Aug. 22, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:48:41
3799 Freedom Versus Fascism - Call In Show - August 13th, 2017
Question 1: [1:39] – “Most other atheists seem to me to be liberal because they want the government to take care of them like a god. You have values that seem to align with Christian views without the idea of being held accountable after you die. What makes you different?”Question 2: [33:37] – “As a political fascist I believe in a regulated market. How does a proponent of the 'free market' justify the free market when it has been shown (mass) man is easily swayed by his desires, primitive urges, and passions; top that off with the reality of corporations willingness to take advantage of that fundamental reality no matter the cost to society or civilization.”Question 3: [1:31:38] – “As a Chinese American who grew up in Hong Kong and in the California area. I have a unique perspective of the world. People in America don't usually view me as an American and people in China don't usually view me as full Chinese. My heart says I belong to both places equally since I have family (genetic and step) on both sides of the ocean. As I think about the future and having my own family, I'm confused with what to teach my child. I don't want my child to grow up only in America because of the general lack of values, manners, history and morality especially in the neighborhood I grew up in. There is no trust or common ground with random strangers in public. This is what my father was concerned about and he brought me back to Hong Kong to grow up first so I can learn and understand my heritage, the language, culture and values. I have peers who have lost all ties with the old country, know little of their heritage, and speak only in English. Am I supposed to follow the same footsteps of my father's if I want future posterity to not be lost with no identity, common understanding, and acceptance from peers?”Question 4: [2:00:17] – “I am 27 years old. I am very successful in my career and life in general is pretty great for me. Many of my friends have had children and my brother and sister-in-law have a young daughter. At this point in time I really have no desire for a relationship or children. I have been watching a lot of Stefan's videos and I feel that if I wait too long to have children, I'll be missing out on something huge in life. 20 years from now, if my mindset changes, I'll feel regret, and it will be too late to change things. Knowing the divorce rate and the state of modern relationships, the risk and loss side of the equation vastly outweigh the benefits of having a family or children. If someone feels no desire for a relationship or children, is this something to try to fix? What can I tell myself to make the laborious, frustrating, and potentially painful process look more alluring?”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well. Great, great show tonight.
What a variety.
The first caller wanted to know, why do atheist lefties tend to treat the state like a god?
What is going on? In the underground of their minds.
I had a great chat about that. Second caller, a genuine fascist who was outraged at my support of freedom and the free market and so on, and asked me to defend my position, as you can imagine, somewhat aggressively, but it was a great conversation and I appreciated him calling in.
Third caller, a Chinese-American.
He grew up in Hong Kong and America.
How... Does he raise his children, given his varied background?
How does he raise his kids so that they get the right values and the right identity?
It's a big and complex problem, and if you haven't moved from one disparate culture to another, I think you need to listen.
If you have, of course, you'll understand.
I hope the advice was helpful. If you haven't, you really need to hear about it, because it's an increasingly big problem, well worth spending some time on.
And the fourth caller wanted to know, well, if I don't want children, is that a problem?
Is that a problem that I need to fix?
Is it bad or wrong to not want to have children?
So we talked about that, which I found a very, very powerful conversation.
I hope you'll enjoy it. Thank you so much for listening, of course.
Please donate at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Use our affiliate link, fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
You can bookmark it if you like. And don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
Thank you so much for listening and for supporting this show.
Here we go. Alright, well up first today we have Brian.
Brian wrote in and said, Most other atheists seem to me to be liberal because they want the government to take care of them like a god.
You have values that seem to align with Christian views without the idea of being held accountable after you die.
What makes you different?
That's from Brian. Hey Brian, how are you doing tonight?
Oh, pretty good. Very, very interesting.
I wonder if you can expound upon your theory regarding other atheists a little bit.
Well, I used to do some arguing, I guess, in the comments on some videos I had out there, and so many of the atheists that didn't like what I had to say in my videos didn't agree with me,
and yet I see that when I watch your videos, I see that you actually have values very close to mine, and I'm wondering why I guess why you're different or why so many other atheists don't have the same values.
And are you an atheist yourself?
No, I'm a Christian.
Christian, okay. And it is, of course, quite fascinating how much I am growing to have in common with Christians, which either means you people are devolving or I'm evolving.
I'm probably going to go more with the latter than the first.
But... So just for those who don't know, like, so the relationship between atheism and the left is pretty strong, and it's a long and complicated history, which we don't have to get into here.
But I think an argument could well be made.
That atheists, in general, are useful idiots for socialists to take over society.
That atheists knock down the edifice of Christianity, and when they've knocked down the edifice of Christianity, the way is paved for the socialists to take over the state.
Now, I mean, of course, my first introduction to small government thinking was Ayn Rand, and Ayn Rand, of course, A strong atheist.
That had something to do with it.
I think what I retain from my Christian upbringing that I think has served me well Is a radical skepticism as to the perfectibility of human beings.
I mean, we share that in common, right?
You can't ever be...
Only one perfect guy in human history, and they turned him into a wood ornament.
And so...
When you accept...
That human beings respond to incentive that we want stuff for nothing, which is, in a free market, wanting stuff for nothing is a great thing because it leads to efficiency.
Like, I'm too lazy to get up and change the channel, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to invent a channel changer and everyone's happy, right?
I'm too lazy to go walk over to someone's house, I'm going to invent a phone.
So wanting... Something for nothing is one of the great drivers of efficiency in the free market and one of the great drivers of corruption in a semi-socialist state such as we have now.
So I think that I had no illusions when I grew up.
About the benevolence of those in authority.
I mean, I went to a boarding school where I and other children were hit.
The education was, in general, terrible.
It consisted of being force-fed, indigestible minutiae, holding them in your cheeks like a squirrel hoarding nuts and then spewing them out on a test paper and considering yourself enlightened.
It was terrible. I had no illusions as to the benevolence of the state.
And I've said this before, but I remember it was in grade 7.
I think it was grade 8. I had a very interesting teacher.
You know, you hoard these scraps like a guy looking for gold in a crackerjack box, right?
You hoard these scraps of wisdom that you get.
I remember this teacher.
He was a history teacher when I was in grade 8.
He wrote a whole paper about...
This was the Sino-Soviet split time, like the Russians, the Soviet Union had split with the Chinese, so the two communist dictatorships that seemed to rule significant portions of the globe were moving away from each other, and this guy wrote a whole paper on how, yes, you know, there's stuff that divides them, but let's not forget just how much unites them as well, and what a potent force they remain in the world.
And he really put his heart and soul into it, but I do remember he was talking about how Well, when you kids get your old age pensions, and we laughed.
I mean, literally a titter went around the room, and I don't think it's because we were so mathematically gifted.
I know I wasn't, but it's just...
So the idea that there was all of this benevolence and the government was going to do all this great stuff and it was just your friend and wanted to make things better and so on, I just...
I just never believed it in any fundamental way.
And I think that arises out of the fact that human beings are corrupted by power.
You know, everyone says the same thing over and over again.
You know, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
But let's have another government program.
Like, these two things just have nothing to do with each other.
They're completely separate in people's minds.
But that's because our desire for the unearned, which is great in a free market...
Is civilization destroying in the state environment, in the environment of a state?
Because when we want something for nothing, we work hard to get it.
People who say, well, I want to retire at 30, well, they work hard to get it.
Other people just have a whole bunch of kids and sit on welfare.
So I do like our desire to get something for nothing.
It's a driver in the free market.
It destroys societies when united with the power of the state.
So I think... I don't know what the atheists think, because they have this perception that, you know, the church, and I know that that's a big statement, but atheists tend to view Christianity as just one big non-denominational blob, which is maybe Unitarianism, but anyway.
And... They say, well, you know, the church is corrupt and look at all these Catholic priests and pedophilia and so on.
Well, you're actually far more at risk of being molested in a government school than you are in a Catholic church.
But they don't see it. They don't see it at all.
For them, well, the church is very corrupt and it lies to people and it propagandizes people and it promises benefits to people that it can't possibly deliver and so on.
It's like, you know, you just described the state completely, right?
And the church is voluntary.
The state is not.
The church, at least Christianity, is voluntary.
The state is not. And so I don't know what machinations they go through in their mind, but it seems like the church is the devil and the state is their God.
And without any moral differentiations that make any rational sense between the two.
So it's funny because they have projected all the failings of the state onto the church.
And they have taken all the benevolence that they think is completely not present in the church and ascribed it to the state.
It is a more dangerous religion, superstition, really.
It's an insult to religion to call state worship a religion.
But I think those things would have a lot to do with it.
And I think also just the pursuit of self-knowledge, you know, having worked a lot on childhood pain and being the victim of significant abuse has closed those wounds for me so that I'm not open to be manipulated by people offering me something.
Like anyone who comes along and says, I don't know, let me just tell you something.
It's a funny little thing, Brian, I just thought of the other day.
Did you ever see...
The guy who did those chamois commercials, I think it was chamois, he had this little headset that came around the front of his mouth and he had this kind of fairly feral expression on his face.
I think it was a chamois cloth or some kind of chamois cloth, right?
And he had this patter.
That went on. ShamWow.
Thanks. Yeah, ShamWow.
That was it. And he used to do this patter.
For some reason, I think his life has taken a rather disgraceful turn.
I could be wrong with these things that pass by when I'm looking at gaudy things in the supermarket checkout.
But he had this patter.
And I was in a store once, and one of his commercials was playing.
And he was... He had this patter going.
It was kind of hypnotic. I mean, he was really good at what he did.
Vince Offer.
Really? The pitchman's name was Offer?
Okay. Unlike his seafaring brother, Otter.
But... He had this pattern, and I really remember, and I won't be able to reproduce it, but it went something like this, you know?
This, you know, this cloth is going to make your life easier.
You won't be on your hands and knees, and your joints won't hurt as you scrub things off, because you've had enough pain in your life, haven't you?
Something like that, right?
Yeah. And, oh yeah, here we go.
Vince Offer, February 7th, 2009, arrested in Miami Beach, Florida, on charge of felony battery after altercation with a 26-year-old sex worker.
He commented that he struck the prostitute when she bit his tongue and would not let go.
So he was not charged.
No formal charges filed against either person.
But anyway, I really remember that bit of his patter where he was talking about You've already had enough pain in your life, you know?
And I think that one of the reasons that his patter was hypnotic, and I guess why he helped sell a lot of shamwheres, and maybe it's a fine product, I don't know.
But I think just dropping things like that in really gets people's attention, because a lot of people's pain is very secret.
You know, we want to put on this front.
We want to put on this front of how together we are, and how happy we are, and how successful we are.
You know, we want life to be a beer commercial that we can climb inside and live forever.
And... You know, we look at people who are rich and famous and beautiful and talented and we say, wow, their lives must be perfect.
And they're not.
But I think I have, you know, in presenting myself to the public, and I mean, I'm I'm not doing a show.
I call it a show, but I'm being honest when I talk to the public.
I present myself warts at all, right?
I present myself with failings, with corrections, with a history of good things and bad things in my life, and I have talked about some of my darkest sentiments and least palatable inclinations and so on.
So I'm trying to be...
Oh, by the way, for anyone who's watching the video, I just...
I got a couple of bug bites while I was biking in the woods the other day.
Anyway... I'm not using.
And I think people put up this front and then when someone comes along and says, oh, you've had enough pain in your life, haven't you?
People are like, he knows, he sees, you know, and there's a kind of connection.
And I think when people offer that kind of...
Even in passing, that kind of recognition that life isn't as perfect as we like to portray it as, I think it's quite hypnotic.
And that offer to, you know, buy this shamwell, it'll take the pain away in your life.
You know what I mean? It sounds like a silly example, but in a much bigger and deeper sense, the state says, surrender your freedoms and I will grant you security.
Surrender your freedoms and I will grant you security.
And then what happens is the freedoms that are surrendered are not equal.
And the security that is offered is not equal.
So the freedoms that are surrendered are generally the freedoms that are surrendered by the rich in terms of taxes.
And the security that is granted is generally granted to some of the rich in terms of protection from competition.
But you know, Tens of millions of poor people dependent on welfare.
Old people dependent on pensions that they did not pay for.
Old age pensions were not paid for.
But I gave to the system.
It's like, no, you didn't give to the system.
You gave to the government. There's no lockbox.
The government spent that money decades ago.
There's no money for you.
And so...
The state will offer to take pain away from you.
The state will offer to take uncertainty away from you.
And because nobody else talks, I think, is honestly about pain and uncertainty, because a lot of people are putting on a false front of togetherness and happiness and sunniness and so on.
I think the state has a peculiar lever that goes deep into the heart of people's dysfunction and offers to relieve them of the burden of being honest with themselves or with others about the difficulties in their life and just takes away all the symptoms.
So that may be a bit of an abstract way of putting it, but I think that has...
Something to do with it.
Because listen, atheists tend to be a little bit smarter on average.
But I think being smarter on average means that government schools were even more painful for them.
You know, everybody, I mean, I think everybody who listens to this show probably knows what it's like to be smart in a classroom of not so smart people or not as smart people.
And that is a difficult and painful thing to be going through.
And atheists, of course, you have very intelligent Christians, but very intelligent Christians have church where they can speak of deep things.
They have a conscience they can examine.
They have the introspection, which I would characterize prayer as being to some degree.
Atheists who are smart don't have that kind of community, don't have those deep conversations.
A lot of atheists I know, when I was younger, didn't really have any deep conversations.
I mean, they maybe talk about economics and some political theory and so on.
They didn't really have any deep conversations about what it means to be human and what it means to do good in the world and what it means to be wronged and what vengeance means and what justice means and what truth means.
They just didn't. And so I think you have high intelligence, high isolation.
And I think that leads you to be very susceptible to the cult of the state.
Yeah. A lot of them tend to get very angry.
Not everybody, of course, but when you ask certain questions, again, I don't want to get into another online argument about it, but do you understand why they might have gotten angry?
Because if somebody says something that I don't Think is right.
I don't really get angry.
At the worst, I'll just ignore them.
We don't have to do the debate, but what are the kind of questions that you've noticed seems to upset atheists a lot?
Well, you start asking about things like, what are the odds that the primordial soup created a You know, an actual working cell.
And then, you know, you basically just go through these asking, you know, these questions and eventually, not all of them, I would say 50% would just get very angry and just start calling you names rather than actually discussing what we're discussing.
Right. Right.
Well, I remember having that exact debate when I was a waiter with another waiter who was a Christian.
And I remember when I was about 16 or 17.
I remember... You know what?
This is funny. I'm sorry to keep delving into the archaeology of me, Brian, but this actually brings up something quite interesting for me at this point.
Because I remember the guy showed me the math on the back of a napkin at Pizza Hut.
He was leading me through the whole argument.
And I thought, you know, that's...
I mean, I was an atheist at this point, but I was like, you know, that's...
It's a pretty good argument. You know, it's a pretty good argument.
I wouldn't put a lot of money on that.
And I hadn't validated the information or anything like that.
And I remember I went back and talked to people who were close to me, who were atheists.
And I said, okay, this is a pretty good argument, a pretty interesting argument.
And I started laying it out.
And do you know what they did? They said, doesn't matter.
It happened and it wasn't God.
I don't even want to see the math.
That's sort of what the answers I've gotten, too.
I remember even at the time.
And whether the math is right or not, I don't know.
Yeah, well, but I mean, to me, and I agree with you, that's not really the point.
The point is, is it an interesting question to ask?
And it is an interesting question to ask, and it should be asked.
Whether the answer is, yes, it could happen, or no, it couldn't happen, but there's some other explanation, or whatever that could be, or it's very unlikely to have happened.
But I do remember at that time thinking like, well, that's not very intellectually curious now, is it?
It's like, nope, don't tell me.
I don't care about the math. It didn't happen.
And it was like, what's wrong with asking the question?
This is an intelligent guy who brought up a Pretty well-reasoned and it seemed to me mathematically relatively sound argument against probability, the probability of something happening, and why not look at it?
But it's like they didn't even want to see the math, didn't want to know about it, and the subject never came up again.
