show off her curves.
She wants to show off how good she looks.
Okay, well, you know, if you've got it, flaunt it.
I mean, I sure as hell did when I had it, and still do to some degree.
So I would say she has a sort of freedom of self-expression, and a number of times you've talked about her confidence as if it's kind of like a bomb you need to defuse over time or something, right?
I mean, what's wrong with her?
Wearing different color lipsticks.
What's wrong with her experimenting with eyewear as a fashion accessory?
What's wrong with her striking a pose to look better in a selfie?
And what's wrong with her being very, very confident?
I mean, maybe she can take the leadership role in that.
So you can be like the neurotic Woody Allen introspective guy, and she can be like the confident warrior princess carving your way through the world.
There's nothing wrong with that kind of division of labor.
So maybe you can cede to her the authority of self-confidence, and she can cede to you authority in other areas.
Yes, I think you're right on there.
Yeah, it's just if there is a lack of depth here that I'm not seeing, that's kind of just what raised me.
Do you think she would be a loyal wife?
Yes.
Would she stay with you?
I mean, her parents together, does she have fixed ideas about the longevity of marriage?
Yes, to both questions.
Okay, okay.
Do you think you're good enough for her?
Yes.
Well, you're 29, she's 27.
It might be time to get cracking.
Exactly.
Because, I mean, look, if you're not going to marry this girl, you need to break up with her.
Because she's getting close to hitting the wall, right?
So she needs to try and cash in her chips, so to speak, while they're still got some gold on the edges, right?
Rather than them getting rubbed away by time.
We're making a decision this summer because we both realized that, okay, we can't waste our time being in a long-distance relationship.
So, yeah.
And you can have, I assume, good conversations with her, engaging conversations with her and all that, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And she really wanted to be on this call, too, by the way.
And by the way, she wanted me to say that she's sending you a very big hug and she really likes you.
Yeah.
That is very nice.
And also, I will commend her emotional intelligence in providing that comment to me when I'm talking to a man who's deciding on whether to marry her.
She is a wise woman, wily, in the ways of how to get things done.
So, you know, I mean, if you're attracted to her, if she's intelligent, if she's confident, if she loves you, if you love her, if you share values...
I'm not sure what else you're waiting for, you know?
Like, well, you know, maybe the next bus could have a slightly different temperature.
It's like, those buses don't come along that often.
It might be time to get on board.
Yeah.
So it's all about the logistics, like, as a step two to this, then.
Yeah, well, that's all solvable.
I mean, she's not on the space station, right?
You don't have to build a giant Jenga block to go visit her, so that can all be done, right?
Yeah, so probably not too interesting for this context, maybe.
You know, give a man a why, he can bear almost any how, right?
If you want to marry this woman, if she wants to marry you, just find a way to make it happen and get together as soon as you can.
Yep.
I mean, if she's the one, and it sounds like you're head over heels, and if she's the one, then let nothing stand in your way.
I mean, let nothing stand in your way.
I guess there's one more thing that I would kind of go into a little bit of depth with you, which is, I guess, again, it's me who's having a little bit of a problem with intimacy.
Um, my problem is that I easily get very kind of oversaturated almost.
I get this like intense need to just breathe.
Um, she's very, very cuddly.
Um, and I am to an extent is also, but it very quickly wears off.
Um, I really want to be giving like a very giving person in a relationship, but I'm also like a very independent, um, Kind of guy.
So, however, I am being fully myself, completely without any filter when I'm being with her.
And I can really sense that I'm really being my best self when I'm with her.
So that's me being giving in and of itself, I guess.
Okay, sorry, I'm afraid you're just starting to make a bunch of noise that I can't follow.
So she's cuddlier than you like, and she's sort of crowding your personal space at times?
Yes.
I get this intense need to just breathe a little more than she maybe is happy with.
Come on, man, that's pretty dramatic.
I mean, unless she's like 300 pounds and prickly puff and sitting directly on your breathing holes.
I need to breathe!
I mean, that seems like a pretty strong way to put it.
You're choking me with your love!
I mean, do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Okay, so what does breathe mean in this context?
Like, I mean, again, it's a very strong way to put it.
She's strangling me with affection.
I just want to be alone for a little bit, or...
Yeah, I just have this...
To begin with, I'll have a strong need to be physical, but then...
There's this really strong feeling in me that just like, oh, I just need to be alone for a while.
Hang on, hang on.
So she's in the room, you're cuddling together, and then you need to go to a different room?
It's not exactly like that, I would say.
No, no.
You said you need alone time, not just, you know, honey, can you back off a little?
You know, I'm starting to feel a bit smothered here.
You said you need like alone time.
Yeah.
Okay, so you need, like, what does that mean?
Is that a separate room?
Do you need to go for a walk?
Could be both, I guess.
No, don't guess.
Like, if we're going to get into Fogland, I can't do anything with the conversation, right?
All right.
So, what is it that, what is the circumstance that provokes this response in you?
I guess it's right after.
What do you mean you guess?
Sorry.
What are you holding back, man?
You're like, what are you not telling me?
Because I know when I'm hitting the fog that there's something solid in there.
All right.
For instance, it's after sex.
Okay.
So after sex, she wants to cuddle and you want a little bit of space.
Is that right?
Well, a lot of space, I guess, if you want to leave the room.
Or just after being...
Or after just spending a lot of time together?
Right.
And I assume that...
Like several hours.
You have...
I'm sorry, say again?
Like several hours, let's say.
Like if you spend several hours together, you need some alone time?
Yep.
Right.
Why do you think that is?
I guess it's about stimulation in a way.
So I am...
Thriving off listening to big idea podcasts and creating really big topics intellectually.
Well, no, I get that.
Listen, I guess I just need to break this down for you.
When you're with a woman, intellectually, your world is most likely to shrink, but it gets better.
Right?
A woman...
As a whole has more immediate concerns, more short-term concerns, more localized concerns, more environmental concerns.
And men have big-picture abstract concerns a lot of times, right?
And this is perfectly fine.
It's perfectly compatible, right?
And it's two different worlds.
And, you know, when you're with a woman, your mental landscape is going to shrink a little, but your environment is going to be better.
Yeah.
Right?
She may want to talk about people.
She may want to talk about things.
She may want to talk about purchases.
She may want to talk about relatives.
She may want to talk about relationships.
And, you know, these stereotypes for a reason, right?
And you may want to talk, you know, there's a...
A meme online with a pretty woman looking at a guy and she's thinking, wow, he's really cute.
I wonder if he's thinking about me.
And the guy is like staring down saying, well, Sweden is gone, man.
France is teetering on the edge.
I don't know what's going to happen in Germany.
Is the West going to survive?
And that's funny because it's true a little bit, right?
I mean, she's thinking about relationships and she's thinking about the immediate and she's thinking about the localized and he's got big picture, long time tunnel concerns.
So if you live in the platonic realm of ideals, after a while, some of the more localized perspective of a woman may shave on you a little bit.
But that's fair because you're To her, often windy abstractions will sometimes chafe on her as well.
Well, that's the compromise, right?
And if you accept that, that there is that compromise, that is an important thing to recognize.
Thanks.
When you're with a woman, your abstracts will shrink, but your environment will improve.
And you'll live longer.
No, seriously, women, you know, great wives, you know, they keep you healthy, they feed you great food, they keep your environment clean, they, you know, nag you to get to the doctor on a regular basis, you know, this is...
You'll end up with more abstract thoughts by being around a woman, because you'll just live longer, and you'll live longer in the most productive parts of your life, which is when you get older, right?
So, in terms of intellectually, right?
So, you're not losing, you're gaining, right?
You don't want men and women to be the same, otherwise, what would be the point of any of it, right?
And so, now, as far as the physical intimacy goes, I mean, either it's something really visceral, in which case philosophy can't help you.
I mean, I don't know, maybe there's something else you could talk to, like a therapist or something.
Or you have a thought about it.
Like you have a thought about it like it's invasive or it's intrusive or it's claustrophobic or it's controlling or you're trapped.
Like you have some thought about it that then triggers the tripwire of some emotional kind of response.
So if you have any idea what the thought is, if there is one.
I mean, if it's purely visceral, you may just need to be trained out of it through exposure therapy.
But if there's a thought that precedes the emotions, then we're in the realm of something philosophy can have a look at.
Yeah, I'm not sure if I have clarity on that, whether it's one or the other.
And to be fair, it is improving this challenge of mine as well.
And she knows about it.
Does she know about it?
Oh yeah, yeah.
You're not like pepper spraying her after sex, unless that's what she's into and saying that he needs his space.
No, but she knows.
And to be fair, she's also fine with it.
Well, I'm sure she would like it to change over time, but also accept that When you're in a relationship, you know, like I always say, it's not the conclusion, it's the methodology that counts.
It's the same thing with a relationship.
Who she is and who you are is far less important than the shared values that you have.
Where you're starting from doesn't matter nearly as much as the direction you're going in.
And so I'm not the same person as when I married my wife.
She's not the same person as who married me, but we're going in a great direction.
And so you're not going to say, okay, well, this is the photograph of who we are, and we have to stare at it until it all goes gray, right?
It is a moving picture.
Right.
So, yeah, that would be my thoughts and my suggestions.
And yeah, send her a big hug back and tell her I appreciate you.
I'm sorry that she couldn't and she wants to call in.
She's certainly welcome to.
But it does not sound to me like there are...
You know what?
You may have read a little bit too much of the women are fatal hypergamous spiders stuff.
You know, like if you said you sort of come out of some of this writing or some of this community, like women are cold-hearted black holes of pussy-throwing and manipulation and resource acquisition and, you know, quicksands of future destruction and, like, I don't know, that might be a little bit extreme, but you may have gotten, like, you've got this loop of Pink Floyd's The wall, you know, the trial in the movie with the wall and the hammers and the crazy shovel-faced mom and so on.
They may be a little bit, you know, the demonic female is a very big archetype in people's minds.
And the female who...
Only pretends to love, who only cold-heartedly manipulates in order to gather resources and so on, has become a little bit of an archetype in certain circles in the manosphere.
And there are women like that, of course.
And there are men who are like that.
There are the pump-and-dump men who lie to get access to a woman's sexuality and then discard her.
And there are cold-hearted women who manipulate men and so on.
But...
The good women are not quite as rare, I think, as some people believe.
I understand all the arguments about risk and so on, and I really do understand all of that.
And to me, risk doesn't mean don't do it.
Risk means do it intelligently.
And so the kind of questions that you're asking, I think, are important.
But I would say that if you have imbibed deeply from the, you know, women are puff adders of...
Cleavage and destruction, then you may need to reassess some of that and expose yourself to some balancing information.
