Sept. 3, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:39:07
3813 Marrying A Hooker? - Call In Show - August 30th, 2017
Question 1: [2:55] – “My husband and I have three kids ages 5, 3 and 1, and we are keen to teach them how to reason and utilize philosophy in a culture that has largely lost that ability. I had a private, Christian education from kindergarten through college, but I'm aware - thanks in big part to your show - that I did not learn to reason regarding current events and relationships. We want to start teaching our kids the basics of reason and philosophy now; how are you teaching your daughter about these things?”Question 2: [18:45] - "Will we eventually have to go back in, with boots on the ground, to the countries - or failed states - in the Middle East, Afghanistan and elsewhere, whose problems we may not have created entirely but have certainly contributed to, in order to avert the existential threat we face in the West and also to deliver safe, civilized, worthwhile lives to the people living in these countries? In short - and I know this is an Oxymoron - should we be planning to impose freedom and civilization on these people for their own good and for our security in the long term?"Question 3: [41:10] – “I’m 28 years old, divorced, musician and a serial fixer. Over the past decade I have had several long relationships with broken women. Somehow I've always knew that it would be a challenge but I dove deep nonetheless hoping that it would work. Now the next ‘victim’ is a hooker living 4000 miles away from me. I don’t know if I'm stupid or a masochist. What drives me to put so much energy and time into those relationships?”Question 4: [1:27:34] – “I am contemplating and leaning towards pursuing philosophy as a career path similar to how you do use it. Given that philosophy has such a large body of work to it, has traditionally been tied to college which is now so ideologically infected. Learning philosophy is not so straightforward in self-teaching as many other skills, what do you advise I do to get a good foundation for the knowledge and skills necessary for this?”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
The Art of the Argument, my first new book in eight years, is number one in social sciences and politics across all of Amazon.
That's right. We have bumped Hillary Rodham Clinton's book out of the number one spot, and we have taken it together like a beachhead of reason.
On the D-Day of Irrationality, thank you so much, everyone.
Please, please, please go to artoftheargument.com.
Artoftheargument.com. You can get your book.
It's a couple of bucks.
Please, please buy it now.
Help drive us up in the bestseller list and expose philosophy to an entirely new generation, a new swath of people who've never even heard of me or what we do.
This is some very, very important stuff.
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It will do you the world of good and it will do the world a world of good.
Now, Four callers tonight.
What a mix.
What a mix we had.
The first callers were a couple who've got three children between the ages of one and five.
And they're trying to figure out how to raise their children rationally and peacefully.
What are the tips and tricks that can be deployed to raise children in a peaceful and reasonable manner?
We had a great conversation about that.
The second caller...
I guess a little north of a half century seems to be quite keen on expanding America's imperialism in the Middle East in particular.
He thinks more bombs next stop, freedom.
We had quite a spirited discussion.
Well, you know what?
Listen to the discussion and you'll see where my perspective comes from, but I think it was quite powerful.
The third caller is interested in marrying a hooker.
I know. I know.
We had a conversation about that.
A little confused he was as to why his marriage didn't work out.
He'd been to about a score of hookers over the course of his life, and we had a pretty deep exploration and buffalo-free examination as to why.
Now, the fourth caller wanted to know how to work with philosophy from the ground up.
What do you start with?
What do you do?
How does it work?
Now, of course, I'm working on a new book, An Introduction to Philosophy, so it's all on the tip of my tongue, and I got it all out in actually the way that I wanted, which was pretty cool.
So thanks everyone so much for listening.
Don't forget to support the show, please, at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Also, please, don't forget to go to, as I mentioned, please, theartoftheargument.com and you can use our affiliate link at fdrurl.com slash amazon.
Alright, well up first today we have Jessica and Sam.
Jessica wrote in and said, My husband and I have three kids, ages five, three and one, and we are keen to teach them how to reason and utilize philosophy in a culture that has largely lost that ability.
I had a private Christian education from kindergarten through college, but I'm aware, thanks in part to your show, that I did not learn to reason regarding current events and relationships.
We want to start teaching our kids the basics of reason and philosophy now.
How are you teaching your daughter about these things?
That's from Jessica and Sam.
Oh, hey guys, how you doing?
Good, thank you.
Doing well.
Good, good.
All right, and what were the ages of your kids again?
Five, three, and one.
Wow.
You've been busy.
Very busy indeed.
And how's it been going so far just in terms of how, I guess talking in particular about the older kids, how do you find them in terms of reasoning and negotiating and all that?
They're actually pretty good.
We do a lot of Montessori stuff with them.
Which is good at teaching property rights, for example.
We don't make them share arbitrarily.
They have to learn to wait until someone is done before they get to use something.
It helps with personal responsibility.
They use real glasses, real crockery, even the one-year-old.
So if it breaks, they get the message of what caused that if they were being careless.
And I think the biggest thing that I've learned is that they will do whatever we do.
So because we don't spank them or anything like that, we can say, we don't hit you, you can't hit anybody else.
And they generally work within that pretty well.
Yeah, I mean, this is one thing that's interesting about kids is that when people get angry at their kids, kids are a significant mirror of who you are and what you're doing.
It's sort of like thinking you can yell at the reflection and you're not doing anything other than commenting on yourself.
I mean, you know, they have their own personalities and they have differences and all of that, but they are going to mirror a lot of what you do.
And most people, it's funny, you know, you see these shows sometimes Where they send a camera crew in to see what the parents are doing.
You know, the super nannies and stuff like that.
And the parents, when they play the tapes back about what the parents are doing, the parents are like genuinely and generally appalled at what they're doing.
Like, they have no idea when they're inside the moment.
It seems perfectly natural when they see a tape of themselves, you know, snarling at their kids or whatever it is, and they're like, oh, I had no idea.
I sounded like that or I looked like that.
And so it is tough.
People don't see how much their children's behavior are a reflection of what it is that they've been doing.
And I think that's one of the big barriers.
And of course, you do get to lord it over your kids if you're reasonable and they're not.
You can say, well, didn't get it from me.
So, you know, you have to kind of do what I'm doing.
Whereas if you're not reasonable, then you can't lord it over them in that kind of way.
So that is, I think the first thing is just live consistently, live the values that you want your kids to manifest.
And I think that's like 90% of the battle, if that makes sense.
Mm-hmm. Are there any specific values that you think are going to be tougher to transmit to your kids?
I think the main thing that I'm worried about is I feel like I had a good upbringing and good education, but when I got to college, There was a lot of conversation about racism and how to be a white ally and all about institutional racism,
and I kind of felt that there was something wrong with all that, but I didn't have the tools to articulate it, to form an argument against it, and I don't want my kids to end up in that position.
Did you say how to be a white ally?
Yeah, for... You know, as a white person, you're not allowed to ally with other whites.
That's really, really important.
You just say to them, betray other whites if you're white.
That is the only way to gain the approval of everybody else in the world, including whites.
So no in-group preference for you.
Sorry about that. All the solidarity we have in the family, we're completely van...
Okay, you get the idea. Well, that's looking a ways down the road.
Do you think that if they go to government school, they're going to get this kind of identity politics stuff early on?
Well, they're not going to government school.
So that would be a no.
Okay, good. Where do you think they might pick it up from then?
Pick up what?
The identity politics stuff.
Is that what your concern is? My concern is, oh gosh, I want to teach them how to form an argument And recognize logical thinking and act it out and be able to speak it.
I just didn't learn how to articulate any of that and I'm just now barely learning thanks to your show.
Is there, sorry to interrupt, is there a particular conversation that you find is more difficult than others when it comes to I guess your older kids?
I can't think of one off the top of my head but I'm thinking of you know very soon when they're starting to ask about current events Like, if they asked about what happened in Charlottesville, I mean, they haven't done that.
They're too young. But when we start talking about current events, and I'm remembering one time you mentioned that you, like, illustrated the non-aggression principle to your daughter with puppets or something, or with your hands or something.
And I'm interested in learning to do those kinds of things.
Right, right.
Well, of course... Freedom of speech is basically, don't interrupt, writ large.
You know, because kids, they get excited and they'll talk over you right away.
Or, you know, occasionally, it just happened today, I'm chatting with my daughter and she's humming to herself.
I'm like, I'm sorry, do I need to be a musical to be interesting to you?
So, the don't interrupt principle, if everyone has room to speak, then you are laying the foundations of free speech.
Because free speech...
Means listening. It doesn't mean you have to listen to everyone who says everything, of course, but there's no point having free speech if nobody's going to listen.
So if you make sure that everyone takes their turn when talking, if you make sure that you don't interrupt and then remind them, as they're going to be impulsive kids, right?
Remind them not to interrupt.