And I just remember at the time being a little startled by that.
And I agree with you as far as like, well, why take it personally?
What if there is a God?
Okay, what if there is a God?
Well, I don't get the sense that the atheists say, well, if there is a God, I'm going to hell.
Like, I don't think that there's that, you know, you're threatening me with hell or whatever.
But there is something that would interfere with their lifestyle if there was a God.
And I think it has to do with objective morality.
The tickling of your dopamine and your sex organs and your bodily senses and your tongue through flavor and your nose through scent and your cranium through travel.
If you are going to have a hedonistic lifestyle with no thought for the future, no thought for defending the values of your civilization, no thought for protecting all of the gifts that your ancestors bled and died to give you if you just want a life of selfishness.
And of self-stimulation with no larger purpose, no larger goal, and fundamentally no larger responsibilities.
If you want that life, you can have that life and a god too.
So I think one of the reasons that there was this pushback many, many, many years ago now, this is more than 30 years ago now, I think the reason there was this pushback was it interfered with the hedonism, I think, that those people around me wanted to pursue, that they did not want to subjugate their materialistic Sensual pleasures to any higher purpose or restraint, I guess you could say.
Yeah. No accountability, basically.
Yeah, yeah. No, you can make up your morals, you can make up your good, you can...
And anytime anybody tries to hang any responsibilities on you, you can just shrug them off.
By saying everything's relative.
And there is a kind of narcissism and selfishness involved in that that has always bothered me in the atheistic community.
And, you know, I mean, to be fair, there are, of course, religious people who will talk about the idea of God but have similar kinds of, you know, God loves everything I do.
You know, I mean, you can work it in the religious sense as well.
But there is something antithetical to...
The modern soul, so to speak, it's antithetical to self-restraint.
It's antithetical, like, don't fence me in, man, don't hang your rules on me.
It's something that comes out of the 60s, where, like, all rules are square, man, and you don't hem me in.
And I get this in the libertarian community when I say you have larger obligations than just your own life.
Because all the things that you treasure, all the freedoms that you treasure were delivered to you by people who had larger obligations than their own lives and sacrificed sometimes their own lives to give you these freedoms.
So if you value these freedoms, you can't just consume them.
Freedom is a capital.
You can squander it all in one generation, which is kind of what's been happening over the last 30 years or so.
But freedom is something that you need to add to.
I mean, because it gets used up just by being rubbed up against the world, by being rubbed up against special interest groups, being rubbed up against selfishness, and our natural desire to consume in the present rather than the future.
So we burn up freedom, we consume the capital of freedom, we need to add to it.
And whenever I talk to people about those responsibilities, I get a kind of similar pushback to when I talk to atheists about objective morality.
Yeah. They don't like it.
In fact, I've had, I would say, probably more interest from Christians in my work on ethics than on atheists, which is kind of funny, and not what you would expect in a rational world, because Christians already have an answer as to objective morality, which is God and his commandments, but atheists don't, so you think they'd be a little bit more interested, but no, not so much.
Yeah. Do you think that there...
Almost refusal to listen to morality questions.
I mean, does that sort of say that they're treating atheism as a bit of a religion to themselves?
Well, no, again, see, and it's a great point, but I would say that I would love it.
I would love it if atheists started treating the state as an actual god, That would be interesting, because that would come with obligations, right?
I mean, if the only obligation you have is to mouth status platitudes, vote once in a while and pay your taxes, which you do under compulsion and therefore is not moral anyway, because religions come with...
The obligations.
They come with the obligations. What does atheism come with?
What obligations does atheism come with?
Nothing, really. Yeah.
Oh, and of course, you know, the other thing, too, is that Christians have faith, right?
Yeah. So Christians say, I believe in God, not because he stands in front of me and I can measure him with an odometer, but because of faith.
But atheists aren't even honest enough to say that they worship the state for no particular reason.
Yeah. That they worship the state.
And it's funny because Christians get attacked a lot by atheists because Christians say, I don't have any way of getting to ethics without God.
And ethics are essential for morality and survival.
And I'm not saying this is why Christians believe.
This is just one perspective.
Yeah. And I think it's been fair to say, how do we get to universal, objective, rational ethics without God?
I mean, I think I've solved the problem.
People can check it out at freedomainradio.com slash free.
The book is called Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
But... Atheists sure as heck don't have a path to virtue.
But the funny thing is, so at least Christians will say, we don't have a path to objective virtue without God.
And that's one of the reasons why belief in God is important.
It's not the reason to believe in God, because that's an argument from consequences.
But atheists will say, I can't figure out how to build a freaking road without the state.
I can't figure out how anyone could be educated without the state, even though they learned their atheism outside of state schools.
They say, I can't figure out how we could possibly help poor or sick people without the state.
So Christians will say, well, we can't get to ethics without the state.
And getting to ethics is a lot more complicated than building a road.
So the atheists who say, well, I can't even conceive of how to build a road without the state.
What about the roads? The roads, how could you have sewers without the state?
It's like, well, because the state doesn't build them.
Engineers build them, and people need them, so they'll pay for them.
But that to me, and there is, I think there's one other thing, which is the pride of sin and emptiness.
Atheists will often consider themselves vastly superior to To the religious.
That creates, I think, a bit of a false self.
Ego inflation. A bubble, so to speak.
We all know what happens to bubbles.
It's not just the fed people.
What happens then is when an atheist comes along and says, you're even more deluded and dangerous than the worst religious stereotype of Christians, let's say, that you could imagine.
Because Christianity remains voluntary, whereas the thing you worship the state is not voluntary.
That the Christian will attempt to convert with the word, but you attempt to subjugate with the sword of the state.
And you're a useful idiot, paving the way.
For sociopaths and psychopaths to take over the state apparatus and kill millions of people, which is, you know, what happens when communists, socialists, fascists, and so on get into power.
And so what happens is that because there's this false self of I'm superior, When someone comes along and says you worship something far more dangerous than the Christian God and you are potentially a useful tool for sociopaths to clear Christianity out of the way so they can grab the power of the state and do untold evils,
then instead of being the servants of rationality and science and philosophy and the enlightenment and objectivity and so on, they end up being cudgels used to beat the virtuous away To unleash the hounds of state power on a defenseless population.
That's quite a lot for a false self to handle, if that makes sense.
Yeah. So does that mean that, or do you think that some atheists have more faith in the government than Christians have faith in God?
Well, I think so.
I do think so.
Because... It's hard for atheists to say what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad.
And atheists don't have the same skepticism regarding the perfectibility of human nature.
Because Christians are skeptical of the state for a number of reasons, not least of which is that they met a lot of lions early on in the foundation of the faith under the Romans.
But Christians know that the desire for power over another human being is satanic.
That is the great offer that Satan makes to Jesus, which is to own the world and everything in it.
When he's out 40 days in the wilderness and Satan comes to him and says, I can give you the entire world.
And he says, well, why would I want the world if it costs me my soul?
And the temptation for material benefit is devilish in many ways in Christian theology.
And the state is power over other human beings.
The state has no dominion over heaven and hell.
It has no dominion over the angels.
The state has no dominion over God, of course.
And so the state is what?
It is dominion over other human beings.
And if Jesus himself rejects as immoral, as the greatest satanic temptation, the offer of power and ownership over other human beings, Then Christians stand between the power mad and the final tool of their destructive impulses, which is the state, because they recognize it as a satanic desire to climb the steps of power, grab the leaves of power, and cudgel to death anyone who disagrees with you, and finally just everyone who's not you.
So I do think that When God says to the Christians, you shall have no other gods before me.
Certainly, post-Middle Ages, I think it's reasonably interpreted that he's talking about the state.
You shall not make the state your idol.
You shall not make...
And what is the golden calf?
The golden calf, of course...
is uh is livestock and it's money it's always struck me as a bit of a you know golden livestock is livestock that the money and and um my big video the story of your enslavement is about how we're kept as livestock on the tax farm So, I think that there's a lot in Christian theology.
Oh, and of course, in Christian theology, an act is stripped of its moral nature if it's coerced.
You must choose the good.
You cannot be forced into the good.
Whereas, of course, the atheist and his state worship is always talking about being forced to be good.
You must be forced to help the poor.
You must be forced to fund the roads.
You must be forced to be charitable.
Everything is coercion.
The Christian has a problem with that because the coercion robs it.
You know, coercion robs lovemaking of its voluntary character and turns it into rape.
But the idea in the materialistic universe is, well, however the resources end up at the person, it doesn't matter, at least they have enough to eat.
And therefore, the end justifies the means, there's no higher morality, and you end up with this really crappy consequentialism or pragmatism that decays any principles into a basically money-grubbing, hand-grabbing stretch-out at the collective trough of state power.
So... I think it's tough for atheists to look at the root of their ideology and to look at the consequences of their ideology.
And atheists, of course, as I've said before a million times, should have, if they wish to displace Christianity, the first job they needed to do, in fact, before they even displaced Christianity, the first job they needed to do was to find a set of secular ethics that could replace it.
They did not. And what that means to me is that they did not like the restrictions and the obligations of Christianity, and they wanted the freedom of materialism, which has proved disastrous.
Okay, so you think that a lot of atheists, and again, not all, but a lot of atheists, basically just are atheists because they want what they want.
Yeah, they wish to be free of restraint.
They wish to be free of rules.
And they have taken the satanic fruit of power over others.
They advocate for power over others.
Government programs, government spending, increased socialism, increased welfare state.
And again, it's not all atheists, of course, but it is such a significant majority of atheists that it can't be coincidental, so...
Anyway, I'm going to move on to the next caller.
We've got a lot of callers tonight, but thanks, Brian.
I really, really appreciate the question.
I hope it was of some use.
Yeah, thank you. All right, up next we have Cultured Thug.
Cultured Thug wrote in and said, As a political fascist, I believe in a regulated market.
How does a proponent of the free market justify the free market when it has been shown mass man is easily swayed by his desires, primitive urges, and passions?
Top that off with the reality of corporations' willingness to take advantage of that fundamental reality no matter the cost to society or civilization.
That's from Cultured Thug.
Well, hello Cultured Thug.
How are you doing tonight? I'm doing fine, Stefan.
How are you doing? I'm well, thank you.
I'm well. All right.
Do you mind if we start with just a few definitions?
Yeah, let's go.
All right. You say you're a political fascist.
Yes. Okay, so could you please define, for me, fascism?
Thank you for asking, because there's so much confusion.
Trust me, as a guy who's been called an anarchist and used that word to describe myself, I know what term confusion can lead to.
Yes, and then you hear Obama's a fascist, Trump's a fascist, so everything gets confusing.
Well, basically, fascism is a nationally organic philosophy, and there's been numerous fascist parties through numerous countries.
Of course, the most famously known, Germany, or infamously known, Germany and Italy.
But all these countries had different policies, but they all stem from the same philosophy, and that is what I am when I say I'm a political fascist.
I also believe in the same philosophy that is a launching ground that each individual party creates their own policies from.
And that is, of course, the collectivist belief.
And united, we are stronger.
And in the sense of America, where I am as an American, that would be our nationalism.
And then also a person of the belief of a common good.
Once again, you can translate that to America first.
A true America first policy is how we would...
Dictate our decisions.
Is it good for America? And then what separates from your typical collectivist ideologies like communism is greater goals.
These societal goals set.
The fascist essentially creates its own metaphysics.
It creates its own myth as man's greater goals of achieving and whatever that achievement may be as a unified society working towards that.
And lastly is To achieve that, to have, let's say we're putting space stations on Mars, whatever this greater goal is, to achieve that, you need to have the most qualified individuals for that.
So there's a belief in building up the self and the society.
And this is where we come into our free markets, because I think, you might disagree, but I think man is very adaptable to his climate, and especially when, if a lot of positive information is being put out there, You're more likely to have a mass of people who are more positive, who are more healthy physically, spiritually, mentally.
If a lot of negativity is out there, a lot of Big Macs and pornography, etc., your masses will come to represent that as well.
And I think we see that playing out today in America.
So these four fundamental beliefs are what make the fascist.
Then the policies from there, each country, they kind of do what's culturally You know, organically stems from them how they think is the best way to achieve these four points.
So that's what I say when I'm a fascist.
That's what I mean. Okay, just make sure I can give me the skinny on the four points again so I can address them if you can.
Nationalism, the common good, greater goals, self-improvement, meritocracy.
Self-improvement, meritocracy.
Right. So, a lot of these would be personal goals as well, right?
They're all intertwined, yes.
Right. So, I assume by fascism you're referring to a political philosophy rather than a philosophy of macho self-improvement.
So, how does the state work in this environment or philosophy?
Okay, well... How it's played out is, first, you have your nationalization of education.
You have your nationalization of healthcare.
These things, as far as meritocracy and proving the person, you want each person who deserves to go to university, going to that university based off their merit.
Not of the wealth they're born into, not because of breaks they've had in life, etc.
Typically, if you want to go to a decent university in this country, you have to go into debt to go into these universities.
The fascistic mindset thinks it's crazy to put your own citizens in debt who just desire education.
So it's based more off this meritocracy.
This helps build the individual.
Wait, hang on. I'm sorry.
I'm just a little confused here.
So a meritocracy and competition and excellence is really important, but then if the government takes over education and particularly higher education, doesn't it turn into a post office style show after that?
I mean, if meritocracy is really important, shouldn't you want to privatize as much as possible so ruthless competition produces as much excellence as humanly possible?
You want competition, but you want it in the truest sense.
You want it off someone's merit.
So you're not getting that when you have these private schools that charge a lot of money.
The meritocracy is based off of how much money you have or how much money you're willing to go in debt.
That's not true meritocracy.
The true meritocracy is if the person who grew up poor, lower middle class, but is highly intelligent or highly motivated and has the ability to go to these universities, that they have the ability to be allowed to go to these universities.
So to me, that's the true meritocracy.
This meritocracy today is meritocracy of money, essentially.
You can romanticize and say that it's not, but typically, if you're coming from the lower classes, even if you want to go to a decent university, A, you're going to debt, B, you're working while you're going to college, so you already started at a disadvantage.
So, to me, that's not a true meritocracy.
That's money meritocracy.
So, yeah, I do believe in meritocracy.
That's why I do believe that there should be a level playing field, not equal results, of course, but true equal opportunity.
I'm sorry, but why on earth would...
College and university be something you would need to do or have in the future.
I mean, if somebody's really smart, they're going to do well no matter what.
This is very well borne out in endless studies in psychology and sociology.
High IQ people do really, really well.
What I think, you know, and I was just talking to Jordan Peterson today about this.
If you combine just a couple of simple metrics, and the two that are most important is IQ and the psychological trait called conscientiousness, you know, the basic, you know, detail-oriented, shows up for work, finishes what they start, good word, like they keep their promises and so on.
If you combine IQ and conscientiousness, both of which can be tested in a single day, one day, one day, It's very significant in terms—it's the most significant combination of predictors into somebody's life outcomes.
So if you want someone—if you want to figure out who's excellent, who's competent, who's great at stuff, then you could just combine these two tests.
And I don't—then the person would—like right now, because it's mostly illegal or at least severely frowned upon— To test employees' IQ before you hire them, because minorities of all blacks and Hispanics don't do as well on those tests.
So right now...
Businesses need smart people, but they can't do an IQ test and they can't do other psych tests like conscientiousness and so on.
And so they have to have this massive, giant, ridiculous, expensive government program called university just to figure out who's got an IQ of 110 or 115 or above, or at least used to.
I don't even know if that's the case anymore.
So if we're talking about meritocracy and we're talking about efficiency, and I assume that efficiency has some value in what you're talking about, why on earth would we focus so much on Like a four-year college degree and 12 years of government education and so on.
And that's my first point. The second point is, the main government has been running education for the past 150 years or more in the West.
And you complain that the masses of people are, you know, dumb and easily manipulated and controlled and so on.
So I'm not sure how more government education is going to solve a problem that must at least to some degree have been produced by existing government control of education.
Well, your last point first is, That's kind of like saying the gun is responsible for killing the person.