Yeah, I wouldn't say that's the main arguments that I've been exposed to, to be fair.
But it's much more self-help related.
And it's actually a funny detail.
I actually found your show through, actually indirectly through, the pickup community.
Actually through Elliot Hulse, who did a collaboration with...
Oh, the blue-eyed man-god.
Yes.
Yes.
So I was following Elliot Hulse for a while, and then suddenly you popped up, and a pretty transformative change has happened since that.
Well, thank you.
I am looking forward to a new conversation with him this summer, and I wish him the best.
Well, thanks, Ola.
Please let us know how it goes, and all my best to your girlfriend.
All right.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Okay, up next we have Zach.
Zach wrote in and said, I was recently suspended from my university for a joke I made in January with my fraternity brothers.
I not only lost a full ride scholarship, but also any chance I had of getting into law school because of this.
I understand why people adhere to PC culture passively, but why, when it is clear it causes direct harm, do people, university staff in my case, still act as though it is the moral high ground?
That's from Zach.
Wow, Zach, what a story.
I'm ambivalent about hearing it for reasons we'll get to, but is there anything you wanted to add?
I don't know if you want to add any details.
I don't know if you want to be...
Findable by the details you might add, but I'm obviously, like everyone, curious about what happened.
Okay, Stefan.
By the way, thank you so much for letting me be on the show.
It's a real pleasure.
Oh man, this is what I do.
I'm happy to have you here.
Alright, so I don't know how much detail you'd be wanting or interested in, but I'll give you what I can.
So essentially, there was a situation with my fraternity back in January.
We have an initiation day for all the new members, and the night before we have this event we call The Challenge.
And during that night, we could do all sorts of team-building games, and you find out who your big brother is in your fraternity.
If you're not familiar, it's sort of like a mentor, personally, who's going to help guide you through the fraternity experience.
And after that, we do some ritualistic things.
And my contribution to all of this, that there's this time when all of the new guys go away.
They actually go, they're blindfolded and they're taking on a little car ride while we get the house ready for what's to come.
And then they come and they wait in the basement of the house to be taken one by one up where they're going to go through this ritual thing, right?
And while they're waiting down there, we're trying to drive up the suspense and the mystery of the whole situation as much as possible.
We're giving them random commands.
We're We're playing loud music.
We're making random noises, whatever it is.
And my contribution to the whole situation, so to give you a little bit more backstory, our university really pushes condoms on everybody.
They have this program called the Condom Club.
They hand them out for free.
They give you buckets of them at fraternity risk talks, which they mandate.
And so my joke was...
What is a fraternity risk talk?
A risk talk is something that the university requires, and it's actually most universities that have fraternities, where you've got to, several times a semester, have a speaker come in to talk to you about why, you know, basically alcohol awareness, how to tell if someone's had too much, or basically what is rape, and of course their definition is the My sober yes is my consent, and it gets into all sorts of ambiguous details, but we don't need to go down that rabbit trail.
But I assume it's the, you know, one of the basic problems with that is only the woman's non-consent seems to matter.
If the man is drunk, it doesn't seem to show up, right?
Naturally, naturally.
Well, I mean, they're more lawsuit-focused in all of these risk talks.
But anyways, they hand these things out like crazy.
In our house, you literally have buckets of them.
And there was a person, we had a group chat among all the fraternity brothers.
It was a new member who asked, hey, is there anything we should bring to this event?
And I jokingly replied, bring a condom.
Well, it turns out some people actually brought them.
And then my next thing was at the event while they're waiting in the basement, people are giving out random commands.
There's all sorts of craziness going on.
I say, okay, take it out and put it on your right hand.
All right.
And then I told immediately after that, okay, take it off.
It was something just like everything else.
It's stupid.
It's something a stereotypical frat boy would do or say, but it had no...
You said bring a condom.
It's a joke.
And you said put a condom on your right hand and then take it off.
Right.
Correct.
Exactly.
Okay.
Obviously, for a man, the right hand can in fact be a sexual organ.
Not something that really needs a condom, but okay.
So then what happened?
Right.
So after that, there was some other stuff that had gone on as far as what the university believed to be hazing, at least.
And we had an anonymous report come in that our fraternity was being charged with hazing or was being accused of hazing.
So they took us, the student conduct office took us one by one, every member of the fraternity into a room, and they called it An informal meeting, but it was more or less a deposition, right?
They were pressuring you.
They were trying to get you to answer questions, trying to get you to admit to things.
So you were in a situation of academic jeopardy, but you weren't allowed to know the rules or have a lawyer or a representative.
Is that right?
Well, I was allowed to have a lawyer present in the room, but not to speak for me.
Like if I wanted to whisper in his ear and he wanted to whisper back into mine, that would have been acceptable in their eyes.
But if I would have had a lawyer just like in a courtroom, Representing me, that would not be okay.
They wanted to hear directly from me, for reasons I understand that much of it.
But what ensued was what I think is really draconian.
So after this whole ordeal, it came out, like I had said, those two sentences, right?
And then the university became very concerned about all of that, and it turned out we had a hearing.
Sorry, concerned about what?
Concerned that I had committed the audacious act of hazing by uttering those two sentences.
By saying, put the condom on your hand, take the condom off your hand.
Right, right.
That was the only thing.
There was no force in this matter.
All of the new members had already been voted into the fraternity.
There was no, like, oh, if you don't do this, then you won't get into the fraternity sort of vibe going on.
It was purely a matter of just the fun and games, the whole thing.
And we had explained to them before, like, we don't We're not going to put you in a situation where you have to do something stupid in order to get into fraternity.
It was common knowledge and it was commonly received by everyone in that situation as a joke.
Like, no one took it seriously.
No one took it seriously to the point where they thought, okay, if I don't do this...
It didn't do anyone any harm, right?
Precisely.
I mean, it was just a goofy thing.
Put a condom on your hand and...
Take a condom off your hand.
This is the big hazing thing?
I mean, the hazing stories that I've heard were pretty astonishing when I was younger.
I mean, just for those who don't know this little snippet of my history, I... I lived in a frat house for a year.
Really?
Yeah, I did.
I was working up north doing my sort of goal planning and claim staking and so on.
And I got back because it took like four airplanes to get back from the remote location I was in.
So I got back to university a little bit later than everyone else.
And the only place that was available was like a room in a frat house.
At least it was on campus, and I didn't want to truck in and out.
And so I stayed with a guy I'm still friends with.
We stayed in the same room for a year, and then we ended up room mating the next year as well, because we got along well.
Yeah, I mean, occasionally I cleared out for frat business.
They did actually ask me to join, and they were nice guys, and I really understood the appeal.
It wasn't my particular kind of thing, but they were nice guys.
I could completely see the value of the frat, you know, the brotherhood, the contacts, the connections, the networking, and that sounds kind of cold-hearted, like it's just some sort of resume thing, but they really seemed, you know, dedicated to each other.
They did a lot of good charity works, and they were very much involved in the community and so on, and Yeah, I think that the hazing rituals such as I heard of could be a little hairy, but I don't know.
It's just dudes, right?
So, but this, I don't, you know, it's like, oh, what joke did you make?
You know, did you burn a cross somewhere?
I mean, it's like, no, just condom on a hand and off.
I mean, no, really, that's...
So, okay, what happened after that, Zach?
It was nothing that would ever be covered under, say, a speech code or anything like that.
They covered it under their hazing policy.
So we got into this hearing, and the way it works is they had three people from the university lined up to hear all the stories.
The thing was 10 hours long.
We sat in a room while all of the questions were darted around the room about this incident.
There were other contributing factors to the reason my fraternity got suspended.
I played a very small role in all of that, I would say.
My questions, like the question about what I had done still came up.
And I was informed by a university administrator that under the university's hazing policy, right, they've got this thing about why it's not okay to degrade people in that policy.
And then I questioned every single witness they brought in the room.
And I asked, did you feel that I degraded you by asking you that question or by telling you that?
And not a single person responded that they felt degraded.
So how on earth, sorry to interrupt, you know how on earth the...
Did the Gestapo administration even find out about this stuff?
Yes, yes.
It was one of the new members.
I don't want to make the story too long here, but one of the other contributing factors to why our fraternity got in trouble, where there were some rogue members of the fraternity who wanted to do more of the traditional...
Big party school hazing.
And they went out by themselves, invited some of the new members over to their private house and did some stuff.
And then one of those guys told a residential advisor who reported it immediately to the school.
And that's how this whole thing came to their attention.
Now, their attention turned to me because I had the audacity to say those two sentences.
Like I said, their definition of degrade came up.
Their definition of degrade, I'm not going to quote it word for word because I don't know it word for word because it's not written anywhere that I could find.
But their definition of degrade as I remember it was to treat another student with less respect than they deserve.
And I've never heard more of a non-definition than that.
Well, of course, you know, totalitarians don't want any objective rules.
You know, if you want to know what a society of the future would look like if the left wins, just think of the left or the social justice warriors being the founding fathers and what kind of society you would have ended up with in that situation.
Probably not one we would remember today.
We might remember it, but not in a positive way.
True, true.
Yeah.
So...
Oh, it's like the family court definition of in the best interest of the child.
Yeah, right.
You know, it's in the best interest of the child not having crappy government schools and a huge giant national debt that they did nothing to deserve, but that doesn't matter now, does it?
Yeah, of course not.
All right.
So then?
So then after this, I'll give you one more piece of the story.
I don't want to make it too long, like I said.
So...
In this whole process, my fraternity brothers, I don't want to use this term because I don't like it, but they cucked out.
They completely bowed their knees to the awesome might of the university administrator, and they almost immediately, as soon as the charges came out, voted me out of the fraternity and voted to expel me from the fraternity, not because of moral reasons, but because they thought they had a better chance of staying on campus If they could show the university that they had handled this horrendous situation internally.
Yeah, they were hoping that if they betrayed one of their own, that the social justice warriors would be appeased and would not escalate.
Precisely.
Yeah, because appeasement always works that way.
And personally, I don't really, I don't hate any of them for it.
I think they had a gun to their head.
I think they made the wrong decision.
But it is what it is.
The real culprit in this case is the university.
So after the hearing, I was given a chance to appeal, and I appealed, I scoured their own policies.
I'm sorry, you said the charges and the hearing, but what was the outcome?
What would you have been appealing?
What was the verdict?
Right.
Okay, so they voted to suspend me for one year, and that immediately resulted in the loss of a full-ride scholarship with Money that I actually was going to be able to use for grad school as well, and a smaller supplementary scholarship.
And I don't want to brag on myself here, but I was one of their ideal students.
We have this thing called Top 100 on our campus.