If you try and stay focused, you know, sometimes when your kids are telling stories, it's a little easy to To drift off into happy, happy list land, you know, it's like, oh, I got this to do, I got that to do, and they're like, what do you think?
And you're like, uh, that's great, honey.
You know, so make sure you're sort of paying attention and listening and making sure that everyone has room to speak and that speech is treated respectfully.
I think that's going to lay the foundation to free speech because, you know, violations of free speech, whether it's Sort of pulling a fire alarm.
Well, this is an interruption, right?
Whether it's, you know, screaming at someone or showing up with menstrual blood, pantomime uniforms all over your sickly frame.
These are all just massive interruptions.
And so I think if you just speak and listen respectfully, that lays the foundation for free speech.
And you can just ask them the basic questions regarding something like Charlottesville.
Which is to say, some people gathered together and they wanted to protest a statue being taken down because it was part of their history and other people wanted to take it down because they disagreed.
About that aspect of history and you can have an interesting conversation about all of that.
Like if stuff's offensive to people, if it's upsetting to people, you can ask the kids, well, what would be offensive to you or what would be upsetting to you to the point where you might want to just have something taken down or whatever.
And then, of course, you can talk about how some people won't even let them speak.
It's like, well, how do they interrupt?
Well, you know, they'll chant, they'll yell, they'll make noise, they'll...
Cut feeds, they'll, you know, and then eventually they might become physically aggressive.
And it is embarrassing. It's embarrassing to introduce your children to adults who behave like toddlers.
And that's actually kind of an insult to toddlers because no toddler has ever hit me with a bike lock.
So, you can sort of explain these things and you can help to understand.
You can say, you know, let's say that you are Have you ever had it where you're playing checkers or you're playing chess or you're playing some game and you get so frustrated you just want to knock the board over?
I mean, I think everyone's had that experience at one time or another in their childhood.
Say, well, this is kind of what they want to do.
They're playing this game called free speech and debate and argument and some people are getting so frustrated they just want to knock the board over.
They just want to say, you can't speak.
And that's not good because the people who are speaking may be offensive, but if it's so offensive it should be easy to prove wrong.
That they're wrong. You know, like if somebody has a free speech right and they come out and say two and two equal five, you know, kids, what would you say?
You say, well, you're wrong, right? It's like, well, how would you prove them wrong?
So, you know, you can let people say that two and two make five and then you can have a great conversation about numbers.
You can have a great conversation about math and it's easy to prove them wrong.
Mm-hmm. And if there are people out there who are hard to prove wrong, then you shouldn't shut them up.
Because if they're hard to prove wrong, they just might be right.
So you can have conversations, I think, reducing it down to, and instead of reducing it, boiling it down to the essence of where the kids live, and I think that stuff can be quite powerful.
But again, the free speech thing is modeled in the family before it's talked about in the abstract.
Mm-hmm. That makes sense.
All right. I feel I've helped.
And I feel if I help more, I will stop helping.
So, thanks very much for your call.
Call back in with us. If there's more specific stuff that comes up, this stuff can be more easy or can be easier, sorry, to work through sort of role-playing about a particular issue.
If one comes up, feel free to call back in, but I hope that's at least a place to start.
Can Sam ask one thing?
Well, it was a thing.
So, the reason we're not spanking is because of you and just It kind of woke me up to that.
I mean, I've had to work through the self-knowledge place through anger, and I feel like I've still got some work to do.
I did spank once, but I remember through some little teaching I did have, or I did hear on it from somewhere in church life, Was to remove yourself from the situation and get that anger out and then approach the child in love and to exert that punishment on them,
not out of anger but out of love.
And so fortunately I had that behind me and then it just took sort of two spanks and not particularly hard to make me realize this is just ridiculous.
Well, I'm thrilled to hear that.
And I want to reinforce something here for people as a whole.
And here I thought I'd stopped helping.
Maybe I can do just a tiny little bit more.
The world is going to be challenging over the next decade or two.
It's going to be very challenging. We are at the end of an era.
There's a big, what used to be called a strategic inflection point.
There's a big change that is occurring.
And your kids are going to need a lot of strength.
They're going to need a lot of strength.
They're going to need a lot of resolution. They are going to need to be powerful and centered and unbroken.
Because I hear a lot of this stuff, oh, the kids weren't hit enough.
If we'd hit the kids more, we wouldn't be...
No, no, no, come on. Kids were hit all throughout history.
And your kids are going to need to be strong.
Because it's a different kind of fight.
In the past, they would need to be strong to go for war, and then maybe, you know, smash them up, break them, and so on.
They'll be more amenable to being drafted and going to war.
I'm not sort of recommending it, but I could sort of understand that argument.
But the battle ahead, the world has become so well-armed that it's only going to be one or lost through words.
And kids are going to need to be strong when they grow up.
They're going to need to be resolute. And it's very, very hard to break an adult who wasn't broken as a child.
And their strength and their solidity, their certainty, their rootedness is going to be more necessary than ever in the decade or so, or decades to come.
And so not hitting your children, reasoning with them and so on, is going to create superheroes in the mind warfare to come, in the word warfare to come.
And That, I think, to me is why reasonable parenting, peaceful parenting, non-aggressive parenting is so essential now.
Because if you're going to start yelling at or hitting your kids and think that's going to do some good for them in the world to come, it won't.
And I'll tell you why. Because there are other cultures that are far harsher on your children than you could even dream of being.
Far harsher and you can see videos of the kids in other cultures and how they're treated and it's brutal and heartbreaking.
So if you're gonna try and have a be harsh to your kids war with other cultures, you're gonna lose.
So we're gonna have that kind of conflict between the broken and the whole and your kids are gonna need to be damn strong and damn whole and that means raising them as peaceful and reasonably as possible so that they have the strength to survive and This conflict between the epigenetics of harsh and peaceful childhoods,
if that makes any sense. Yeah, and one thing we wanted to mention is that we've listened to a podcast by a lady named Janet Lansbury who talks about respectful parenting and has really helped us put legs to peaceful parenting.
Like, what exactly do you say and do?
When the toddler jerks a toy away from the baby, she gets very specific and it's been very helpful.
I think anybody interested in peaceful parenting would benefit from her suggestions.
Well, I appreciate that.
I appreciate that a lot. And I hope that helps shore up your resolution for where to take it.
And again, if you have any sort of specific stuff.
To talk about if there's a particular conflict that is hard to explain or hard to work through.
We can work through more specifically.
But I appreciate your call, guys.
And congratulations to the nth degree for the commitment that you've made in your parenting.
It's going to pay off like you wouldn't believe.
It's harder now, but it gets so much easier later.
And that is a wonderful thing.
So thanks, guys, so much. Let's move on to the next caller.
Thank you, Stephan. Thank you for your work.
You're welcome. And I know this is an oxymoron.
Should we be planning to impose freedom and civilization on these people for their own good and for our security in the long term?
That's from Mark. Hey Mark, how you doing?
I'm very well, Stefan. How are you?
I'm well, I'm well, thank you.
Are you talking about places like Iraq and Afghanistan and so on?
Yeah, I think so. I think places that we've been in saying that we're here to help The old government thing.
But we actually haven't.
We've made the situation worse.
And I hear people saying, yeah, we need to stay the hell out of there.
But I think we've gone past that option now.
And what's your skin in the game here?
Are you going to go? I don't have any skin in the game at all, no.
I was writing about this a few years ago when I said we need to go and help these people in the Middle East.
And I now think that we need to do that.
There's more of an imperative because of the migration that's coming from that part of the world into the West, into Europe in particular.
Do you have any kids, Mark?
I do. And do you have any sons?
Yes, I do. And would you be willing to send them?
Potentially. So they, you know, according to what you're saying, it would be worth the risk of death or maiming of your son or sons in order to pursue this government agenda of nation building or culture rescuing or something like that.
I think it's not really about my skin in the game, as it were.
My question is really about our civilization going forward.
We're talking about, you know, real people, real bombs, real maiming, real death.
Yeah. Right?
So, these abstract things, you know, the question is, would you be willing to sacrifice your son?
Would you be willing to turn him over to the government?
In the hopes that the government, which can't fix Detroit, which can't fix Chicago, which couldn't fix New Orleans under Katrina, which can't fix the national debt, which can't fix failing schools, which can't rescue academia from incipient communism, but somehow it can spend blood and treasure on the other side of the world in cultures and languages it knows little about and succeed.
So what you're saying is if I'm unwilling to sacrifice my son, I can't have an opinion on this?
Well, it just means it's nothing more than an opinion.
Well, that's what it is. It's an opinion.
It's words. That's what we're talking about, isn't it?