It's the person. Government's a tool.
So the people...
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
Yes, yes. You cannot compare human beings with their own self-interest, self-motivations, response to incentives, and free will with an inanimate object called a gun.
Come on. No, you're saying, since you desire government and things are the way they are, you...
You should be happy you have your government oversight.
And I'm saying, no, you're saying...
What?
What did I say? You're trying to attribute...
You're saying...
You're saying the masses are dumb, which I'm not saying.
I'm just pointing out... No, no, no.
You're complaining that the masses are too easy to control and too easy to manipulate.
And I'm saying, well, government has been running both lower and higher education for 150 years all over the Western world and in other places.
And I assume you think this is a problem common to the Western world.
So if... Governments are great at educating people, then why is it in country after country after country we find people who can't think critically, who can't think independently, who are highly susceptible to manipulation, and who magically think, after being trained by the government, that the government is the solution to most problems.
That's the kind of corruption that happens when the government takes over education, right?
That's the kind of corruption that happens when the modern day system takes over education.
Once again, government's a tool.
Government's a tool used by man to move man forward.
No, no. Government is man.
It is not a tool used by man.
It's not a plow. Government is a tool.
It's not a knife. Government is man.
Government is men and women and voters and special interest groups and a military-industrial complex and welfare dependency.
The government is human beings.
It's not a tool.
You know what I mean?
It's not a Swiss army knife.
It's a whole human conglomeration.
That's still a tool.
No matter how you want to say it, it's – you're blaming government itself.
What I'm telling you is it's not government itself.
It's not the function of government.
It's not the identity of government that itself is to blame.
It's the people behind the government today.
It's the people running the government today.
It's the sociopaths. Thanks to the system we have today where – Your government is going to be better.
Your control of government, the people you put in charge of government, they will not be corruptible.
They're going to be perfect.
They're going to be completely honorable.
They're never going to fall sway to the temptations of power.
You're going to give people this ring.
You're going to give people this power.
But your people are going to handle it perfectly.
Is that the argument? No, you're exaggerating as you do, but no.
What I'm saying is people, because what are politicians motivated by today?
Their special interests, A, And their own success and pandering.
If you have people in power who are truly motivated by A, nationalism, B, a common good, C, greater goals, and D, self-improvement and improvement of society, yes, they will make better decisions.
Yes, we'll have a more functioning society.
Yes, we'll be able to actually preserve and enhance tradition and culture.
So yes, there's a big difference in the human element here from what you're talking about.
We're not talking about We're talking about sociopaths that pander to the lowest rung on the ladder and serve the highest rung on the ladder, and this is how the system keeps going.
We're talking about people who are actually ideologically believe and passionate about what they believe and promoting that.
So yeah, I think there's a big difference.
Sorry, are these leaders chosen by the masses or are they imposed upon the masses?
A leader is always chosen by the masses, not in your democratic way of voting.
Okay, so somehow the masses that you consider to be not too smart and easily susceptible to manipulation, somehow these masses are going to choose these godlike philosopher kings immune to the temptations of power and corruption and so on.
How is it that you get these perfect leaders out of the impulses and votes of the masses you consider to be uncultivated?
Well, first, that's hyperbole.
Second, I never said anything about the masses being stupid.
This isn't my opinion.
Are you disagreeing, really, that the masked man is open to their desires?
Do we disagree on this point?
Are you saying that the masked man, the masked crowd, that they usually listen to their intellect, and that's how they usually process their decisions as a society?
Or do we agree that, no, it's Primarily, the instincts of man, the desires of man, is what A, what advertisement speaks to, B, what politicians speak to.
This is what gets the wheels moving.
I mean, so are we having a disagreement here?
I'm not putting down and calling people stupid.
I'm just acknowledging what the reality of the psychosis of the mass group are.
And it's not my opinion. This has been documented by numerous different people.
Gustav Le Bon, his book, The Crowd, The Psychology of the Mind of the Group Think, Edward Bernays, his book, Propaganda, he specifically changed the advertisement history of America by learning tapping into desires can get people to buy stuff that they have no need for.
I understand. People are often irrational.
They are, as you point out, instinctual.
You used the term psychosis, which might be a little bit strong.
But if this is the nature of people, as you point out, how are they going to choose these wise, incorruptible leaders?
Well, it's... No one ever knows if they're going to choose a wise and incorruptible leader.
I mean, like I said, I'm not trying to say, like, hey, I'm telling you this is the perfect way.
Not at all. I'm not trying to say no one will ever be corrupted in any kind of system.
I'm not, you know, painting these pictures of these false identities, no, or these false realities, no.
People will...
How will you reach these people?
Through a populist movement.
In America, a nationalist...
Trump kind of touched on it.
He opened the door.
We're going to go more towards that way.
We might have to deal with a... You know, coming leftist insurrection here soon, but we're going more towards that way.
How do we deal with that is speaking to what people need.
And you kind of spoke about it a little earlier with your last caller.
You know, people want security.
They want to be able to put food on their table, feed their family.
They want to have a decent society.
They want to maintain their culture.
Sorry, we've left the realm of philosophy and now you're just reading a pamphlet or something.
I don't know what any of this means.
This is just a bunch of words. You're not making any arguments here.
You're just painting positive language and thinking that you're getting something done.
But we have to be a little bit more rigorous here.
So tell me, the government takes over healthcare, the government takes over education.
So would you then characterize countries where the government has control of education and healthcare as fascistic countries?
No. No, it was once again, you're taking all the spirit out of it.
Just because you have the apparatus on the outside, you have oversight.
Just today, in America, we have oversight over the market, right?
I wouldn't call this fascist.
No, no, no. I asked you a question. I asked you a question.
You need to answer my question and not go off on tangents if we're going to have a conversation.
Right? So, you said that it was to do with government control of education and healthcare, right?
So this is just a category definitional problem, right?
So if you say that governments with control of healthcare and education are fischistic governments, then every Western government is already a fischistic government.
So tell me what the difference is.
No, no. First, no.
I did not say these are components of it.
These are what could come from looking for a common good.
Yes, you would nationalize.
You wouldn't put your citizens in debt to get cancer taken out of their body.
You wouldn't put your citizens in debt if they're contributing citizens, right?
But that's not a tenet.
The free market doesn't put citizens in debt when they get cancer.
And I'm not sure what you're talking about here.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I don't know why you're coming back to...
Well, because everybody knows that you have a risk of getting cancer and you have a risk of getting sick.
So you take out insurance.
And in a free market, insurance is very cheap.
And you take out insurance for these kinds of very rare but expensive problems in healthcare.
Or if you don't take out insurance, you save your money so that you can pay for things.
I'm not sure how cancer automatically means debt.
I don't quite follow that.
Well, because anyone has a deal with cancer, the money you're paying for, first off, I mean, I remember specifically for something much less than cancer, spending the hospital for two days and ended up a $20,000 bill for basically laying in bed for two days.
Yeah, but it has nothing to do with the free market.
I mean, America has very little to do with the free market with regards to healthcare.
We don't have to get into that discussion.
With regards to free market and healthcare, then, you have processed meats, which Have been linked to cancer.
And you have a market that doesn't care because the free market only cares about accumulating capital.
There's no ethical incentive to the free market.
There's no cultural incentive to the free market.
There's no ethical incentive to the free market.
I mean, you rattle these things off like they're just two and two make four.
And the world is a sphere and there's no ethical dimensions to the free market.
Where's your ethical... Where's your ethical incentive to the free market?
Have you ever run a business?
No. So where are you getting your sense of business from if you've never done it?
It's like me describing Thailand.
I've never even seen a picture of it.
Where's your ethical? Let's just get right to the point.
where's your ethical incentive to the free market?
If the market's only about accumulating capital, that's all it's about.
There's nothing else attached to it.
The free market is soulless and is about accumulating capital.
No human element to it at all.
So where's your incentive?
Because I'll tell you what sells in this country And it's the junk food, right?
It's the pornography. It's everything.
The proof's in the pudding, as they say.
So where is this incentive?
If you actually had corporations caring about as citizens, they wouldn't be pushing forth food that's been linked to cancer to their people.
They wouldn't be pushing forth sex in every advertisement to pull on people's primitive urges.
So where is this incentive to have any kind of ethical restraint in the free market when At its root, it's simply about accumulating capital.
There's no loyalty to anything except accumulating capital.
So how do you accumulate capital in a free market?
Getting people to buy stuff, whatever you're selling.
Okay, excellent. So you have to get people to buy stuff.
So you have to advertise and you have to get people interested in your product.
And then usually you'll have to get them to try it.
Now, if the people don't like The product.
Or if you're dishonest about your product, right?
If you say, you know, here's a bar that's sugar-free, you know, some power bar and it's sugar-free, right?
And then it's not sugar-free and then people with diabetes or other things, they eat it and they get sick or whatever, then not only will they not buy your product, but they'll probably sue you.
As well, right?
So you have an incentive for honesty, which is why you see calorie counts and so on.
I don't know if some of that stuff is legislated and so on, but you have to give people decent food in your restaurant.
You can't... Give them rotten food, they'll get sick and never come back and tell everyone and sue you and so on.
So you have an incentive to be honest, to provide good services at a reasonable price, and to have consistency in your food offering, right?
So, you know, one of the reasons places like McDonald's are popular is that when people go to a McDonald's in a new city, they know what they're getting, right?
Especially if you have kids, right?
If you've got fussy kids, you go to McDonald's, they're going to be able to eat.
It's cheap and all over the place.
That's why people do it.
It's cheap and all over the place.
Fast food is on every corner and it's on every billboard.
No, there's no incentive to that.
That food is horrible for your body.
Everyone that's ever documented it knows that.
And it's the number one selling fast food is number one selling food in America.
America's one of its biggest... I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean.
What do you mean fast food is all...
There's choices you can make that are good and bad in food.
And you can get mostly good and bad choices in fast food places.
You can go to McDonald's and you can get a veggie wrap.
You can go to McDonald's and you can get a pretty good salad.
You can go to McDonald's and you can get a bottle of water instead of pop.
You can go to McDonald's and you can get lots of healthy stuff.
So I'm not sure what you mean.
Sure, some people like to eat badly.
I don't know what the problem with that is.
The problem, of course, you know, everybody has a piece of cheesecake once in a while.
Everybody, you know, you can't live on cheesecake, but a little variety is fine.
So the fact that some people choose to eat badly...
Well, that's their choice.
The problem is, of course, everyone else is being forced to subsidize and pay for the resulting healthcare costs, right?
Yeah, well, that is a problem.
I agree with that. But no, that's not the reality of your pain.
It's not some people. No one's going to McDonald's to buy...
I know however old their lettuce is in their salad, any of their salads, right?
Come on, man.
You've got to pull your head out of your ass and start looking at the real world.
There's no way that McDonald's would have those salads if nobody bought them.
And when I go to McDonald's, I'll order a salad.
There's a whole row of them. When I leave the McDonald's...
They're gone. Of course people are buying salads.
You maybe go run a business for a year or two and then start talking about the market.
I guess your anecdotal experience is different from mine then, right?
Because I don't see anyone in these, at least the last time I went into any of these places.
All right, we can look it up.
I didn't just provide anecdotal experience.
I also provide an economic argument that there would not be salads at McDonald's if nobody bought them.
Do you understand how that works? Because they'd be spending a lot of money buying ingredients for salads.
They would not be recouping those in sales, right?
Listen, okay, I exaggerate when I said nobody.
Most people go to McDonald's to buy the burgers, to buy the fries, and to buy the milkshakes.
They would go to somewhere specifically built around salad or, you know, vegetarian food if they were looking for salads, decent salads out there.
So I think we can agree on that, that most people go to fast food places looking for hamburgers, looking for fries, looking for the food.
This is this suggestion to the people, which makes it more likely people to eat that kind of food.
And once again, not good for you.
There's no ethical standard to the McDonald's or the market or anyone.
Wait, hang on a sec. Do you think that people are eating worse now than they were, say, 40 years ago?
Do I think they're...
Yes, I would think so.
Why do you think that is the case?
Like I said, I think the abundance of the fast food, I think the abundance of the processed...
No, no, there was fast food. Many years ago there was fast food.
We've gotten away... No, no, this is important.
40 years, I think we've gotten away from the natural diet too much.
I think everything has become too processed.
I think 40 years ago, I mean, it's kind of close to when all the fast food craze kind of started.
Maybe if you push it back 60 years, people had more of a natural diet, more to their local area.
But that's kind of changed.
And, you know, there's a lot of things to blame, definitely with...
You know, the growth of the cities and the mass industrialization and growth of the population, all these things, you know, account to it.
But, yeah, I would definitely say our health, at least looking at, you know, diseases, obesity, premature death, looking at these things, yeah, I would say, I would think we're in a worse state now of eating and health consciousness than we were 40, 50, 60 years ago.
And the government is...
Much bigger than it was 50 or 60 years ago.
The government has a lot more power and control over people's lives and their health care and their insurance policies.
And, of course, the government has been, I think, heavily influenced and lobbied by food groups to place not the healthiest food combinations at the top of, you know, the food pyramid and all that kind of stuff.
So I don't think it's a lack of state power.
Oh, and the other thing, too, of course...
No, no, that's not the argument, though. Hang on a sec.
Hang on. The other thing, too, is that the...
The rise of the two-parent working household has also contributed a lot, I think, to bad eating.
Because people end up, they want processed food because they don't have enough time, because there's no mom home doing the shopping and making the good food from scratch.
You know, like my wife...
She loves making food for the family.
She says, you know, I know everything that's in here.
You know, there's nothing in here I can pronounce.
There's nothing in here that's had it survive a trip from some warehouse in the mountaintop in Chile or something like that, right?
So this...
You know the old story about how this went, right?
There was this massive anti-fat campaign which led to the substitution of sugar.
There were high taxes on sugar which led to the substitution of high fructose corn syrup into the modern diet.
And of course, because packaged food is less tasty than natural food, you end up having to add a lot of crap to it.
Preservatives and flavor enhancers and often sugar is just everywhere.
It's like this snow blizzard in the grocery store.
And a lot of this is because we have this crazy two-parent working household system because taxes are so high now that if you want a middle-class income, most people have to have two people working.
And so, you know, I agree with you that I think, I mean, obesity rates are certainly way up from where they used to be.
Also, multiculturalism has destroyed the cohesiveness and security within neighborhoods, so kids stay home a lot more rather than running around outside.
And video games. Video games, too.
Add that in there, too. Listen, any criticism you have about government today, I agree with you on.
There's a lot we agree with.
The difference is where I'm saying, no, I don't say scrap government.
I say we can have a functional and good positive government.
You believe that that's not possible at all.
But I wonder, back to the original question.
And I was trying to make a point of how do...
You said these people that are easily susceptible to their lower instincts, how can they elect a decent person or back a decent person?
It's a person that speaks to their desires in a positive way.
People are earning for that. But to...
To go completely back to the message, what is...
Why are... I would say you seem like very dogmatic on the topic of the free market.
It's not an argument. See, exactly.
Exactly. Well, no, this is what I'm saying.
You might say that's not an argument, but to me it just seems...
No, it's not. Calling it dogmatic is not an argument.
Okay, well, here's why. Here's why.
Because to me it... Rules, guidelines, ethical, cultural, national guidelines set to the market.
The economy should serve man, right?
It's not this mythical creature that we all follow and let us lead.
You know, it's not Prometheus giving us fire, you know.
No, but the market does serve man because you can't sell something to someone who doesn't want to buy it.
So the question is, if you're right about people's tastes are base and corrupted, the question is why?
Well, I think that there's a number of answers to that.
A lack of critical thinking, a lack of religion, or at least the moral absolutes that religion used to provide, that philosophy is yet to provide.
I'm working as hard as I can, but I can't do it.
Let me finish my point.
So the question is, why are people's desires so debased?
Well, because there's a lot of easy crap out there that people can get, that the consequences of which are shielded from them, you know, like they can get fat and then the government will just pay for their healthcare or whatever.
And also because people are lost.