I was nominated for it.
I've been making the Dean's List.
I've been academically strong, involved in all sorts of student organizations, community service, all of the above.
But that has nothing to do with it, Zach.
The reality is that the existing culture doesn't want white males to have any brotherhood, doesn't want them to have any contact with each other, doesn't want to have any support structure, doesn't want to have any networking.
I mean, this anti-white male hatred is running so deep that it's becoming catastrophic.
This is why fraternities are attacked, because they're considered to be, you know, preppy white boy clubs.
And this, you know, as we all know, community gives people strength.
Having friends that you're bound to gives people strength.
Having networks gives people strength.
Having support gives people strength.
And that can't be allowed to white males anymore, which is why this stuff gets targeted so much.
Right, right.
I completely understand and agree with that.
So the decision that was appealing was what I said.
I was suspended for a year, and I scoured their own policies and procedures and found that they had not only broken their own policies and procedures, but quite possibly federal law as well in doing this.
There are several court decisions which say that you must have this hearing in front of a third party, which means not employees of the university.
Well, all three people who were voting on what would happen to me Or voting on whether or not I did what they accused me of and what my sanctions were going to be.
All three of them were directly employed as staff members by the university.
So I appealed on those grounds and I was granted a rehearing, which is actually tomorrow.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
And do you have a lawyer?
Do you have support in that sense?
I've reached out to quite a few lawyers, the ACLU, all sorts of organizations.
I've just hit so many brick walls.
I personally don't have the means to afford a big retainer.
And a lot of the lawyers I've called, who seem to be very much pro-free speech guys, laugh me off on the phone because, I mean, they're not absolutists to anything, to any extent, but they were concerned with the Oh, you might have hurt their feelings, they might countersue sort of arguments.
Yeah, the ACLU just do a fairly glowing portrait of Linda Sarsouris.
They may not be your first choice for this kind of stuff.
They weren't, believe me.
Yeah.
How much money do you need?
Well, the average trainer fee I've been asked for is about $5,000.
$5,000 to help you with a hearing about condom use on the hand.
Right.
We're calling the whole situation Condomgate, by the way, because I think it's a catchy name.
Wow.
Wow.
Yeah.
And so it's tomorrow, right?
Correct.
Correct.
July 13th.
And what are your hopes for that?
Well, if I were to be super optimistic, I'd say that because this time around they're going to have a faculty representative and a student representative voting on my decision and not people purely driven by university interests, that they might decide what a normal human being would decide in this case, which is that that sort of thing is just guys being guys and not horrible behavior.
But I do not think that This is going to go well, honestly.
I was given a personal phone call by the dean shortly after I appealed, and he basically tried to convince me not to by saying, well, we were lining up the hearing with staff members because students are normally too harsh.
I don't know if I buy that because they aren't beholden to university interests, but Basically, I wouldn't give any faith to them being fair the second go-around either.
They very well might say that they're going to expel me this time around.
Right, rather than the suspension.
Now, after the suspension, would you have any chance to get your scholarship back, or is that gone?
Well, I mean, they gave me a chance to appeal the scholarship.
That's actually the day after tomorrow is the deadline for that, so I'm going to wait until I hear...
Back on what my sentence is before I go down that road.
But if I were suspended for a year, there is no chance, realistically, that I could get that scholarship back.
And what were you taking, Zach?
What was I taking, like, course-wise?
I mean, what was your major or what was your faculty?
So I was a chemistry major with the intention of going into law school, pursuing a career in patent law.
Right, right, right.
Well, I'm shocked that I'm shocked, but I'm shocked.
That is pretty, I mean, that's the most innocuous hazing that I've ever, if it's not even whatever you would qualify it at.
I mean, let's put a condom on your hand, take it off.
I mean, it's constitutionally protected speech.
Of course it is.
They shouldn't even be legally allowed to.
If I had the resources to pursue a case against them, then I'm confident that the outcome would be positive in my favor.
But as of right now, with the next semester creeping up, I've got to think of Other things, like what am I going to do in the immediate future?
What am I going to do as far as the next school?
I've been accepted into a couple different universities, but I still have to make all these decisions, pay all sorts of fees, and figure out the next steps, you know?
Why do you want to go back to college?
Specifically, my thoughts on this have always been Don't go to college unless it's a career that you really realistically cannot do without a college degree.
Specifically, I would like to go into patent law.
It's a field that's always interested me.
I'm very good at chemistry and I've got a brain that I'm really good at thinking like a lawyer in that sense.
I really don't like the state of the current patent system and pharmaceutical specifically is what I'm interested in going into.
And I think It would be a career in which I could thrive, I would very much enjoy it, and I could also do much good.
Right.
Okay.
Now, as far as pursuing a suit for, I don't know, like a violation of your First Amendment rights or whatever, I mean, you could crowdfund that, I think, pretty easily.
I mean, lots of people are focusing on this campus stuff.
And if you look at...
If you look at what's happened to some of the universities that the PC culture has metastasized to the point where they're popping up regularly in the alternative media and even sometimes on the mainstream media.
I think you're like University of Mizzou and people like that or groups like that.
They've had huge declines in enrollment.
Like it cost them a massive amount.
Right.
And there are financial incentives for them to want to keep this quiet and You could get some, I'm sure you could get some pro bono stuff, you could get some crowdfunding, you know, you could tell your story to campus reform, like, if you wanted to take this on.
Right.
There are ways of doing it, and that may give you a different mindset tomorrow.
Well, the collateral damage from what has happened, I've been essentially forced out of my house and I lost a lot of friends.
I don't know if I'd call them friends in the first place, some of them.
I've lost the scholarships.
I've had to focus on what the next steps are as far as new schools or trying to remedy this current situation.
It's been almost a full-time job just trying to cut my losses here.
So I haven't put a lot of thoughts into things like what you're talking about, campus reform, until I know the conclusion of my story.
Which I guess I'll know tomorrow.
I feel like that should be secondary to these other immediate concerns.
Right, right, alright.
And how is your family with all of this?
My family is outraged that there would be anything, that the university would take anything this stupid so seriously, anything this petty.
They were against me joining a fraternity in the first place.
I've got some disagreements with them on that, but I think their intentions were wholesome because they were afraid of almost exactly this sort of thing.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, this is obviously not even close to the same degree of seriousness.
In fact, it's not serious at all, in my opinion.
But if you look at how UVA fared with the Rolling Stone story that they got sued for and lost, if I remember rightly.
This is the only name dropping I'm going to do.
Same fraternity, buddy.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, it is open season on France, because, you know, I mean, I know that there's lots of multicultural, multiracial France and so on, but in general, the perception is, I mean, there's this wild hatred for frat boys, right?
Right.
And it is, you know, they're a targeted group these days.
I mean, and I think it's tragic.
I think it's horrible.
And if it was happening to any other group, it would be a cause for outrage.
But because, you know, white males are privileged, my ass, right?
Privilege is to be blamed for everything.
And I guess, like, I was just looking today.
This is completely by the by, Zach, but I was just looking today.
That there are, like, well north of 45 million slaves in the world today.
And the top five nations where slavery exists and slaves are bought and sold are all non-white nations.
And they have a list here where there's no slavery or very few slavery.
Boom, boom, boom.
It's all, you know, historically white nations.
Less so, of course, as time goes along.
And so the least slave-owning nations are the historically white nations.
The most slave-owning nations are the The non-white countries, but who gets blamed for slavery?
Ding, ding, ding!
Yes, that would be a space decent.
So, it is tragic.
It is tragic.
Now, of course, you do need the degree, you need the accreditation, you need the formal structure to become a patent lawyer.
But it's going to be a price to pay for that, right?
Right, right.
I mean, your relationship to university, I mean, it's traumatic now, right?
I knew I was walking into enemy territory from the very beginning, Stefan.
It was not something I relished, but I knew it was more or less a means to an end.
So what actually drove me towards the Greek life community, the fraternities, was the fact that out of any sort of corner on campus, any group of student organizations, they were the most...
The most conservative or classically liberal in that sense.
They were the people who cared a lot about free speech.
They cared about capitalism.
They cared about the things like these classical Western values.
That's another reason why white males are targeted is white males are the largest constituents for a small government in the world.
Sure.
So if you want a bigger government, they're your natural prey.
Right.
So I agree.
I was very much drawn to this fraternity in particular because of that sort of openness, that sort of willingness to discuss things rather than shutting down people we don't like.
And that was a disagreement with my parents.
A lot of it was they were like, why would you put yourself under, you know, why would you put yourself under the crosshairs, essentially?
You're walking to where they expect you will be.
But for me, it was more of I could thrive better, I could learn better when I had those resources, that network, And was around people that supported the same ideas that I did.
Right.
Now, your ambition prior to being targeted in this kind of way, Zach, your ambition was to work as a patent lawyer.
Correct.
Has this experience, I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but has this experience potentially changed where you think your focus may be as a person who cares about freedom?
I think it has, in that I don't trust...
I don't trust fellow students to hold to those values on a campus setting where someone could potentially put a gun to their head and tell them, unless you play Judas against this guy, we're going to do awful things to you.
And they did threaten a lot of my fraternity brothers, basically say, talk or we'll do awful things to you.
There was one of my fraternity brothers who even said that the investigator guy I mean, this is the environment that is often where you are.
Right.
This totalitarian, no rules, veiled threats, foggy consequences, turn on each other, betray your values, knuckle down.
Right.
You don't, like to have an effect in the world, you don't need to go to college.
To have a positive effect for freedom, you don't need to go to college.
I'm not just saying this to you, this is just in general.
There's a whole, like the gatekeepers are gone.
College used to be a way, of course, that you would go and say, hey, I'm one of the smart guys.
You know, I can plan things.
I can get into college.
I can complete my assignments.
I can navigate the system.
I can come out with a degree.
I know A, B, C, X, Y, and Z. Right.
That is not what college is anymore.
I mean, with some few exceptions in various faculties.
That is not.
Of course.
Right.
And my parents basically are of the same impression.
They told me, don't go to college unless you know that you need to go to college.
And that was what drove a lot of my efforts in high school as far as getting the scholarships that I've got and everything else because I knew this is something I need.
This is something for what I want to do.
But Zach...
What if you end up going through college, keeping your head down, feeling like you're in some mental North Korean labor camp intellectually and fearing, you know, every phone call and every complaint that could exist or fearing people find out your history or what happened.
And then you end up articling, studying the bar, getting your degree, and you find that the law is not what you thought it was.
You find out that the law is kind of what you faced in the past and what you're facing tomorrow.
Right.
Well, I have other motivations besides just patent law for wanting to go to law school specifically.