No, we're kind of talking about philosophy here.
I really don't care about people's opinions.
And you shouldn't care about mine either.
Okay. Okay.
Do you think that the government...
Which can't fix Washington D.C. Washington D.C. has a ridiculously high murder rate, ridiculously high crime rate.
Do you think that the Congress, the government, which cannot fix the bloody streets right outside its own buildings where it has massive powers of control, of taxation, of regulation, of somewhat respect, it cannot fix the streets outside of its own buildings.
Do you think that it's going to be able to fix Afghanistan if it can't fix Washington, D.C.? Why did it go into Afghanistan in the first place?
You know, we have a responsibility, surely.
We've created more of a mess over there than was the case when we went in.
We've got people over there that we have a moral obligation, in my opinion, to try to help.
Trump has sent 4,000 more people in for the wrong reasons but the right thing to do, in my opinion.
I think we've created a much bigger mess in the Middle East, and we've created a movement of people the like we've never seen into the West, which represents an existential threat to Western values.
And I therefore think we need to fix this problem on both sides of the Mediterranean.
Otherwise, we are under threat in terms of our future as humanity, in my opinion.
Sorry, you keep talking and I know I'm going to have to interrupt you because you say like 10 big things and I don't know what to pick, so I'm going to have to just interrupt you.
Why do you think more Western troops need to be sent to Afghanistan in order to protect Europe?
has the option, the choice at some point or another of protecting its own borders, right?
I mean, there's Eastern Europe, there's Poland and Romania and other countries.
Who are not accepting these refugees, as Japan is not accepting these refugees, Mexico is not accepting these refugees, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and so on.
Lots of these countries are accepting few, if any, refugees.
So why is it necessary to go and bomb more Muslims or other people from that region of the world in order to enforce borders?
I mean, borders were enforced before, and they're not being enforced now, so wouldn't the choice then be to...
I completely agree with that, Stefan.
And that's part of the Brexit thing from the UK. And Germany, you know, Merkel said that multiculturalism hasn't worked back in 2010.
But she's still invited a lot more people to come into Germany, which seems crazy to me.
She's just a politician.
Who cares what she says? I mean, that's ridiculous, right?
I mean, not your ridiculous, but the idea of saying, well, Merkel said this, and therefore, right?
I mean, but she's just, you know, when she comes up for re-election, she's going to talk about controlling this mass migration, this semi-invasion.
She's going to talk about controlling this and getting more sensible policies, and then she's going to get elected, and she's going to open the floodgates again.
I mean, this is... This is a very clear pattern, not just in German politics, but in most politics around the world.
Yeah, but why?
Why is she opening the floodgates to people whose cultures aren't really compatible?
I know she needs young people into Germany, but why didn't she invite unemployed young people from Southern Europe who are, broadly speaking, of the same background?
Why does she need young people into Germany?
Because of an aging population.
But why does she need young people?
I don't quite understand. I mean, why not just automate things?
Well, she obviously seems to think that she does need young people to come in in terms of replenishing the aging population.
Well, of course, you understand that's a lie.
If they needed a young, energetic...
You know, they would be bringing in people, whites from South Africa, who already speak the language, who already have a European background, who already respect and understand...
The free market, who are going to be hardworking and well-educated and of an IQ of 100 or so, right?
So they would be accepting refugees, like white refugees from South Africa, if that's really what they needed or what the story was.
But the idea that you're going to bring in people from the Middle East, or not even bring people in, just let people swarm in from the Middle East.
Look, if you're some guy in the Middle East and you've got one really brilliant son and you've got one really non-brilliant son, Which of them are you going to encourage to go to Europe?
The guy who's going to take over your business and double its revenue, or the guy who has trouble knowing which way of the broom to stick on the ground, right?
I mean, these are not, they're not sending their best, trust me.
So the idea that you're going to need these people in order to prop up your tax rolls, I mean, you understand.
I'm not saying you believe this.
But it's a ridiculous thing to even imagine to believe, because they don't speak the language, different culture, IQ problems, I mean, potential religious incompatibilities, and of course, they cost a huge amount of money, right?
I mean, they're giving them thousands of euros, and internet access, and housing, and food, and MacBook Airs, and the idea that this is somehow going to contribute to the tax rolls is, I mean, It's ridiculous. If you proposed this in a business context, I mean, you'd be laughed out of the room and they'd put you in a nice little room where you could hug yourself for all eternity.
But no, I mean, they don't need...
What they do need is social chaos so that people won't get too rebellious when they run out of money.
I mean, that's the basic reality behind it.
It's got nothing to do with helping prop up the tax rolls or anything like that.
I mean, that's not going to happen.
And it's very clear that's not going to happen.
And it hasn't happened. This has been going on for years.
And in Germany, what was it?
50-odd people got jobs out of the million.
And a bunch of those were at the post office, which is basically propping people up to pretend to work while you pay them thousands of euros a month.
But they don't need it.
They don't need it. Because if there's a shortage of labor, what happens?
Everybody knows. This is Econ 101.
If there's a shortage of labor, what happens is the price of labor goes up.
When the price of labor goes up, The incentive increases to invest your capital into automating your processes.
And then you need less labor. So you can have an aging population.
You can have this inverse pyramid of ages.
You can have an aging population.
You can have a very small youth base of it.
It can all work out perfectly.
In fact, it can be for the better.
Because you just automate.
Or, you know, people can diminish their expectations or whatever.
So, I mean, I just, I know you don't necessarily believe this, but I don't want to sort of let that pass like this is some sort of reasonable argument that they're making.
Yeah, I need to point out a couple of things.
One is, when I'm saying that this is what they're doing in Germany, it's not in any way that I support it.
Sure, I know, but there's other people listening.
This may be the very first show that they're hearing, right?
Okay. Cool.
Okay. Well, that's great.
The other thing I would say, if I may, is I'm not talking about going back in and bombing the hell out of these places.
I'm actually talking about going in and having an exit plan, or not even an exit plan, but a stay there and help them with their Establishment of law-abiding societies and values and those kinds of things and allowing them to trade into the first world.
I'm not talking about going back in in a destructive way.
I'm talking about going back in in a constructive way.
Okay, hang on, hang on. Sorry to interrupt.
Again, you're listing off a whole bunch of things which are questionable.
So as far as free trade goes, yeah, great, let's have free trade.
For sure. I'm happy with that.
I think that's wonderful. You don't need any armies for that.
At all. Right?
You just need to say, hey, free trade now exists between the U.S. and Afghanistan.
And then you have it.
But tell me how sending the army in...
Like, you understand, the West has been involved in Afghanistan for a quarter of a thousand years.
Like, 250 plus years.
And Afghanistan is where it is.
Got an average IQ of 83 or something like that.
And that's just the people they can test.
I think the average is probably even lower still.
And of course, that's back when they could test.
Prior to the war, the average is probably gone since anybody with a brain has fled years ago.
So tell me specifically how it will work and what the motives and incentives are for people in the government to have it work the way that you want it to.
Okay, I'm not talking about, when I say we, I'm not talking about the US and the UK. I'm talking about the civilised nations of the earth, okay?
I think we've got a real problem in the Middle East with an ongoing war that is now actually coming across to our side of the pond.
I think we have, of course we've had problems in Afghanistan.
Everyone's, the Ruskies, Napoleon, us, you guys.
But we've always had a situation where the other side was supporting the bad guys, if you like.
If we had Russia, China, the US, Canada, UK, people like this on side who recognize that we need to sort out this problem, then I think we could make great strides towards doing so.
You've not answered anything.
Like, I don't know if you just woke up in the morning and said, I really want to waste Steph's time by spewing empty adjectives of him as much as humanly possible.
I asked you for a specific plan, and you just gave me general feel-good verbiage, right?
Okay. All right.
I mean, you have to look at this as big picture.
What am I going to say? We open a post office in Kandahar, and that's the center of our situation.
You're talking about trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of people's lives.
I'd hope that if you have this strong opinion about how people should be torn apart, blown up, destroyed, ground under, subjected to imperialism, I'd hope you'd have more than a bag of adjectives.
Is that unreasonable for me to explain?
Well, I think if we're looking at this at a big picture level, I'm not suggesting I'm talking about this from an on-the-ground, specific location level.
I'm saying it's about the will.
If we have the will to achieve this for the good of both sides of the divide, Then we can make it happen, and I think we need to make it happen, otherwise we're in trouble.
Make what happen? Bring to an end an endless, seemingly endless conflict that's happening in the Middle East.
Bring peace to the Middle East.
That's what you think can happen if people just have the will.
Yeah, I think if people realize this is a massive existential threat to everybody on the planet, then we should be able to get together with former enemies and try and make a difference.