They're adrift. I agree with you as far as this goes.
We don't have any higher purpose other than often our next meal or our next one-night stand or our next whatever it is we use to satisfy our senses in the moment.
And that is a terrible thing.
And I think that has resulted from expansion of government power.
People used to be worried about being a single mom because it was a disgrace and because it was expensive and because there was no provider.
So the parents would have to pay for the upbringing of the kid, of their kid's kid, the grandparents would have to pay.
So, you know, the welfare state, a variety of other things have just taken away the negative consequences of people.
And we have a really dumbed down curriculum for a variety of reasons.
Like there are way too many women teaching in the primary school.
They're not enough male role models, not enough male rigor.
You know, women are great cheerleaders for the young, but they don't often have the same ability to impose the kind of stricter standards that men can, which children need.
And we have all of these weirdly perverse incentives that has coarsened and debased the population as a whole.
And of course, the government loves it if you're only thinking about your next meal or your next bang or whatever it is, rather than thinking about larger or more important issues.
So I think that a lot of the debasement of what's been going on in the population is the result of expanded government power.
So for you to say, don't worry, We'll use this power in the positive way.
You know, if you're talking about, obviously, I know people talk about Mussolini and Hitler, who actually, Mussolini started out as an out-and-out Marxist.
And Hitler always referred to himself as a socialist and hated capitalism.
Or, well, he divided capitalism into two, like productive capitalism, which was making stuff which he didn't mind as much.
And then there was finance capitalism, which is usury speculation, all this kind of stuff.
And you can see this.
The Democrats still talk about this.
Wall Street is the problem.
It's the finance capitalism.
They just don't like saying Jews, I guess.
But it's the finance capitalism that is the big issue.
But if you look at the platforms of Mussolini and Hitler...
It's full-on socialism.
I'm not sure where the fascism element comes into it.
I mean, certainly Mussolini said that socialism is better achieved within a single nation-state within Italy, and so he confined it to the nation-state.
Hitler was more around the Aryan race and so on, but it's socialism with a different collective.
I think you left out the most important part of why people have these urges, and it's evolution.
Our sex drive to reproduce and to recreate was a huge drive in us to keep the species going.
Our desire for food, mankind would go weeks maybe without food until the next hunt.
So now all these things are in abundance, so it taps into our primitive self.
And it's very hard to control that for most people.
And yes, there's a small percentage of society can and does control that, but the large percentage of society does.
I think this is more than government and everything else you just went on about.
I think it has more to do with tapping into.
In advertisement, once again, Edward Bernays, his book Propaganda.
Are you familiar with Edward Bernays?
Yeah, wasn't he Freud's nephew?
Yes. Yeah, but the question is, why are people so susceptible to propaganda?
Because they've not been taught how to think.
Because they've not been taught how to reason.
Because they've not been taught how to identify a soft stream.
It's not a negative thing. Once again, propaganda, dare I say it, it would drive you crazy again.
It's just a tool. It's who's wielding the propaganda.
Propaganda in itself is not a negative thing.
It's just a repetitive message that you're trying to convince me.
No, no. Propaganda is a terrible thing.
Propaganda is a terrible thing. You're a propaganda for the free market.
I mean, it's just the same thing.
What? You have repetitive messages over and over again about the free market.
Oh, so you haven't understood anything that I have been saying as an argument...
With reason and evidence.
For you, it's just you battling your narrative against my narrative.
There's no possible way that we can bridge the gap based on reason and evidence.
No, our definitions of propaganda is different, is what it is.
If your definition of propaganda includes philosophy, then you have the wrong definition of propaganda.
It's the opposite of philosophy.
My definition of truth is falsehood.
Well, no, it's not really that way at all.
Propaganda is a tool of getting information out there.
It's not in itself A negative thing.
You can call it positive or negative or whatever, depending on the message you hear.
Propaganda is a way of getting information out there, a way of convincing people of something.
Doesn't mean what you're trying to convince them of is wrong.
It doesn't mean it's people. No, I don't care what the content is.
It's the methodology that's the problem.
It's the methodology of getting people to believe stuff without reason and evidence.
Then you have to appeal to their base of nature, so you have to appeal to their fear or their greed or their hatred or their resentment or whatever it is.
You have to emotionally manipulate people into doing what you want if they don't know how to think and you want them to do something.
So another reason why the masses are so susceptible at the moment is they've not been taught how to think.
And the reason they haven't been taught how to think is because the government's in control of the education and the government doesn't want people who think.
And that damn well isn't going to be different in any system that you propose where the government controls the education.
Well, that's where you're wrong.
Once again, we see the example in Germany.
You brought it up. I mean, the reason we went to space is why?
Not because of capitalists, because we took these national socialists from Germany, as Russia took some of their greatest minds as well, and then we used them to help us get to the moon and all of this stuff.
So, obviously, these people were being taught pretty damn well.
What the fuck does getting to space have to do with anything?
What the fuck do I care about getting to space if that means the government controls education?
What the hell do I care if 12 people go into space if that means my daughter grows up with a quarter million dollars of debt on her head?
What the fuck do I care about going to space?
What does this have to do with anything?
Why would she grow up with debt?
What are you even talking about now?
Why are you...
You're talking about going to the moon, which was a massively expensive government program.
I'm talking about people from a nationalist, fascist country had high education and very intelligent people.
So much so that all the A, the communist, and B, the capitalist countries had to take their scientists and use them to accomplish things.
So to use the argument that- German people have a very high spatial reasoning IQ. German people have a very high IQ as a whole, a little bit above, I think, the average even in Europe.
That is not a function of fascism.
That is a function of genetics, largely.
Now, it was taken over by fascism, and I'm not sure that you really want to be taking 1930s and 1940s Germany as the way forward, but I don't care about going to space.
I care about freedom. I don't care about seeing little specks of human beings in government uniforms rotating around the planet.
I care about something a little bit more immediate, which is personal and political freedom in the here and now.
Personal, yeah. That's what it comes down to.
It's personal. It's personal.
Everything is, you know, the self.
Your capitalist ideology, right?
With the free market. You're saying it's my capitalist ideology.
None of the arguments have landed for you.
So for you, everything that I'm saying is mere ideological assertion.
That's called projection. And nothing that I'm saying is actually a reasoned argument with evidence, right?
Well, no, I haven't.
In defense of the free market?
No, you haven't given me one reason why we shouldn't have any kind of national stipulation over the government or oversight over the government.
Why should it be... Oh, the reason we have a free market is because theft is wrong.
Stealing is immoral. Can we at least agree on that?
That stealing is immoral?
No, because your definition of force and stealing...
Oh, sorry. In your definition of the government, is no force involved?
Is that what you're trying to tell me?
No, in my definition, I'm part of a team.
Is force involved in the government you're proposing?
Is force involved in the government I'm proposing?
No. There's laws.
You're not forced to follow the laws.
You can make your own decision.
Oh, so what happens if you don't follow the laws?
Just out of curiosity. What happens today when you don't follow the laws?
You go to jail! Force is involved because it's the state.
Well, of course, to have any kind of cohesion, you have to have a collective understanding of society, right?
No, no, no. Forget this collective understanding, word salad.
Is force involved in what you're proposing?
Of course it is, because you're proposing a big government.
And when you have a big government, you have force.
Now, with the government, how is it going to finance all these things that it wants to do?
How is it going to finance these bigger visions and this common good and this collective?
How is it going to do it?
It's going to do it by borrowing, by printing, and by taxing, right?
Now, you don't seem to be a big fan of the borrowing, all right, because you don't like the debt, get it?
So that means it's either going to print money, it's going to tax money.
If it prints money, it destroys the economy.
If it taxes money... Well, it's stealing from people because it's initiating the use of force to remove property from someone else.
Now, the free market doesn't do that.
The free market does not violate the non-aggression principle.
The free market does not initiate the use of force to take from other people against their will.
See, we disagree on the whole language, because to me, it's not stealing.
I'm a part of a country.
I'm contributing to that.
It's like I'm a part of a church, and I'm putting into the donation.
I'm contributing to that.
I'm not being forced.
Yeah, okay, so listen, listen.
If you want to have sex with some guy, then it's having sex with him.
If he has sex with you.
If I don't want to have sex with the guy and he has sex with me, it's rape.
The fact that you want to do it doesn't make it right.
You understand? Oh, no, but then you shouldn't be in the country to enjoy any of the benefits of it, right?
You make your choice there.
That's where the line is drawn.
So you're saying, I want to be a part of this country, but I don't want to contribute to it.
I just want to do what's best for me, and I don't care what happens.
I have started businesses, I have hired tons of people, I'm contributing intellectually, I'm contributing morally, I've contributed artistically from a business standpoint.
What does it mean to say the only way I can contribute to the country is handing over money at the point of a gun to the state?
Because if we're talking about having, you know, in this fascistic society where you have a nationalized healthcare and a nationalized education system, obviously you're going to have to put into it too to reap the benefits of it.
So if you're not willing to, yeah, then you shouldn't enjoy the benefits of it.
Then you're making your own decisions.
See, that's the thing.
That's the thing. I don't like socialized medicine.
I don't want to contribute to it.
So I'm more than happy to not take the benefits of socialized medicine, because I know those benefits, at least to me, proved almost fatal.
So I'm fine with that.
Just give me the freedom to not be forced to participate in this scheme of yours, and we'll part as friends.
Well, A, theoretically, that can be accomplished, right?
Fantastic. So I don't have to participate in funding or being a part of the socialist medicine system or the socialist educational system.
Fantastic. Then it's an optional thing for people to sign up to.
I'm allowed my free will.
I'm allowed my options.
I'm allowed my ethics. I'm allowed my conscience.
I'm allowed my choice. That's great.
That's a possibility. I don't know how that would work out in the long term in reality for people.
How would you have people living in a country, some contributing and then some not?
I don't know how that would work out.
But back to the original point.
So the free market, now you can take...
So we grow corn in America, let's say.
And you have these American farmers, American companies growing corn.
You can also get corn from Mexico.
So a company decides, I'm going to get corn from Mexico cheaper.
And bring that corn in now and I can undersell the American corn competition and make my business bigger and eventually grow a corn monopoly.
So a little oversight, a little nationalistic oversight of the market would say, hey, listen, we got plenty of corn.
We have plenty of corn farmers.
We have a lot of American jobs through corn.
So guess what? You can't get corn from Mexico for cheaper.
You can't import that.
To you, what is the big crime with that?
Why does that seem like having any- What's the big crime with that?
Because two human beings on the planet want to have a voluntary transaction.
Right? So two people on the planet, one guy wants to buy corn, another guy wants to sell corn.
They're not harming anyone.
They're not defrauding each other.
They're not stealing. They're not setting fire to anyone.
They're not kidnapping anyone.
But they are harming. Hang on.
They are harming. Hang on. Hang on.
Two people in the world want to have a voluntary economic transaction to mutual benefit.
And you're saying, no, fuck you, one of you guys is going to jail, or both of you.
That's what's wrong with it, is that they're peacefully interacting economically and you're showing up with a gun.
Well, listen, this is what internationalism is at its finest.
You're replacing American jobs.
You're taking, you're, A, bringing in a cheaper product that you can undersell, like the Walmart model, right, to take out all the small businesses.
You're bringing in this cheaper product, so you're knocking out American farmers.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Why?
Well, hang on a second.
Hang on a second. Jesus. You've read a lot, but you've not, have you ever spent any real time in the free market as an agent?
Have I worked?
I mean, have I worked? I mean, I don't understand.
No, I mean, you haven't over-owned a business.
Do I play the stocks or any of that?
No. Okay, so let's say the price of labor is cheaper in Mexico, right?
And that's the big factor as to why the corn is cheaper?
Mm-hmm. Okay. If you are an American farmer, And you can't compete with the price of labor in Mexico because, right, so cheap over there.
You don't just go out of business, right?
Just brainstorm with me here, brother.
What are a few things you could do if you're an American farmer and the Mexicans can sell corn cheaper?
You would have to lower the wages of the people working for you is one, I'd imagine.
That's one possibility, but that wouldn't be your first choice, I'm sure, because that's kind of volatile, right?
Yeah, big time. Okay, so what else can you do?
To compete with the lower wages of the Mexican worker.
I don't know. What could you do?
See, here's the thing. You don't know.
So you should stop talking about this stuff until you figure some of this stuff out.
I mean this like you're a smart guy, you're verbally very astute and so on.
You could do wonderful things in the world.
But the fact that it's like, well, I either have to cut my wages or nothing.
Well, give me the answer then.
There's tons of things. Tons of things you could do.
What can you do?
Here's some things you can do.
You can switch crops. It's not that easy.
You're a corn farmer.
You're just not going to take all the corn out and say, hey, guess what?
Mexicans don't run us out of our business.
Let's start growing radishes. Are you saying that farmers don't switch crops all the time?
You've got to be kidding me.
Do you know anything about farming?
Farmers have to rotate their crops, for Christ's sake.
If you grow corn year after year, your soil gets exhausted and you're done.
Of course you switch crops.
You have to as a farmer.
Come on, man. Your answer to internationally bringing in—to having cheap labor and bringing in products is, hey, too bad.
Cough it up. Figure out something else.
Grow something else. Once again, the human government— No, no, no.
Hey, hey. Hey, hey.
Hey, hey. Hey, stop that shit, man.
Stop that shit. You ask me a question.
Okay? You asked me a question and you said, what else could you do other than lower the wages?
I'm sorry, you're right. I gave you an answer.
Don't be a douche about it, okay?
Okay, you're right. You're right.
Don't just stop mocking me.
What are you, Google? Christ.
I know. You're right. Okay, I'm sorry.
It just seemed like a crazy answer.
It's not a crazy answer.
Farmers switch crops all the time.
In fact, farmers have to leave fields lying fallow, right, because the soil gets exhausted.
Okay. So that's number one.
And listen, if you don't think farmers switch crops, you should see what happens when they started subsidizing corn in order to get ethanol.
Farmers switch crops to corn all the time, right?
There's corn in Idaho.
This is why you have to talk about corn in Idaho all the time, right?
So farmers, they switch crops all the time.
I'm not saying they don't switch crops.
I'm saying your answer, saying, hey, they just have to switch, is...
That's what I'm saying. You're completely lacking any nationalist tendencies in you.
Like, everything is...
No, but what I'm saying is they can switch.
There's one other option. Okay, that's one option.
Here's another option. What's the option that preserves any kind of American job or that preserves any kind of, you know, function of Americanism over just importing cheap materials?
Like, you need that kind of option.
Wait a second. Hang on.
Are you saying that change is bad?
I guess it would depend on which kind of change you're talking about.
I have no idea. Do you still use a rotary dial phone or do you have a smartphone?
Are you saying that somehow change is bad?
What I'm saying is, yes, importing either cheap labor or cheap products from foreign countries that compete with American products, yes, that's bad for sure.
Here's another option.
You can automate more.
So for instance, let me give you an example.
The cheapest labour was slave labour, right?
Was it? I mean, they had to feed them and house them.
I mean, if it was not the cheapest, then nobody would have bought a slave.
I mean, again, just understand how the market works here, all right?
I'm looking at minimum wage today, though, Stefan.
And really, do you think—this is a serious question.
Do you think, like, the minimum wage work—what is it, $7.50 today?
Do you think—what do you think— Most workers in the 19th century lived on a dollar a day.
In the West. A dollar a day.
Okay, I'm not going to get...
Slave labor was cheap.
Okay, because you didn't have to pay them, right?
I mean, when you have to feed them, you have to feed your workers either way.
It's just because the food that you give, the money that you give them, they used to buy food.
So slave labor was cheap.
But what slave labor did was it delayed automation.
Because if you've just spent, like a slave cost about the same price as a car, roughly, you know, 20,000 bucks and 15,000 bucks.
So if you just bought 10 slaves, you spent 150 or $200,000.
Then what was your incentive to introduce labor-saving devices and thus lower the value of your slaves?