And that is specifically that it seems, from my experience, from the people I've talked to, that law school is one of the few areas in the education field where it's actually like a boot camp for your brain.
They actually teach They actually teach how to think better.
And that's what I want for myself.
But you've heard the Dershowitz stuff, right?
Of course, of course.
Why don't you say it?
Specifically what?
Well, him talking his issues teaching rape law.
Right, right.
Well, I mean, it's the inconsistency between moral laws or ethics and the current laws we live in.
Oh no, that's not what I mean.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Yeah, that's fine.
Let me just look this up, make sure I get it correct.
Let me make sure I get this correct.
So, Dershowitz's...
Alan Dershowitz, a famous lawyer, of course, when he was teaching rape law, he got complaints from students.
And now he has to record everything, and they considered him teaching rape law to be problematic.
Right.
And that is...
Where things are.
Even in a famous law school, even with a famous lawyer.
I mean, I've had conversations with academics where it is a very alarming environment.
And you've got a whole bunch of, you know, we see this president of the United States is supposed to have significant, if not complete, control over immigration policies.
And you've got all these activist judges saying, nope, can't do it.
And so, where you go in terms of the law may not be, in some ways, foundationally different from what you've been exposed to at the college.
Well, if that is the case, that's not the road I want to go down, of course.
I don't want to change my values given my environment.
I've been supplementing lectures at my university with a healthy dose of, say, your program or Other philosophy programs, other political programs like Stephen Crowder's program, just as a break from the madness in order to give me the alternate perspective and sort of bring me down to earth.
Breaking through the bubble, I call it.
Right.
Right.
Here we go.
The trouble with teaching rape law.
Imagine a medical student who is training to be a surgeon but who fears that he'll become distressed if he sees or handles blood.
What should his instructors do?
Criminal law teachers face a similar question with law students who are afraid to study rape law.
And they say 30 years ago their reluctance would not have posed a problem until the mid-1980s.
Rape law was not taught in law schools because it wasn't considered important or suited to the rational pedagogy of law school classrooms.
And he says, but my experience, as this woman says, my experience at Harvard over the past couple of years tells me that the environment for teaching rape law and other subjects involving gender and violence is changing.
Students seem more anxious about classroom discussion and about approaching the law of sexual violence in particular than they have ever been in my eight years as a law professor.
Student organizations representing women's interests now routinely advise students that they should not feel pressure to attend or participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual violence and which might therefore be traumatic.
These organizations also ask criminal law teachers to warn their classes that the rape law unit might trigger traumatic memories.
Individual students often ask teachers not to include the law of rape on exams for fear that the material would cause them to perform less well.
Wow.
One teacher I know was recently asked by a student not to use the word violate in class, as in does this conduct violate the law because the word was triggering.
Thank you.
Some students have even suggested the rape law should not be taught because of its potential to cause distress.
I don't know that it's exactly to kill a mockingbird in there anymore.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I would agree with you.
From my experience, the social justice warriors have taken over big swaths of the campus.
Now, to my amazement, at least in my own university, the sciences and the economics departments, the more pure fields in my mind, have been able to ward off this sort of vague or destructive thought.
They've been able to combat it with reason, or they just stay out of the political issues, or I don't want to use that word, or they want to stay out of these sort of emotional issues.
The science, like chemistry is chemistry, and there's very little that can influence chemistry from outside sources.
There's no political agendas, there's no...
Wait, are you saying there's no political agendas in science?
Oh, absolutely in science, but I would say, like, in mathematics, there's really not.
In chemistry, there are, I'd say, some small issues, but in large, it's not really a controversial topic.
And biology is probably the most controversial, that or psychology, that I've observed.
Well, you know, if...
If mathematics was so free, why aren't they spending more time cracking open some of the fudgy data in global warming?
I mean, they would be the experts to do it, but they don't seem to want to do it because...
Why?
Because, I mean, good lord, do you know how many scientific disputes these days are settled by being sued?
Yeah, you're right.
You're right.
I mean, good lord.
I mean, the idea that you settle scientific disputes in the courtroom...
I mean, what is it?
The monkey scopes trial, which itself is largely bullshit.
Science is incredibly politicized because it's government-funded.
And as you know, biology, like race and IQ, is a highly volatile subject.
Race and criminality, a highly volatile subject.
Yeah, maybe.
I mean, I don't know.
I mean, maybe there's areas where it's not.
But it's pretty politicized from what I can tell.
What I can say is that what I've observed just from my classroom settings, from my professors, is there is not a lot.
There's some global warming stuff that comes up every once in a while, but that's not by any means a focus.
They're not basing curriculums on that.
There are no courses on it yet.
It's very much just, okay, we're going to teach you organic chemistry.
We're going to teach you the same organic chemistry that the ACS requires from so many universities, right?
It's really not Controversial in that.
I haven't encountered many really controversial issues within that field.
What is it about patent law that satisfies your ambition or intellect that you feel you could not get out of being an entrepreneur?
Well, actually, entrepreneurship was another thing on my radar as well.
I think law school, at least, even if the laws aren't fair, Even if the laws aren't moral or ethical, knowing what the laws are can help you become an entrepreneur as far as just knowing how to negotiate this madness.
Oh, come on, man.
Zach, I mean, if you're going to spend years becoming a lawyer and spend how much to become a lawyer, the idea that you couldn't spend that money in those years becoming an entrepreneur and be better off, I think, is not very rational.
Well, the thing was, it was going to be almost free with the scholarship I had.
But you know the concept of opportunity costs, right?
True, true.
So that's my question.
What is it in college that you feel you need that you can't get from being an entrepreneur?
Or let me put it another way.
Do you know the educational achievements, down to the last detail, of the people you listen to and who influence you?
Absolutely not.
No, I don't.
I don't know what Stephen Crowder's educational achievements are.
I have no idea.
Right.
Does it matter?
Well, if you're going into...
Say, if I wanted to go specifically into patent law...
No, no, no.
I know that.
What I'm saying is that if you wanted to be an entrepreneur and if you wanted to...
Do good in the world.
And if you wanted to spread virtue and critical thinking and knowledge and philosophy and so on, college would be the wrong place to go.
I think completely the wrong place to go.
Well, the long term, I don't know exactly what I want to do with my wife.
I've got to be honest with you.
But one thing that really kept popping in my head was there are several pharmaceutical companies who are interested in lobbying specifically against the FDA, trying to reduce federal regulations, trying to strip through some of this madness.
There are drugs that have been legal in Europe that are effective, that have been proven to be effective, but they're not legal here.
Because they still have to jump through all their hoops and cut all the red tape.
Which has cost literally millions of American lives, just so.
Of course.
You know, people can look at Dr.
Mary Ruart, R-U-W-A-R-T, for more on that.
But sorry, go ahead.
So, one interest of mine was specifically to go into, say, politics on the local level, state politics.
We've got a couple of very big pharmaceutical companies headquartered here where I live in Indiana.
Or to become a lobbyist of sorts.
And these positions exist.
There are people who do this.
And to be able to fight the FDA machine.
Personally, my little brother, he was paralyzed when he was three months old from the waist down.
He's had cancer.
He's got scoliosis.
He's got Down syndrome.
All sorts of medical issues, which, in my opinion, many of which could be averted with a little bit more freedom.
And I'm sorry to hear about your brother, my huge sympathy to you and your entire family for those challenges.
But if you want to make the case for reducing regulations, why do you need to be a lawyer?
Well, you and I really don't care too much about credentials, but a lot of the leftist community does, in my view at least, what I've observed.
Like people who use the big words, who speak their own language, who have the credentials, who are basically on their level or whatever level it is in their own heads.
They want to feel as though they're talking to another academic, even though I think it's...
Sorry, first of all, the fact that the left likes it should be your first warning, right?
But secondly, why would you want to talk to the leftists?
You can't change their minds for the most part.
Any more than they can change your minds about sort of fundamental issues.
You know, this is the RK stuff.
I mean, it's somewhere at the level of genetics.
Politics is to some degree at the level of genetics.
They can predict people's political affiliations, or at least they can map them according to genes.
So you're trying to talk someone out of being tall or short in terms of using language.
The way that you would change this stuff, I think, is you would bring your message to millions of people as charismatically, as entertainingly, as engagingly as possible, And through that, you would develop the pressure to change the situation.
But the idea that, well, they'll listen to me because I'm a lawyer.
I mean, they won't, right?
I mean, Trump is very well educated.
They sure as hell don't.
He's not able to change their minds, right?
It's more so for the people who are sort of on the fence about these issues.
You had a video.
It was a call-in show.
I forget when it was.
Where you're talking about the proper way to argue and you had a guest who was kind of hostile towards you about being mean in an argument.
It's not always to win over the guys across the fence.
It's often to win the guys who are on the fence, who might respect the credentials, who might see that you're talking the same language, beating them at their own game, as it were.
That's my sort of take on this.
I'm not saying it's perfect.
I've honestly not put...
Do you think that I should have delayed...
Starting my show for seven years so I could go to Harvard and get a PhD in philosophy?
Absolutely not.
Why not?
I would have credentials.
Your audience is composed of all sorts of people, not specifically other people with law degrees or philosophy degrees.
And my opinion, I guess on this, or I don't call an opinion, my argument would be that in order to debate lawyers, they would respect you more if you're a lawyer.
Okay, so if you want to spend your life debating leftist lawyers, I'm not really sure that I mean, I would question as to whether or not that's the most effective way to spend your life.
Because remember, being a lawyer means you have a license.
And being a licensed means that you're vulnerable, right?
Because people can always just try and attack your license.
That's true.
That's true.
Right.
Well, to be honest, I don't want to sound like I'm hard set.
I'm throwing arguments at you that I've tossed around in my own head.
I don't know what I'm going to do with the next year or the next seven years of my life.
Well, if you...
Listen, I mean, I hope that you get what you want tomorrow.
I hope you get justice tomorrow.
And I hope you let us know how it goes.
But I will say this, like if you...
If you do get a year off, you do have the opportunity to pursue entrepreneurial stuff in the realm of passionate advocacy for freedom.
Right.
Because there is very...
There's no barrier to entry.
If you've got, you know, the technology to make a phone call through to me, then you have the technology to do what I do.
Right?
I mean, so you have the opportunity to make...
A passionate case for freedom over the next year, and maybe you can make some money doing so on Patreon or how you ask for donations or whatever it is.
Come up with cool ideas for merchandise and so on.
So you do have the opportunity to do that, in which case, you know, I offer you the possibility.
This is why I said at the beginning, Zach, that I am ambivalent about it.
Because let's say you throw yourself heart and soul.