I still don't know what you're talking.
Do you think that people have not had the will?
Let's just talk about the last 16 years, right?
Yeah. A couple of trillion dollars, a couple of thousand American lives, tens of thousands of Afghanistan, Afghani lives.
Do you think that they've lacked the will?
Do you think that they've lacked the goal?
Do you think they've lacked the plan?
I think they've lacked the plan, certainly, yes.
And why do you think they've lacked the plan for 16 years?
Because they went in and Effectively took out the worst elements of the Taliban quite quickly, and it seems to me that since then they've had no real plan for nation-building or for what to do next.
And they've just been slowly losing power back to the Taliban.
Why do they have no plan?
Why do they have no will or goal?
I don't know why they didn't, but they don't seem to have had a plan at all.
The same was the case in Iraq.
So you think that people should do something differently, but you have no idea why they're doing what they're doing?
Well, why they were doing what they were doing in Iraq was so that W could have a response to 9-11, whether Iraq had anything to do with that atrocity or not.
That was the motivation behind it.
It wasn't about nation building or anything else.
It was about his reputation.
Wait, did we just switch from Afghanistan to Iraq?
Well, my question was about Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
Okay. Can you think of a foreign intervention that the United States has done since the Second World War that has been a success according to the standards that you have?
Probably not. Right.
Okay, so we've got millions of people dead, we've got tens of trillions of dollars spent, and no success.
But you think somehow giving the government the go-ahead to do more of this is going to generate success?
I think if we don't do something to address this problem, this problem of the Middle East, of Islam coming to the West and breeding its way to a majority in many countries, if we don't do something about this, which means finding them somewhere where they can live and they're happy living and they can trade themselves and be law-abiding, if we don't do that, we've got a real problem as a species, Stefan.
I'm not talking about one country or another, I'm talking about...
So your big contribution to this entire debate, Mark, is we need to do something?
No, no, I'm talking about what we need to do as well, Stephanie.
Okay, but what do we need to do?
My suggestion is that we need to take over, as I said in my question, we need to take over and impose freedoms on these people, colonial style, if you like.
That's a kind of shorthand way of putting it forward.
Okay, and what does that look like that's different than what's been happening?
Well, what we've done is we've gone in and taken over, let's say, Iraq, and then we've handed the keys back to people that couldn't control the population.
Okay, we got rid of Saddam, who was brutal and horrible, but he governed his people using those methods.
We took him out, took the lid off Pandora's box, and we've given now on the keys to somebody who can't handle it.
We should have stayed.
And put law and order in place and trade in place and infrastructure in place, in my opinion.
So America should have stayed.
Do you mean stayed in the way that they've stayed in Afghanistan?
Potentially, but I'm not talking now.
You see, that original question goes back a few years.
I think it's more imperative now because we've got the issue of the migration, which means that...
Migration is not an imperialistic issue.
Migration is an immigration issue.
Migration is a control of the borders issue.
If you control the borders, migration stops.
And we know that because the borders were controlled and there wasn't migration.
Okay, but if you've got no control over the borders and they're coming, you need to try and do something to stop them coming, which means making the hellholes they're currently trying to escape from livable.
What? Do you think that they were livable 30 or 40 years ago when there wasn't this mass migration?
No, you control your borders.
It's sort of like, I don't know how to explain it in a way that makes...
Okay, you've got a house.
It's full of treasure. It's full of money.
You keep all your gold in the basement.
I don't, but let's say you do.
And the gold is all...
No, it's not in the basement. It's on the main floor.
It's visible from the street.
It's visible everywhere. And your windows are open, and your doors are open, and people come to take your gold.
What would the sensible thing be to do there?
The most cost-efficient and reasonable thing to do in the shortest amount of time?
Yeah, put your security together, I guess, or put it somewhere more secure.
Close your doors. Close your doors, lock your windows, maybe hire a security guard for a while.
Now your goal seems to be, let's go to the houses these criminals are coming from and see how in a couple of generations we can change the parenting to the point where they won't come and steal their stuff anymore.
Yeah, I don't think that's an unreasonable assessment of what I've said perhaps.
But you understand it sounds a little crazy when we're talking about it in this context, right?
Yeah, but we have got a situation where we've got wars in that part of the world.
We've got illegal migrants coming from places that aren't those countries.
They're not refugees. They're illegal migrants.
We have perfectly good laws designed to address that issue, but Merkel and the EU are basically saying, come on in.
Right, so these governments cannot control their own borders.
They can't keep their own population and their own countries safe.
In fact, they pay people to come in illegally, so governments cannot control their own borders.
They cannot keep their own population safe in their own countries where they're responsible for the voters, but somehow they can turn the Middle East into a paradise.
Do you understand the problem with that logic?
Yeah, I do understand the problem with that logic.
It's a different scale. Good, good. Because I need you to drop this delusion, Mark.
In fact, I would say that the world and the young, who may be drafted, who may be forced into these kinds of wars, really need you to drop this delusion that the government has a magic wand of peace and security and paradise that it's only willing to wave on the other side of the world, but it's not willing to wave in its own countries.
It does not have such a wand.
It does not have this power.
The government has the power to tax and shoot.
Now, taxing and shooting is not how paradise is attained.
It may be fine in an extremity of self-defense, but it is not how you build paradise.
The government has no magic power to create paradise overseas that it somehow does not possess domestically.
It will be a thousand times worse overseas than it is domestically, because domestically There's a press that's on it, or at least I guess an alternative media that's on it trying to make it honest.
It's responsible to voters.
There are constraints within the domestic sphere.
The idea that it's somehow going to be much more moral overseas, where people don't see what's going on, where they're not beholden to the population, where they're not restrained by an activist media.
The idea that they're going to be Infinitely more responsible overseas than they are domestically is a complete delusion.
If you want to look at how they're going to handle things overseas, look at how badly they're handling things domestically, multiply it by a thousand, and you're probably in the right neighborhood.
Okay, I'm guessing that's a no then.
You might find it funny, but I don't.
I'm going to move on to the next caller.
Oh, that's unfortunate.
It really is unfortunate.
Alright, up next we have James.
James wrote in and said, I am 28 years old, divorced, a musician, and a serial fixer.
Over the past decade, I've had several long relationships with broken women.
Somehow I've always known that it would be a challenge, but I dove deep nonetheless, hoping that it would work.
Now the next quote-unquote victim is a hooker living 4,000 miles away from me.
I don't know if I'm stupid or a masochist, What drives me to put so much energy and time into these relationships?
I fall in love too easily and need to put a stop to this.
That's from James. Hey, Stefan.
Hey, James.
How's it going? I'm doing great.
How about yourself? I am agog with curiosity.
I am agog with curiosity.
Are there any buffaloes involved?
No, I just watched that video last night for, I think, I repeated that part 17 times and I went to bed laughing so loud.
Now, if we can get you to start crying over that scenario rather than laughing, we'll be making jokes.
Yes, that makes more sense, that's for sure.
Alright, so give me a sense of what's going on.
Was it the hooker of 4,000 miles away, is that right?
Yeah, correct. All right.
How did you meet? What's the story?
How do you even know she is a lady of the evening, as it were?
That's no mystery. I come from a country where that's very...
Oh, you have the receipts? Is that right?
Oh, yeah. The IRS would definitely give the money back to me.
So I come from a country where that's very common and legal.
So I went looking for service.
And I found that lovely young lady.
That's a bomb waiting to explode.
And yeah, so I went looking for her.
I looked for a paid date.
And we hooked up one night.
The things... Went from sex to a date.
Actually, we went out to dinner, which is not a very common thing at all.
Well, it is in the gay community, but not in what you're talking about.
Okay. Yeah.
And so we went to dinner.
And then she gave me her personal number.
We started talking.
I went back to the U.S. And I was bluntly...
I'm very honest with women.
So I told her, I do not have money.
I'm not going to be a guy who's going to throw 100 grand in your face, travels and hotels and a great life that you're probably looking for with that profession.
And she said, yeah, I know.
I completely understand. And we developed kind of a friendship in a long distance.
And she wants me to go back there and see her.
I want her to come here and see her and all that thing.
It's like a beginning relationship 4,000 miles away.
Right, right, right.
So it's not a very equal relationship at this point, right?
Because she would desperately love to come and be your wife and get access to the relative freedoms and opportunities that your country and culture represent.
Is that fair to say? Yeah, I think that's fair.
I think that's fair. She's not originally from the country that she works in.
I can say it. Screw it.
She's from Brazil. Everything happened in Brazil, but she's actually from Argentina.
And yeah, so she already immigrated looking for a better opportunity.