More zero, right? This is one of the reasons why the ancient world, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, they knew about the steam engine, they knew about a whole bunch of cool things, but they never automated because they had so many slaves that the people who had the money bought the slaves and therefore nobody wanted to automate this stuff.
And so cheap labor in the form of slavery delayed automation.
Right. At the beginning of the last century, like 70 to 80% of Americans were involved in farming.
Now it's like 2%. Why?
Because it's not like the population has gone down or Lord knows, as we talked about earlier, people's caloric intake has increased.
And so why are we able to produce so much more food now with far, far fewer people?
Because there's competition.
Automation, yeah. Because competition and automation.
So if you have...
Cheaper labor, whether it's across the town or it's across the country, or it's in another country, the cheaper labor is a stimulus for improving your efficiency.
So I'm glad you brought up slavery because the big thing about it is, was our short-sightedness.
We were short-sighted, no we, we weren't here.
The people that were in America were That bought slaves, used slaves, were short-sighted as to the larger picture.
So what happened then? We have what we have going on today, all the way up today, as a result from slavery.
Now, same thing with illegal Mexicans, mainly, coming in from the South.
Big businesses were happy taking them because, hey, they didn't need to give them insurance, they can pay them less, but they're very short-sighted.
So what do we have? I live in the Southwest.
I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. I've watched the whole place demographics change in front of my eyes in the last 10 years because They didn't look at the long-term picture.
I've watched the culture change in all these cities as well.
Same with automation now.
Because we can get the cheaper work, the more efficient work, we're not looking at the long-term picture of that either.
We're looking at the short-term. Hey, we can make things more, faster, and cheaper.
We're not looking at all the people who will be put out of work.
We'll have to look for work. We removed that human element for it.
I see what you're saying.
It's a theory, but I tend to agree with that theory that slavery has kind of slowed down automation.
When I look at the consequences of it, I look at automation just like the same way I'm looking at slavery.
I'm like, hey, let's slow down.
Let's look at what the long-term effects of these things we're doing could be because we have a swelling population.
You're trying to make decisions on, like, moving chess pieces around and, you know, should we automate or should there be...
Instead of blindly moving...
No, no, hang on, hang on. Let me finish my point.
So you're trying to make decisions on how much automation is good and what are we going to do with the 10% of people in the country who've got IQs 83 or below and, you know, can't exactly retrain to become software engineers or whatever.
But here's the thing.
We'll never know. You will never have enough information.
I will never have enough information.
No one will ever have enough information to make these kinds of decisions about what should be done.
How should we judiciously apply government force to do this?
Or should corn be imported from Mexico?
Or should TVs be imported from China?
Let me finish my point. Let me finish my point.
And then I'll let you talk.
All right? This is how it works.
We will never have enough information because nobody knows.
Nobody knows all of the details, all of the complexity, all of the price systems, all of the desires, the demands, the shifting demographics.
Nobody knows. So here's the thing.
Here's what we do. We don't make decisions based on consequences.
We don't make decisions based upon manipulations or special interest groups or who likes water or which farmer wants to grow which crops because we don't know.
We make our decisions, my friend, based on ethics.
We make our decisions based on morals.
Now, I'm with you as far as this illegal immigration goes.
It is a disaster. It is a disaster primarily because of the welfare state.
The problem is that The businesses are able to pay these immigrants, these illegal immigrants, so little because the costs are being socialized, right?
The taxpayers are paying for the education of the kids and for when they show up at the emergency room and they need medical care and the roads that they use.
It's the taxpayer who's being forced to pay for all of this stuff to subsidize.
somewhat termed an invasion, right?
So it is not a deficiency of government power fundamentally.
You know, if you leave a big pile of honey in the woods, don't get mad when the bears show up, right?
If you people wander across an unprotected border and they get tens of thousands of dollars worth of free stuff, like vastly more than they could earn in their own corrupt country, they're gonna do it.
You can have open borders, you can have a welfare state, you can't have both.
You can't have both, or you get just these kinds of disasters.
You shouldn't have either, I'd say, but yeah, go on.
Ideally, this is a philosophy show, right?
This is not a sort of applied political show.
But we make decisions based upon ethics.
And the initiation of force is immoral.
The initiation of the use of force is wrong, whether it's against people's persons or against their property.
And if you want to jump over the morals and start talking about how we can move these chess pieces about and so on, Then you're at the wrong show.
Because this is a show where we start with, this is a conversation where I'm going to have to start with, as a philosophy guy, I have to start with first principles, reason, evidence, ethics.
And the reason and the evidence and the ethics are that if people are engaged in voluntary trade, peaceful trade, that should be allowed.
And it doesn't matter fundamentally whether across the street, across the country, or in another country, if people are, if they want to trade with each other, You know, I mean, I can't...
I have a banana in my studio for a snack later if I get hungry.
Can't grow those in Canada, right?
So, obviously, if I want a banana, and I like bananas, got to be able to trade with other countries.
America, Mexico, I believe some of the other South American countries are very, very big on the banana trade.
And at least that's what I got from the Harry Belafonte song.
So, if people want to trade, let them trade.
Now, if people want to move into a neighborhood, like illegal immigrants, they want to move into a neighborhood and they want to start accessing all of the taxpayer resources that are extracted from the population through the power of the government, well, that's a whole other issue.
The immorality there is not the illegal immigration.
Because what they're doing, well, it's illegal.
But of course, in most places, they're still able to access social services and welfare.
It's one of the mind-blowing things I found out about just over the last couple of years of living in the shadows.
I don't think so.
But... The question to me just comes down to what is moral?
Property rights. Integrity of persons and property is moral.
Initiation of force, initiation of violence, initiation of theft, these are all immoral.
And it comes down to those questions for me.
All of this other stuff about, you know, automation and And Mexican workers and so on.
Nobody will ever know how to manage all of that stuff.
We simply have to work on the basic principles of what is good and what is bad, what is right, and what is wrong.
And those decisions are a whole lot easier.
So, what I would say first, because, you know, you kind of change topic here and there, so I'm trying to remember at first, with the conversation of automation, You have to have at least a conversation, is what I'm saying.
I'm not saying we're going to know it all.
We're going to know exactly the perfect plan.
What I'm saying is we as a society have no conversations about any of these moves we're making in society, whether they're automation or whatever they are.
There is no conversation.
There is no thought on it.
It just happens and goes and goes and goes.
So I don't think...
That's a logical way to go about these things.
I don't. I think it's more rational to have learned people, trusted people, to look at these things and discuss these things and see what are the pros and cons and go about it.
So that's what I would say about the automation.
But as far as the morals and ethics, what you're saying is your morals and ethics.
Wait, are you saying that you think that violence is good or that theft is good?
No, I don't. Okay, so then we share that.
Don't say it's my ethics if you agree with me.
But I don't agree with what you're calling theft, is what I'm saying.
That's not theft. Like I said, once again, how I look at contributing to a functioning government is not theft to me.
It's a part of the team, part of the culture, part of the civilization.
I don't look at it in a negative sense, right?
You want to pay for it, but that's not the issue.
The issue isn't whether you want to pay for it.
The issue is whether you can force other people to pay for it and call yourself a good person.
That's the line you draw on the sand.
How do you have civilization at all if you have no line in the sand?
If you don't tell people, listen, us, we as a culture, we as a people, we as a society demand this of you if you want to be a citizen, be a brother, be a sister.
This is what we demand of you.
If you're not going to do that, then hey, guess what?
You're not a part—you're not a citizen.
You're not a part of the country. We have—this is what we're failing, too, as a society, a civilization, as Western society.
We—every line we drew, we kept pushing back, kept pushing back, and look at where we're at today.
We can't even figure out what bathrooms to use anymore.
So I believe you have to have—and no, I don't look—I'm not an advocate of force or violence, but I don't look at it—I understand the realities of life.
Nothing has ever changed or happened without violence or force.
Nothing. So these are realities I have to accept.
I have to be a little more Machiavellian about it, for sure.
I think we all do.
I'm not going to admonish force in itself or violence in itself.
No. Like I said, all of history has shown me how this country was created, how this country unified all through violence, unfortunately.
I mean, these are fundamental realities.
I can't ignore them. So when I say your morals and whatnot, yes, I view the theft as different.
I view society, we're on a precipice as a civilization.
And if we don't draw hard lines and figure out how to unite with each other, with all our little differences, like you and I may agree on 15 things, but there's five things we're just at each other's throats.
Like if We don't come together and figure out how to get rid of those five things as people and unite on those 15 things.
We're going off the edge.
And I know you say it because you see it yourself.
You've been speaking about it for about two years now.
So you see the same thing.
I agree with you that we're on a precipice.
And I agree with you that it's kind of an emergency at the moment.
But if the answer is...
More government, more force, more bigger power, more government, more laws, more force, more jail, more collectivism, more government control of people's minds through education.
I'm afraid we part ways because that road, that's been tried for about the last 100,000 years.
And this is where we've ended up.
Listen, I'm going to move on to the next caller.
I appreciate the conversation.
I really do. And I appreciate the work out.
And thanks very much for sharing your thoughts.
All right. Thank you. Take care.
Bye-bye. Alright, up next we have Quincy.
Quincy wrote in and said, As a Chinese-American who grew up in Hong Kong and in the California area, I have a unique perspective of the world.
People in America don't usually view me as an American, and people in China don't usually view me as full Chinese.
My heart says I belong to both places equally since I have a family, genetic and step, on both sides of the ocean.
As I think about the future and having my own family, I'm confused with what to teach my child.
I don't want my child to grow up only in America because of the general lack of values, manners, history, and morality, especially in the neighborhood I grew up in.
There is no trust or common ground with random strangers in public.
This is what my father was concerned about when he brought me back to Hong Kong to grow up first so I can learn and understand my heritage, the language, culture, and the values.
I have peers who have lost all ties with the old country, know little of their heritage, only speak in English.
Am I supposed to follow in the same footsteps of my father's?
If I want future posterity to not be lost with no identity, common understanding, and acceptance from peers.
That's from Quincy. Oh, hey, Quincy.
How you doing? Can't hear you, Quincy.
You might be muted. Hello, sorry.
Hello? Hey. Hi.
Oh, come on, man. You've blown my stereotype already.
Chinese people are supposed to be really good for technology, man.
How's it going? I'm good.
I'm good. Hungry. Hungry for some knowledge here.
Okay, good, good.
You know, I thought about this like half the afternoon.
It's a big, meaty, detailed question.
Yeah. Right? I mean, if you were in the Ming Dynasty, you know, like nothing had changed for 2,000 years, this wouldn't even occur to you as a question, right?
Right. And so it is a real challenge with regards to values.
And I wanted to ask you, first of all, when you say the general lack of values, manners, history, and morality, especially in the neighborhood I grew up in, you said, what does that mean?
Well, right.
So, yeah, I've been thinking hard about this, trying to reflect on my life.
And what do I really mean when I say that is that the only way I can go about it is to compare to my life in Hong Kong, like how people treat each other, how everyone knows common history or values such as family, filial, piety. Over here, you don't have things like that.
You have kind of like a phantom type of value system where they talk about liberty and equality, but don't really do it.
Or altruism is a big thing here, and Ayn Rand fought hard against it.
I recently learned about her and a really amazing thinker, and I'm really excited to learn more.
But back to your question.
I think that's pretty much all I have.
Not sure how to really explain myself more clearly here.
Right. Well, as far as this question goes of who do I meet, who do I marry, how do I raise my kids, right?
Based on what values?
Right. I'm already married.
We're thinking about starting a family.
That's why this question came up.
Actually, my landlord had flown back to India with their kids for a couple of years.
That's what triggered my question today, too.
What's your wife's background?
She's half Chinese, half Vietnamese.
Did she grow up in America?
She was born overseas and came here, but most of her recollection is in America.
She doesn't remember much overseas.
Right, right. It's tough because kids, as you know, are more influenced by their peers than their parents.
Yes, that is true.
And now, that's not always the case.
I mean, if you dump them in government schools, yes.
And if you don't monitor who their peers are, yes.
So the parents are still fundamentally in control.
But it's the peers. You know, if you have parents with a big Scottish accent, some thick Scottish accent, the kid goes to local school, the kid's not going to have an accent.
Because he's going to copy the language of his peers.
And that makes sense.
You marry your peers, not your parents.
And so you need to get along better with your peers genetically than you do with your parents.
So whatever you teach, the question is, like if you were in Hong Kong, it's pretty ethno-homogeneous.
In Hong Kong, right? And so if you're teaching values to your kids in Hong Kong, and their Hong Kong values, then they go to school and they're going to meet other kids who've had those same values and they're all going to be swimming in the same swimming pool of these kinds of values, right? So it's not going to be, they're not going to be contradicted by peers.
But if you're in America, you teach your kids a particular set of values, they go to school, and what happens?
Nothing. Nothing is taught in terms of values and morality.
Well, and that means something is taught, which is they're going to get the nihilistic sex education, they're going to get the no values, they're going to get the multicultural cult stuff, they're going to get the subjectivity, the relativism, all the crap that comes along with government schools these days, they're going to get infested by.
And They're going to have to get along with their peers who are probably getting much more relativistic kinds of education at home, right?
Right. So it is tough.
And it's one of the devil's bargains that people make to come to a Western country.
Really want the opportunity.
Really want the freedom. Really want the economy.
Really want the remnants of the free market.
Sorry, you have to give up your cultural certainty for that.
It's like, oh man!
Really? Come on!
Can I have both? No!
Sorry, leftists took over.
So, yeah, everybody wants the wealth, but they don't have to give up their culture, and I understand that.
I have a much more friendly relationship with culture now than I used to.
So, what I want to say, Quince, is you're doomed.
Um... But in a good way.
Philosophy. Doomed, but with a smile on your face.
So what that means is that because you grew up in one culture, because you've been immersed in another culture, because you have a culture with strong values, you have a culture with less values, again, except for the abstract stuff, and now in particular because you've discovered Ayn Rand and things like that, what that means is that you've jumped the tracks.
There's no... Culture that you're going to feel at home in.
Does that make any sense or does that describe your experience at all?
Yeah, it does definitely describe it.
Right. So having no culture you feel at home in is the very definition of philosophy, my friend.
Yeah. Right.
You're off the tracks.
And what that means is that you have to keep pushing on to philosophy.
It means that what values are you going to teach your children?
Well, you're going to teach them reason, evidence, syllogisms, arguments, logic, objectivity, ethics, you know, all the stuff that philosophy can provide that is often at odds with culture.
But I think you have to push on to philosophy.
I don't know that there's any way you can keep both legs on these drifting apart ships, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that does make sense.
And what scares me is that whatever I choose to do will affect all these generations after me, if there are any.
And that's a big decision and a lot of weight on my shoulders right now.
Right, because at one point you will in fact be the honorable ancestor who got the whole ball in motion, right?
Yeah. Right.
Which means that you, I mean, it certainly is going to be the case when you have kids, but you have to choose as wisely as humanly possible.
And you have to, I mean, you have to accept that when you pursue the path of philosophy as a parent, you have to introduce some difficult truths to your children.
That the world is...
Kind of a little crazy, right?
Just a tiny bit.
Just a smidge. Just a smidge on the nutty side.
That the society is full of sophistry.
That there are many people who will try to manipulate them.
There are many people who will claim virtue who don't possess virtue or who will advocate for truth while possessing no truth.
Who will advocate for the good The collective good, when it turns out, it's just what serves their thirst for power.
So you do have to introduce your children to a harsher world when you pursue philosophy as a parent.
Whether that's good or bad, I guess we'll find out over time.
I'm not going to lie to my child.
I'm going to provide what I think is...
Appropriate information for the age and in the context and all of that.
But I'm not going to lie to her.
The world is a little crazy.
And... Going back to the question that you asked me, Stefan, earlier about values, there's one thing I did recall.
It's about education. It's not necessarily, I guess, it could be values.
Can I tell you the difference between the education that I found that kind of struck me between the education I got in Hong Kong and in America?
Yeah, please do. One of the obvious, I don't know if it's obvious, but In Hong Kong, it's a lot tougher in terms of studies.