Into passionately communicating for freedom and you get some traction and you take off and you find out that you love it.
And you know what you'll say about the hearing tomorrow if it doesn't go the way you want it to?
Doesn't matter.
Not only doesn't matter.
Best thing that happened.
Right.
I had a list and I won't go through it now in the interest of time.
time i have a list of the things i thought were bad at the time that turned out to be great and that list is pretty much everything everything i thought was bad at the time turned out to be uh to be great right right Yeah.
I really appreciate that input.
You know, I've thought about different things entrepreneurially I could do, but I've never thought about, say, what you suggested, voicing my opinion in a similar way to what you do or other YouTubers or whatever it may be.
I've never thought about doing that myself.
Do it, man.
You are intelligent, articulate, you're a clear thinker, you're a persuasive debater, conversationalist, just based upon our back and forth here, and you're very passionate about freedom, to the point where you are willing to risk your academic future and go against the advice of your parents by joining a frat just because they were freedom lovers like yourself.
Maybe that's God's way of saying, put freedom above indoctrination.
Put freedom above college.
Put effectiveness above accreditation.
Maybe the universe, for want of a better word, is trying to tell you something.
That you chose freedom over safety.
And I think that your desire for accreditation may have something to do with safety.
The only people I could convince on the power of accreditation would be people who aren't worth convincing.
I'm either going to make good arguments or I'm not.
My arguments are either valid or they're invalid.
Me having a PhD in philosophy from XYZ indoctrination camp doesn't make my arguments any better or any worse.
Anyone who says, well, I'm going to listen to this guy because he's got a PhD from Harvard, what they're saying is, I can't think for myself, so I'm going to kneel and Before the medieval god of calligraphy.
You know, they go and set the stings on the wall, you know, all these ornate, swirly letters that look like drunken spiders lurching across parchment.
I mean, I... Tom Willicott, years ago, I did a debate with Tom Willicott.
I think if I remember right, he had two PhDs and he was a lawyer.
And he was terrible.
Wow.
Go listen to the debate.
Go look it up.
Listen to the debate.
And I don't want anyone...
If I could snap my fingers and magically have a PhD in philosophy, I would not want it.
I would say no to that.
Because not having the accreditation, like not having a doctorate in philosophy, but running the world's biggest philosophy show, means that I have to work harder.
That's why I don't have Kevin Federline in his belly as a backup dancer.
Just this plain white background.
White spotty foreground.
Because I have to work harder.
I have to work harder.
If I had the accreditation, I could coast a little more.
And people could say to me, well, you should listen to Steph because he's got a PhD from Halala, right?
It's like, no, I don't want anyone to listen to me because I have a degree in whatever.
No, that's fair.
It's persuasive argument, and you sold me on it, man.
I have to work harder.
You'll be a better presenter without accreditation.
The degree to which you need the accreditation is the degree to which you feel insecure, and you're wallpapering over the insecurity with the accreditation.
But no, you have to confront that insecurity.
I have to sit there and say, yep, I'm going to...
Debate a guy with a PhD in philosophy and a law degree, right?
And I have to debate foreign trade with a former budget director under Reagan or whatever, right?
I mean, and that just means that I have to work harder.
I have to polish my arguments more.
I have to be better.
And so for me...
I've mentioned this story before, but it's been a while, so we'll consider it new, you know, just like we're married and I'm pretending the story is new.
I read this story many, many years ago.
Very briefly, a guy was a butler, and one day he's dressing his lord, and the lord asks him to read something, and the guy says, I can't read it.
He says, why not?
Because I can't read, right?
So he gets fired, and he's really up despondent, and he goes down the street, and he wants to smoke, but he can't find a smoke shop on the whole street.
So he ends up saying, well, other people must want a smoke shop.
So he opens a smoke shop, then he opens up another one, and then he opens up a department store, and then he opens up a mall, and then you know, right?
Right.
And then, you know, 10 years later, he's a multimillionaire.
And he goes to his accountant, and his accountant says, I need you to read this.
Guy says, I can't.
He says, why not?
Because I can't read.
And he says, wait, you've become a multi-millionaire, incredibly successful businessman and you can't even read?
Imagine where you'd be if you could read.
And the guy says, I know exactly where I'd be if I could read.
I'd be this guy's butler.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's a powerful story.
You know, fat chicks.
You know the cliché about fat chicks, right?
You know when people say, hey man, I want you, Zach, I've got a great blind date for you.
She's got a really, really great personality.
She's really funny.
What do you think?
Oh, probably lacking in the aesthetic department.
Yeah, you have to make up for your deficiencies.
You have to overcompensate or at least compensate for your deficiencies.
I work so hard because partly, in fact, because I don't have some big fancy-schmancy background.
I don't have a PhD in philosophy, so I have to work harder.
I have to have a great personality because I don't have the cleavage of the PhD.
So...
Deficiency is quality.
That's kind of what I'm pointing out.
Full deficiency in, say, the degrees, the things I might be seeking.
Yeah.
What if you had to make the case to somebody and could not rest upon your credentials?
What if you had to go talk to a lawyer about the FDA and you could not rest on your credentials?
What would you do?
You'd work damn well harder, right?
Well...
In personal experience, I got to say the same thing right now.
I crafted this elaborate email with lots of research I did on, say, federal precedent on free speech on public campuses.
And I sent it to the dean last night hoping that he might, because he still has the power to dismiss the case, hoping that he might see a reason and drop the whole thing.
And then I got a response that was just like, hey, thanks for your email.
The hearing is still tomorrow.
But still, it was empowering to think that I could do all that research and basically do the work of a lawyer without being a lawyer.
Yeah, I mean, law is supposed to be rational argument based on precedent.
Right.
I don't see where you have to be a lawyer to make a rational argument.
So anyway, if you have the year...
I would say engage as much as possible in a public sphere and see what you can make of that year in sharpening your skills of presentation, of debate, of argument, of motivation, of rousing the masses.
hopefully helping turn all of this around.
That would be a pretty cool way.
And if that should happen to pan out, and I think it well could.
I mean, that is largely up to you.
How courageous are you willing to be?
How many risks are you willing to take?
How personable and vulnerable are you willing to be, right?
I mean, to really go out into the world and say you care about stuff is put a giant series of disco lasers on your forehead from all of the nihilistic snipers that surround every potential flaring and flourishing of human hope.
And so that's up to you.
How successful you're going to be is largely up to you in this realm.
And if you were to take whatever happens tomorrow, let's say you get the time, let's say you get the summer, And you were to go full tilt boogie, hit the gas, Mach 12, in bringing great arguments to the public sphere.
What if you loved it and you look back and say, I am so glad they went nuts because that's how I got sane.
Right, right.
That's kind of a big picture, eye-opening sort of thing to think about.
Let me give you a stupid example.
This is bullshit, but I'll say it anyway.
A couple of years ago, I got a little pocket in my gum, which is where, I don't know, something burrowed in and made a home there and laid spider eggs or whatever, right?
That sounds pretty passionate from you.
Those are the sort of things that keep me up at night, man.
It's not bad.
I kept it clean and all that.
You know, it didn't hurt.
It wasn't getting any better.
It wasn't really getting any worse.
And then I'm like, you know, fuck it.
I'm just cutting out sugar.
Now, I was not a huge sugar hound.
It's just something you kind of have to give up as you get older.
But I was like, that's it.
No more sugar.
And it's better all around.
I still miss it a bit.
But overall, I mean, this is all getting better.
And I have more energy, a better digestion, like the whole thing is like, so I'm like, oh, no, I have a little pocket in my gum.
You know, it's like, oh, no, this is bad.
It's like, no, this was fantastic.
Because it prompted me to make a change that I'm never going back on.
It's so hard to tell what is good and what is bad.
I'm telling you, it's really, really hard to tell.
I mean, me, I'm a 21-year-old guy.
Like, I've got barely any life experience under my wing.
And facing the world, you know, freshly, I would say three years, still freshly out of my parents' house, not having them to sort of baby step me through.
Oh, man, I know.
And I'm so sorry to interrupt you, Zach.
You don't have experience in the world?
Are you kidding me?
What you just went through?
What you're going through?
Well, I didn't have experience with this sort of thing before, so I'm saying this whole experience was...
You have it now.
Right, right.
You have an experience of visceral injustice within the system that makes you, tragically or positively, wise beyond your years, right?
I suppose so.
Use it.
What can we do?
You know the old judo.
Use the momentum of your attacker to make him lose.
One of the reasons I called or I emailed in and said I want to be on your show is because I think the spirit like mine can't go untold.
And that's not just for selfish or personal reasons.
That's because I know if they can do it to me, they can do it to any other schmuck who says something they don't like.
They can take any speech, twist it under some obscure policy and some obscure definition and punish that person for it.
I mean, I wanted to get on your show.
I try to get in contact with Steven Crowder and those guys as well.
But it's absolutely a thrill to be on here and just be able to share this story with a wider audience than I've had.
Well, and I think you've done a really great job.
Again, I say I'm ambivalent about what happened to you.
I hate the injustice, and I respect the opportunity that it might provide you for a life that is more self-directed and self-generated and less sitting in the train tracks that were installed by a society before you that has treated your generation abominably badly.
So I remain ambivalent about it.
I mean, certainly, please, if you can, let us know what happens after tomorrow.
And I hope that you will not look at it as, oh, like this is the worst thing ever, which I can completely understand.
You know, when you think you're going in a particular direction and your direction is rudely altered, then that is a shock to the system.
But...
This is, you know, I don't want to give you the boring ass builds character speech, but there is significant opportunity in being pushed off the tracks.
Because you had a track.
Well, I'm going to go this, I'm going to do chemistry, I'm going to do my pre-law, I'm going to do my law degree, I'm going to do this.
That was your track.
You pushed off the tracks.
Now you get to explore.
You get to carve your own path.
You get to pursue your own values outside of an externally imposed agenda.
That is...
Alarming.
And if you can pull it off, unbelievably liberating, both for you and the world as a whole.
Well, I look forward to what lies ahead, no matter what it be.
We never got to the more philosophical question that I asked, but hey, perhaps another time?
I know we're out of time today.
You are absolutely welcome back, and let us know how it goes, man.
Thanks so much for your story.
Thank you so much for your time, Stefan.
All right, man.
If you can avoid...
You know, college is like the ER. You know, if there's any way you're not there, don't be there.
If there's any way you cannot be in the ER, don't be in the ER. And I think the same is true, particularly with arts degrees these days.
But all right, let's move on to the next call.
Thank you.
Alright, up next we have Nathan.
Nathan wrote in and said, I, like many of your listeners, have over the past couple of years really come to see the extent of lies and hypocrisy dished out to people, and especially to young people, by the mainstream media, government education, culture as a whole, and even parents.