Well, yes, but I mean, I assume you're not in either of those countries and have many more opportunities and benefits to offer her at this time, right?
Yes, yeah. Right.
Why do you think that you need to have that much power and that much?
You see, here's the thing.
This is what I think is sad, James, if you don't mind me saying so.
Please, please go ahead. You happen to live in a first-world country, right?
Correct. You didn't earn that, right?
I did, actually.
How's that? I'm originally from Brazil.
I came here to study and spending my hard-earned money in zero debt.
I paid everything from my pocket for school.
And I got married to a girl here.
She was American. That's how I kind of earned that, you know?
No, but you didn't earn and create the society that you moved into, right?
Oh, yes. I'm sorry for that.
Yes, correct. Right.
Yeah. So you have a great gift to offer her, which is economic opportunity, relative stability, and peace, and a non-future that looks like Venezuela, right?
Yes. But you didn't earn that at all.
No. Yeah. So you're kind of prostituting out the West here.
A bit, right? Right.
So why do you, like, what's missing in you, James?
What's missing in you that you feel you have to come, or you have to dangle economic opportunity over a woman to get her to commit to you?
I don't know. I don't know if that's a recent thing, you know, since I... I start paying my bills, but I don't know if that's something that happened since I started my date life when I was 17 or 18.
I can't really discern that.
Let's say you didn't have this to offer her.
Okay.
What would she think of you?
It's, well, the logic tells me to say that she probably has had less interest, right?
Okay.
That's what I'd feel that would be...
Okay, so she would be less interested in you if it was just you, right?
If you didn't have the, hey, come to the West.
The streets are paved with gold.
I can open up the avenue of freedom and opportunity for you, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Sorry to interrupt. Did you, when you got married, you said you got married before, did you marry an American citizen if you're in America?
I did. And is that how you got citizenship?
I don't have citizenship, but that's how I got my immigration status, yes.
Right. So you slept your way past Lady Liberty, right?
You slept your way, in a sense, into America.
Yeah, taking my wife on my back, but I did, yeah.
Right. And now you're offering that same thing to someone who's going to sleep with you, right?
I think probably we're talking about something that might be implied, but being together...
Oh, no, no, no. Come on.
Oh, please. No, no, no.
Listen, you're not talking to a fool here.
Shit. You know, we'll put out for economic opportunity.
Well, that used to be called Eastern Europe, right?
But that is...
That is an age-old bargain, right?
It is. Here's a freedom I did not invent, did not earn, did not create, but I'm willing to dangle it in front of you for a blowjob, right?
Yeah. I don't have that much to offer you, but a lot of hard-working people created a great society that I can dangle in front of you in return for a place to dump my load.
I think within this...
The concept of this relationship, I think you are 100% correct.
I just don't understand how that applies to my other relationships.
Wait, you want to leave this relationship behind at the moment?
Like we've dealt with this somehow?
No. Now that we've identified how corrupt it is, you just want to move on?
No, no, no. This is where we auger in, my friend.
Okay. Okay.
I never had such things to offer to other women.
Forget all of the...
You are the gateway to American economic opportunity.
Forget about all of that. Let's say that there's a woman in America.
She already has economic opportunity.
Maybe she's decently educated.
Maybe she's well-educated. What do you have to offer her?
I think I'm a good person.
I like to think that.
Well, in this conversation, I lost a couple points, but I like to think I'm honest, and I'm not the greatest provider of all.
I don't make six figures or anything, but I don't have debt.
I pay my bills, and I like to think that I'm a good human being in the heart.
And what is it that makes you...
I'm not disagreeing with you. I don't know you, but what is it that makes you a good person?
Well, I'm an honest person.
I'm dedicated to the people around me.
I dedicate my time. Sorry to interrupt.
Honesty is not really a virtue.
It depends what you're honest about.
Hey, I just drove over a hedgehog and backed over it because I don't like those little spiky bastards.
It's like, well, that's honest. Doesn't make you good.
Yes, I agree with you.
I use honesty as saying that I don't lie.
It doesn't make you good. If you confess to a crime, you're not lying.
It doesn't make you good.
So, let's try it again.
It's hard to say that.
It's like putting my most intimate values on the table like this.
No, no, no. Listen, man. We already talked about you having an affair in dangling marriage.
To a hooker 4,000 miles away.
Getting coy now is a bit of a fact.
It's not being coy.
I just don't know how to express what I can bring to another person like this.
But that's the problem, you understand, right?
I'm very clear on what I can bring to a relationship.
I mean, that's why you called in, right?
You know some of the value that I can bring, some forthrightness, some principles, some honesty, some non-hostile frankness, so to speak, right?
And I always felt like dating-wise, I'm like, well, you could date other men, but why?
Why would you want to bother?
And so I've always been confident about the value that I bring to bear.
You know, just put out The Art of the Argument, my new book today, already number one in philosophy, number one in political science.
Yeah, I bought it. Thank you.
I appreciate that. I appreciate that.
And see, that's sending your money overseas in a way that doesn't require me to give you a blowjob.
Always a benefit. Perhaps for both of us, I'm a bit stubbly at the moment.
Probably wouldn't be any good for you. You are kind of cute, Joe.
No, kind of cute. Come on.
Come on. I thought you were honest.
So... I'm aware of the value and, you know, some of the challenges that I bring to a relationship.
You don't know what you bring, which is why you pay.
In fact, you think, like, let's say you, I don't know, how much did you pay this woman for sex?
It would be like $100, I think.
A hundred bucks, okay. And that was for the sex or the sex plus the date?
No, the date was not supposed to happen.
That was just the sex. So you paid a hundred bucks for sex, right?
Mm-hmm. Right. And what that means is that you feel that you're minus a hundred dollars worth of attractiveness.
Because if you were attractive and so on, then you could go and get a date and maybe have a relationship.
Or even if it's a one-night stand, you could go and you could have sex and you wouldn't need to pay the woman, right?
Yeah. So for you, you have to pay a woman $100 to have sex because you're minus $100 worth of attractiveness.
But the $100 evens it out.
Like if I have to pay you $100 to have dinner with me, then you want to have dinner with me minus $100.
Like your price for having dinner with me is like, well, I want to have dinner with you minus $100, but if you give me $100, I'll have dinner with you, right?
Yes. So that's what we call honesty.
So my question is, why the minus?
Why are you starting at a minus that you have to fill in with money to get women to find you attractive?
Or to not even find you attractive since you pay a woman.
She finds you attractive minus $100, right?
Yeah. So what's going on with you?
Well, the divorce was pretty recent, pretty catastrophic.
And I've been through a phase of very low self-esteem.
And I had the opportunity to, you know, had sex.
Without having to go to the bar and say some random bullshit in my head, in some way that's more honest than a one-night stand, which was never my thing.
And why did you get divorced?
I was cheated on.
And why were you cheated on?
From her mouth.
It's because she wanted to break up.
She didn't know how to do it.
And she did that so I could do that.
I could break up because she knew that that was a deal breaker for me.
And that's the first relationship that someone ever broke up with me was my trial or did something like that.
And why was she? How long were you married?
One year and a half. One year and a half.
Yeah. And why did she want to divorce you?
I think I started changing a bit.
I didn't want to live in the city anymore.
I wanted to live in a slower place where with more space.
I wanted to live in a house. You wanted to live in the middle of the city in a tiny apartment.
Well, that's not it. Probably not.
I guarantee you that's not it. Because love conquers mountains.
Love survives wars.
There were slaves in the 19th century in America who walked across state lines being hunted by slave hunters just to regain and rejoin their family.
Love is not broken by, I'd like to move to the country.
You understand? So why did she want to divorce you?
I think we got married very soon and we realized that We weren't compatible.
There was a lot of fights. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Of course you weren't compatible.
This is just another way of saying it.
Why weren't you compatible?
What values? You understand?
Oh, okay. Why did you get divorced?
We weren't getting along. Yes, I know.
Our lives were very troubled because of things like she had no idea how to handle money, so I constantly had to be...
Her responsibilities were pay the bills, do some things at home, like laundry, and she couldn't do that, so I had to go after it.
Wait, so she didn't work, but she was a terrible homemaker?
She was, yes.
She was finishing school, and I was the provider, and I was playing and paying some of the bills, and I had to get a job in a completely different business.
Okay, so why did you marry a woman where you had to You see the pattern here, right?
You're paying her bills just like you're paying the prostitute's bills.
But why did you get married to a woman who was not willing to do her share of the household work?
Part of the household work is getting the money to pay the bills and the other part of the household work is making it run efficiently and actually paying the bills rather than just having the money to do so and so on.
So was she lazy?
Did she not care about you?