We had to study English from first grade and memorize poems and their meanings.
Five hours on average for homework versus here, one hour.
We actually have a class planner, write down all the homework so we don't forget it.
And we have no recesses.
The part of the reason why I chose to be in America as a kid is because my mom was telling me, hey, there's a thing called recess where you don't have to do anything.
You go out and play. And I'm like, oh, that's awesome.
I'll stay here. And the last thing I want to point out is that the classrooms, every class is ranked.
Every kid.
So out of one class full of kids of 34, I was averaging in the 30s.
And I was getting yelled at.
And kids, the people around, they make fun of the kids who are lagging and behind.
And so, unlike here, where if you're smart and you raise your hand and have all the answers, people make fun of you here.
So it's like complete opposite.
And so, you know, as a kid, I'm like, okay, so I don't want to get yelled at anymore.
I don't want to be the stupid kid.
I'm gonna, I gotta do something.
I have to ally, make a friend who's at the top.
So I made a friend with number five.
And I got to 22 on one report card.
And it was, it made my dad proud.
Yeah, no, it's like a friend of mine, when I was younger, guy from Korea, he's like, Oh no, I got an 85, that's an Asian D. Oh no!
No, and this, yeah, the nihilism and anti-intellectualism in the West as a whole, and in America in particular, is pretty rough.
You know, oh, you're such a keener.
It's like, what, I'm smart and I enjoy the work, and I'm doing well.
So sue me. You know, like, what are you going to do, right?
I mean... Yeah.
There's an old movie called Network.
Was it Network? Something or other.
And... Not the one with the guy yelling.
Broadcast news, that's the one I'm thinking of, with Holly Hunter.
And at the beginning, there's some guy, he's a smart guy, and he's getting beaten up by all the kids in his school, right?
And he's being chased to the bus, and he gets on the bus, finally turns around and he says, Oh yeah?
Well, I'm going to leave this town, and none of you guys are ever going to make more than $17,000 a year, losers!
That's his big sort of cut, right?
And they sort of laugh at him and they turn to each other and say, 17,000 bucks a year, that sounds pretty sweet.
Yeah, it's tough being a smart guy in this kind of highly populist and dumbed down culture.
But yeah, of course, you know, the question is then what do you do with your kids' education?
Especially if you've gone through the RAND portal, the objectivism portal.
I think it's pretty tough to put your kids in government schools when you know the kind of mindset and the kind of people they're going to be exposed to.
But I did want to ask you how close your values are with regards to your wife.
Pretty close. We have a lot of discussions intellectually about why things are and how should we act.
A lot of times she catches me hearing her stuff a little too much and she gets annoyed.
Yeah, but we're pretty much aligned and we're both afraid of public schools because she had a bad experience as well.
We're planning on homeschooling our kids.
And then the question popped up, well, do we stop there or do we...
Go overseas and get some of that culture and education.
Not just stay at home, but go overseas and experience other culture and see how they educate.
I don't know. It's a big question and I've been pondering for a long time and making no headway.
And nobody I've asked has any...
I don't know.
Everyone's stuck on it.
Well, if you bring your kids up philosophically, they'll feel both at home and not at home everywhere.
Right? If you bring your kids up culturally, then they'll feel at home one place and not at home other places, right?
If you bring your kids up philosophically, then their allegiance, their country, their nation, so to speak, their world, is philosophy.
Right? And that means that they will never feel particularly alienated in one place or another.
Maybe, I guess, if they go some really crazy places.
So they won't have that kind of easy comfort that comes with cultural acclimatization, but they will have that sense of security and that connection with reality and honesty and integrity and facts.
They'll have the facts about the world.
They'll have the facts about reality.
They'll have the truth about the world.
And that means that they won't be able to dissolve themselves into the collective, which means they won't be able to feel, ah, I've arrived, I'm home, blah blah blah blah blah.
But at the same time, they will also never be particularly alienated or susceptible to the manipulation of having That taken from them.
So I genuinely believe it has your kids grow up stronger and more robust and more independent of local circumstances and environments, which doesn't mean they would take them to Hong Kong.
It's a wonderful place to visit, I'm sure, and it's part of their history and part of their culture, part of their heritage.
And they should, you know, as far as language goes, I can't I can't know.
I'm sure it'd be great if they can speak both Mandarin and or whatever flavor is local to you guys.
I'm sorry for my whiteness.
I just apologize all around when talking about these issues.
But if they learn, I guess, your cultural history native language and they learn English, that's a pretty good combo.
And given that they kind of have one foot in both cultures, that would be a good way to bridge them back and forth.
But if you teach them reason and evidence, you teach them philosophy, you teach them critical thinking, what else can you do?
I mean, if you know the value of that and you withhold that from your children, that's not right.
You have to teach your children the values that are true.
Now, most times I would say the values that are true for you because we're talking about sort of subjective cultures and so on.
But if you're pursuing philosophy, then you have the values that are true.
And what, you know, it's out of your hands.
What's your choice? Are you going to tell your children things that aren't true?
Well, way to detonate your own credibility and make your parenting job 10 times harder when they get a tiny bit smarter.
So you simply have to tell your children the truth.
You know, in age-appropriate, layered ways, you know, you don't start them off with, you know, and Genghis Khan raped 10,000 women.
Here's the video, right?
So, but what is your job as a parent?
To tell your children the truth.
It's not to have them adapt to crazy people.
It's not to have them to submerge themselves into some random collective.
It is to tell your children the truth.
And that is going to make their lives difficult in some ways, and it's going to make their lives easier in other ways.
But those are all arguments from consequences.
My goal is to tell my daughter the truth, to be honest with her.
And if I have to be honest about things that are bad in the world, well, that's the world's fault.
It's not mine. And if you simply commit to saying, well, I'm going to tell my children the truth, I'm going to raise them to be critical thinkers, to be skeptical of authority, to reason for themselves.
That is the very best that I can do.
I can't fix the world, but I sure as hell can tell the truth to my own children.
That makes a lot of sense.
And it's easier, right?
And you don't have to juggle all this stuff.
It's like, no, I'm just going to tell the truth, you know?
Just telling the truth is so much easier.
Speaking of telling the truth and teaching your children facts and reason, I had a thought on that, actually, kind of like a rite of passage.
You know, we see a lot in movies where they show, like say in the movie 300, where the little boy has to fight his way out of the wilderness and beat the wolf, and so that he becomes a man.
I was thinking something similar, but intellectually, Instead of just brawn, where you sit in a room and you answer fundamental questions such as what actually exists in reality and what is truth?
How do you discern truth from falsehood?
What's the methodology?
My daughter and I play the bad philosophy game.
Bad philosophy show game.
Okay. Okay. I'm doing a bad philosophy show.
What am I going to say? Right?
And, you know, we come up with all these bad arguments, non-arguments, you know, and things like that.
And it's great, you know.
And it's, you know, the first time she hit me with not an argument was like two years ago.
And she's actually pretty bang on with that stuff.
Yeah. No, it's a perpetual part of...
And you also need to, of course, remind your children that the whole world isn't like this household, you know?
Like, I mean, it's really, really important to understand.
If they're being raised in, you know, the Arctic Circle and they're going to end up living in Jamaica, you might want to prepare for them a little bit that way.
But, no, I just...
I know what you mean, like, well, how's it going to play out and what's going to happen and peer relationships and this?
None of those consequences would ever uproot my commitment to tell the truth to my child.
None of them. That is my commitment.
Tell the truth to my child. Tell the truth to the world as best as I can.
And, you know, the consequentialism stuff, it'll drive you crazy because you can't ever predict it.
It's like what I was saying to the caller.
The guy who referred to himself as a fascist, although he seemed to be just like a Democrat.
But anyway, you have to live your life based on simple principles.
Simple principles. And this consequentialism stuff, well, how much time should they spend here?
What language should they learn? Those, you know, not saying they're unimportant decisions or whatever, but when it fundamentally comes down to it, you tell the truth to your kids.
You don't lie to them. You don't misrepresent them.
And you teach them how to think.
And that to me is, am I going to deviate from that?
For what possible scare story could I invent for myself that I'm going to dislodge my commitment to be honest to my child?
I can't think of one.
So, as far as the mechanics go of the cultural back and forth and so on, you'll work that stuff out.
And of course, your wife's culture, which is not identical, it's obviously part of that equation as well.
But it's a whole lot simpler, I think.
You know, like the economy, it's a whole lot simpler than people think it is.
You know, what should the Fed rates be?
And what should the interest rates be? And how much money should be printed?
And what kind of tariffs should we have?
And who should we subsidize?
It's like, nope. Nope.
Just respect persons and property.
Don't steal. And don't use violence.
And forget the rest of it.
It's just very, very simple things that you need to do.
Tell the truth to your kids.
And that is the greatest gift that they can receive and the greatest strength that they will possess.
Yeah, I totally agree.
And does that also apply to when kids first learn about Santa Claus and say, yo, kid, this is all fantasy.
Other kids may believe it, but the truth is, and you tell them right away.
It's a fun story.
It's a fun story.
I mean, that's what I told my daughter.
It's a fun story.
And it is a fun story.
It's no less fun because it's not real.
You know, and these people are like, kids need magic!
It's like, really?
You know, if you go to the Lord of the Rings movies and you think it's a documentary, you're not in magic, you're in psychosis, right?
You don't need things to be true for them to be fun!
I mean, do people really think that they're Duke Nukem wandering around a pixelated landscape blowing up digital things in real life?
No! You know Duke Nukem isn't real!
But you play it and have fun.
You know, when I dipped into Doom 2016, I didn't think I'm actually ripping the livers out of demons through their eyeballs.
It's just fun. It's goofy.
It's cartoonish, obviously, right?
So, I mean, I knew that the Roadrunner couldn't run that fast, and I knew that Wile E. Coyote was never going to catch him.
I knew that none of these things were real.
It's still fun. Well, toys can't actually speak, you know, so Toy Story is not real.
It's like, I know. It's called suspension of disbelief.
The idea that, I mean, I don't know how, I don't know, kids need magic.
It's like, no, they need reality.
They already have their imaginations.
They don't need to be pretended that the imagination is a portal to an alternative reality that exists concomitant to ours.
I mean, I don't know. So, yeah, you say, look, this is a fun story.
And here's why people do it.
And, you know, ah!
Rapey magic shows!
Game of Thrones! It's real!
I don't know. I mean, everybody knows it's not real.
So does that mean, well, I only watch documentaries.
Even documentaries aren't real.
They're selected. So, no, you tell them that it's fun.
And you'll say that...
Other parents tell their children that it's real.
You know, and, you know, I talked about that with my daughter, you know, when she was little.
You know, that's really Santa.
He really comes down the chimney, right?
And I said, okay, well, you know, how would we know?
Like, if you were a kid, and let's say I told you this was a real story, that Santa Claus went to every single household, went down the chimney, and Left toys and all of that, and ate milk and cookies or whatever.
And I said, let's say I told you that was real, how would you know it wasn't?
And boom, boom, boom, she went through the list, right?
You know, he'd be going too fast, he couldn't get everywhere at night, some places don't have chimneys, he would die of eating too much sugar, you know, that kind of stuff, right?
I mean, it's not that hard to figure out, right?
So, you tell them the truth that Santa Claus isn't real, and you tell them the truth that other parents say it is.
And then she says, why?
Why do other parents say that it's real?
And these are the kind of incredibly great questions you can have as a parent, great conversations, because, man, what a big-ass question that is.
Why do parents say to their kids that Santa Claus is real?
It's a big question. Yeah, it's definitely a difficult one to answer.
I don't know. I don't know either.
I don't know. I mean, I'd have to think about it and maybe talk to some people.
But the problem is, is that people who lie to kids will never tell you the truth about why they lie to kids, because they're already liars.
So, you know, this is the one great problem.
I'd love to know what motivates liars, but they'll never tell me the truth anyway.
Alright. Okay, well, go ahead.
Sorry, one last tidbit.
A quick question, if I may.
I just want to get your opinion and thought on Eastern philosophy.
I've been diving into now Lao Tzu and his work on To Tai Chi and his battle with Confucius and Han Feizi in ancient times.
I was wondering if Do you have any thoughts on that before?
If you do, what are they?
Just out of curiosity, that's all.
There are a couple of, I mean, it's a big category, it's a couple of Eastern philosophers that I want to, but like Lao Tzu, the aphorisms, the sort of Nietzschean aphorisms are very thought-provoking, but as far as the Socratic reasoning goes, I find it lacking.
That having been said, it is not my specialty.
I have not spent a lot of time reading through, and certainly not in the original, which I'm sure is important as well, a lot of Eastern, particularly Oriental philosophers.
So I will have to beg out and tap out.
But I will tell you this.
I want to. I will get to it at some point before I shuffle off this mortal coil.
So I can't give you any particularly detailed answer to that other than to say it's a very interesting topic, which I'd like to learn more about.
And if you do have some recommendations, feel free to send them in.
Cool. Thank you. All right.
Thanks, man. I appreciate the call.
Have a good night. Thank you, Stefan. Alright, up next we have Matthew.
Matthew wrote in and said, I'm 27 years old.
I am very successful in my career, and life in general is pretty great for me.
Many of my friends have had children and my brother and sister-in-law have a young daughter.
At this point in time, I really have no desire for a relationship or children.
I've been watching a lot of Stefan's videos and feel that if I wait too long to have children, I'll be missing out on something huge in life.
20 years from now, if my mindset changes, I'll feel regret, and it'll be too late to change things.
Knowing the divorce rate and the state of modern relationships, the risk and loss side of the equation vastly outweigh the benefits of having a family or children.
If someone feels no desire for a relationship or children, is this something to try to fix?
What can I tell myself to make the laborious, frustrating, and potentially painful process look more alluring?
That's from Matthew. Hey Matthew, how you doing tonight?
Doing very well.
Pleasure to speak with you, Stefan.
Thank you for having me on. Thank you.
I appreciate that. Congratulations on your success.
Oh, thank you very much.
So, in preparation for this discussion, I've actually organized my thoughts into three main points I'd like to address with regards to my question.
I can see why you're successful, Matthew.
Please go ahead. But first, I'd like to start by saying, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for your tireless work and your staunch defense of Western civilization, and for being a relentless, passionate, articulate voice of logic, morality, and the fearless investigation of truth.
Well, I love your first point.
Actually, thank you very much. That's very kind.
I appreciate that. All right, let's get on to your three points.
Go! So, primarily, basically to champion the benefits of being a good father and the joy and fulfillment it brings to one's life.
Kind of give assurance and inspiration to myself and your younger audience that fatherhood is definitely something to fight for and have as a goal in life and how it's both personally enriching and enriching for mankind as long as it's a stable, loving household it's created.
During these pivotal times of history, it's absolutely crucial that we have voices like yours that cut through the chaos of the political battlefield and all the brainwash and everything that's going on and reach the minds, hearts, and spirits of so many.
Number two would be to discuss kind of the dysgenic designs of those that are wanting, you know, larger state power with a centralized authority and recognize how the destruction of the traditional family is needed.
Oh yeah, I just wanted to mention, just by the by very briefly, for those who want to see even more cultural programming on why white people shouldn't breed or the argument for white people not breeding, just check out the show Gypsy.
I think it's on Netflix. But anyway, please go on.
Wow, yeah. Yeah, and basically they destroy the family because it's necessary to destroy those horizontal linkages that bind together communities of people, and that the true aim is kind of to domesticate and homogenize humanity into a sub-100 IQ, dim-witted,
featureless, culturalist, cowardly, replaceable cogs, and that the adverse effects of the political and social isolation that that would result in, citizens would no longer care about the actions of the state upon their fellow citizens because they don't feel connected to anything.
They may be in a city of a million, but they feel all alone.
And third point is basically my personal story of when I sent you that email two months ago, I was very much in the mindset of foregoing relationships for the rest of my life and family altogether to really pursue my own- Was that related to MGTOW or just as a whole?
I think for me, I mean, I knew of MGTOW, but I never prescribed to that label because number one, Why do you need some kind of support group for that?