Growing up a sick child whose natural development was constantly interrupted and stalled, I was always told that whatever people did to dictate my life and raising was for my own good, the best they could do for me, yet they always, always put their own comfort first, and I hardly had any ability to question or oppose their viewpoints.
It was so much, in the end, more harmful than helpful.
Why don't parents actually protect and be honest with their children?
That's from Nathan.
Oh, hey, Nathan.
How you doing?
Hi, doing okay.
All right.
Yeah, I don't know if there's a big reservoir of honesty that parents have that they're just not supplying to their children.
Do you know what I mean?
Like in order to know that you're lying, you need to know what the truth is.
And I'm not sure that a lot of parents even know that they're lying in a way.
Mm.
Well...
I mean, the thing is, with what was going on with me, and with a lot of the choices that they made, and directions...
Their lives took with themselves and their children.
But they would always say, we know what we're doing.
Of course, I'm the parent.
You're the child.
We know what's best.
But the thing is, they were doing just about everything wrong, of course.
They...
They had three young children who needed them.
I have two full siblings, and our two biological parents, the first parents that I knew, Separated over something really petty when I was 10, and the third one had just been born.
And then a couple years later, I had an unbelievable health crash.
And then there was a horrible stepmother and two half-siblings, which...
The three full siblings loved and really tried to be there for, you know, be the mentor big siblings that we thought siblings should be.
And, you know, the secondary caretakers, not as babysitters, but I mean, officially, because we were hardly ever paid for it.
It was just, we loved having that many siblings.
And again, but of course, another divorce.
We were all torn apart.
We were doing our best to survive all of this.
The parents kept feeding us.
They knew what was best the whole time.
And then with all my health issues, they were Really confusing, really traumatic, and I eventually came to the realization there's no possible way they could have known not known that they were guessing the whole time.
That they were just guessing, and they were just doing what they felt they wanted to do, because they didn't know what was right.
Why not Why not ever say to the children, you know, we don't know.
We're just guessing.
Or I guess that's a tame way of putting it, but it's just so much chaos.
And again, how did it become...
So easy.
I watch a lot of your shows.
It's like the first dedication to actual reason.
Consistent dedication to reason and evidence and sanity that I found.
And I know you have a lot of shows where you talk about as recently as the 40s and the 50s.
Whatever was...
Despite all the Well, the 50s was right after World War II. No, it was not that long ago.
Family structure was really strong.
How easy was it to completely shatter it?
And how easy was it made easy?
Right.
And this is never talked about, but things that children have questions about.
Right.
There is a quote that I have always remembered from Carl Jung.
Right.
Thank you.
And this is from Collected Works of C.G. Jung, the first complete English edition, blah, blah, blah.
And I read this when I was young, young, young, young, in my early 20s, I think it was.
And in it he writes this.
He says, people are everlastingly saying that the child's personality must be trained.
While I admire this lofty ideal, I can't help asking who it is that trains the personality.
In the first and foremost place we have the parents.
Ordinary, incompetent folk who more often than not are half-children themselves and remain so all their lives.
In the first and foremost place we have the parents, ordinary, incompetent folk, who more often than not are half-children themselves and remain so all their lives.
He goes on to write, How could anyone expect all these ordinary parents to be personalities?
And who has ever given a thought to devising methods for inculcating personality into them?
Naturally, then, we expect great things of the pedagogue, of the trained professional who, heaven help us, has been stuffed full of psychology and is bursting with ill-assorted views as to how the child is supposed to be constituted and how he ought to be handled.
It is presumed that the youthful persons who have picked on education as a career are themselves educated, but nobody, I dare say, will venture to assert that they are all personalities as well.
By and large, they suffer From the same defective education as the hapless children they are supposed to instruct.
And as a rule, are as little personalities as their charges.
But that sentence, the parents, ordinary incompetent folk, who more often than not are half-children themselves and remain so all their lives.
And I remember that being very powerful for me with regards to my own parents.
But With regards to society as a whole.
Because when we are born, we look at our parents like divine sky gods of omniscience and omnipotence.
And quite often they are half-children and remain so.
All their lives.
They don't grow up.
I've definitely noticed that.
So, and this is what I mean.
Like, most people...
Are exceedingly incompetent in the realm of values and virtue and truth.
I don't think they have to be.
But the way that values and truth are presented in the modern world is so baffling and confusing just to sort of pick up a modern book on philosophy or ethics or anything that the postmodernists or the existentialists or the modernists.
And it's like, what is going on?
How does this help me figure out the price of bread on a Tuesday and what to do on Wednesday?
Philosophy used to be something that was taken from great abstractions down to actionable, utilizable tools for the masses.
Socrates never used the word epistemology.
And I try to avoid those kinds of words.
I try and speak in the vernacular.
Because what did Socrates do?
Give to people.
What did he give to the young?
He gave the Socratic method to the young.
A way of examining the ethics and the morals and the knowledge and the wisdom of their elders.
And asking them to prove what they knew.
You say you know what is good.
You say you know what is true.
You say you know what is virtuous.
Step me through it.
And with the Socratic method, Socrates, of course, became an enemy of the lies of his civilization.
And therefore had to be put to death.
Now, that lesson has not been lost on subsequent generations of philosophers.
If you help the masses think, you will be a target.
Of course.
Because the entire system rests upon people not thinking.
Because when you can't think, but you have to make decisions, you defer to authority.
So those who want to rule you must first strip you of the capacity to think for yourself.
And then you will be a slave.
To their praise and their punishment.
That's it.
And so philosophers saw the example, of course, of Socrates and Aristotle and Plato.
Plato tried to get into politics in Syracuse, ended up being sold into slavery.
Aristotle had to flee, saying he would not allow Athens to sin against philosophy twice by putting him to death as well as Socrates.
It is an extreme sport, teaching people how to think, you see?
And so...
Philosophers have said to themselves, I will either be a slave to the powers that be, or I will be academic and opaque, and therefore speak only to other academics, and never translate what I say, like the ancient Catholic priest speaking only in Latin, which the common folk couldn't speak.
I will only speak In incomprehensible polysyllables, and I will only produce baffle-gab works of foggy nonsense in order to never accidentally connect the wires of thought to the generator of the masses.
That way, I'm either clear to the masses in telling them to obey the state, Which is Hegel, it is Kant in particular.
I'm either going to be comprehensible in my commands to obey the state, the secular rulers, or the religion.
Or I'm going to be opaque and baffling.
You know, there's an old quote, I think it's Emerson, mistrust any enterprise that requires the purchase of new clothes.
Mistrust any philosophy that requires mass invention of new words.
You want to strip things down.
How often do I use words that I've either made up myself or that are incomprehensible to the average decently read layperson?
I don't.
I don't.
And so the masses cannot think, which is exactly where the rulers want them.
Of course, you don't want plotting cows.
You don't want cows figuring out the locks on the paddock.
You don't want them wandering off the plantation.
Right?
You don't want slaves with jetpacks.
So you must cripple their natural capacity to think.
And I've been around enough kids as a daycare teacher and all of that.
I've been around enough kids to know that kids are wicked smart when it comes to debate.
You know, have a debate with kids about candy.
And they bring them in.
They're like...
F. Lee Bailey, man.
Boom, boom, boom.
With their arguments.
Kids know how to reason.
Kids know how to think.
Kids know how to hold their position.
That's how we're born.
And that is the natural birthright that is torn out of us.
Torn out of us.
Like a giant suction cup taken out of spinal fluid.
Like a spinal tap from hell.
And about as painful, I think, over an extended period of time.
So people have been stripped of their capacity to think.
Because when we can think for ourselves, why do we need rulers?
Why do we need a controlling mechanism?
Why do we need a hierarchy?
Of this brutal kind that we all attempt to survive underneath.
Why do we need these boots of coercion constantly stamping on our wallets and our hearts and our futures and our children's faces and hearts and minds?
Why do we need government schools when we can think for ourselves, reason for ourselves when our children can join us in the exploration of life?
Rather than sit in deadening rows to be lectured on about virtue and self-responsibility by people who force their parents to pay their salaries and often force their parents to deliver them up like sacrificial Incan drugged offspring.
And so people can't think anymore because they've had it beaten out of them.
They've had it jeered out of them.
They've had it bored out of them.
In this crippling, brain-dusty, value-three-nothing burger they call 12 years of government education.
Let me teach you a bunch of inconsequential facts that lead nowhere, as well as a whole bunch of geometric theorems you're never going to use in your life because at least that won't offend any fundamentalists in the room now, will it?
Oh, this offends things ridiculous.
And now it's not 12 years, 20 years or more.
Of course, yeah.
But, you know, then some of it you find for yourself directly.
You're 18.
You can't drink, but you can sign $60,000.
That's for education that has no proven value in the long run.
In fact, it's a detriment to a lot of people in the long run.
So, saying to parents, well, you know, you didn't tell me the truth.
The truth has been kept from them.
They've been punished for even getting close to the truth.
The truth has become like the fiery sun god that melted the wings of Icarus and dumped him into the ocean to die.
The truth is, ooh, you're getting close.
I mean, what is it they say these days?
If you're being attacked, you're doing good.
They only shoot at the planes that are over the target.
If you're getting anywhere close to the truth these days, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
Ward them off, particularly if you're helping other people.
You know, back in Socrates' days, when the young men began to question their elders, their elders could very well have said, you know what?
Maybe we've just taken a few things for granted here.
Maybe we can rethink some of these things.
Nope.
Kill Socrates.
That's the problem.
Because all power in general breeds psychopathy.
And when people get addicted to power, they murder, or want to, anyone who interrupts their supply.
Which is why, you know, communists and totalitarians will kill people who object to the realm or who ask rational questions or who think for themselves.
Because they're going to be taking away the drug of power without which these people can no longer live.
So they're cornered rats in defense of the star chambers of power.
Anybody who teaches people to think interrupts the dopamine drip of those addicted to power.
And power is the power to kill.
That's all power is.
Power is the power to kill.
To kill people who disagree with you.
That's all the power fundamentally is.
This is why when people say the power of big corporations and the free market, well, absent their relation to the state, what power do they have?
They can't compel you to do a goddamn thing.
But the state, on the other hand, well, we know that.
So I do...
I do give some latitude to those who don't tell the truth if they've not been told the truth or if they've been punished for even thinking about the truth or approaching the truth.
Because we're not designed to be honest.
We're designed to reproduce.
We're not designed to be wise.
We're designed to fucking make babies.
I mean, we are machines of DNA reproduction with a little free will thrown in for good measure because it adds to sexual market value in certain situations.