Why didn't she do her part of the work?
I always thought that that was a minor thing and with time she would learn.
I'm sorry, what was a minor thing? That her lack of responsibility with things around the house was a minor thing.
When I saw her that she forgot to do the laundry or that she forgot to pay the water bill, that was a minor problem and that...
Because she was very responsible and mature with other things, like her profession, like...
Well, the stuff that she wanted to do, nobody wants to pay bills.
Yes. Yeah, exactly.
And I thought that would... Sorry to interrupt.
Did she manifest any of this behavior before you got married?
Did you have any clue whatsoever about this irresponsibility?
Before we got married, yes.
I had a clue that this was an issue.
I did. I can't deny that.
I had no idea that...
It would be so hard and demand so many deep conversations and take parts slowly and day by day of our, you know, pleasure to be together.
I didn't know that would become such a humongous issue because I lived with girls before and so I thought that would be manageable and it was not.
And how old were you when you first went to a prostitute?
Oh boy, 20 I want to say.
And how old were you when you got married?
26. And did your wife know that you had gone to prostitutes before dating her?
Yep. Did she have any issue with that?
Nope. She had no issue with the fact that you had gone to prostitutes before you got married?
Nope, whatsoever. That was never a thing.
I told her that, like, I tell you that I'm having water in a blue cup.
And how many prostitutes have you...
I shouldn't say, it could be the same one more than once, but how many times have you visited prostitutes in your life?
How many times have I paid for sex?
Yeah. Okay.
Let's say 20 times.
Right. Right.
And I'm going to assume that you have not paid for sex while you're in a relationship.
Or have you? While in a relationship, yes.
But with her, I was 100% with her.
And have you always told the women that you have been paying for sex if you're in a relationship and you pay for sex?
Do you tell the women that? No, usually the couple times that happened were at the end of the relationship.
Hang on, hang on.
Weren't you just telling me how honest you were?
What am I lying? But you were in a relationship with women.
You went to prostitutes and you didn't tell the women?
No. And the reason why that happened is that I was away from the girlfriend that I did that to her.
And I was looking for a better way to break up.
I couldn't be physically there, so I did it.
Over the phone, because I was miles and miles away from her.
So I thought it would have made a bit of a difference that I was already...
Hang on. You'd already decided to break up with the woman when you went to the prostitute.
So you never exposed a woman to the risk of a sexually transmitted disease that you may have picked up from a prostitute that you would then have sex with an existing girlfriend?
No. No.
I got treated...
How do you say it?
Chested several times, or a million things.
Let's just say you've been lucky.
It's kind of Russian roulette, you understand, right?
I don't know. You don't know?
Well, because you probably know more about that as I do, but I probably have more experience with prostitutes than you.
And the sex can be very safe.
It's just like sex with any – it's like saying that the chances of getting a sexual transmitted disease with a one-night stand, you have no idea if that person had 100 partners last year.
I don't know.
That's how it sounds to me.
Please tell me.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, though, and I'm going to say that I'm guessing that prostitutes have more sexual partners than the average woman.
Yeah, I think you're correct.
Now, when you got married to your wife, your ex-wife now, did she know that you had visited prostitutes while still somewhat in a relationship with prior girlfriends?
No, she did not know that.
Why not? She knew that I cheated one girlfriend.
She knew that.
And we started dating...
The same week that both of us broke up with our respective boyfriends and girlfriends.
Oh, you started dating the woman who became your wife the week after both you and she broke up with partners?
We were living together.
We were roommates.
And that was a spark going on.
And we started flirting, flirting, flirting.
And then we both broke up with our boyfriends and girlfriends.
And we stayed together.
So that's not a great way to begin a relationship, right?
Oh, absolutely not.
Absolutely not. So why did you do it?
I mean, you knew at the time this is not a great way to begin a relationship, right?
I knew it. I knew it. I have a good reason for that.
I thought it would be a one-night stand.
One-night stand, no, I thought it would be like a, I don't know, a girl that I had sex with.
And because we were living together, we got close.
And then we tried to stop, and we didn't want to stop, and then we got a house for just of us, and then things became serious, more serious than it was before.
And was she close to her parents, her family?
She lost her dad and her mom.
She's kind of close. Her mom lives very far away from her, but they were talking regularly.
And what did her mother think of you?
She absolutely loved me.
We still talk today, like very silly things on Facebook and stuff like that, but that's it.
So the woman's mother is still chatting with you after her daughter divorced you?
Correct. How handsome are you?
I'm an amazing six and a half.
I'm not sure quite how that equation works, but...
No, I'm overweight right now, but I think I'm kind of a seven and a half, and in a good night, I can maybe push an eight.
Great, okay. All right.
And where are you from originally?
I'm from Brazil. You're from Brazil?
Mm-hmm. Does your immigration status change after you get divorced, after being married for only 18 months?
It is a shit show right now.
I'm trying everything I can.
It's a situation.
There is a chance of me having to go back.
Do you think that the American taxpayer is happy that you're here?
I spent...
A lot of money.
I brought a lot of money from Brazil here.
A lot of money from Brazil.
Where did you get that money from?
Working in Brazil.
All right.
So, how can I help?
Think about the taxpayer only, right?
When you say only the taxpayer.
Think about the taxpayer.
Yeah, I brought them here.
Sorry, if I could help you answer one question tonight, what would it be?
I know you put in the question, but just after our conversation.
Yeah, so I don't understand why I'm able to break up with long-term relationships.
I know how to break up with a girl.
And I know that when I'm starting a relationship, I know that I'm in love, or whatever you want to call it, and I know that this is going to be a bomb, and even though I jump right in, cannonball style, that's what I don't understand, why I keep doing this.
Isn't it just because you're a cocksman?
Like you're thinking with your dick, and you want to have sex, and you want to discharge, and you want to fuck, and you want to cum, and you want to You want to be done, right?
Am I missing something here?
Yeah, because if I just want to have sex, I pay the hooker.
Which you've done. Yeah.
More than you've had girlfriends.
Yeah, correct.
So, doesn't that confirm what I'm saying?
Isn't the, well, isn't the hooker the carcass?
Isn't she way more carcass than the girlfriend?
What do you mean, carcass? I haven't used that word.
Oh, sorry. What did you just say?
Cocksman. What's that?
What does that mean? Just basically, you're focused on your cock, you want to discharge, you want to empty your balls, your life sort of revolves around that, right, Saxon?
Probably. But at the same time, I'm very happy.
Hang on. What utility do young women have in your life outside of sex?
Company. Someone to talk.
Because I'm very happy when the relationship gets to that plateau where sex slows down and the companionship starts to rise as a more important part of the day-to-day thing.
I'm very happy with that part.
So you enjoy having conversations with women?
I do, very much.
I try to learn a lot about them, and I try to learn about the world.
That's one of the reasons why I listen to you talk, right?
And I like to share that.
I like to share that. I like to debate.
I like to grow with my opinions and learn about them.
And what kind of childhood do you think these prostitutes have had?
What kind of, like, what life paths do you think, what life circumstances do you think have led them into a very dangerous occupation?
Probably very troubled.
What do you think? Have you ever, I mean, you've had some conversations, I assume, with these women?
Have you ever figured out how they've ended up in this situation?
It's hard to say, Stefan, because...
I don't know if they were honest with me.
I never heard from their mouth about something catastrophic, but I do know that 75% of prostitutes went through some sort of abuse in their life.
I do know that.
But I never heard anything from their mouth.
Well, it would not be good marketing on their part to say, you know, you're pillaging over the broken wreckage of a sex abuse victim as a child, a child abuse victim, a molested victim, a child rape victim, right?
Yeah. But that's answering your question.
Like, I never heard from their mouth that.
But you can do the research, right, if you wanted?
Exactly, yeah. Because if it was the case that you were paying women for sex and you were basically exploiting human wreckage created by unbelievable levels of perversion and abuse as children, how would you feel about that?
What would you think? I would feel that I want to kind of not do that again.
That was very selfish.
Has that not crossed your mind?
Nope. That's a big flaw.
That's a big, big flaw.
Can you think of a time in your life where you felt the most empathy?
What is the time where you've had the most empathetic experience or the experience of the greatest empathy?
Empathy. Oh, kind of hard to say the greatest empathy.
I don't know. And what would the word mean to you?
Someone who selflessly is there for you and helps you.
Is that what empathy is?
You do good for a different person?
I would put that more in the category of sacrifice, James.
To me, empathy is when you genuinely and truly understand and inhabit somebody else's lived experience or emotional experience.
Okay. I think it was with my ex-wife.
She was having some very difficult medical situations in the middle of our dating period.