Just do your own thing, dude.
Why you gotta label yourself?
Why you gotta be like, oh, you know, why does that have to be your identity?
But for me, it was just, there's a hundred doors in front of me, and if I open them, 99 of them are a swift kick right to the nads, so it's like, you know, why even bother opening any doors if I'm cool now, you know?
And no cap cheating either, right.
Yeah, exactly, yeah. Straight on to the softies, right.
And a lot's happened in these, like, two months, and the events of the last 60 days or so composed actually...
I guess the best way to put it is a rather dramatic but triumphant tale of how the concepts I've actually learned from your show, like self-discovery, has given me an entirely new perspective.
And I feel like that story...
Explored by a discussion, you know, we can extrapolate a lot of wisdom, you know, for me personally, but also sections of your audience, you know, that it's not majority, but a large segment is prescribing to things like MGTOW and things like that, that they can relate to my story and be able to learn from and realize that, yes, being a father is totally rewarding and worth it.
And, you know, if that...
Discussing those things cool with you and minding time constraints that I'd like to work backwards with my story, the current state of the world, and then towards the future, something optimistic, because I feel like this message...
Of the joys of fatherhood when it's so demonized.
And the same thing with motherhood, and there should be maybe a separate discussion about that, that feminists say motherhood's not—you're bringing another human being into the world, something that's the most complex thing known to humanity.
And they say, oh, you're just a mother.
But fathers are the same thing, that if you're a deadbeat dad— How do deadbeat dads still have friends?
You know, because like a child molester, no one likes child molesters, but they mess up a child's life by not being there just as much almost, you know, in terms of correlation with negative destructive behaviors later in life.
I don't know that father absence is the same as, I mean, that seems pretty strong, but, you know, if you've got data, but send it over.
So, yeah, I mean, fatherhood is...
It's very much demonized.
I mean, fathers are either considered to be inconsequential or a negative drag.
You know, like there's this old joke, it's like, oh, you know, if the woman has two kids, it's like, oh, I have three kids, my two and my husband, you know, this kind of stuff, right?
Right. And this is because the state has elbowed aside men, and men are no longer necessary for the economic functioning of a family, because, you know, welfare and...
Alimony and child support and socialized healthcare and, you know, even things, you know, people forget things like government-run education because government, you know, men used to be necessary to pay for the children's education and now it's all socialized or they used to be necessary to pay for the healthcare of the kids.
Now it's often socialized and so on.
And so when you don't need your customers, you can treat them like crap.
I mean, the women's vagina has become the equivalent of the DMV these days.
Department of Motor Vehicles is like, slow service, kind of dusty, and oddly wrinkled.
So yeah, it's like the sloth, right?
So it has become...
It's easy to demonize.
Like those who you've captured, you can mock.
Those who can't escape, you can make fun of.
And in particular, white males, as you know, kind of herded into the tax livestock pens and everyone's kind of feeding off the jugular of the productive.
And yeah, those who you exploit, you must dehumanize and demonize.
And that will change.
It's going to change. It's not going to be a pretty change, but it's going to be a change.
Like, I mean, just take a silly example, right?
Let's say that some ridiculous thing happens in the electricity, like some EMP weapon, like all the stuff that's talked about, right?
The electricity grid goes down for a month, right?
Yep.
Um, Hey ladies, do you think you might need a man around at some point during that situation or circumstance?
You've never worked with high voltage, have you?
Yeah, well, or just, you know, I've got to stay home with the kids and they're hungry.
Go out and get me some food, you know?
It's not going to be any of this.
I'm sorry, just wait for two years.
I'm sure some politician would come along and you can vote for some food.
It's like, actually, the kids are kind of hungry now.
And there won't be, you know, that will be a month of, like...
Mostly nagging free existence and a massive amount of respect.
Like I saw this, just by the by, I thought it was worth sharing.
I saw this thing on Twitter the other day.
Someone had posted one of these memes that said, you know, respect for women is the greatest gift a father can give his son, right?
Sounds very nice. And someone had reversed it and said, respect for men is the greatest gift a mother can give her daughter, right?
And that sounds great. It does.
But the first one we were like, yeah, the second one sounds weird almost.
It's like because people don't think of it that way.
Right. But yeah, you don't need to treat your slaves and livestock that well.
You just have to keep them healthy.
So yeah, I understand the hesitations about...
Fatherhood. But, you know, this divorce thing too, you know, it gets kicked around a lot and at some point we'll break the numbers down in even more detail.
But to me, oh, there's a very high divorce rate.
Yeah, okay. There's a very high obesity rate.
That doesn't mean you get fat.
Right. You know, there is...
There's lots of ways of managing the risk of divorce.
You get somebody who's educated, who's not some crazy feminist, who I would argue is not a leftist.
Somebody who's got a religious background or is currently religious is going to have some significantly more compatible values with philosophy than your average leftist.
And, you know, get a woman who's...
Hopefully has a decent relationship with her father.
Or if she doesn't, she's at least gone through therapy or some pursuit of self-knowledge to deal with the issues and shared values.
And most fundamentally, you need somebody who is committed.
Committed. Like, no fooling, 150% committed.
To resolving disputes through reason and evidence.
You know, philosophy, it's not just for like me in a little YouTube box and in your ear and so on.
Philosophy is like for everything and everyone around you.
If you have someone in your life You have disagreements.
You're always going to have disagreements.
And by that, I don't mean you're always going to be disagreeing.
What I mean is that, you know, like every six months, my wife and I have some significant disagreement.
And actually, the rest of the time, it almost never happens.
I just want to point this out, right?
But, you know, every six months or so, there'll be something we really disagree with.
And they have to spend an hour or two really hashing through it.
But of course, we don't raise voices, we don't yell, we don't extrapolate, we don't obviously call names or anything, we just like, we can be emphatic or whatever it is, and Mike and I will, one day we may disagree, we disagree on things, and you know, we can get heated, and we work through it and all that, and it's fine.
And so you just have to have the people in your life who are like, reason and evidence, baby, reason and evidence.
And if you have someone like that, you really can't end up disagreeing for long.
Because either both of you are wrong, in which case, why hold a position?
One of you is right, but the other one respects reason and evidence, so they'll conform, or vice versa.
So, if you get that commitment, you know what I'm telling you?
If the woman listens to this show and appreciates what's going on here, or the man listens to this show and appreciates what's going on here, that's a pretty good thing.
That is a pretty good thing.
You know, I know of a number of marriages that have come through the show, having the conversations about values.
And the values, because when I say values, and I should use a more precise term, but methodology is so freaking unromantic.
But when I say values, the only fundamental value that matters is not the content of what you believe, but the methodology of belief.
Because you're going to change your mind.
Over the years.
You know, let's say that my wife said, well, Steph, the hottest thing about you is your avoidance of political action and your avoidance of involvement in politics.
That! Okay, second hottest thing about you.
The other one remains unmentionable.
But the hottest thing about you then, okay.
Then 2016 came along and it's like, okay, things have changed a little bit, honey.
Guess we're going to have to go to the backup position, the one sexiest thing.
But, um... So, but because I have a methodology of working on my positions and on reason and evidence and so on, then you share that.
You can keep that going your whole life.
The content of your beliefs should damn well change over the course of your life.
New information, new circumstances, new data, you name it, right?
So the content of what you believe should change and the content of what you and your wife will believe will change.
But the methodology is the only thing that really fundamentally matters and if you have that I can't like I fundamentally can't imagine how you could get divorced You know, barring something, like, really ridiculous, which, I don't know, like you...
Yeah....aplegic or like something, I don't know, whatever, right?
Right. But if you share that value, because it's pretty rare these days, if you're attracted to each other and you share that value of working through reason and evidence-based discussions, there's no upgrade from that.
Well, and, you know, the thing is, I think for...
You know, people that might be in the MGTOW kind of group or just, you know, that you see these news articles of men waiting longer to get married or just kind of like being man-children for a while.
And I think the reason why that is is because, you know, for me personally, when I talk about a lot that's happened in the last two months, you know, I had an epiphany where I, you know, everything that you just said about getting somebody that follows virtue and has a methodology and it's, you know, it's really about the I said about the hundred doors.
Well, not all doors are made equally.
Some doors are burning with fire and have a lot of red flags that say this door is going to hurt you.
And then you just have to be observant and kind of know that certain people are not right for you.
It's not really cosmic justice, I guess, for yourself to be spent on that person.
When they are not virtuous, and you are, and that you have so much you're going to give to the world, and rather than them strengthening you and being shoulder-to-shoulder with you, that they're going to have you act less virtuously because of their own vices, that they're unwilling to change.
Growing up, it was a pretty...
I grew up poor, actually.
Not starving poor, but...
I would say high, lower class.
I mean, in the sense that, you know, my father was a truck driver and my mom kind of didn't really work.
You had a car, but it was an old one.
Right. Never owned a new car.
All the cars were paid off like a couple hundred bucks and, you know, you worked on them.
They always broke down. Yeah.
And I really like that now that I've been successful, that I'm not materialistic and I'm fine living in a cardboard.
As long as I got internet and not cold in the winter and not cold in the summer, not extreme temperature, then I'm cool with that.
It doesn't matter where it is. It could be $400 rent.
The thing is that the public school I went to, Around here, drugs are bad.
It's a college town. And I know people that have died from heroin.
I mean, lots of nefarious things around here.
And the stock of people here just really has a lot of problems.
And it wasn't until I actually started talking to people outside of the local group that I was like, oh, this is what it's like to talk to a well-adjusted human being.
Wow-wee! Did you have anyone where you were growing up that was like your portal to the middle class?
No, not while I was growing up.
There was, however, when I was 18.
When I was 17, I graduated from high school and then I worked a distribution job for three years until I decided to go back to college because I didn't want my brain to be spent doing that for a life.
And I went to the local college because it was there and it was cheap and it had a really good business school and I'm a musician and I was a performing musician at the time but I didn't want to do anything with music because I knew there wasn't a job market for it and I knew that What I wanted to do was be a performing musician.
I didn't want to be an audio engineer.
I just wanted to be a performing musician.
But, hey, backup plan.
Let me go to business and IT. It has a really good business school.
Around the same time all that happened, that I became a musician, there was this girl that was my leg up to the middle class.
This girl and I, she was who I lost my virginity to.
I had very good parents, and they loved each other a lot.
Role model for a romantic relationship was very sound.
I never really wanted to do anything sexually with anybody unless I loved them.
This girl, I fell in love with while we were dating.
We're going to die together.
We're going to have kids. With four years, and I guess during the last semester...
Because she had changed colleges and all of her, I guess all of her girlfriends had boyfriends, you know, around all the time.
And she just, I don't know, the distance and all that stuff.
And just like a light switch one day, it was like everything's fine and dandy and then bam, just like done.
And I really kind of ruined my psyche there for about a couple of years.
Wait, so she just, sorry, you guys were going out and it was long distance and then she just, she monkey branched up like she just went with some other guy?
No, she didn't.
She left me.
She had the decency to leave me first before she just like the next couple of weeks or whatever started dating somebody else.
But that normally means that, you know, things were happening.
Yeah, right. And really, you know, when I was in elementary school and middle school, I was overweight and unattractive.
And I had a great family, but socially I had a hard time.
And it really wasn't that I was bullied, just so much that there was a lot of social defeat.
And I was a sensitive soul.
I mean, I'm an artistic person.
I'm a poetic person. And, you know, I internalized that as inadequacy.
And when I was in high school, I met this girl that wasn't my, you know, first love that I was in a relationship with.
She was just my first, like, unrequited love, or, you know, however that's pronounced.
Unrequited. Unrequited.
Thank you. And, uh...
And she would be very, very flirty with me and just be hanging out all the time and everything.
And I was like, hey, we're having a good time together.
How about you? Do you want a date? And as soon as there was any kind of emotional ask for a return back, she was like, I'm not into it.
But she just...
Always was around and always had lots of fun.
So it was just very confusing for me as a young adolescent male.
Why was I not good enough?
And why was she with guys that were awful with her that she always fought with?
Why were you overweight?
How much overweight were you?
Oh, let me think here.
I think the biggest I was, and I'm about 5'10", 5'11", but I don't know how much I was.
240, 245.
I was a big boy. So that's like, what, 65 pounds, 70 pounds maybe even?
Oh, dude, I lost 80 pounds.
Whenever I went into high school, I started playing sports more, and I, you know, just, I don't know, just got a fire in me to self-improve, and actually from my career, I'm a self-improvement engineer, and I work in business intelligence, and, and, um, You know, it's all about, you know, philosophy-wise, I'm all about bettering myself in mind, body, and spirit constantly.
Hang on, hang on. Go ahead.
How did you get to be 80 pounds overweight as a teenager?
Oh, I would say...
Were you a fat kid?
That... The kinds of food that my parents cooked, because they often cooked a lot of cooked food, but it was very farm...
My family was from Western Pennsylvania, and they all had manual labor-y jobs, so the kind of foods they would be would be very calorie-dense.
No, no, no. I get it had to do with the food intake, but your parents would have noticed you were getting dangerously fat, right?
Uh... Yes, and that's why I started losing weight whenever it got to be like that.
No, no, no. I'm sorry.
I mean, and I hate doing this, but I have to be honest, right?
I mean, you got an ACE score of zero.
You say your parents are great, and I'm sure there's wonderful things about them.
But when you're dangerously obese and isolated as a teenager, I have to ask, how did that happen?
I mean, it's their job to keep you healthy, right?
Right. And they didn't.
And at a time when you're getting your first consciousness of sexual market value, they kind of took you out of the game, right?
Right. Yeah, I mean, I agree with that.
So why wouldn't they change what you ate?
Why wouldn't they say, we've got to pull back, you've got to exercise, maybe we all have to change as a family?
I mean, that's really important.
I do consider this very, very negative for kids.
And this was your first introduction to more or less adult social interactions, adult sexual market value, and you were kind of crippled out of the gate, right?
Yeah. Oh yeah and I guess that's definitely a conversation I should want to have with them and I appreciate you bringing that to my attention because I had not thought about that before.
Are they overweight at all? My mother was when I was younger but since then she's lost weight.
When did she lose weight more recently or when you were a teenager?
Uh, basically, like, there was a moment where my family was like, wow, like, we're kind of getting a little bit puggly here.
Let's, you know, let's start getting healthy.
And how old were you when that happened?
Uh, I believe I was, well, let's see, I guess, high school.
When's high school started? 13, 12, 10?
12? High school isn't...
Well, I graduated when I was 17, so I went to kindergarten when I was 4, so, you know, 17 minus 4, 13, 12-ish.
Like, end of middle school, beginning of high school, I started doing sports and being outside more.
Wait, so you were 12 and you were 240?
I believe so.
Are you kidding me?
I was a big boy. No, you were dangerously obese, weren't you?
Oh, yeah. It was, yeah.
Holy crap. Where do you even shop for clothes?
Tarp stores. Wow.
When did you start gaining...
See, I'm thinking you're like, you know, 17, right?
I mean, if you were... It was...
I mean, it was...
Let's see.
I mean, I remember in my elementary school, I don't have very...
Strong memory of elementary school, but in pictures, I remember being not fat until like third, fourth, fifth grade. So, basically, in half a decade, you went from normal weight to 240.
Right, right.
And I'm trying to think, because I remember a friend of mine and I were weighing, and I don't know why I remember this.
I think it's because the movie Rocky had come out, or, you know, the sort of muscle fitness thing was starting up.
And I very clearly remember going over 115 pounds when I was 12 or 13.
Mm-hmm. So you'd be twice that.
Oh, and I'm just under six foot, so I'm above average in height, so not much.
You know, the scary part is there was actually some kids in school that were actually bigger than me.
Right. Like, this area...
Like, there's some kind of, you know, just maljustice.
Did your doctor say anything?
I don't know. I was too young.
I don't know if I paid attention to this, stuff like that.
No, but I'm sure the doctor would have said to your parents, what the hell is going on here?