So we are not creatures of honesty.
We're not creatures of reality.
We're not creatures of truth.
We're creatures of reproduction.
Of course, we want to make a society where truth and sexual market value go hand in hand.
But not these days.
Someone shared with me.
I don't know.
It's a pretty telling graphic.
And it's a graphic of a woman in three stages of sexual excitement.
The first stage is she's kind of bored.
The second stage is, well, she's having a pretty damn old good time.
And the third stage is, like, she's biting the sheet, screaming in orgasmic joy.
And in the first picture is the caption, he's nice to you.
He respects you.
He tells all your friends he thinks you're beautiful.
And she's like, eh.
And the second was, he has no job.
He has no car and no particular fixed address.
And then she's having a pretty good old time in the bed.
And the third one is, you know, he has multiple felonies.
His pants are hanging down around his waist and he asks you for money.
It's like, boom!
That is the multi-orgasmic princess, sheep biter.
And that is where things are in society in many ways.
So I do have some sympathy for the people who don't know the truth because they have been punished for even thinking about the truth.
Now that's changed since the internet has come along because the truth is just a click away.
You know, they say, rape, murder, it's just a shot away.
It's just a shot away.
Well, truth, reason, it's just a click away.
It's just a click away.
And now it's so accessible to everyone that not having it It is causal to responsibility.
Yes, but that doesn't seem to matter because now we've let even let academia be taken over by the masses, by fear of the truth, by these microaggressions.
I can't believe it.
I had never heard of that But if there is not some honesty and truth, and my parents, yes, they had hard childhoods of their own.
They were punished quite a bit.
My dad, a little hard to tell.
I don't My mom certainly had a very harsh dad and a weak mom.
My dad's dad died when he was nine and he was raised by a welfare mom.
But they both...
They both grew up to be, well, they both grew up to be scientists.
So they were smart enough to have done better than they did.
And if we take what the last caller Zach was talking about, parents today should be furious that colleges are threatening the families of students.
Where is that?
I see almost no anger.
Well, because college is still coasting on its prior reputation as being a sorter for great intellects.
You know, like, as a society, all we're doing is feasting on the rolling boulders of man, meat, and cultural achievement from the past.
I mean, college, to me, it used to be an intelligence test.
Now it's the opposite of an intelligence test.
Oh, I'm all aware of that.
So, I mean, to me, let them have academia.
What do we care?
Because we have no more time to...
The world is falling to pieces.
We don't have time to...
Yes, but we have the internet.
We have this conversation.
We have these arguments.
We have this access to everyone in the world, pretty much, who's got access to the internet.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know for how much longer.
But it's more than we've ever had before, right?
It's more than independent thinkers and those who avoid the gatekeepers that push you towards confusion, obedience, or irrelevance.
We've never had something like this before.
And I'm willing to say there are still open bets.
Look, the time for a soft landing is gone.
That is past.
And it probably passed decades ago.
Yes.
That doesn't mean that hope is gone.
I mean, the hope of things resolving themselves peacefully with no significant conflicts, oh, that's gone.
That vanished decades ago.
Long before I ever became a public figure.
I'm trying to figure out what to do in the hard times to come.
I mean, the hard times have not yet come.
And the sooner they come, the better.
But what to do, the only thing you can do is be right.
The only thing you can do is say this and this and this and this and this will lead to disaster.
And you will be mocked and you will be attacked and you will be ridiculed and you will be called a fear monger and you will be called delusional and you will be called a doom porn merchant or whatever.
And then you'll be right.
And Churchill was laughed at throughout the 1930s and then he wasn't.
Oh, I'm well aware of that.
I've even begun...
A YouTube channel of my own to try to start doing this.
And I do try to talk about...
Well, I did with my parents and family.
None of them want to hear it.
In fact, I got that a lot growing up too.
We don't want to hear it.
And those people will not prepare for the hard times.
And I'm sorry to say it, but that is a sorting mechanism that has been around ever since we were single-celled organisms.
There are people who understand the hard times that are coming, and there are people who are preparing for it.
And sadly, there are people who reject the reality of what is coming and are not preparing for it.
And this is a story as old as evolution in terms of who gets to keep going on into the future.
This is tragic.
I wish it were different, but I have to accept the world as it is, not as I want it to be.
Yes, that's true.
The world is so hypocritical.
To talk about the whole global warming, should I call it a scare?
I spent five years in high school and five years in college because they were delayed.
Well, and also because it's hard to do it in four years at all.
I'm glad I got out when I did because hearing what it's like now.
Although it wasn't that different just a few years ago.
So recently...
President Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, and one of my most recent videos was in defense of this.
I went to high school and college, five years, majored in ecology and environmental science.
I was especially fascinated by it because I did a lot of self-study and I actually learned about Probably about 90% of what I've actually retained was from a self-study.
But all through it, I was figuring out...
I was learning.
This climatology is one of the most complex of the Earth sciences, barring maybe...
You know, the exact predictions of things like earthquakes and volcanoes.
I'm sorry, you're going to need to get to your point a little bit more quickly, if you don't mind.
Just being conscious of the hundreds of thousands of listeners, so please.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, the scare.
I wanted to bring...
So, I wanted to bring...
I wanted to figure out the truth about that because it's been blown way out of proportion.
I have to start all the way from the ground up.
You got people like Obama and Bill Nye saying the science is done.
That should immediately disqualify it.
There's no way that complex a science is ever done.
And I want to do things like this.
I would love to be one of those scientists Who are actually dedicated to finding out the truth about this.
Why do you need to be a scientist?
Back to this credentials question.
Why do you need to be a scientist to do that?
Well, first of all, I've already got the credentials.
I don't need any more credentials just being what I do, what I work on.
Okay, so I'm not sure what the point is here.
Do you want to work on debunking long-term 100-year climate science predictions?
I want to work on...
I want to work on finding the truth.
The world is wasting resources it doesn't have on projects that will never work.
I, uh...
What, uh...
Listen, I've got one more caller.
I don't want you to flail around trying to find a point on my time or the listener's time, but I really appreciate the question and I'm glad that we had a chance to talk about it.
But I'm going to move on to the next caller and I appreciate your call.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
I had a point.
No problem.
No problem at all.
I had other questions.
Maybe another time.
Maybe another time.
Thank you.
Yeah.
We wouldn't want anyone wasting resources, right?
Anyway.
What have we got?
Okay, up next we have Aaron.
He wrote in and said, I have seen the videos with Dr.
Duke Pesta, The Truth About Education, all the podcasts on homeschooling and natural education, All of the criticisms of contemporary higher education, but what I'm still missing is a clear vision of what a feasible system is morally best and what moral steps there are to achieve it on a macro level, especially in the European Union where the situation is a bit different than it is in North America, and there are many people who don't even realize that it could be so much better.
So rephrase, what is the most moral and effective educational system that we can hope to create here in Europe?
That's from Aaron.
Hey Aaron, how you doing?
Hello.
It's an honor.
Well, thank you.
Aren't I doing it?
I mean, you're asking a guy who's trying to educate the planet about philosophy...
Who's been doing it for 10 years and has thousands of show.
You're saying, well, what is the best education system?
Well, if I'm not doing it, I'm not doing a very good job.
Well, the problem is that in Europe, people...
Well, the only reason that I have found you is because I had an entire gap year.
Well, exactly two gap years.
And I had the time to research and find many shows and other resources to educate myself independently.
But many people don't have that opportunity.
And that is why I've decided to get into education and I'm sorry to interrupt you, Aaron.
Is your hypothesis that everyone who doesn't have a gap year is excluded from responsibility regarding the gathering of knowledge?
No, of course not.
Okay, so the gap year is a bit of a red herring, right?
I mean, let's say you had the gap year and then you can send my videos or other resources to people and then they don't have to have the gap year because you've sent them the video, right?
Right.
So, do you think that I should be doing, I'm not trying to make this personal, I'm just trying to understand, like, I mean, I think I'm doing the best that I can in terms of how to engage and educate people in philosophy, and I think I'm doing very well as far as that goes,
you know, like, 15 million views and downloads a month, hundreds of thousands of books going out every, free, so, not wealthy, but, so, What do you think I could or should be doing differently in order to improve?
Because if I'm doing about as well as I can, then people should just do what I do, right?
I'm not going to criticize you in any positive or negative way.
I won't fall into that trap.
However, my question, my original question was more about what I could do myself, but Michael has responded to me that that was not a philosophical question, so I rephrased my question to the one he just read.
The only education that matters is value education.
The only education that matters is moral education.
Now, if that sounds simplistic, it's because it is.
Because, you know, people need to be good and not everyone has an IQ of 170.
So, we need to bring values across to people.
The initiation of force is wrong.
Respect property rights.
Respect persons and property.
Think rationally and learn to think critically and all that.
The vast majority of people can achieve that.
I think you can achieve that IQ 85, 90 and up, if it's presented in the right way.
So the only education that matters when you think about what you retain from what you were told when you were younger.
I can think of like a dozen things that I learned or heard about or was told about when I was younger that I still retain and use to this day.
None of them involve the triangle inequality relation or the opposite angle theorem or any of the other Euclidean garbage because that's value-free.
That's learn how to manipulate these equations in your mind to solve stuff for no purpose whatsoever.
It's busy work.
It's got nothing to do with values.
It's got nothing to do with anything you can use in the future unless you're specializing in something along those lines, which, you know, very, very few people ever end up doing.
And so...
It's the values that you learn, either directly or indirectly, either through instruction or through example, or hopefully a combination of both.
It is the values that you imbibe that matter the most.
And this is precisely, of course, what is stripped out of the curriculum in government schools, and increasingly, of course, now, and I assume it's almost all but gone, in higher education.
Right?
So whatever you teach in terms of values is going to offend some splinter group or some group in society that's going to get mad and upset and as a teacher or as an educator or as a principal or as a curriculum designer is going to make your life difficult because they're going to complain and they get a lot of complaints and you get stuck in grievances and stuff, right?
So the AP has released a style book that says you can't use the word Islamist.
You can't use the word terrorist.
Okay.
Why?
Why?
Are these not terms that have any accuracy?
I mean, is there no such thing as terrorism?
Is there no such thing as a terrorist anymore?
We just wipe that right out of the memory hole?
Why?
Well, I think we all know why.
It's not that complicated to figure out.
It's because it's offensive to, I don't know, some magically unknown group in society, right?
I mean, so what matters is values, right?
Yes.
And it used to be that values were taught at home.
Well, first of all, originally values were taught in school.
And then when you got, you know, this massive crashing waves of immigration into America into the 19th century, one of the concerns was about all the...
It was originally a very...