We thought about getting married six months into the relationship just so she could go to Brazil and try to get a surgery because we didn't have the money to do here.
And what was, just out of curiosity, just roughly, what was her medical issue?
She had a misdiagnosed thing in her eyes that she was going blind.
And a series of doctors told her that it would only be a cornea transplant to bring everything back to normal.
So I said to her, okay, if that's really it, let's go see this last specialist.
And if you say that's really it, we could get married and we try to go to Brazil and get this done there.
Because here we wouldn't be able to do it.
So here's the interesting thing, and this is the pattern that I think would be helpful for you to absorb, James.
You were kind to her when she was going through this medical issue, right?
Yeah.
Do you see somewhat of the parallel with the prostitute?
Of me as...
Did you say dingling the Statue of Liberty in her face?
Is that what you're saying? No, what I mean is that when there's a great power disparity, in other words, she's vulnerable, she's going flying, she's scared, then you can be there.
So that's what I'm calling it.
You have this power.
When you have power disparity, you feel more comfortable.
When you own the woman, For sex because you gave her money.
When the woman is losing her eyesight, freaking out, vulnerable, not going to fight back, needy, dependent, and you're big and strong.
Right? You're drawn to power, control, and you can be empathetic as long as there's no chance of a threat to your ego.
You were probably a pretty good date, so to speak, to this prostitute, because she was, in a sense, bought and paid for.
Yeah. So, this is what I mean about power disparity.
You have value because you can bring economic opportunity to a prostitute.
You have value because you bring $100 to a sexual encounter.
You have value Because you can stride in and save this woman's eyesight, right?
But do you have value without any of those things?
Do you have value in and of yourself?
Will someone love you not for what you can do or what you can offer or what you can bring?
Will someone love you Just for you.
if you have nothing material to offer, if you have nothing to dangle, if you have no backup value to bring someone to you, could you be loved?
Yeah, that's a pretty intense question.
I...
That It kind of shocks me a bit because when I think about men and the women and the guy being the provider and everything, it's really hard for me to understand that that's not somehow, somewhat expected for my part of the deal.
No, and I understand that.
And here's the weird part about self-sacrifice with you, James, is that you're willing to be the provider But the insecurity is so deep that you're not willing to be the provider and demand reciprocity.
You paid for this woman who went to school, she couldn't even be bothered to pay a hydro bill, right?
So fine, be the provider.
But have the self-respect to not be exploited for that.
Do you see what I mean? Yeah.
Yeah. Do you think that a strong, intelligent, mature, confident woman, how do you think she's going to react if you say that you've been to prostitutes close to two dozen times?
I would say that would be detrimental to my image.
Why do you think that would be the case?
Well, because I think she'll say like, well, he can get from himself.
He has to do that kind of stuff.
That's what I think it is, isn't it?
I assume you had an orgasm with these women, right?
Some, yeah.
Some of them. So, what it says, I think, to people, perhaps, is that you are willing to overlook the disastrous histories that probably ended up with these women forced to sell their vaginas for money to be objects, to be masturbatory devices.
That does not interfere with your sexual pleasure.
That you can get an erection, you can have sex, you can have an orgasm, and then hand a woman a hundred bucks and walk away and feel fine.
What do you think that communicates to people?
Yeah, that's a horrible person.
That's for sure. Well, I wouldn't necessarily say horrible, but...
There may be questions about...
Morality, for sure.
The level of empathy, the level of concern, the level of selfishness.
Mm-hmm. You know, I own you.
I paid for you.
You will now service me and I will move on.
Mm-hmm. You know, these prostitutes, this is not what they wanted from their lives, right?
They didn't sort of sit there while the other kids were playing with dolls.
They didn't just sit there and say, I hope Ken comes with the tenor so I can give him a Hummer.
They wanted probably to maybe have a nice job, have a husband, have kids, an extended family, bake, make fruit salad, dance in the festivals.
And what they are doing is turning over the greatest treasure of their inner being to a guy who doesn't care about them at all for a couple of grimy dollar bills.
That's where they've landed.
That's where they've ended up.
But you don't care. Your cock doesn't care.
You paid your money. You take it.
You didn't earn your comparative wealth.
They did not deserve their comparative disasters.
But the difference is fine with you.
The fact that they don't like you, the fact that they don't care about you, the fact that they probably find you quite repellent, but they have to pretend that they like you.
This is prisoner behavior, you understand.
This is traumatized behavior.
And the fact that another man was there 20 minutes before, Ejaculating into that bought pocket of empty flesh.
You have to ignore a lot to come in that situation, right?
Yeah. Yeah, that's true.
And I think that's the challenge.
You know, where something may have happened in your childhood where you were not taught value, virtue, empathy, Look, I'm not trying to be all Victorian on you here.
I'll be perfectly frank with you because I know there are a lot of people out there who are going to listen to this and recoil and say, oh, women, yes, we look at women in lust.
I understand that. Men are visual creatures.
We are looking for signs of fertility.
We look at, you know, we objectify women.
That's fine. You know, sometimes men turn women into TNA and sometimes women turn men into a wallet.
It's not the end of the world. It happens sometimes.
You know, I'm not trying to...
Say, well, it only must ever be a spiritual union and blending of values.
That's what works in the long run, for sure.
That's what is necessary for lasting love.
But if you want to break this cycle, you need to look at how you were treated as a utility as a child.
You know, people steal because they were stolen from.
People murder because they were murdered.
People assault because they were assaulted.
And people use others because they were themselves used.
And so my question, if I were in your shoes, would be, okay, what was it in my childhood where I was used for the benefit of others?
Does anything pop to mind?
For the benefit of others.
People didn't ask you what you wanted.
It doesn't mean, you know, rape or something.
Where your preferences were not inquired of.
You were there for...
To some degree, I was a vanity piece for my mom.
Because I was doing English courses five years or six years ahead of my class.
I was always in the gifted class.
I took advanced computer science when I was in grade 8.
I was in a grade 13 writing class when I was in grade 8.
And my mother would always say this to people.
Oh, he's doing this, he's doing that, he's so proud.
I didn't like it. I don't like being a vanity prop for other people.
I was smart. My mother didn't earn that.
I didn't earn it.
I mean, that's just a little example of how we can be used by others sometimes.
Well, I have that a lot in my life, and that exposes a bit of my parents that I don't think I can talk publicly about it.
Right. But that's, you know, if you wanted to get some therapy, I think that would be a great idea.
It sounds like you've got some resources.
But exploring how you can depersonify others and turn them into objects is worth exploring if you want to break it.
That cycle. And don't bring the whore to America, and don't marry the whore, and, like, you can't.
No, I don't have any interest.
You understand. You can't do that kind of stuff.
You need to figure out what the hell is going on for you that you can use people in this way, and it doesn't seem to bother you that much.
There are ways out of it, I believe, but it is going to involve examining, my humble opinion, how you may have been used in the past.
Yeah, it's just...
I always thought that I had interest.
I always had interest in the woman that was there, even paying.
And I always wanted to carry on, even if it's a conversation or outside of the business environment, so to speak.
And that somehow was an excuse for For doing that.
Because I believe I have genuine interest in the person.
But when it starts off with such a great power disparity, it means that you could be interested in someone else when your interests cannot be threatened.
Yeah. When your dominance cannot be threatened.
You know, I'll give you a tiny example, and I'm not trying to make this about myself, just sort of as an example.
My mom, when I was not well, she was fantastic.
She was great. She'd set me up on the couch, she'd give me some newspapers, some crosswords, some comics, make me lemon tea, and she was great.
Because I was... Tired.
I was unwell. Unable to resist.
Unable to challenge her.
So she could be, quote, empathetic because I was helpless.
But when I was strong and resolute and when I disagreed with her, boom.
Right? Yeah, I had some pretty similar stuff going on.
Right. Right.
Very similar, by the way.
And I'm sorry for that, James.
Truly, truly, truly sorry for that.
And again, I know you don't want to talk about it publicly.
That's fine. I fully respect that.
But, you know, one man to another.
One human being to another.
I'm incredibly sorry. That's not how you should have learned things.
That's not how you should have taught.
And that's not how you should have had to shield yourself growing up.
When you're raised by selfish people, empathy is your undoing.
Because you empathize with them, you do what they want, it never gets returned.
You dissolve, you turn into a ghost that then gets banished.
You cease to exist, you turn to dust in the wind.
Nothing remains.
If you empathize with selfish people, you cease to be.
And this is why empathy becomes a danger.
And this is why, for you, letting your guard down requires that you be fully in control.
You can only feel equality when you're dominant.
But finding a way to feel equality when you're vulnerable, when you're equal, finding a way to feel empathy when you're not in control, I think that's the essence of breaking this cycle.