Right, right, yeah. And that's, you know, I mean, maybe, again, I'd have to have a conversation with them, but there was a moment where it was like, okay, seriously now, we need to do something about it.
And... But I mean, it was definitely, you know, self, a lot of like me understanding about and really teaching me from an early age, I guess at that age, the difference between short-term enjoyment versus long-term happiness.
Oh, your kids or kids in general want to eat more.
I mean, adults do, right?
I mean, you have to stop eating 20 minutes before you feel full or so, as far as I understand it, right?
Yep. Hmm.
And... So, um, so, exactly.
So, you know, feelings of inadequacies, uh, socially, um, with this girl that, uh, you know, flirted with me a lot and then, you know, uh, would flake out, uh, And we would go through cycles without just keep happening.
No, and I gotta tell you, I don't like the girls who use you as a disposable canvas.
You know, like, I'm gonna flirt with you, but the moment you start reciprocating, it's like, no!
It's like, eh, you know.
It's like going into the car dealership pretending you can buy something and you can't.
I mean, it's really not a big waste of everyone's time.
And it hurts. Oh, yeah.
And, you know, so she, at a certain age, as she would start dating these guys that were bad for her, you know, I learned this recently.
She actually has a family history of her mother dating psycho baby daddies and her, you know, grandmother doing the same.
And she had got pregnant by some guy that she had known for like six months.
And, you know, they kind of disappeared off my radar.
I went to college and then, you know, that I had the relationship with the first girl.
Ended right before the end of college, and then right from there I went to my job, but I was just kind of broken-spirited.
But during high school and college, I had gotten down to like 160 was my lightest weight at 5'10", 5'11", and then put on 20 pounds of muscle, and I actually got pretty ripped.
And being a musician on stage, I actually played death metal, black metal, And, you know, artistically, like, there was an angst in me that's, you know, not there now, but there was an angst in me that that really was a good cathartic exercise to do for a couple years.
Because then after shows, people really praised me.
They really, you know, liked me for being me and for that being my artistic expression.
And that was a great thing to help me get over that.
But there was still, you know, a kind of inadequacy I felt there.
And then, so, recently, within the last two months, when I sent you that email with the question about, you know, I don't want to be a dad and all that stuff, this girl that I kept on having cycles with came back in my life.
She broke up with the psycho baby daddy.
And, like, I always, like, really, really liked her.
And two-year, you know, absolutely just burns you up.
Single mom, and, like, I fell for the honey.
And, you know, just being completely...
Wait, how long have you been listening to this show, Matthew?
Yeah. I know, I know.
Slam me with it, man.
I deserve it, man. This is not a drill.
This is not an abstract exercise.
This is not a podcast.
Anyway, go on. Well, it's a triumphant story at the end because, I mean, you really helped me.
And I really wanted to tell you this story because I do want to thank you for everything that really helped me through this.
So this girl...
Came back in my life, and I felt like I had a sense of stewardship about her because I was doing really well in life.
We grew up together. I hated seeing her in such a bad situation.
Why did you hate seeing her in such a bad situation?
Because she normally has, like, a happy, bubbly, flirty personality, and, like, when she was with the psycho baby daddy, every time that she would, like, get texted or something like that, the amount of fear, abject fear in her face when she would get texted by this guy, and it's like, that's who you're dating.
Like, why? You know?
But... I'm sorry, I... She rejected you, a nice guy, a guy destined for success and maturity and good health and musicianship and ripped abs and all that kind of stuff.
So she rejected a good guy and she went after a psycho.
Uh-huh. Maybe I'm just old and cold-hearted, but...
You know, payback's a bitch, you know?
I mean, if you make these terrible decisions, I mean, I'm just concerned that, Matthew, you might have a bit of this soft spot that leads you open to manipulation from people.
Because, you know, I'm not saying I'd be happy, but it's like, you know, you take what you want, you pay for it.
You want to go with the bad guy?
Okay, you've gone with the bad guy.
And he's left you pregnant, he's left you a single mom, he's buggered off.
You know? I was around.
You chose someone else.
You live with your choices.
Of course, you won't have to because, you know, the welfare state and all of that.
But I'm just not sure about the...
She broke your heart, didn't she?
Well, one of the things I learned from this that I was able to, now that I kind of, as Jordan Peterson would say it, slay a psychological dragon that plagued me for so long, is that I, this whole time with the announcement, It made me have a lack of self-respect and a lack of self-worth.
And that's why it's like, oh, well, you know, like selling myself short, you know, and being able to subvert my own happiness for the happiness of someone else.
Well, you just need to get a little crueler.
I mean, I won't get into any details here other than to briefly give you the very, you know, so there was this woman I was dating before I got married.
And I've always considered myself a bit of a catch.
She was into it, but she had all of these demands, you know, and she had very high standards, and she wasn't going to compromise on anything, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
And, you know, I don't want to sound overly vain, but if you want to upgrade from me, I'd like to see.
I'd like to see that.
But anyway, yeah, so I ended up, we broke up, and I'm like, sorry, I just like, if I'm not going to, you're not bald enough.
If I'm not going to be enough, you know, there's no good.
And so then...
Years after I got married, I ran into her, and she was alone.
It was sad.
You know, she kind of missed her window for having kids, and she wanted to know if I wanted to get a coffee, and I was like, nope.
Not a chance. You had your shot.
You know, maybe I'd be a better person.
Like, I'm really open to this.
Maybe I'd be a better person if I said, oh, I'm really, really sorry that this ended.
It's like, but I'm not. I'm not sorry.
Well, you take what you want and you pay for it.
If you want to have all these ridiculously high standards when you're in the fading era of your fertility, then you're going to end up with no babies.
Oh, I'm so sad I'm alone.
It's like, I don't understand that.
You know, it's like the guy who sticks a knife into his side and he says, I'm so sad I have a knife in my side.
It's like... I'm not sure I have a lot of pity.
You stuck a knife in your side.
This is not that complicated.
If you're in your late 30s or your early 40s and you've got really high standards and you're dumping a guy who's keen for you, then you're going to end up alone or you're going to end up with no kids.
I'm not sorry. I'm not like, yeah, that's the best thing ever.
It's just like, yeah. That's what happens when you do stupid things.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
You played a stupid game called Vanity and you won a stupid prize called Solitude.
Right. And, you know, in terms of being a little bit more cruel, then you'll like the, I guess, the crescendo of the story because, you know, I said earlier that it's kind of a dramatic story in the sense that I had had blood work done because I actually had my gallbladder shut down.
It had a whole bunch of kidney stones in it.
Not kidney stones, gallbladder stones.
And I had blood work done after that.
I'm completely fine. Now I actually feel a lot better after having it removed.
And they had blood work and it came back and it said that they had found some kind of paraprotein in my blood that was indicative of something called multiple myeloma.
It's a degenerative bone marrow plasma cancer that the survival rate for five years is like 35% and At 10 years, it's like 1%.
And it was very odd that I would have it, you know, because it normally only happens to people that are over 60.
And the idea is that, you know, at first, initially there's no symptoms, and it normally gets found when people break their bone over something trivial, and then they go to the doctor and they go, oh, wow, your bones are deteriorating.
And, you know, but...
They took a second test because it was just so peculiar.
I was waiting for the test results and I was just really scared and I didn't necessarily want to tell anyone until I got the second results back because I didn't want to worry everybody over nothing if it was nothing.
This girl was also in my life during that time and I was trying to be like, I definitely was all with your school of thought that, okay, I can be friends with this person, but I'm not going to give her my resources.
I'm not going to pay for her mistakes. I'm just going to be friends with her.
But when I found that, that just put me into, obviously, a stressful emotional state.
And I'm like, well, she's around a lot.
I like being around her.
And I need someone to help me take my mind off of this.
And it was Tuesday, I think maybe two weeks ago, she said that she'd be there for me.
And then Wednesday, she was like, oh, I can't do this.
And just blocked my phone and just completely, bam, gone.
She said she was going to be there for you when you face this potentially life-threatening diagnosis.
And then the next day...
Yeah, see, this is what I mean.
You have to be a little colder.
Because she just gets to fuck you again, right?
This is where it happened.
This is where I got cold. So after three days of not talking to her, and I'm just in a mess because of all the things that are going on, she texts me after three days, six long text messages just bitching me out.
For just having feelings for, you know?
What do you mean, getting you out? Like, getting mad at you while you're facing a life-threatening diagnosis?
Because... Right, right.
Like, you know, you've always, you know, every time we hang out, you always pressure me for stuff.
Her actions speak louder than her words and all that.
Because she just flirts with me a lot.
You're like, how many times have I rejected you?
I don't want that kind of thing with you.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But she was up my ass for two months.
All day.
Constantly.
After she was quote-unquote single again.
Hi, everybody.
This is DeFan Mullins.
I mean, she was never actually married.
In any case, so...
You know, and I don't like being scolded after three days of thinking that I was left to die.
So I told her, I goes, you know what, how am I going to teach you to avoid people that you are instinctually attracted to if I make the same mistakes?
You know, that just because you're attracted to someone doesn't mean that they're good for you and are going to bring you long-term happiness.
And like, And that, you know what?
You're not worth any of this.
Because, you know, I've been fighting so hard over a lukewarm bucket of piss.
You're a 27-year-old with a kid used up hussy.
And, you know...
Man, okay, I didn't mean that far.
No, I mean, you know, I wanted to use the word specifically hussy because it's a unique word.
And every time she hears it from now on, it'll be like, bam!
And... And, you know, I really hope that, you know, she – and I told her, I was like, you know, once the weather starts getting cold, you're going to go crawling back to that baby daddy, you know, because that's where the resources are.
And, you know, and just that, you know, you're not worth my time.
And that, you know, after I did that, it was kind of like I – You know, slayed that psychological dragon where it was like, you weren't inadequate.
Like she, I mean, she has, I mean, she has a lot of, you know, emotional baggage from, I mean, I don't know, I think I had her take the adverse childhood experience survey, and she came up with like a five or six.
So, you know, I mean, and...
Did your parents not know much about their relationship with this woman?
Your parents, did they know anything about your relationship with this woman?
No, not really. I mean, I've been living on my own for a while, so I mean, I just really...
You don't talk to them much about this stuff, right?
No, I do.
Well, not specifically.
Not your dating life, right? Right.
I just say, oh, I'm hanging out with this one girl, and that's about it.
Yeah, but why, I mean...
Your parents have to know that there are nice and mean women in the world, right?
Wouldn't they want to help you? I mean, if they've got a successful marriage for many years, why wouldn't you want their advice or why wouldn't they get involved?
Well, my mom, who knows that girl a little bit better than my dad, she goes, be careful.
Just, dude, don't get too excited.
I mean, she definitely always warned me about it.
My dad didn't really know her that much.
And you didn't listen to your mom, though, about it, right?
No, I did not. I'm a dance man.
Well, all right. No, these are just things to try and figure out with your family.
Oh, yeah, definitely. You know, and I may be knowledgeable and quick in certain realms, but there are some things that, yeah, it takes me a while.
But, you know, once I kind of really was able to live...
A huge weight was off.
And my perspective is completely different now.
And a lot of it is because over the last couple years, I've been listening to you and doing a lot of self-knowledge and reading a lot of...
I've always read lots of philosophy, but the last two, three years, I'm just reading it all the time.
And it's been really, really helpful.
And the amount of girls I'm attracting now.
Like, wow. As soon as that happened, I guess it's just an irradiance of confidence how they always talk about, oh, you gotta have confidence.
I never knew what that meant when I was younger.
You know what it's like?
If you're eating the junk food, you don't have any room left for good food.
Exactly. So when you have junky people around, you don't have any mental or emotional space for good people.
Right. And that's the price you pay.
For having the bad people around is they act as this force field, this alligator-filled moat to keep the good people.
Crabs in a bucket. You ever see that?
I'm sorry? You ever see crabs in a bucket?
Oh, trying to keep each other from crawling out, right?
Yeah, right. They just grab their leg and say, nope, you're not getting out.
You're down here with me. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So you got to watch out for that.
So listen, now that you have got to a better place and you've got some of the toxic people out of the way, I think that, like, if you knew...
That the woman you chose to be the mother of your children was a trustworthy and reliable person, then you would feel much more comfortable about getting married.
It's not women that people don't trust, it's themselves.
It's their capacity to judge women.
There are good women, there are medium women, there are bad women.
And if you know... You know, if you've got one furry sandwich in the bunch, then you don't eat it.
Because you've got mold on it, right?
If you can't tell, then you don't want to eat anything.
And you say, I don't trust the sandwiches.
It's like, nope. You don't trust your ability to figure out which sandwich you can eat and which sandwich is going to put you in bed for three days, right?
And not in a fun way. So, once you can trust yourself, once you can trust your ability to judge people, then you can...
Get the right person.
You can choose the right person and the right person will choose you.
If you don't trust yourself, a good person won't choose you because you won't be trustworthy.
Not because you're doing anything bad, but because if you don't trust yourself, you can't be consistent.
And so if you can learn to identify the signs of virtue, the signs of open-heartedness, the signs of consistency, the signs of integrity, then you will be able to Choose the right person and you will be able to enter marriage with confidence.
And you need to not have too many illusions about romantic love.
Romantic love is a beautiful thing.
And it lasts about six months.
Right? The endorphin high lasts just about long enough for you to have your babies and hopefully get them through the very first few months of, well, I guess, get the pregnancy going and maybe you'll stick around for the actual birth.
So... You have to recognize that what's called romantic love is for baby-making.
And for baby-making, women need resources and men provide resources.
So if you're looking to be loved just for yourself, you're looking for a mom, not a wife, not a girlfriend.
Your mom, when you're a baby, she's supposed to love you just for yourself.
You know, you pee in her eyes, she's supposed to love you.
You poop on the wall, she's supposed to love you.
That's how it's supposed to work, right?
And it's a beautiful thing.
But when you are an adult man, you have to recognize two basic facts about what is called romantic love.
A man's love is sacrificial.
A woman's love is acquisitive.
There's nothing wrong with that.
It's just the reality of biology.
Because a man has to go out and get resources for a family.
If the mom is staying home, as I think she should.
So the woman is going to love you.
To a large degree, for your capacity to provide.
Now, that doesn't mean that there's no morality in the love.
Of course there is, right?
I mean, because you hopefully are going to be acquiring those resources because of your maturity and your courage and your negotiation skills and your intelligence and your dedication and your integrity and consistency.
But the woman, as far as once kids enter the picture, if the woman loves the children, which she must bond with the children for there to be a healthy family environment, the woman's going to bond with the children And therefore, she's going to need you to keep delivering those resources.
And she's going to love you when you deliver those resources.
And she's going to be impatient with you if you don't.
Not because she's cold-hearted or mean or anything like that.
But because biology and the reason there are men and women is so we can make babies.
The reason we're all here is because some dad usually went out and got resources for some family.
So the man's love is sacrificial.
He is going to go out and he's going to get 10 times the resources he needs to live alone.
And he's going to deliver them to his family.
And so his love is sacrificial.
The woman's love is acquistative, not because she wants to gather all these bubbles, because she has got to feed her boobs to feed the baby.
It's just you're a flow-through device, right?
And so there's a lot of sentimentality around romantic love you know like it's starry-eyed strolls on the beaches and so on and there is that and it's a beautiful part of things but that will pass and what needs to be there is the foundational commitment to each other to the kids to the marriage to the family structure as a whole and the romantic love part of it is cool it's a little gay at times but it's pretty cool But you need to be in it with a clear-eyed,
especially if you want to become a dad, right?
Which, again, I hugely and highly recommend.
It is a very, you get the resources, and your wife is going to use those resources to beautify the home and keep the kids alive, you know?
Or as they say in my family, the dad is there to make sure your childhood is fun.
The mom is there. To give you a reasonable chance of reaching adulthood.
So I hope that helps.
I'm going to close off the show here.
Thank you so much, Matthew. I appreciate your call.
And I wish you the very best of luck in your hunt for an eggnest for your tadpoles.
And thanks everyone so much for listening and for watching.
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