It was a white Protestant British country.
Like 95% of the immigrants were sort of white Protestants from even a particular part of Britain, right?
And then you got lots of other people from different countries coming in.
You got Catholics coming in and there was a concern that the Protestant culture was going to get washed away.
And so you had government schools put in partly to attempt to push back against the increasing Catholicization of America.
But then once you got a classroom full of half Protestant and half Catholic kids, what the hell are you supposed to teach them?
Oh no!
Whatever I teach here is going to offend this group.
And that's when there were only two groups and they were both Christians.
When you start to get 27 different kinds of groups with 27 different kinds of religions, plus agnostics, plus atheists, plus pantheists, plus nihilists.
I mean, you can't teach any values.
You have to scrub the entire curriculum of youth free of values and therefore free of meaning.
And then you end up with a hedonistic group of amoral pleasure seekers who wonder why their lives have no meaning.
Well, that's because the cult of multiculturalism robbed you of that which gives life meaning, which is values, which is morals.
Which they robbed you of the endorphins you get from doing good in society.
And instead of having good that relies on masculine virtues like courage and integrity, we get this bullshit, anemic, waspy crap called being nice and being sentimental and helping people.
It's so...
I mean, to call it girly is an insult to girls.
The West was not won by being nice.
Or helpful.
Don't get me wrong.
Being nice and helpful are fine things in and of themselves, but they're scarcely the major virtues that founded the freest civilization the world has ever known.
Dear Lord.
So, the only education that matters is value education.
And why is this show growing so much so far so quickly?
Because I am unapologetically laser-focused on the transmission of values.
On the transmission of values, on the provocation of nobility and virtue, and therefore the necessity of courage and the satisfaction of truly moral achievements, of moral courage.
I say to people, talk about these things with people in your life.
Send them, provoke them, challenge them, undermine their delusions, reinforce their capacity for truth.
And through that, reason equals virtue, equals happiness.
You cannot aim for happiness any more than you can aim for thinness.
You can aim to change your diet.
You can aim to drop smoking.
You cannot aim directly at health.
You cannot aim directly at happiness.
Reason.
Think critically.
Think rationally.
Think universally.
Think logically.
That gives you the capacity for virtue.
Virtue, a knowledge of virtue plus the courage of your convictions gives you the opportunity for success in the dissemination of virtue which gives you happiness.
Both in the present and in the moment and in the future, as you attempt to push back the ever-increasing tsunamis of coercion that surround us and encroach upon us and threaten to swamp, the shining cities are elders built.
So, forget percentages.
Forget how to capitalize the start of a story.
Forget how to capitalize the title of a paper.
These things are fine.
You can look them up in 30 seconds.
The education that matters is the education of meaning, of values, of virtue, of something to live for beyond the tickling, momentary, savage, and ultimately depressing and enervating stimulation of our senses, which squids fucking in a reef can easily achieve.
We have to aim for something a little bit higher Than all the chirping and burping and yerping of all of the animals in a beautiful sunless meadow that are either trying to eat something, avoid getting eaten, or fuck.
And the only thing that elevates us above the brute spinal fluid and other fluids of mere fucking is thought, is virtue, is the spirit of what can be achieved in the world in goodness.
No other education matters.
At all.
And every other piece of education is a mere distraction and evisceration of our capacity for virtue, courage, meaning, and happiness.
Yes.
May I? Yeah.
Yes, you have completely accurately described the situation in Europe and basically the common core system that we have in Europe.
Numerous common core systems and to varying degrees, very restrictive.
So even if I would enter the education system, I would not be able to teach or to convey those ideas.
No, no.
Everything of quality is happening outside of state systems these days.
I agree.
Almost nothing of quality can occur within state systems, within coercive systems, within education, whether it's Pre-university or post-university, nothing of quality is happening in the state sector at the moment.
The state sector is something to be stepped aside, like a rotting body in the road.
Yes, that is exactly what I want to get to.
Everything of quality is happening in the voluntary sphere of the internet.
Right.
Suppose we were given the three wishes thing.
What would we wish for in order to change this current education system so that it will be as we wish it would be?
Well, there's only one thing to wish for, and the wish will soon be granted, which is collapse.
Collapse of the state.
Well, I don't know, but collapse of the funding, collapse of the existing structures and the existing systems.
It doesn't take a mathematical genius to look at the diverging lines between unfunded liabilities, immediate spending, Entitlement spending, which is largely beyond the power of Congress to alter, and tax revenues.
I mean, there's this widening gap.
It's not that complicated to figure out.
I mean, we're able to extend and pretend for so long, and then we're not.
So I don't think we need any wishes.
We just need to hope and to pray, even perhaps these days, to hope and to pray, Aaron, that the sooner the crash comes, the sooner the Big adjustment comes.
The better off we will all be.
The longer it continues, the worse off we will be.
And when it does collapse, what can we expect to come into its place?
That's a very passive way of looking at it.
Well, something has to replace it.
Sorry?
What do you want to come into its place?
Well, that is my question.
Well, I can't tell you what you want to come into its place.
Well, I've had a very rough and rich experience with the education system on two continents, actually.
So I have my strong opinions, but I wanted to hear yours.
Oh, freedom.
That's all I want.
Freedom.
I agree.
Just freedom from coercion and freedom from falsehoods.
And the freedom from falsehoods It's just freedom from propaganda.
I don't care if people lie to me privately.
I can avoid those people.
But I do care when young children are lied into funding their own propaganda and brain destabilization.
And so all I want is freedom.
I simply want to not have guns pointed at me every time I walk down the street and every time I sit in my house and every time I wake up and every time I go to sleep.
The only place where no one is armed these days is in my dreams.
Right.
That is exactly what I want for everybody else.
However, I have noticed a very sad reality that not everyone requires freedom.
Some people...
I mean, not many people demand freedom actively.
Some people...
Oh god, most people avoid it like the plague?
What are you talking about?
Of course they do.
Yes, exactly.
So...
So?
What to do with that?
Well, again, we don't have to worry about it.
It's going to play its way.
It's going to play its way out the way it plays its way out.
I mean, there are people who loathe and fear freedom because they've become dependent on coercion.
They have made life decisions in terms of not getting married and having kids out of wedlock and working for giant military industrial corporations selling Death Stars to every Asshole in a sheet with a couple of billion dollars all over the world.
I mean, there are people who have adapted themselves to the fruits of coercion, of state power.
And that state power cannot last.
And they desperately want that game to continue.
They desperately want that debt, that extend and pretend to continue.
But it won't.
You know, I want to live forever, but I won't.
Right, right.
And so, as far as, well, what do we do with people like that?
Well, there's nothing we do with people like that.
There's nothing we can do with people like that.
They will never voluntarily give up.
The bloody coins of state power, they won't.
And I'm not...
I don't want to use force to take it away from them because what's the point?
You know, it could be argued as the initiation of force.
But it's going to happen anyway.
It's going to happen anyway.
You know, there's an old...
There's an old thing that Socrates said to the Athenians after they...
Voted to put him to death.
And he said, listen, I'm in my 70s.
What's the point?
Nature would have taken care of your wish in all too short a time.
I initiate something that nature is taking care of on its own.
So I feel a lot of sympathy for the people who are dependent on state power.
They've been lied to.
They have been used as the pawns of those in power.
They have been bought and paid for.
They have been enslaved into a dysfunctional system that can't possibly last.
I have a huge degree of sympathy for how much they've been lied to and how much they have been made addicted to the bloody fruits of state power.
So I have sympathy.
I have compassion.
But just...
Just because someone's addicted to a drug doesn't mean that you should enable them by supporting its continuance.
Because you care for these people, you should want the adjustment to be sooner rather than later.
Like if somebody is going to get off heroin, you want it to be after they've been on it for six months rather than six years or 30 years.
If the drug is going to end, let it end sooner rather than later.
So that fewer bad decisions are made in the pursuit of that drug.
And so that there's less time that people have been exposed to that drug because there are people now who are 20 who are making decisions on the idea of the infinity of the welfare state and the infinity of alimony and child support and all the stuff which may not be sustainable over time if there's a huge recession or a depression.
They're making bad decisions on the infinite sustainability of that which is not infinitely sustainable.
And, you know, we all say this about the environment.
We never think about it in terms of the economy.
Of course, the leftists don't, because they don't care about the environment either.
They just care about state power.
And so the adjustment should come sooner rather than later.
And it would be humane for it to come sooner rather than later.
But everyone's going to try and extend and pretend as much as humanly possible, because it will reveal the final lie.
Of the statists, of the central planners, right?
The old Margaret Thatcher quote, socialism always fails because eventually you run out of other people's money.
Well, what people in Venezuela are facing right now is horrible.
I wish it were different.
I have argued for decades that people not pursue policies that result in that.
My conscience is clear.
I have no fucking clue how other people live with themselves.
I have no fucking clue.
How people who've advocated this kind of central planning and this kind of price control and central banking and all of the crap and coercion and violence and debt that has resulted in the disaster of Venezuela and other places like it, I have no idea how people like that live with themselves.
I'm very conscious of what I say and very conscious to be responsible about what I say.
I have no idea.
How the Chavistas, how the people who are really, really keen on Hugo Chavez, I have no idea how they live with themselves.
I don't know if they're just a bunch of sadists who enjoy watching the Venezuelan people suffer, or it's not real to them, or I guess they just, as usual, displace the blame onto something which is not to blame, like the free market, or American imperialism, or nothing to do with their systems.
They've got no personal responsibility.
I don't know how these people live with themselves.
I can only assume it's because they have...
Zero conscience whatsoever.
Or maybe they are sadists who enjoy watching the suffering.
I don't know.
I don't know.
But my conscience is clear.
But it is better for the Venezuelan people as a whole to be suffering this now rather than in 20 years.
Because in 20 years there would be even more poor people, even more people dependent on the state.
And things would have gone even further out of focus, and you would have had even more unwanted children, I mean, or children who can't be sustained in the current system.
I mean, it would have just been awful.
More awful.
If it's going to adjust sooner, it's better.
And it means that certain infrastructure can maintain in place to steer the ship that has foundered back towards the seas of freedom rather than having it completely break up on the rocks.
All right?
Listen, I'm going to close off the show.
I really, really appreciate everyone who's called in.
What a joy, a pleasure, and a treasure it is to be part of these essential conversations in the salvation of the planet itself.
Well, at least human society, the planet will probably continue anyway.
But I really, really appreciate everyone's honesty and openness in bringing these topics up.
I'm glad that the conversations are as helpful as they are.
And please don't forget to go to freedomainradio.com slash donate.
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Have yourselves a wonderful night, my lovelies.
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