It is.
It is.
And for that, I think talk therapy would be a great thing to do.
Again, I like Dr.
Jordan Peterson's work, selfauthoring.com.
You can check that out.
I work on that. Talk therapy, I think, is fantastic.
But those are my thoughts, and I hope they've been of some help.
It was. Thank you very much, Stefan.
You're welcome. Take care, man. You too.
Thank you. Alright, up next we have Nevis.
He wrote in and said,"...I am contemplating and leaning towards pursuing philosophy as a career path similar to how you use it.
Given that philosophy has such a large body of work to it, has traditionally been tied to college, which is now so ideologically infected, I don't think learning philosophy is so straightforward and self-teaching as many other skills." What do you advise I do to get a good foundation for the knowledge and skills necessary for this?
That's from Nevis. Oh, hey Nevis, how you doing?
I am great, although a bit of a whiplash there from that last conversation into this.
Why is that? What do you mean? Just the difference of kind of heaviness towards the end of it going into the academic setting and so on.
I appreciate that, but to me, it's all philosophy.
It's all reason and evidence.
You look for clues, you draw your hypothesis, and you see if it plays out.
So, I appreciate that.
It's a great question.
Why would you want to go into academics to study philosophy?
To some extent, I do not, and that is part of why I'm calling you.
No, part of you does, because if you just didn't want to at all.
Like, I don't call people up and say, how do I not go to ballet school?
Because I don't want to go to ballet school, right?
So, part of you does, which is why the question's coming up.
Because what I want is a little bit of guidance and some help finding the direction and starting point for How to learn the methodology and necessary history.
But you do it by doing it, right?
You learn it by doing it.
Some of it goes into, for example, I started looking into Nietzsche after you and Peterson had mentioned him.
And I realized that there was a bunch of references and builds on previous philosophical works that were going over my head, and I realized that it seems to me that there's a starting point somewhere that I'm not really sure where to really start to get into this.
It depends what it is that you mean by philosophy, which is really quite a philosophical question when you think about it.
Granted, there are different areas.
By philosophy, do you mean having meaningful conversations with people in the world about stuff that matters, stuff that's principled in nature?
Or do you mean something else?
I think that is what I'm looking for, I guess.
Because you can also do philosophy by writing books.
You can do it by writing articles.
You can do it by composing operas with a very philosophical libretto, right?
I mean, there's lots of ways that you can...
Do philosophy. It can be conversational.
It can be more cloistered.
It can be thoroughly engaged in the world, or it can be, you know, ivory tower stuff.
Sorry, I'm saying there's lots of different ways, but it basically sounds like two, so I just want to be honest about that.
Right. But neither of those two things require that you go to university.
I mean, if you want to have meaningful conversations with people in the world, then you can just go out and have meaningful conversations with people in the world.
And you can do that for a while, while you do something else if you want to pay your bills, and then you can start to record them with people's permission, as I do, and you can then share those conversations to the world.
Like, I sort of stepped into this, doing these call-in shows about philosophy, I guess, about 10 years ago, and it felt completely natural.
Why? Because I'd been doing it for 20 years before that, right?
I mean, this is nothing new for me, having these kinds of conversations with people about things that matter, principled conversations about deep, deep topics.
You know, it's like the Huey Lewis in the news, right?
The 10-year overnight success.
It's like they came out of nowhere.
It's like, no, they were playing bars like NXS for like a decade or whatever, right?
And so if you have a lot of conversations about things that matter with people, then you're studying philosophy.
If you want to write about philosophy, then you can read a bunch of philosophy.
You can find out which topics are the most interesting to you, the most powerful for you, the ones that you think are going to have the greatest meaning and impact in the world.
You want to join your personal preferences with things that people need, right?
That's sort of supply and demand.
Your supply is your passion.
The demand is what the world needs, and I guess if it needs it, it's willing to pay for it, right?
I mean, if all I did was write really abstract articles about metaphysics, it seems less likely That I would be able to get any kind of real donations or any kind of donations out of it.
And, you know, people have just started reading The Art of the Argument and, you know, we're getting some feedback now like, you know, it's great, you know, it puts these complex ideas in, you know, powerful, easy to understand language and all of that.
Artoftheargument.com should check it out.
But if you want to write books, you can write books.
You can do some research about what topics are the most interesting to people at the time.
You can write for that.
You can write articles. It's called A-B testing because marketing is very much underappreciated when it comes to spreading ideas.
A-B marketing is you write an article about epistemology, study of knowledge.
You write an article about metaphysics, study of reality.
And you count the views, and you count the engagement, and you count the comments, and you count the shares, and you find out which is more important to people.
And then you write, whichever one is more important, you write that, and something about ethics or something about politics, and you keep doing it, right?
Why am I able to create or participate in the creation of content that people find so interesting and compelling?
Because I've been doing it for 35 years, and because we get A huge amount of feedback on what we do, what people like.
I can see YouTube views. I can see podcast downloads.
I can read the occasional comment.
I can get a sense of what's important to people.
Because the philosopher must meet the people where they live.
They must meet the people. Like the businessman has to produce something that people want to consume.
Producing something that people don't want to consume, who cares?
He's wasting time. Self-indulgent.
The philosopher, to be responsible, must meet people where they live, where they need wisdom and instruction.
Where they are the most lost and gain the most from being found.
You can do all of this without going to college.
You can do all of this without risking, risking the very real risk.
The benefits of college we all understand.
It's like this big, giant, ridiculously expensive IQ test that's required because you're not allowed to actually give an IQ test to hire someone.
And when you go to college in the arts, you are facing the enormous and significant risk Of massive compromises to your integrity.
You get some leftist, some Marxist.
It's a battle and a half.
And you sometimes have to swallow your soul.
Swallow your integrity. Pretend that you are something other than good.
Pretend that you are something other than honest in order to get the grade, to get the degree.
And that is a stain that you may never come clean from.
So, I would say, sort of like saying, well, to be a carpenter, do I need to go to carpentry school?
Well, not if you've been a hobbyist for five years.
You've been building a whole bunch of stuff in your spare time.
You've learned a hell of a lot. And going to carpentry school is rarely going to indoctrinate you in cultural Marxism or whatever postmodernism, existentialism, identity politics.
You're never going to be forced to To regurgitate things that are false and immoral, if not downright evil.
So I would say, if you want to do philosophy, by God, do philosophy.
You know, like I met a guy recently, successful businessman, and he got his start by going to concerts and selling those little light-up necklaces and bracelets and stuff like that.
He was hustling. Learns a lot about business.
It's like somebody on Twitter the other day was saying, once in your life you should have a job in sales.
Especially commission sales, where you are, you know, that old Dilbert cartoon is like, hey man, you're sitting there twiddling your fingers and getting paid, because you're on salary, right?
And so, you can go out and do.
And if you're doing, you're learning, and you're learning a lot more viscerally.
Than if you're just sitting there absorbing the questionable wisdom of questionable people.
Does that make any sense? Yes, that does.
Yeah, I think that answers it.
Well, good. I'm very, very glad.
I hope you'll keep us posted on what you decide.
And of course, if you end up producing cool stuff, which I hope you do, let us know about that as well.
I'd be glad to.
Thank you. You're very, very welcome.
And I just want to thank everyone.
For the great honor of this conversation, the great openness.
I really appreciate that.
And I appreciate your support, which you can provide at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
You can buy.
Buy! Please go and buy and drive up the sales.
Even if you're not going to read it for six months, buy it now.
It really helps move it up in the sales rank so that Just got paid.
One of the first things I'm planning to do is buy the book.
Thank you. So, yeah, because people who don't have any clue who I am, which is fine.
I don't care if they know who I am.
I just want them to get the book so that they learn how to argue better or how to argue at all and debate better.
But buy it now.
Drives it up. People then will see it who have no idea who I am.
They'll click on it. They'll be curious.
They'll read. You know, a couple of pages and then they'll buy it hopefully and that way we can spread better arguments, better debates at a time when free speech is really under attack.
Free speech won't be under attack for long either way, right?
Because it's either going to rescue itself or it's going to fall and the way it rescues itself is people become better at debating.
So if you go out and buy artoftheargument.com It's a great book.
The print will be out soon.
The audiobook read by me will be out soon, but it's pretty important.
I don't usually do a lot of direct asks to the audience, but this is certainly one of them.
It would mean a lot to me. I think it will mean a lot to the world.
That's kind of why I wrote the book, and if you can't buy it, the more it's pushed up in the sales ranks, the more people will take notice of it, and the more people will buy it who've maybe never heard of me or have no particular interest Thanks everyone so much for a great,
